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One author has a most interesting personal definition of charisma. He is describing how he witnessed people responding to Nazi propaganda gatherings. He was in Vienna, and on Hitler's birthday, an immense portrait of the Fuhrer was set up in a large public square, surrounded by many burning candles, exactly the way shrines had been set up for Catholic saints in that same place for centuries.

The author witnessed an old woman turning aside after viewing the Hitler portrait and without realizing what she was doing, she had crossed herself--and then had a look of horror on her face. Hitler's image had been incorporated into her life long body practice of devotion to God and Mary and the saints. Remembering this episode, Bharati wrote:

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'I am using the term 'charisma' here in a special sense to denote that numinous personality change deliberately infused into the victim'.

This was written about 30 years ago by Leonard Fischer/Agehananda Bharti in his Memoir, The Ochre Robe.

He lived through the Nazi occupation of Europe and was horrified by the effects on people.

What is yet more interesting is that decades after Bharati wrote this in The Ochre Robe, a psychoanalyst named Stanley Rosenman seems to have identified a similar process and describes it in detail.

Stanley Rosenman has written about how identity and even emotions are interfered with when someone else inserts alien introject into targeted persons. Rosenman examined this only in the context of traumatic assault, such as rape or prolonged torture.

He didnt consider that this could be done by seduction, persuasion, by presenting oneself as a guru and securing peoples attention by promsing priviliged access to the ancient heritage of India.

But we are free to ponder this. Rosenman has suggested that a self impaired perpetrator may seek immortality by injected shards of his or her introject into others.

This article is worth reading. Therapists can get it through subscription to PEP. Others may have to look for it at a psychoanlytic institute library. But I think Rosenman manages to describe the same process alluded to by Bharati,
2003). Journal of American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 31:521-540

Assaultive Projective Identification and the Plundering of the Victim's Identity

Stanley Rosenman

(Abstract)

A destructive mode of projective identification is delineated: a predator's catastrophic attack calculated to cause the victim a stress disorder marked by a disarrayed identity. This discomposure enables the perpetrator to aggrandize a manifold inroad upon the victim's identity to imprint, intrude, mingle and/or lodge his representation into it; to ravage, steal from, impoverish, and/or corrupt it; finally to have his representation emerge as an internal regulator of the traumatized prey's functioning..."

Corboy's laymans commentary:

If someone is able to infuse an alien introject into the deeper layers of our inner landscape, layers deeper than the level of adult conscious awareness, and if this alien and parasitic introject usurps our true selves and begins disrupting and interfering with the flow of our emotions and perceptions, this is grave interferance with our inner life.

It is like having one's garden overrun by crabgrass.

But..if we can identify this process consciously and reclaim ourselves, we may well get a spiritual life truly our own, not through an LGAT or a guru like Muktananda or Gurumayi but by finding our inner cores and regaining custody from intrusive thieves who feel so dead inside that they need to get a sense of agency and immortality by injecting shards of their unhappy inner selves into thousands of followers.

And do this not by respecting us and by engaging in open dialogue or courtship, but by covert means and hidden 'tech'.

You'd be plenty annoyed if someone hacked into your computer and messed with its programming.

At least if the hacker left a message saying, 'Hey I was bored, I snuck into your computer and did thus and such'--youd be plenty angry but would at least have useful
information to give to your IT person when getting your stuff repaired.

But if someone were to sneak in and hack your system and do it in such a way as to disrupt it, but conceal the exact methods used and cause your system to work for other people and not for you, cut checks for other people but not put anything in your account, send arrogant e-mails that annoy the hell out of the people who love and care about you...

That would be upsetting as hell.

Now imagine its your own brain...

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Let me take up Genkaku Adam Fisher’s point and his echo of the Buddha’s words,
It is not what others do and do not do that is my concern. It is what I do and do not do — that is my concern.

This has been cited to me in one form or another on this and other issues. It is very nice and comfortable to tend one’s own garden while watching others’ go to ruin. Or is it? And further is it even possible for someone on the Buddhist path?

What I do…” is always in relation to a larger whole. While I do agree with Genkaku Adam Fisher it is only insofar as it’s not used as an excuse to cop out and relinquish one’s self to fear. Actions have a context. They have a cause.

In concerning myself with “What I do…” I am also concerned with that which is the impetus of what I do as well as the possible results of what I do. Nothing happens in isolation.

Often we see exhortations, even from a few Buddhist teachers to remain silent, be above the fray, to back off.

This transcendental egotism, as I called it in a previous post is absolutely unrealistic. To attempt to limit one’s actions to a singular sphere wherein context is irrelevant is highly deluded if not psycho-pathological.

What more can be done?

Violations of trust are not healed by those who are on the receiving end of the violations. In the sense of transformative, or healing justice it is those who have committed the harmful actions who, by realizing the harm done, instigate dialogue and attempt amends with the help of the community. It involves all of us including those responsible for the article (or bad behavior), those directly affected by the article, those of us with knowledge of the situation, those of us who feel some sense of offense and the larger readership of the magazine since their perceptions, either way have also been affected by this.

I can keep explaining and explaining but that’s just like some cry in the wilderness. By reacting, I and others of the community have actually initiated dialogue. Just not the dialogue Tricycle Magazine(or in this case Ole N and Diamond Way—Corboy) and it’s representatives want to hear right now.