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Christa
Carlos, I'm very glad you brought this issue up. I've actually been thinking about why it is that so many "pseudo-sprituals" like Tolle, Katie, and others are getting such massive play. It's like eating Cheez-whiz instead of Cheddar or Camembert. Sure, you can do it, but why would you? (Unless you want to eat crap petrochemicals instead of real food and weigh 400 pounds, which, when you look around...)

Christa, this actually gets to the heart of the issue. There's a lot of spiritual junk food around. But where's the gourmet version? It's something I've been thinking about a lot. You can forget the eastern versions - they are all about control, power and wealth. We've seen it over and over again. Western spirituality - forget it. It's just politics by another name. So all that's left is you and me. Just as we have to decide how we live, our values and priorities, we also have to decide for ourselves how we view the meaning of our lives. There's nobody who can do this for us.

What is more incredible and mystical - an experience of oneness during meditation or watching the birth of a child? I'd say there's not a choice to be made here. We are witnessing creation, however it came about, through our consciousness, limited though it may, and should just appreciate that and get on with living.

Ingredients of the cultic milieu--and I have probably not covered them all.

Note--none of these by itself is necessarily a cult. But these form boundary markers
for a social scene in which recruiters can fish and media types can advertise any product, whether its a food or a vitamin, body care product or a guru.

First, magazines serving the Buddhist and yogista communities. Look at the advertisements.

1) Health food stores (look at their bulletin boards. At the one I go to I see the Noni Juice manufactured on Chris Butler's farms. In the bulk bins they have Golden Temple granola (Yogi Bhajan-the fake Sikh 3HO) and Yogi Tea (same).

2) Any event that attracts large numbers of people, period, especially people who think themselves progressive --yoga in the park events, Phish concerts, Harmony Rally, South Asian/Indian festivals, Sufi concerts and poetry readings.

Nearly forgot. Laundromats and cafes. Anyone that has a bulletin board will have fliers for all sorts of wierd stuff on it, especially if you live in some parts of the country.

3)Yoga studios. Yoga anything. Its a gateway into cultic milieu and a lucrative niche market. Lulemon, who manufactures yoga clothing has a Landmark connection.

[www.google.com]

4) Anything related to meditation. Everyone wants cheap or low cost meditation and yoga and few think to fact check.

5) Meditation centers that are excessively loosy goosy with whom they are willing to give rental space to. Esalen was a powerhouse of the cultic milieu. The places that let too many spiritual entrepreneurs in, especially ones who claim expertise in too many traditions all at the same time (eg anyone who says they do enneagram, advaita, insight mediatation and martial arts is trying to do too fucking many things all at once)

6) Vegetarian, Vegan and Raw food restaurants. Cafe Gratitude has a Landmark connection. [www.google.com]

Sri Chinmoy started some vegetarian restaurants, too.

7) Indian restaurants. The owner of the restaurant often has zero connections to a cult, but owners are usually willing to let anyone post fliers on thier windows and too busy to fact check. A surprising number of Indian restaurants have fliers for cult related stuff. that the owner may have nothing to do with.

So in hippie dippie parts of the US, it may be that people who are apt to eat in Indian restaurants seem to be denizens of the cultic milieu.

For, Ive not seen fliers for cults in Chinese restaurant windows nearly as often as in the windows of Indian restaurants.

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Hope
I picked up a free publication entitled, "Inner Realm", and even though I laughed all the way through it, it was at the same time kind of frightening to see how many PhDs, LSWs, etc who are licensed in their state to practice medicine, therapies, etc. are involved in this stuff, quite frankly to make a quick buck. There are also groups with weekend-trained reverends, and all kinds of practitioners with meaningless letters after their names that have set up shop or offer mini-LGAT seminars and retreats all over the place. The guy I had worked with was setting up seminars at Catholic retreats.

Hope - yes that's another effect of the milieu. It corrupts and tempts those who should know better. After all if you can earn more practising a pseudo therapy like NLP - and you can pick up an advanced certificate with a few weeks 'study' - why bother with something more substantial that you may have spent years studying.

It's been the case for several decades that almost anyone can put a sign on their door saying 'therapist' and attract vulnerable clients. The New Age cultic milieu has greatly exacerbated the problem because it's provided a world view complete with jargon and seemingly serious text books - garbage like 'Turtles all the way down' by Grinder and his suitably sycophantic sidekick Delozier - which means that the client and the therapist are using the same familiar jargon. It's scary stuff because it means that people damaged by new age nonsense are seeking out therapists who feed them more of the same poison.

An important aspect I want to highlight here because it's common across the spirtual/psychology boundaries of the new age and beyond is the idea that there are techniques or a technology that can be used to solve your problems. This is promoted by everyone from scientology to Dr. Phil to 'respectable' therapies like Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. I think this is a profoundly mistaken approach - there are techniques that can keep your demons at bay but the only thing that actually chases those demons away is real understanding arrived at by serious hard work - thinking, reading, talking, reflecting. There are no magic wand solutions. Life is a serious business.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/11/2009 04:47PM by Carlos B.

It can also be very difficult to know, unless you know enough to ask, if your therapist is using LGAT/pseudoguru techniques and ideas. My doctor, working out of the office of a department head of a major hospital, was up to his eyeballs in Landmark Education, but never disclosed that to patients. However, on one of my earliest visits, he asked if I had ever heard of LE as another client of his had attended and thought it was great. That was it. But now I know it's enough information. I was listening recently to Armand DiMiele on his radio show, The Positve Mind, and he merely mentioned Landmark, and I switched stations. He included The Forum in a list of positive things one can do for themselves. That was enough for me. Finally, the therapist I saw briefly after my experience with the Landmarkian doctor right off the bat recommended BK, and I was still to raw and uninformed to know better.

The dilemma obviously is almost a Landmarkian one - you don't know what you don't know. Most people who haven't been damaged (yet) by one of these programs or individuals is likely to be persuaded to cease using their products. A poster at a post-abuse forum uses BK's stuff on fear (who would you be without your fear of____?). She's a nice, intelligent, gentle person, and feels she's being helped by BK's exercises on fear. Two years ago I would have jumped on her with warnings, but that really doesn't change anything. If she hints that she's planning on attending a seminar, then perhaps I'll refer her to the BK overwhelming thread.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/12/2009 01:21AM by Hope.

A lot of these fringe types LOVE to rent rooms from hospitals, universities and Buddhist centers that have an honored name, because these settings give 'derivative legitimacy' to the entity renting the room.

The entity merely rents space from the aforesaid instition and *allows* those who attend to assume that the event or guru is endorsed by the institution, when its merely just renting space and the hospital, university or church/meditation center is eager just to get a bit of much needed liquid cash by renting out rooms.

And in this recession, new age scholck meisters can get excellent deals from big name hotels and convention centers.

Just because a mediation event rents space at a prestigious and trusted institution doesnt mean they've been endorsed. They just use theatre arts to make it LOOK that way.

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Hope
The dilemma obviously is almost a Landmarkian one - you don't know what you don't know. Most people who haven't been damaged (yet) by one of these programs or individuals is likely to be persuaded to cease using their products. A poster at a post-abuse forum uses BK's stuff on fear (who would you be without your fear of____?). She's a nice, intelligent, gentle person, and feels she's being helped by BK's exercises on fear. Two years ago I would have jumped on her with warnings, but that really doesn't change anything. If she hints that she's planning on attending a seminar, then perhaps I'll refer her to the BK overwhelming thread.

Well, this is the problem - you never know how hot the fire is until you put your hand into it.

The dividing line between serious and pseudo therapy is often very fuzzy particularly at a theoretical level. I was looking at the abusive relationships thread where someone was talking about a therapist who defined an abusive mother-daughter relationship as codependency. The problem is that every therapist is to some extent hamstrung by his/her theories. If the therapist generally approaches relationships as a form of codependency they are probably going to fail when confronted by a relationship based on power and coercion.

Psychology as a discipline is much more diverse and dependent upon interpretation than the natural sciences. A popular exposition of say particle physics is just that - a simplified outline of much more complex theories that in no way allows the reader to set him/herself up as a particle physicist. A popular exposition of a psychological theory is often more or less the theory itself because there's actually not much to understand. We can all grasp the idea of codependency without too much of a struggle because it's just a superficial generalisation which at times has some truth in it and at other times is wide of the mark.

The vague and superficial and (consequently) accesible nature of much respectable psychological theory makes it easy for the snake oil salesmen to slip their theories and bad intentions into the mix. Of course, sometimes, it may be useful to ask yourself "who would you be without your fear of _____" just as it may be useful, sometimes, to view a relationship from the standpoint of transactional analysis. But because this is all so imprecise and inexact all that really counts is the integrity, experience and flexibility of the therapist.

I think there is a huge need for education here because an understanding that there is no unified theory that can be applied to human psychology and that much of what goes on in the therapy sessions is hit and miss could create a culture in which BK and friends find it harder to operate - ie we need to demistify psychology and therapy in general.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/12/2009 07:49PM by Carlos B.

New Age = the spirituality of corporate consumerism?