Re: Soka Gakkai International -- SGI
Date: February 24, 2014 06:45AM
> “Your chanting-addict friend reminds me of a
> former friend of mine who’s heavily involved in
> SGI. I went on vacation once with her, and another
> friend of ours who isn’t an SGI member. My SGI
> friend just became extremely anxious, perhaps from
> being away from home and in a strange place. We
> were at this beautiful beach — and all she
> wanted to do was sit in the motel room, very
> withdrawn and irritable, curtains drawn, and chant
> for hours. Our non-SGI friend and I tried to get
> her to come out and do things with us, and she
> refused. All she wanted to do was sit in that
> motel room and chant. She’d come out for meals
> and that was about it. So, the other girl and I
> just went out without her and had fun…what were
> we going to do?” –Tsukimoto
>
> “This is really sad. I talked to a lot of people
> suffering from anxiety in the course of my
> healing, I noticed that isolation was a common
> theme, and I was no stranger to that. I’m very
> grateful that I had people that were pushing me to
> get back out into life. There seemed to be a lot
> of anxious people in SGI and my SGI “mentor”
> would tell me stories about these various members
> of the group that I was in and their various
> conditions — this one has depression, that one
> has anxiety — and they had been in SGI for
> years. I said, wow, that’s amazing. If they’ve
> been chanting all this time why haven’t they
> gotten better? Her answer: They’re doing it
> wrong. They don’t attend enough meetings and
> they’re not chanting with determination to
> overcome their fundamental darkness.” — Kitty
> Luv
>
My former friend has a tendency to anxiety and depression, as I do. Depressed, anxious people are great targets for SGI members looking to shakabuku someone. If you feel desperate and hopeless, you will do anything to feel better. Initially, the love-bombing that guests are given, being told that you can chant for, and get anything, and the effects of chanting on the brain and nervous system -- it all can make you feel like you've really changed something.
As time goes by, maybe it takes more chanting to get the same high. Maybe it's hard to admit to yourself that you put all this time into chanting and SGI activities, and life really isn't any better. If you get guidance, you will have been told what Kitty Luv's leader said: You aren't chanting enough, or with enough determination, you don't do enough SGI activities. So on top of the anxiety and depression you may already be feeling -- you also feel like you've failed. So you try harder -- and it becomes a real vicious cycle that sucks people in for years.
My former friend, like many SGI women that I knew, spoke many times of wanting to be in a relationship. Yet these women spent so much time chanting and doing SGI activities. When did they have time to meet anyone, or develop a relationship? There are not many SGI members in my area, so the odds of finding love with another local SGI member were not very good. And realistically, how many nonSGI members could accept the amount of time that these SGI women spent chanting and in SGI activities?
People can lose so many years, so much time, to SGI.