The Human Potential Movement Gone Awry
Outside the limits of the human imagination.
Outside the limits of the human imagination.
By WIN
MCCORMACK, in The New Republic, April 12, 2018
The original text appears in black. My comments appear in dark red.
Mix
some disconnected revelations and "peak experiences" with some
desperately sought camaraderie and self-serving conditioning, in-doctrine-ation, instruction, socialization,
habituation and normalization. Wear
the patient and hopeful down to imprint the latter.
Who
gives a flying ---- if the suckers got anything useful. We're here to make a
buck and turn 10% of the fools into compulsive proselytes.
“It’s an amazing phenomenon,” says Sarah T. (a
pseudonym), a former disciple of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. She is referring to
the movement she left a few years ago when she became exhausted and ill from
overwork.
“And I think people still don’t get that what’s happening up there
[at Rajneeshpuram] is very, very powerful—more so than they’re giving it credit
for being, even at this point. Because every person who’s a sannyasin, every
person who’s up there in Oregon -- particularly now -- is a very different kind of
human being than you meet out here [in the secular world].
“They have
extraordinary gifts as people. They have extraordinary personal power. They
have extraordinary capabilities and abilities, because they’ve learned to go
beyond all limits.”
Sarah, a therapist whose professional discipline falls
generally under the rubrics of the closely connected humanistic psychology and
human potential movements, first became interested in Rajneesh when she read a
book of his collected discourses called The Book of Secrets. In
those discourses, originally delivered in Bombay in the early seventies, before
the establishment of the ashram in Pune (Poona), India, Rajneesh drew parallels
between the theories of the humanistic psychology and human potential
movements and his interpretation of the Eastern sexual philosophy and practice
of Tantra, which all share the theme of liberation from the emotional
and sexual repressiveness of society.
Sarah says that after reading the book she
was “gone -- right away I started having mystical experiences.”
“I had the feeling,” she remembers, “that this is what
I had been looking for my whole life. And that I had come to the end of my
journey. That this was it. Reading the book was like having somebody express my
innermost feelings.”
The academic humanistic psychology movement,
launched in 1961 by, among others, psychologist Abraham Maslow, sought to forge
an alternative to the two dominant trends in contemporary psychology: Freudian
psychoanalysis and behaviorism. Maslow believed that too much attention had been
devoted in traditional psychology to pathological behavior, and not enough to
healthy individuals who were able to “actualize themselves” and to attain and
live from what he called “peak experiences.”
In 1962, the Esalen Institute was established in Big
Sur, California, to offer experiential workshops designed to help people
realize their “human potential” (the phrase comes originally from Aldous
Huxley, an early ally and inspirer of Esalen). Human potential theorists,
seeking ways to counteract what they saw as people’s harsh psychological and
social conditioning, found parallels among the emotional opening up process of
Western cathartic psychotherapies, the peak experiences described and advocated
by Maslow, and the altered states of consciousness produced by Eastern methods
of meditation (and also by psychedelic drugs).
The union of Western psychology
and Eastern religion became one of the human potential movement’s goals.
Rajneesh, in the words of one observer -- social
worker and cult expert Hilly Zeitlin -- “picked up all the pieces of the human
potential movement.” Rajneesh’s juxtaposition of avant-garde Western
therapies, such as primal, gestalt, and encounter, with such classic Eastern
meditations as kundalini yoga and zazen lured hundreds of thousands of Western
disciples to his ashram in Pune in the 1970s.
After reading The Book of
Secrets, Sarah’s next step was to attend a “Let-Go” weekend at a local Rajneesh
center. The workshop involved participation in massages, therapy games,
encounter groups, and meditations from 5:00 am until midnight. The effect of
the Let-Go weekend on Sarah was even more profound than her reaction to
Rajneesh’s written words had be
“I stopped
thinking,” she says. “I was driving back home and there were all these twinkly
little white lights on the windshield. I was seeing things. I don’t know even
now what was going on.” Not long afterward, Sarah was on a plane to Pune.
[Thought stopping is one of manipulative, unethical, phony, cultic meditation's major attractions and supposed benefits. Any long-experienced, practitioner of insight meditation knows there is no such thing, but the lingering state of dissociation induced by the misuse of meditation seems to be thought stopping to the naive and unsuspecting who don't know that. See Abuse of Narrow Focus Meditation and Why Thought Stopping Doesn't Work.]
Rajneesh and his group leaders in Pune took the
various cathartic therapy and meditation techniques associated with the human
potential movement far beyond their usual limits of duration and intensity.
Groups in which participants did deep, strenuous, yoga-style breathing
exercises -- exercises that [hyperventilate and] can overoxygenate the brain and cause
dizziness and nausea -- would last for hours a day over several days [just as was
the case for those who did the hugely popular est trainings of the 1970s].
The
ashram’s therapy groups became notorious for episodes of emotional, physical,
and sexual violence. Sarah reports that she suffered physical injuries,
including two cracked ribs and a concussion, in an encounter-type group in
Pune.
“You see,” reflects Sarah in retrospect, “some people
like to be on the edge. It’s much more exciting than the monotony of everyday
life. It’s like a drug. It’s a high. And you think that you’re moving
forward. These people really believe that this is Jesus Christ up there, OK?
That is the beginning. And he’s providing them with experiences, with
situations that are taking them past anything they’ve experienced in their
lives previously. There’s a rush to that, that I’ve never found anything to
equal. It’s like playing a game of death -- your death.”
One of the criticisms of the human potential movement
has been about its tendency to overemphasize the human potential for good and
to underplay the evil, or dark side, of human nature. The word evil has also
been used by observers to express their feelings about the motivations of
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
In her 1983 book, Miles from Nowhere, A
Round-the-World Bicycle Adventure, writer Barbara Savage describes her
experience of visiting Rajneesh’s ashram in Pune and hearing him denounce
Mother Theresa, who had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her
charitable ministrations to the poor of Calcutta. Rajneesh called her a “sexual pervert who gets her sexual satisfaction from touching lepers.”
Savage
says that she stood up in the audience to protest Rajneesh’s tirade against
Mother Theresa, but that “one of Neesh’s strongmen grabbed me and literally
threw me back down on the floor. After that,” she writes, “I was too frightened
to move.
“I sat there and watched and listened to the man rave
on,” Savage continues, “and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a great sense of
evil. I mean that. I truly felt as if I was surrounded by this massive evil
force. I tell you, Rajneesh was emanating evil. I was terrified beyond
words. When the meeting was over, I fled.”
Nathaniel Branden,
a well-known humanistic psychologist in Los Angeles [for whom I worked briefly
in the 1970s, and who jolted me out of at least some of my own cultic
conditioning], had a similar reaction to some of Rajneesh’s published discourses,
particularly certain passages in The Mustard Seed.
In an October 2, 1978, letter to a friend at
Rajneesh’s ashram, Branden wrote that Rajneesh “explains and justifies the
slaughter of millions of Jews throughout history on the grounds that the Jews
killed Jesus.”
“Since I first began listening to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s
cassette tapes, and reading his books,” Branden told his sannyasin friend, “I
have been fascinated. Among all the Indian thinkers I have read, he strikes me
as clearly the most brilliant. At the same time, almost from the beginning, I
have had the growing feeling that this is a man who is deeply, deeply, deeply
evil -- evil on a scale that is almost outside the limits of the human
imagination. “The greater a man’s brilliance, the greater number of truths he
has insight to,” Branden concluded, “the more dangerously destructive that man
has the power to be -- if his core is evil.”
[The terms “malignant narcissist” and “sociopath”
had been invented but were not in widespread usage at the time this article was written.]
n Originally published in Oregon
Magazine, August 1985, this article was adapted from The Rajneesh Chronicles, published by Tin House Books.
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