05.23.07

Cults, cults, and other cults

Posted in you've got mail at 7:44 pm by nemo

From chaosmos, teilhard, kenwilber, hegelnet @yahoogroups.com
In a message dated 5/23/2007 7:24:41 AM Central Daylight Time,
x@yahoo.com writes:

Dear John -

We are of similar minds on this. See Arthur Deikman…

_http://www.deikman.htt_ (http://www.deikman.com/)

…among others, for additional insights on cult psychology…..

_http://www.deikman.http://www.deihttp_
(http://www.deikman.com/cultpsych.html)
Reply button:
Thanks for the encouragement. It is helpful. However, my views are very
complex and pertain to dealing with certain types of ’sufi shady characters’ as
much as the cult phenomenon hotly pursued by ‘deprogrammers’ and the purveyors
of that other cultic field, psychotherapy, the business.

It is ironic therefore that the Deikman link to ‘cultpsych.html’ points to a
book with a foreword by Doris Lessing, a closet follower of one of my
nemeses, Idries Shah. Small world. The sufis are especially clever. I tangled with
people in that vein many years ago, and didn’t enjoy the experience of
cannibals dressed up as spiritual types. And fascists (like Eliade, an echo of such
groups). I am not surprised that Iraq shows the insanity that arises in
cultures where these genocidal lunatics are let loose.
I can’t pursue that any further, due to the dangers to my personal person.
The Shah sufis protect themselves with Idries Shah’s exposes of other
people’s cults. The sufis within the sufis of the Shah gang are far too clever to
get caught, behind their ingenious front of denouncing cult indoctrination.
(That doesn’t mean they were wrong, they had many useful insights into why
spiritual paths fail). If you want to see some real humdinger victims of gurus I
would point to the lost souls devastated by this pack of thieves, or rather
various people vaguely associated with them. This is topkapi level ‘high
occult crime’, but not in the legal sense. These people never get caught, and
they don’t really help people who aren’t in their closed milieu.

Idries Shah was a fascinating fellow but his ’shady sufi aspect’, unapparent
even to many who have read his useful,ethusiastic, and odd ball books on
sufism, requires some digging. He was harmless enough, and had a positive
message, but the world of sufism has taught me a different dimension of the ‘cult’
problem. Sufism has an immense following in the Islamic world, I have to
exempt that from my statements, and I have put myself behind the eight ball in
my various attacks on the subject, much of it springing from the morass of
various degenerate forms of sufism, plus the undecipherable Gurdjieff phenomenon.
Idries Shah left behind some revealing clues, one of them a meeting with
Gurdjieff in his youth. Some say these people and their milieu are the ‘real
sufism’, that the rest of it (now promoted by the State Department with big
money as a benign alternative to jihadism, by golly, the State Department) is
pious substitution as exoteric charity, sufism for idiots, certainly it is wise
to be wary of the whole entity, starting with skeptical readings of the
‘gnostic esoterism’ hype.

A major sufi in the West is the founder of the San Francisco Ball, a
pornographer. Another is his sidekick E.J. Gold, a genuninely dangerous operator.
This is no doubt unfair, but I for one have nothing further to do with that.
I won’t go on. The world of the sufis has some genuine and deep corners, but
none of this is going to available to Westerners in any reasonable context.
We need to move on. These people have no monopoly on anything, and our first
task is to defend our modern freedoms from the assault of spiritual madmen
armed.
My view then is to propose an intelligent secularism in which people can
recreate the spiritual psychologies of antiquity in a form free of the
exploitations of gurus, safe in their autonomy after the fashion of Kant’s critique of
religious domination. And the tools to actually get somewhere. But that’s
not likely to happen. It never has before. Power types always move in and take
over.
The idea suggests a task that is non-trivial, and if we find that the gurus
haven’t gotten it straight, and the proponents of scientism are so far out in
left field they can’t even decipher the simplest forms of religion, then it
is a good questions as to how to proceed. The New Age movement is escalating
in all dimensions of spurious innovation into a spiritual wasteland and it is
hard to see how, stripped of the leadership that ‘gurus’ originally were
supposed to provide (Jesus, remember), anything significant can occur.

That’s why, in exasperation, I recommended Schopenhauer, a thinker with a
problematic of his own, perhaps, but he makes one realize that the problem has
simpler solution than we might think if we can escape the feeding frenzy of
self-appointed gurus, sufi sharks, New Age con-men, and predestigators of
occult special effects. There isn’t anything mysterious in coming to an
understanding of spiritual psychology, but the message always gets scrambled.
Perhaps this chaos has always been so. The guru world goes back to the
Neolithic, and is ancient indeed. It was old by the time of Gautama, who, one
forgets, was an upstart beside the figure of Mahavir Jain, who was the last of
twenty four buddha figures: that was in sixth century BC! Buddha attempted to
sovle the problem we are seeing with a rational formulation of a tradition
already millennia old.
Le plus ca change.

Enough for the moment.

John Landon
nemonemini@aol.com
jcl99@columbia.edu

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