-Caveat Lector-
On 7 Sep 99, , Das wrote:
> In the late '60s and early '70s I travelled on the periphery of the inner
> circles out of which came the "New Age," first wave, and I personally
> witnessed --VERY personally, e.g., in private conversations with many of
> the notables, who confided in me as "one of them"-- attitudes and
> behaviors which, if made publicly known then, would have immediately
> resulted in the founders of most "New Age" groups being seen as knowing,
> cold-blooded manipulators of people's belief systems for ego, personal
> power, and for profit above all. As early as 1971, I watched
> "supersalesman" Jack Rosenbaum aka "Werner Erhard" steal most of what he
> claimed to have discovered from Silva Mind Control, Alexander Everett's
> Mind Dynamics, and Scientology and go on to create the first EST seminars;
> I worked with the person whom Erhard himself had early on groomed to be
> his protege, on an alternative (and rival praxis) to EST that would've
> been less cult-like, because it was even by then already recognized as a
> hyped-marketing mindfuck, with most of its members eerily zombie-like,
> classic cult-followers of the type that DEFINED the "New Age" that would
> follow as they wandered on from one "spiritual" movement to another. Back
> then, I kept company not only with ESToids but with Scientologists (not
> much difference in psychology and behavior) -- but with the advantage of
> also knowing L. Ron Hubbard's literary agent, his publisher, his business
> partner from the days of Dianetics (A. E. van Vogt, who wrote a textbook
> on hypnosis), and several of Hubbard's first "Operating Thetans," as well
> as dissatisfied people who had operated in Scientology's "internal
> security" division, the Guardian's office. As usual, I observed the
> dissonance between three realms: (1) the con-man mentality and motives of
> the founder and his closest allies, (2) the uncritical faith and devotion
> of his students and followers (almost worshipful in a manner deliberately
> promoted by the founder), and then, judgable in a separate category, (3)
> the "system" being taught, always with some merit in and of itself but
> always used primarily as just a platform for developing a profitable
> marketing machine, a pool of cult-followers to serve the founder's
> ego-needs, and an authoritarian social structure that served as a private
> universe totally defined by the founder's needs.
BRAVO!!! Goat.....Sounds like we've been in a lot of the same places and have drawn
much the same conclusions.
The downside is the very human need to "belong"--a need that all these groups play on
shamelessly, as do traditional religions-- and once you've found the autonomy and
developed that cynicism about groups that these experiences engender....well, you
can't be a belonger. In a sense you've found both autonomy and safety....but it's a
little
lonely out there.
sno0wl
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