I spent many years of my life in a structure of belief that I now find hard to explain*. It was an extraordinary honey-trap which leaves me ashamed of having got caught in it.
The essence of the creed was to be “in that place”. We all knew what it meant, thanks to our possession of Knowledge—secret techniques of meditation. As the leader said in one of his extempore talks, which seem so compelling and cogent to believers:
Of all the things you do, all the things you do, if you find yourself not in that place, yes, you can do what you do but fundamentally something in that equation will be missing.
Knowledge was the key to be in that place. In its heyday (long past) the movement was remarkable in inspiring people to take on vows of poverty, chastity and obedience within a chain of ashrams. So it doesn’t surprise me that the same kind of intelligent young people of the middle classes can nowadays get recruited as suicide bombers.
It is scary to think of how easily one can become brainwashed. All that’s needed is to break your link to common sense and common humanity. After that, you are special, a member of the elect. You have no defences left against promises of salvation.
In the case of which I speak, the only reward was to “be in that place”. It was a reward one constantly strove for, and in its absence one constantly examined oneself to discover shortcomings, such as an insufficiency of effort. One was tempted of course to escape. There was no mechanism to stop you, just the sense that “yes, you can do what you do but fundamentally something in that equation will be missing”. This was experienced as guilt, a sense of nameless horror at the consequences of betrayal.
“In that place”—as if there was just one place, reached via renunciation and surrender to dubious leadership! My dears, when I think of “that place”, it seems like a miserable dungeon, all the worse because I put myself in it. When the door is finally opened, and the prisoner set free, it takes him time to gather the courage to walk out.
Sometimes I have asked myself if that thirty years was wasted, or yielded value despite everything. I’ve alternated between both those answers. But now it seems like a leading question, containing an embedded assumption, which I reject. I don’t have to submit a set of accounts for my life, with any spiritual profit and loss recorded for each year. I learned a lot, that’s certain; much of it consisting of what not to do. I curse my own perseverance in doing what yielded nothing; in following a self-styled teacher; and most of all in thinking I had been shown some “pearl of great price”, an embryo enlightenment, whose failure to hatch was all my fault.
Dear reader, I suggest there is greater joy in doing the opposite of what, for so long, I persisted in doing.
Picture credit: zazzle.com, purveyors of custom T-shirts.
I’m away for two weeks and wanted to post before I go, despite a sombre mood which inspired the above.
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