Comment

Rich on Sun 19 Oct 2008:

Very important and timely post. Lifton has done classic studies of cults and mind control societies. There are obvious parallels between Statements from this article and the frenzy in Pondicherry directed against a scholar's biography of the founder of Integral Yoga.

Lifton: The good and the pure are of course those ideas, feelings, and actions which are consistent with the totalistic ideology and policy; anything else is apt to be relegated to the bad and the impure. Nothing human is immune from the flood of stern moral judgments.

Locally: The leaders of the movement for excommunication of the author demand conformity to ideological commitments they judge culturally pure.

Lifton: The language of the totalistic environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.

Locally: The clichés used are familiar and in this case are masked in the guise of words such as “Falsehood” or “Truth“, “Vital or Mentalizing” and are often used by decontextualizing quotes from the Mother and declaring that: Mother said this or Mother said that.

Lifton: For an individual person, the effect of the language of ideological totalism can be summed up in one word: constriction. He is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed. This is what Hu meant when he said, "using the same pattern of words for so long…you feel chained."

Locally: Any attempt to approach founders or themes in Integral Yoga in a critical manner that is congruent with the thought patterns consciousness has evolved in the current episteme are constrained by claims that the person is simply mentalizing it or is making imperialistic claims upon the ideologically pure, which in this case is aligned with Hindu Nationalism. Invectives are hurled by those uncomfortable with critical inquiry accusing the author of using rationalism and secularism to attack their foundationalist interpretations. They denounce the author as "Mr Objective" and in so doing denounce contemporary historiography in favor of the history of Blut and Boden.

Lifton: This sterile language reflects characteristic feature of ideological totalism: the subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine. This primacy of doctrine over person is evident in the continual shift between experience itself and the highly abstract interpretation of such experience — between genuine feelings and spurious cataloguing of feelings. It has much to do with the peculiar aura of half-reality which totalist environment seems, at least to the outsider, to possess.

Locally: One is not free to express ones feeling, for example, although Sri Aurobindo writes in the Future Poetry that appreciation of poetic forms most often conform to the aesthetic of an age or episteme, if one no longer swoons for poems and sonnets written in a language of a century ago which Sri Aurobindo's adapts to his visions- they are condemned.

Lifton: The inspiriting force of such myths cannot be denied; nor can one ignore their capacity for mischief. For when the myth becomes fused with the totalist sacred science, the resulting "logic" can be so compelling and coercive that it simply replaces the realities of individual experience.

Locally: Although Sri Aurobindo did not proclaim his own Divinity, it is demanded that the faithful invest him with such divinity. Although none can demonstrate miracles, it is demanded those faithful to the yoga believe in a narrative of Origins which is exclusively supernatural. The supernatural is the domain of a few to interpret. Interpretations are decoded in culturally privileged ways

Lifton: The totalist environment draws a sharp line between those whose right to existence can be recognized, and those who possess no such right.

Locally: Demonstrated by the excommunication/censorship and physical attacks on the author of the Lives of Sri Aurobindo!

Lifton: Are not men presumtuous to appoint themselves the dispensers of human existence? Surely this is a flagrant expression of what the Greeks called hubris, of arrogant man making himself God. Yet one underlying assumption makes this arrogance mandatory: the conviction that there is just one path to true existence, just one valid mode of being, and that all others are perforce invalid and false. Totalists thus feel themselves compelled to destroy all possibilities of false existence as a means of furthering the great plan of true existence to which they are committed.

Locally: The few leaders of the intolerance movement claim sole access to the Truth and the right to interpret it. Their rhetoric couches an ethnic superiority and the militancy of an aggrieved subject evoking a right to respond, even with violence, to readdress the insults against their essentialist communal identity.

Lifton: Existence comes to depend upon creed (I believe, therefore I am), upon submission (I obey, therefore I am) and beyond these, upon a sense of total merger with the ideological movement. Ultimately of course one compromises and combines the totalist "confirmation" with independent elements of personal identity; but one is ever made aware that, should he stray too far along this "erroneous path," his right to existence may be withdrawn.

Locally: How else can one explain the actual exercise of mob violence against an individual accused of not sharing a totalizing vision of conformity?

Lifton: Also, Ideological totalism itself may offer a man an intense peak experience: a sense of transcending all that is ordinary and prosaic, of freeing himself from the encumbrances of human ambivalence, of entering a sphere of truth, reality, and sincerity beyond any he had ever known or even imagined. But these peak experiences, carry a great potential for rebound, and for equally intense opposition to the very things which initially seem so liberating. Such imposed peak experiences — as contrasted with those more freely and privately arrived at by great religious leaders and mystics — are essentially experiences of personal closure.

Locally: This one is a bit or a mystery namely, the fact that the leaders of the excommunication movement, who claim the right to teach the practices of the yoga, and who apparently have very active meditation practices that help establish equanimity in the being, are the very folks inciting mob action against an author of a book with whom they do not agree.

P.S. The fact that the folks orchestrating the actions against a scholar claim to be scholars and teachers themselves, and are attempting to network with National and International foundations and academies that encourage open critical inquiry and tolerance reeks also of charlatanism. The excommunication/censorship movement has been spurred on by those who should know better! If you are seeking international or national University accreditation, or you are in search of support and funding from any major foundations for “Free Progress Education”, or if you have taken your degree from any reputable academic institution and work on the tenure track, or write history and wish to remain credible with other historians, or you are a physician who consults with patients on death and dying yet incite others to violence, you all should remember the coming forth of the truth does have consequences.