SHAINBERG: What did Aum hope to achieve by its horrific acts?
LIFTON: Aum represents a new human danger: it was an apocalyptic cult with both a fascination for and the capability to acquire ultimate weapons, in particular what they called the “ABCs of weapons”—atomic, biological, and chemical. They had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons and had sought to acquire nuclear ones. The attack on the subway was actually an improvised response to news that a police raid was on the way. In fact, their planned release of sarin gas was scheduled for some months later, in November. Asahara had originally wanted to make seventy tons of sarin. They had bought a helicopter and sent one of their members to America to learn how to fly it so they could dispense the gas from the skies over Tokyo. That could have killed people in the hundreds of thousands, even millions. That was to be their means of setting off World War III. And thereby initiating Armageddon and the end of the world. That was their modest ambition.
SHAINBERG: How many members did it have at its peak?
LIFTON: It’s usually thought that there were 10,000 people in Japan and 30,000 in Russia—it’s a strange statistic. But of those 10,000, fewer than 3,000 were shukke, monks or full-time devotees who lived in isolated communities.
SHAINBERG: Did they have a following in this country?
LIFTON: Just a sprinkling. They had a little office here, and Asahara came here a couple of times, but he was quoted as saying that Americans were almost impossible to convert because their bad karma was fifteen to twenty times heavier than that of the Japanese. But I do think it’s important to recognize that Aum was part of a worldwide end-of-the-world impulse. It’s not just the Japanese. Everywhere, on every continent, there are religious or political groups that embrace the idea of the end of the world. Where Aum was different was that, rather than simply anticipating the end of the world, they actively sought to bring it about.
SHAINBERG: Instead of waiting passively, the guru took action to make his predictions come true?
LIFTON: It was mainly Asahara’s idea, but it was embraced by his followers. The end of the world was an integral part of their concept of salvation. That’s why Aum has to be seen, as uncomfortable as this is for many of us, as a religious problem.
SHAINBERG: But why did they want to destroy the world? How did that connect with their religious vision?
LIFTON: Aum sought to cleanse the world of all its defilement by destroying it. Only then could a pure, new people and spiritual level be attained in the world. The apocalyptic message itself stemmed from a vision Asahara described in which the god Shiva appeared and commanded him to lead an army of the gods in a struggle of light against darkness. Of course, Shiva is a Hindu deity, but then, Aum was eclectic. As you know, there’s a lot of Hinduism in Tibetan Buddhism, and Aum’s overall focus was on intense forms of Tibetan Buddhist practice. When Asahara began to train his followers, it was with a set of practices that were largely taken from the Tibetan tradition.
LIFTON: There were various kinds of meditation, including so-called standing worship-moving from a standing position to abject prostration and doing it 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 times-he took this from the preliminary practices of the Nyingma school. But I think the most significant idea he took from Tibetan Buddhism was phowa [a practice whereby a dying person’s consciousness is liberated from the body through the top of the head]. Phowa is to be learned from a guru and to be applied when one is in the process of dying, for the sake of enhancing one’s own spiritual movement toward Buddhahood. There’s uncertainty about the extent to which in actual tantric practice it might have been extended toward the performing of some violent act. But the way that it was interpreted by Asahara emphasized that in Tibetan Buddhism there are some very rough demands. If your guru says you must kill others, you must kill them. Because that means that their time to die has come, so it’s the right thing to do.
SHAINBERG: In other words, it’s an act of compassion.
LIFTON: Yes. The capacity to insist that everyone in the world must be killed, to purify the world, comes from a world-hating vision of religion. The world is defiled and hopeless in its bad karma. It’s an act of compassion to kill such people—that is, ordinary people like you and me—because it enhances their immortality, or their subsequent reincarnation, or their journey to the Pure Land, however you want to put it. Not everybody in Aum believed this in such stark terms, but Asahara pressed this point of view, and as he became more unstable, he pressed it more.
SHAINBERG: How did he get to Buddhism in the first place?
LIFTON: He read extensively 111 Tibetan and tantric Buddhism. And in the early eighties, he was a member of Agon-shu, one of the so-called Japanese New Religions. Thousands of these have been founded in Japan since the nineteenth century, and a whole run of them following World War II. Certain of his ideas about the persona of the guru and the heritage of Tibetan Buddhism can be traced back to Agon-shu. After leaving Agonshu, he went to the Himalayas, where in 1986, he claimed to have achieved final enlightenment.
SHAINBERG: Has he discussed what he meant by final enlightenment?
LIFTON: Not really; he just declared it. One of the problems with final enlightenment is that it’s such a subjective claim. Because he didn’t belong to any reputable religious institution, he wasn’t responsible to anybody or anything. You know, you can say, as many young Japanese do, that Buddhism in Japan lacks life. It seems deadened to them. But if you’re a Japanese Buddhist and you belong to an institution, there are limits to what you can do. That’s not so when you form your own religious organization that has no ties or requirements involving anybody else.
SHAINBERG: Do we know who he studied with in the Himalayas or what his experience there was? Was he just wandering there?
LIFTON: He visited a few people there. He didn’t really study with anybody. He just checked in and discussed his religious life, as he did with the Dalai Lama.
LIFTON: The Dalai Lama received him courteously, probably even warmly. And probably said things to him that he wishes he didn’t say. Asahara had pictures taken, and then quoted the Dalai Lama as saying, “What I’ve done for Buddhism in Tibet, you will do for Buddhism in Japan.” The Dalai Lama was asked about it later on and denied having said these things and said he just received him in a hospitable way. Asahara also visited religious leaders in Sri Lanka and other places, had his picture taken with them, and claimed they received him as a great spiritual master. But the Japanese press followed up his visits and interviewed a number of the people he’d described as having acclaimed him. One of them said, “We had a meeting and then he came back to me a week or two later and said he had achieved final enlightenment. I thought that was rather surprising because it usually takes close to a lifetime to achieve enlightenment.” But the act was convincing to his followers. And, in some way, it was convincing to himself. There’s a strange psychology with some people that enables them to believe in their own version of events and simultaneously maintain a whole manipulative, con man side. The combination can be persuasive.
SHAINBERG: Any can man becomes more effective the more he believes in himself Was anything in his belief justified?
LIFTON: He demonstrated a rather unusual talent for yoga from early on. A lot of people came to him initially for yoga instruction, many of them professionals or young university graduates who wanted something spiritual in their lives. This talent for yoga was a very important basis for what came later. It became inseparable from the Buddhist practices or Buddhistlike practices that he taught And he had a certain superficial brilliance in articulating various Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian concepts. Asahara was an extraordinarily effective religious teacher as well as a murderer.
SHAINBERG: How did he get from religion to murder?
LIFTON: One account of his direction, which is the usual one, is that Aum Shinrikyo, like Agon-shu, could initially be seen as a typical example of a New Religion. It held a lot of interest for spiritual seekers and got a lot of positive response. It was only later, once people began to resist Aum in various ways—parents’ groups claiming that it was brainwashing their children and so on—that it came into conflict with mainstream society; then Asahara went bad and broke down, and caused a lot of trouble.
LIFTON: I think a truer version of the sequence is that he was visionary and megalomaniacal from the beginning. He was an extreme paranoid, and paranoids are notorious for functioning at a high level of intellectual capacity. Especially if they can continue to control their immediate environment, which is their whole world. When that control is threatened, for one reason or another, they tend to break down. And that’s what happened with Asahara when his cult came under siege. Details started to leak into the press in the late eighties about Aum’s illegal acquisition of land and the finances of its members and other crimes. The most notorious case was the murder of a lawyer named Sakamoto who was taking the lead in exposing Aum’s illegal behavior. He was killed in 1989 along with his wife and baby. And there were lots of other murders that took place between ’89 and ’95. In fact, it’s not quite known how many people they killed. It could be up to a hundred. Many people are missing from within Aum. Now, it’s true that most of the ordinary members did not know about the weapons or the plans for violence. But they too had to ward off evidence that something was wrong—although just when the change occurred in Asahara is not easy to say. Because it was not a complete change: the potential was always there. There was always the dimension of the con man in him as well as the effective religious teacher.
SHAINBERG: Have you heard descriptions of him as a teacher?
LIFTON: Yes. His disciples describe him as extraordinarily dignified and composed. One man I interviewed described how struck he was by the contrast between the dignity that never left him when he was a teacher in those early years and the way he has fallen apart in the courtroom.
LIFTON: Oh, absolutely, and he’s acting psychotic, bizarre, accusing the judge of sending waves of radiation to his brain. I think it’s possible that he had become psychotic even before the end of Aum. Months before he launched the actual attack he was talking about being attacked by sarin gas, suffering from acute fever, looking for spies within Aum. He always had an apocalyptic orientation; but he became more monolithic, more insistent on his prophecies of doom. And his project for realizing those prophecies.
SHAINBERG: Do you think there’s a relationship between the way that Asahara’s own fantasies seem to have bled over into the world outside, and the condition of a world in which media is making fantasies concrete for us all the time?
LIFTON: Asahara’s relationship with the media was a two-way street: if there were fantasies going out, there were also fantasies coming in. Aum, like certain other New Religions, was media-savvy; it took full advantage of Japan’s media saturation. Asahara was a frequent television guest. In one of the blurbs for his book, it says he was, in effect, your all-purpose genius—”He wrote music, he made films, he was a great religious figure and a prominent television personality.” So there is a way that the media could be seen as a conduit between Asahara’s imagination and outer reality. His ideas certainly found a fertile environment. Ever since World War II, the Japanese media have thrived on apocalyptic fantasy. They feature all kinds of stories about the earth being threatened, or the earth being blown up, or the earth being involved in an enormous confrontation with an evil planet; and usually there are Japanese saviors who struggle to sustain the earth or who come into a postapocalyptic world and offer services to the human remnant. And World War II is very much a factor in these stories. It may be no accident that a violent cult that wants to bring about Armageddon appears first in Japan, the only country that’s experienced the atomic bomb.
SHAINBERG: Did that kind of imagery get reproduced in the fantasies of Asahara and his followers?
LIFTON: There’s a vision that I’ve heard from several former members of Aum. It starts with a scene of absolute devastation. Big fires, cities crumbling, parts of them falling into the sea—Armageddon combined with a nuclear holocaust. Then, in some tiny corner, there’s a quiet spiritual area in which a small group of Aum practitioners are going through their meditative practices. World-ending images or fantasies have always been with us; they’re part of the human repertoire. Ordinary people have these fantasies in dreams all the time. But the weapons that could make this fantasy come to pass didn’t exist until recently. That’s what’s extraordinary.
SHAINBERG: So is the degree of credibility Aum members were encouraged to place in these fantasies.
LIFTON: The place was full of visions. I talked to many people who referred to intense mystical experiences. Enormous emphasis was placed on meditation and oxygen-depriving breathing exercises. And later, there were drugs, including LSD. People had frequent visionary experiences, many of which had to do with seeing bright lights—that seemed to be their mystical logo. From very early on, the word among people who had undergone training with Asahara was that it was extraordinarily intense, extraordinarily rewarding.
LIFTON: Almost to a person, they describe experiencing high energy. And that energy itself took on a kind of mystical feeling because it really meant life power, immortality power. And they miss it, despite everything that’s gone on in Aum. One former member I spoke with in Tokyo told me, “I’ve been going to the trial every day. I’m learning things that I hadn’t known about Aum. But it’s funny, I had such enormous energy when I was in Aum.” I asked him: “What about since then?” He told me: “Well, it’s gradually petering out.” And I’ve spoken with others who were more actively nostalgic for that energetic state that they had never known prior to or after Aum. But I should also make it clear that not all the teachings were on this rarefied level. He would also give sermons or little lectures about understandable, everyday lifestyle issues. “What’s the point of worrying about death? It’s karma, it’s a silly thing to worry about. What you want to do is look at your life. Is there some sort of vacuum in your life? Do you feel you live in a corrupt social situation?” And his analysis of Japanese society could be quite hard-hitting—that it’s lockstep authoritarianism in both educational and corporate structures. It made sense to people who were themselves antagonistic toward Japanese society and felt themselves to be excluded from it. They were often young people who were viewed as weak because they couldn’t stand up to the demands of the Japanese rat race. So Aum gave them a home and spoke to them on this nitty-gritty basis as well.
SHAINBERG: So you’re saying Aum offered its members a sense of community, it offered them a spiritual anchor, and on top of that it offered mastery of these special practices that were generating high energy?
LIFTON: Yes, but if you put it that way, it sounds pretty calm and matter-of-fact. What it offered was fierce intensity. Not simply a community, but a transcendent community of special people who alone had the highest spiritual aspirations-increasingly devoted to the teaching that everybody outside of Aum was defiled, hopelessly doomed by their bad karma. That’s why, when things started to go wrong, their commitment was so internalized that they couldn’t condemn the guru. They couldn’t separate themselves from him. Even now, it’s extremely hard. People I’ve talked to will say things like, “Asahara’s a criminal, he betrayed me as well as others.” But then in their next breath, they’ll tell me, “I must have had a tie to him in an earlier life. Maybe he was my guru back then.” He used the whole concept of karma in a highly manipulative way. Even in esoteric Buddhist or Tibetan teachings, as I understand it, karma may be the result of past lives, but you still always have an opportunity for redemption through good behavior. Karma doesn’t wipe out your potential for good, so to speak. But with Asahara, it did, unless you followed him. You were weighed down, you were dominated by your bad karma, that was his teaching.
LIFTON: Yes. When I studied “thought reform;’ or so-called brainwashing methods, in totalistic systems, I found that the key to controlling other human beings seemed to be in controlling their guilt and shame mechanisms. Well, controlling their karma goes one further than that-it includes guilt and shame because you can feel yourself to be bad or condemned on account of what you’ve done in past lives. But the guru also assumes control over your destiny, over what you are and what you can be in an absolute way.
LIFTON: And all of your next lives, that’s right. He’s knowledgeable about your past, he’s offering you a fascinating, transcendent present, and he’s asserting control over your future. And all future lives.
SHAINBERG: He has also lifted any sense of personal responsibility from you. He’s liberated you from all banal responsibility in this lifetime.
LIFTON: Yes. Your only responsibility is toward following his training so completely that you merge with the guru. It’s a total annihilation of self, but it’s also an assumption of his megalomania. Total self-surrender is rewarded by shared grandiosity. Several former members I interviewed still struggled with that grandiosity—it was palpable. Because they are these very special people who alone are in possession of the truth that is destined to be transmitted to the whole world following World War III and Armageddon. They are to be not just the leaders, but the arbiters of this new cosmic dimension. And in return for such a promise, they surrender. Annihilate their own self in the service of merging with the guru self. Many of them experienced visions that illustrate this belief.
LIFTON: One young man saw a pyramid-like structure that was made of human beings. At the top of it was Asahara sitting like a divinity. Like the Buddha. And he, the person who was having this vision, was drawn toward the top of this pyramid, toward the guru, by some inexorable force. He moved closer and closer until the two of them merged and he was no longer just himself, he was Asahara, and Asahara was no longer just Asahara, Asahara was also he. And then he asked Asahara—but of course it was also Asahara doing the askin—”ls this true emptiness?”; and the Asahara figure, but at the same time also he himself, answered: “Ah. So you experience it for the first time.”
SHAINBERG: This is all consistent with Zen or other Buddhist doctrines which aim toward a relinquishing of ego, losing separateness from the teacher and becoming one with him—but here it’s turned into megalomania. Can you say something about the scenario that transforms what is essentially a vision of total humility to one of egomania?
LIFTON: Well, the humility was never there for the guru, so, you see, there’s a terrible problem for the practitioner in discerning megalomania in his or her guru. The paradox of Asahara, I think, is how the leader of a religion could both genuinely convey and teach spiritual practices—mainly Buddhist in this case—and, at the same time, be corrupt from the beginning. One can’t dismiss either his deep corruption or his genuine religious achievement.
LIFTON: Yes, it’s hard for me even to say that because I don’t like to call it an achievement, but at least it was perceived by followers as such. It’s not always easy to tell a compassionate guru from a murderous one. Part of the problem is that states of exaltation have a certain consistency and appeal no matter what their source. Or, to put it another way: He who enables someone to achieve high states that are perceived as authentic has gained tremendous influence over him. That’s true whether it’s a great Zen master or somebody who turns out to be not only a fanatic but also a criminal, as was the case with Asahara. A genuine religious experience, in this sense, requires a kind of enhancement of the disciple’s vulnerability by opening his self up to formlessness. And Asahara seems to have had a powerful ability to induce visions of formlessness on the way to mystical experience through kundalini yoga or other methods. The danger lay in his ability to exploit this vulnerability.
SHAINBERG: What we call “formlessness” in Buddhist tradition means, among other things, the experience of total insecurity or groundlessness. Ideally, in a Buddhist framework, if the teacher and student trust each other and can work together-if the teacher is an authentic teacher-he can help the student tolerate this vulnerability and see, as we would say, the unity of form and formlessness. But if one persists in maintaining a distinction, then the experience of formlessness is only going to create a desperate need for form. Buddhist literature is full of statements to the effect that if the practice is explored in any kind of partial manner, it can turn to poison. In some ways, what you’ve described with Asahara is a horrible caricature of this point; but you can also see it as a metaphor for all institutional religion. At the source, it’s a vision of formlessness, but the vision evolves to impose a new form and subsequently to corrupt and abuse it.
LIFTON: Aum arrogated to itself the claim of all truth for all human beings. But it also radically separated itself from a life-affirming or human-centered morality by setting up a barrier between itself and ordinary people. In fact, there were two sets of barriers—two sets of absolute distinctions. On the one hand, there was the barrier between the Aum people and the ordinary people, who were hopelessly defiled. They were defiled in the first place because they had had no contact with Asahara. The second level of radical differentiation was the barrier between Aum members and Asahara himself. Even now, quite a few of them feel guilty and fearful over having “broken the pipeline”—that’s their phrase. One side of their mind still holds to the guru as the only source of truth and purity in the world. And that makes many of them wonder whether maybe history will prove him right—that all this was for a higher purpose that we ordinary human beings are incapable of grasping, but that he understands, in order to achieve a higher level of human evolution.
SHAINBERG: It’s quite extraordinary when you think of it corning out of Buddhism, which begins with a denial of precisely that kind of discrimination: the fundamental idea that all beings as they are have Buddha nature. There is no such thing as defilement in terms of a Buddhist vision-in any true Buddhist vision. But he appropriated the doctrine that essence is formless, and he turned it inside out.
LIFTON: All religions have the possibility for destructive behavior. You know, I spoke with a Buddhist priest who helped me a great deal in my research. He has been extraordinarily giving in his way of dealing with former Aum members. Nevertheless, when he talked about Aum, he would say: “This is not Buddhism. Buddhism is about other things; compassion is central to our theory and practice.” Well, that’s true; it’s not Buddhist compassion, certainly-but you can’t say it’s not Buddhism.
SHAINBERG: There’s an expression in Buddhism that Buddha and the devil are never more than a hairbreadth apart. That’s why it’s critical to examine the way that Aum Shinrikyo springs from Buddhist understandings.
LIFTON: That’s what so many of the former disciples are trying to do. And they have a very hard time. It’s partly that the whole experience has been so disrupting that their lives have been not only interrupted, but shattered; and, of course, there’s the reality of being made pariahs in Japanese society. But I also think that it’s very hard for them to extricate themselves from the Aum version in which they were immersed so deeply and come to another Buddhism. Many are simply casting about. But they do struggle with the tradition. They read the Buddhist scriptures, they look to Buddhist teachers, they do all kinds of things to rediscover a different Buddhism.
米国の著名な精神医学者、ロバート・ジェイ・リフトンへのインタビューです。リフトンは、広島の被爆者に対するインタビュー調査とその精神的側面に光をあてた『ヒロシマを生き抜く─精神史的考察』の著者として知られています。長年にわたり、戦争をはじめとする極限的な状況における人間の心理について批判的分析を行ってきた研究者です。近著、Witness To Extreme Century : A Memoir （『極限の世紀の証言者 〜回想録』） では、これまでの自身の活動を、研究者としての学問的行為であると同時に、「証言者」としての行為であったと振り返っています。「証言者」とは、体験を受け入れ、自身の言葉で語り直す人のことだとリフトンは言います。原爆投下とホロコースト、２０世紀に人類は最も過酷な歴史を体験しました。そうした歴史に「証言者」として向き合うことが、過酷な体験から意味を見出し、それを乗り越えるために必要であるとリフトンは考えています。今回のインタビューで、リフトンは自身が関心を寄せてきた様々な話題（気候変動、拷問、反戦活動、死刑制度、ジェノサイドなど）について語っています。
I sat down and had a most wonderful conversation with Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. on the occasion the publication of his memoir entitled, Witness to an Extreme Century.
Lifton talks about Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism and his work in Hong Kong in the 1950s exploring brainwashing in communist China. We then talk about his book, Death in Life, which describes the psychological effects of the nuclear bombs on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as his life work campaigning against nuclear bombs and ultimately nuclear energy. Then a discussion of his work with Nazi Doctors, the concept of "doubling" and the mot amazing levels of atrocity done in the name of "virtue." Then to his book, Destroying the World to Save it, about apocalyptic cults. The book focuses on Aum Shinrikyo, the cult of Shoko Asahara who ordered the manufacture and ultimate sarin gassing of thousands on the subways of Tokyo. We talk in depth about this cult and throughout this fascinating talk, the themes of how powerful situational influences can make essentially, intelligent, good people commit extreme and immoral acts.
Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs (English Edition) 1
Introduction
The world has changed since Releasing the Bonds: Empowering People to Think for Themselves was first published. Back in 1999, most Americans including myself could not have imagined the destruction and fear of 9/11, jihad, terrorism, the prevalence of religious extremism, or the many other phenomena that can make today seem like a frightening time to be alive. I have decided to do this updated and revised edition as an e-book and print on demand paperback and retitle it Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults and Beliefs. I have made numerous substantial changes to more accurately reflect all that I have learned.
Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs (English Edition)
The phenomenon of destructive influence and cults of all types has not gone away. It has morphed and become much more sophisticated. Today’s twenty-year-olds know little or nothing about major cult stories of past decades: Charles Manson; Jim Jones’ People Temple Jonestown tragedy (they know the expression, “drink the kool-aid” though); David Koresh’s Branch Davidians in Waco; Heaven’s Gate mass death; Shoko Asahara’s Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin gassing in Japan; and Order of the Solar Temple mass deaths to name some major news stories. Mainstream media is doing less investigative reporting on destructive cults, avoiding their civic responsibility, in my opinion. Large cults have gone mainstream and become very sophisticated, hiring top law firms and lobbyists. The Internet is now the major recruitment arena. Unfortunately, sleep deprivation is rampant, making people especially vulnerable to undue social influence.
But events are happening that also make this an exciting and hopeful time. Former members of cults are putting up web sites, and are writing blogs and publishing books. Many have, like myself become mental health professionals, and have gone on to have very successful careers. As we learn more about human behavior, we enhance our ability to help people who’ve been recruited by controlling organizations and cults. Today we have knowledge, including neurobiology research that explains what just a few years ago would have been considered magical, occult, or satanic.
Like most of us, I knew nothing about any of these phenomena when I was recruited into the “One World Crusade,” a front group for the Unification Church, better known for decades as the Moonies. I was a 19-year-old junior at Queens College in New York in February of 1974. I was an appealing target for cult recruiters as I sat in the college cafeteria and mourned the loss of my girlfriend. I was idealistic and bright, the only son of a loving middle-class family and especially vulnerable at that moment to the smiles of three attractive women who flirted with me and invited me over for dinner.
Dinner led to longer meetings, and workshops. Within a few short weeks, I came to believe that Armageddon was at hand, World War III would start in 1977, and we Moonies were single-handedly responsible for defeating Satan and building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
I threw myself into the work of “saving the world,” logging 18 to 21 hours a day, seven days a week, fundraising, recruiting and indoctrinating new members, organizing public relations and political campaigns, and meeting regularly with Moon and his highest-ranking lieutenants. As an American, I had no real power, just position. The upper echelons of the hierarchy were composed exclusively of Koreans and Japanese, with the Koreans in the position of the master race. Moon had moved to the United States, and he needed American front men who were intelligent, passionate and dedicated. Over a matter of months, I went from founder of a recruiting front group, C.A.R.P.[1] at my former college, to the rank of Assistant Director of the Unification Church #10 at National Headquarters in Manhattan. I was highly praised by Moon himself, and proclaimed, “the model member.”
It took a miracle–disguised as an accident–to save my life. In 1976, after three days without sleep, I nodded off at the wheel of a fund-raising van and crashed into the back of an 18-wheeler. This near-fatal accident gave my family the opportunity to do a deprogramming. On the second day, I threatened my father with violence, at which point he broke down in tears and asked me what I would do if I were in his position? For a brief moment, I was able to see from his perspective, to feel his pain. I reluctantly agreed to meet with a team of former members for five days without contacting the cult or trying to escape.
As a devoted Moonie, I did my best to fight the deprogramming process. But the information gradually began to sink in. In the days that followed, I came to understand brainwashing as practiced by Mao Tse Tung in his Communist re-education centers. Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (Norton, 1961) helped me realize that the techniques we used in the Moonies were much like those used by the Chinese Communists to make their people obedient. Eventually, after five days, I came to the painful realization that not only had I been subjected to these techniques, I had used them on others. I was horrified that I could have turned my back on my family, friends, religion, my life goals to essentially become a tool of a demagogue who wants to take over the world.
After my deprogramming, I went on to complete a master’s degree in counseling psychology. From my unique position as a former cult member and counselor, I dedicated myself to helping others escape and recover from destructive situations. In 1979, following the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, I founded EX-MOON Inc., a nonprofit educational organization made up of ex-members of Moon’s international organization. I published a newsletter, held media conferences, and established a clearinghouse for information about the Moon organization. I later served as the national coordinator of FOCUS, a support and information network of former members of destructive cult groups. I am now directing the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, Inc. (www.freedomofmind.com), a center dedicated to helping families and individuals, and to informing the public about destructive and deceptive influence practices.
In the early 1990s, I learned that the leaders of some cults were buying copies of my first book, Combatting Cult Mind Control: The #1 Best-selling Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults, so they could learn how to resist the exit-counseling process. For example, Kip McKean, who founded the International Churches of Christ, reportedly held up my book at a general assembly and told some 15,000 members that it would be sinful to meet with me or even read my book.[2] In this way, cult leaders impeded the efforts of many families–but also forced me to develop more effective ways of strategically and creatively interacting with those trapped in cults. A cult member’s friends and family are traumatized by the situation and, to mobilize them, I had to find ways to empower them, both as individuals and as a team. These revelations became the cornerstones of the method I call the Strategic Interactive Approach, or SIA.
This book is the culmination of 36 years of experience in helping people all over the world. It describes a practical approach to helping those affected by destructive cults. The Strategic Interactive Approach (SIA) improves upon exit counseling, and promotes a family-centered, non-coercive course of action. It provides friends and family of the cult member with a greater understanding of cult methods, and the effects of indoctrination. It offers new insight into cult-induced phobias, and effective tools for overcoming them.
The SIA is designed to help the cult member recognize that he has been under the influence of the group and eventually, to recognize the pervasiveness of the group’s control over his life. Once the former member has experienced such an awakening, my methods help him regain a sense of personal power, integrity, and direction. Most cult members I have worked with have experienced emotional, psychological and even spiritual rebirth. They were able to return to their families and were spared further injury or possibly even death.
SIX YEARS AGO, in 1989, I set out across the country on my own search for wisdom. In the course of my travels, I interviewed and worked with more than two hundred psychologists, philosophers, physicians, scientists, and mystics who claimed to have the answers I was after. By the time I wrote What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America, it was clear to me that Ken Wilber was in a category by himself. He is, I believe, far and away the most cogent and penetrating voice in the recent emergence of a uniquely American wisdom.
It has been nearly twenty years since Ken Wilber published The Spectrum of Consciousness. Written when he was twenty-three, it established him, almost overnight, as perhaps the most comprehensive philosophical thinker of our times. Spectrum, which Wilber wrote in three months after dropping out of graduate school in biochemistry, made the case that human development unfolds in waves or stages that extend beyond those ordinarily recognized by Western psychology. Only by successfully navigating each developmental wave, Wilber argued, is it possible first to develop a healthy sense of individuality, and then ultimately to experience a broader identity that transcends—and includes—the personal self. In effect, Wilber married Freud and the Buddha—until then divided by seemingly irreconcilable differences. And this was just the first of his many original contributions.
The title of this book is deceptively breezy. A Brief History of Everything delivers just what it promises. It covers vast historical ground, from the Big Bang right up to the desiccated postmodern present. Along the way, it seeks to make sense of the often contradictory ways that human beings have evolved—physically, emotionally, intellectually, morally, spiritually. And for all its breadth, the book is remarkably lean and compact.
Indeed, what sets A Brief History of Everything apart both from Spectrum and from Wilber’s eleven subsequent books is that it not only extends the ideas advanced in those earlier works, but presents them now in a simple, accessible, conversational format. Most of Wilber’s books require at least some knowledge of the major Eastern contemplative traditions and of Western developmental psychology. A Brief History is addressed to a much broader audience—those of us grappling to find wisdom in our everyday lives, but bewildered by the array of potential paths to truth that so often seem to contradict one another—and to fall short in fundamental ways. For those readers who want still more when they finish this book, I recommend Wilber’s recent opus, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, which explores many of the ideas here in more rigorous detail.
No one I’ve met has described the path of human development—the evolution of consciousness—more systematically or comprehensively than Wilber. In the course of my journey, I ran into countless people who made grand claims for a particular version of the truth they were promoting. Almost invariably, I discovered, they’d come to their conclusions by choosing up sides, celebrating one set of capacities and values while excluding others.
Wilber has taken a more embracing and comprehensive approach, as you will soon discover. In the pages that follow, he lays out a coherent vision that honors and incorporates the truths from a vast and disparate array of fields—physics and biology; the social and the systems sciences; art and aesthetics; developmental psychology and contemplative mysticism—as well as from opposing philosophical movements ranging from Neoplatonism to modernism, idealism to postmodernism.
What Wilber recognizes is that a given truth-claim may be valid without being complete, true but only so far as it goes, and this must be seen as part of other and equally important truths. Perhaps the most powerful new tool he brings to bear in A Brief History is his notion that there are four “quadrants” of development. By looking at hundreds of developmental maps that have been created by various thinkers over the years—maps of biological, psychological, cognitive, and spiritual development, to name just a few—it dawned on Wilber that they were often describing very different versions of “truth.” Exterior forms of development, for example, are those that can be measured objectively and empirically. But what Wilber makes clear is that this form of truth will only take you so far. Any comprehensive development, he points out, also includes an interior dimension—one that is subjective and interpretive, and depends on consciousness and introspection. Beyond that, Wilber saw, both interior and exterior development take place not just individually, but in a social or cultural context. Hence the four quadrants.
None of these forms of truth, he argues in a series of vivid examples, can be reduced to another. A behaviorist, to take just a single case, cannot understand a person’s interior experience solely by looking at his external behavior—or at its physiological correlates. The truth will indeed set you free, but only if you recognize that there are many kinds of truth.
A Brief History of Everything operates on several levels. It’s the richest map I’ve yet found of the world we live in, and of men and women’s place in it. In the dialectic of progress, Wilber suggests, each stage of evolution transcends the limits of its predecessor, but simultaneously introduces new ones. This is a view that both dignifies and celebrates the ongoing struggle of any authentic search for a more conscious and complete life. “No epoch is finally privileged,” Wilber writes. “We are all tomorrow’s food. The process continues, and Spirit is found in the process itself, not in any particular epoch or time or place.”
At another level, Wilber serves in A Brief History as a demystifier and a debunker—a discerning critic of the teachers, techniques, ideas, and systems that promise routes to encompassing truth, but are more commonly incomplete, misleading, misguided, or distorted. Too often we ourselves are complicit. Fearful of any change and infinitely capable of self-deception, we are too quick to latch on to simple answers and quick fixes, which finally just narrow our perspective and abort our development.
Wilber’s is a rare voice. He brings to the task both a sincere heart and a commitment to truth. He widens his lens to take in the biggest possible picture, but he refuses to see all the elements as equal. He makes qualitative distinctions. He values depth. He’s unafraid to make enemies, even as he is respectful of many voices. The result is that A Brief History of Everything sheds a very original light, not just on the cosmic questions in our lives, but on dozens of confusing and unsettling issues of our times—the changing roles of men and women; the continuing destruction of the environment; diversity and multiculturalism; repressed memory and childhood sexual abuse; and the role of the Internet in the information age—among many others.
I cannot imagine a better way to be introduced to Ken Wilber than this book. It brings the debate about evolution, consciousness, and our capacity for transformation to an entirely new level. More practically, it will save you many missteps and wrong turns on whatever wisdom path you choose to take.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYTHING is one of the most popular books I have written, which is heartening in that it contains a good deal of the integrative vision that I have tried to develop. “Integrative” simply means that this approach attempts to include as many important truths from as many disciplines as possible—from the East as well as the West, from premodern and modern and postmodern, from the hard sciences of physics to the tender sciences of spirituality. As one critic put it, this integrative approach “honors and incorporates more truth than any approach in history.” I would obviously like to believe that is true, but you can best be the judge of that as you read the following pages.
And even if it were true, so what? What does an “integrative approach” even mean? And what does it have to do with me in today’s world? Well, let’s have a quick look at what it might mean in business, science, and spirituality.
Scholars of the many and various human cultures—premodern, modern, and postmodern—have increasingly been struck by their rich diversity: the beautiful, multicultural, many-hued rainbow of humanity, with multiple differences in religion, ethics, values, and beliefs. But many scholars have also been struck by some of the similarities of these cultures as well. Certain patterns in language, cognition, and human physiology, for example, are quite similar wherever they appear. Humans everywhere have the capacity to form images, symbols, and concepts, and although the contents of those concepts often vary, the capacity is universal. These universal and cross-cultural patterns tell us some very important things about the human condition, because if you have found something shared by most or even all humans, you have probably found something of profound significance.
What if we took all of these common patterns and put them together? What kind of picture would we get?
This would be very much like the human Genome Project (the complete mapping of the genes of human DNA), except that this would be a type of human Consciousness and Culture Project: the mapping of all those cultural capacities that humans everywhere have access to. This would give us a rather extraordinary map of human potentials, a great map of human possibilities. And it would further help us to recognize any of those potentials that we—that you and I—might not yet be fulfilling. It would be a map of our own higher stages of growth and a map of our own greater opportunities.
You might be surprised to know that a good deal of this Consciousness and Culture Project has in fact been completed. The result of the research of thousands of workers from around the world, the Consciousness and Culture Project has already disclosed a profound range of higher states of consciousness, stages of growth, patterns of spirituality, and forms of science that often dwarf the more restricted versions sanctioned in our present culture of scientific materialism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the postmodern celebration of surfaces.
As you will see, these greater potentials and possibilities are a crucial ingredient in the bigger picture that is presented in the following pages—a bigger picture that is a kind of “theory of everything.” A “theory of everything” is just that: if we assume that all the world’s cultures have important but partial truths, then how would all of those truths fit together into a richly woven tapestry, a unity-in-diversity, a multicolored yet single rainbow?
And once that rainbow is clear, how does it apply to me? Perhaps very simply: a more accurate, comprehensive map of human potentials will directly translate into a more effective business, politics, medicine, education, and spirituality. On the other hand, if you have a partial, truncated, fragmented map of the human being, you will have a partial, truncated, fragmented approach to business, medicine, spirituality, and so on. In garbage, out garbage.
Thus, no matter what your field of endeavor, a “theory of everything” will likely make it much more effective. So it is not surprising that this more comprehensive map of human possibilities has seen an explosion of interest in virtually all fields, including politics, business, education, health care, law, ecology, science, and religion. For those interested in some of these recent applications, see A Theory of Everything—An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality.
But the basics are all here, in this volume, which will give you all that you need of this comprehensive map to see if it is useful for you. And although this comprehensive map might sound complex, once you get the hang of it—as I will try to show in the following pages—it is surprisingly simple and easy to use, and by the time you finish reading, you will have all the tools you need to begin applying it if you wish.
One last point: the whole idea of a more comprehensive map is to enrich, not deny, your own present understanding. Some people are threatened by a more integral approach, because they imagine that it somehow means that what they are doing now is wrong. But this would be like a great French chef being threatened by Mexican cooking. We are simply adding new styles, not condemning those that already exist. I love French cooking, but I also like Mexican. They are not going to cease being what they are if both are fully appreciated. Most of the resistance to an integral approach comes from French chefs who despise Mexican cooking—an attitude that is perhaps less than helpful.
And so, in the following pages, you will find an international style of “cooking”—a universal smorgasbord of human possibilities, all arrayed as a shimmering rainbow, an extraordinary spectrum of your own deeper and higher potentials. This map is simply an invitation to explore the vast terrain of your own consciousness, the almost unlimited potentials of your own being and becoming, the nearly infinite expanse of your own primordial awareness, and thus arrive at that place which you have never left: your own deepest nature and your own original face.
In the following pages I do not offer any formulas for getting rich quickly or for discovering immediate solutions to all personal problems. What is explained are reliable, tested and verified ways to experience satisfying spiritual growth and live happily and effectively. My thesis is simple: for prosperity to be real or authentic, it must be based on an awareness of spiritual realities and on compliant cooperation with the principles which enable it to be experienced.
In 1994, a department of the United Nations published a progress report to provide information about global conditions and human affairs. It reported that, in comparison to conditions fifty years previously, more people had access to food and literacy levels were higher. Even so, almost two billion people, most of them in economically undeveloped regions of the world, were impoverished. Approximately one third of the planet’s human inhabitants were illiterate. The gap between rich people and poor people had widened. In some countries, the average annual income per person was less than three hundred dollars. Ten countries had nearly seventy percent of the world’s poorest people.
Other sources report that global human population is increasing at the rate of eighty million people every year: approximately six and a half million a month; one and a half million each week; more than two hundred thousand each day. According to a report published by World Watch Institute, there are already some signs of faltering growth trends in countries that were expected to have the greatest population increases in the near future. Population in thirty-two industrialized countries has stabilized because of declining birthrates.
A few countries, including Russia, Italy, the United States, and Japan, have declining populations. In some developing countries where population growth will probably be slower in a few years, more people are dying. India, Pakistan, and Nigeria, for instance, are beginning to experience difficulty in feeding, housing, and educating increasing numbers of children while having to confront the challenges of falling water tables, deforestation, and soil erosion caused in part by rapid population growth in recent decades. Some observers of global trends are of the opinion that human population growth will slow down because developing countries will begin to encourage smaller families or unrestrained birth rates will result in the spread of famine and disease. The major threats to human security on the planet are conflicts within nations because of socioeconomic deprivation and differences, and ethnic and religious intolerance.
The period in human history through which we are now passing is characterized by rapid changes in the outer realm, while indications of accelerated intellectual growth and spiritual awakening are increasingly observable in the transformations occurring in the social order. That we are being confronted by effects of powerful evolutionary causes is obvious to anyone who is sufficiently perceptive to examine the evidence. I look upon the world scene with an abiding sense of wonder and am serenely optimistic about our near and distant future possibilities. I hope you are viewing the unfolding drama of life with a thankful heart and pronouncing it good.
