-Caveat Lector-
In a message dated 99-09-06 15:01:36 EDT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>I have met many of the NLP enthusiasts that exist in Northern California.
>North California, you may know, has been the international hotbed for NLP
>development for some time. None of the individuals I have met could be
>construed in ANY sense of the word to be followers, which is a necessary
>element in a cult; without followers, there is no cult.
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.
The psychodynamics of "cultism" was THE RULE in the late '60s and throughout
the '70s, into the early '80s, and the ONLY thing that kept "New Age"
movements afloat -- and I say that from having INVESTIGATED those seminal
movements at VERY close range, "sociologically," because I had studied the
same esoteric techniques and skills as the founders and leaders of those
movements --and had to struggle to avoid being turned into a "guru" myself by
starry-eyed novices-- but I was committed to using them in a totally OPPOSITE
way, to DE-program the mind (contra the momentum of these followers to BE
programmed) and encourage AUTONOMY rather than authoritarianism
under the common disguise of the "master/disciple" relationship. During this
period, I breathed a sigh of relief when I read an interview with Sufi
"master" Idries Shah in Psychology Today wherein he stated that, himself
being perceived by other Oriental "gurus" in the "New Age" marketplace as
"one of them" and therefore safe to be frank with, most of the highly-revered
"Masters of Wisdom of the East" were in fact motivated by the basest
instincts -- greed (big money), lust (satisfied with submissive Western
devotees), and blatant anti-Western hostility, aimed at "paying back"
Americans and Europeans for colonizing and exploiting the Orient. I'd seen
the same motives (less the anti-Western element) at work, behind closed
doors, in MOST "New Age" promoters.
In the late '70s and early '80s, when I turned from "para" psychology to
psychology as an academic discipline, I witnessed the "yuppification" of
these "New Age" movements.
Nearly everyone who was anyone in the arena (writing popular books, holding
seminars, travelling the New Age Expo circuit) would confide to me, in
private, that this was all a "business" and that ignorance and gullibility
offered the biggest untapped market base
for entrepreneurs of the esoteric. I knew all that they knew, and generally
even more, but I had no desire to capitalize on it by developing "pyramid
schemes" exploiting the silly needs of those populating the "New Age"
mass-market, whom I frankly despised for their gullibility, easy
hypnotizability, and lack of psychological and spiritual autonomy
(qualities which those who DID profit from exploting them disdained as much
as I did!).
The smirkingly hypocritical predation, megalomaniac self-delusions, and
manipulation of the innocently believing, essential definers of the field,
drove me out, made me cynical.
I've seen nothing since --and I've stayed in touch-- that will alter my basic
judgmernts.
You'll forgive me, then, if I'm rather jaded with the whole scene. There's
no doubt that some percentage of students and practitioners of NLP are
tough-minded, still have a sense of perspective, and do not fall readily into
either the cult leader or follower profile, as you've observed. There have
been similar types in all the movements I've examined, but they were never
the rule, particularly in the formatory and initial stages of a "wave."
NLP has as much of value to offer as any other "system," taken with the
prerequisite grain of salt, but these "systems" TYPICALLY begin and flourish
as cult structures, so long as the founders are in control and the "first
wave" predominates sociologically. In time, they mellow out --one might even
say, with more truth than irony, "burn out"-- and just become more prosaic
offerings on the bookshelf of the "New Age" marketplace, judged for
information content -- possible only AFTER its original authoritarian or
"cult" social structure is gone. NLP was one of those systems, in my
opinion, and it's now PASSE, one little niche in the wider geography of
hypnotic technologies. Anyone who's found any real value to it is likely to
be equally involved in other areas of the same field, usually in Ericksonian
hypnosis, going back to its source ... Away with "middlemen"!
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