stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

SPIRITUAL CHOICES 417
indeed just as constraining, and more psychologically destructive,
than any mere “armed guards and fences” could have been. Indeed,
whether the constraints take the form of peer pressures, literal
fences, or concern about “pursuing furies,” they will all have the
same effect. That is, they will all make it extremely difficult for one
to leave such environments, even having entered them voluntarily
to begin with.
As I later tried to explain to people outside Scientology, I was
like a two year old child. I was incapable of leaving home.
They owned my soul. The ties binding me to the Org, though
invisible, were more powerful than any physical bond could
have been. I was in a trap more powerful than any cage with
iron bars and a lock. Mentally I belonged to them (Wakefield,
1996; italics added).
[Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard] controlled our
thoughts to such an extent that you couldn’t think of leaving
without thinking there was something wrong with you
(Gerry Armstrong, in [Miller, 1987]).
Without having done in-depth research (particularly in the
pre-Internet days), however, such poor souls had no way of knowing
what they were getting themselves into. Thus, they suffer endlessly,
for no greater sin than having “surrendered completely” to
one or another “god” in a voluntarily entered totalitarian environment.
Meanwhile, our world’s unduly respected theoreticians congratulate
themselves, and each other, on having composed “devastating
critiques” which embody little reference indeed to the spectrum
of relevant concerns.
One may further argue endlessly about what constitutes coercive
“brainwashing” or relatively subtle “mind control,” and whether
any given community is guilty of either or both of those. The answer
does not really matter here, simply because there are people
trapped in every such environment who cannot, psychologically,
“just leave,” regardless of any “theories” which may say that they
shouldn’t be thus constrained. Zimbardo demonstrated that with a
mere dozen previously healthy individuals thirty years ago; as did
Wilber himself, inadvertently, at the low, suicidal point of his own
second marriage.
One might further be tempted to disparage the intelligence,
independence or emotional stability of #819 as a cause for his in-