The Right to the Audacity to Think

By Alain Chevillat (March 2005)

Because, for our forum, we had invited - along with 46 other speakers - Jayanti Behn, one of the leaders of the Brahma Kumaris association, there came a barrage from three newspapers of the local press: “Behind the guests… the cults?”.

The mayor of Aix-les-Bains and the director of the Tourist Office were alerted, and we were asked to cancel the participation of the contested person. The press spoke of a possible cancellation of the whole event. Pressure was exerted on Sister Emmanuelle to get her to refuse to take part, and thus not to “cover for the doings of a cult”. The whole thing had been triggered, and was driven, by Mrs Boulanger, of the ADFI of Chambéry.

The Congress Centre maintained its confidence in us. Sister Emmanuelle replied that if the lady in question ran a cult, “we would see it plainly enough by listening to her”. When the day came, not one of the three journalists so zealous in the defence of virtue - any more than a representative of the ADFI - was there to listen to Jayanti Behn, and to learn for themselves, outside the received notions.

For all the censors founded their indignation on nothing but the “Parliamentary report on cults”, which they brandished without thinking any further, as people once did in China with Mao’s little red book.

But what credibility does this report have? What qualifications do those who wrote it have? What truths does it contain? What proofs do they give? To all these questions there is only one answer: none. No proof, no truth, no credibility, no qualification. This report is a political work of intellectual censorship. It was drawn up without any public adversarial debate and without the necessary culture and rigour. The consequence is an amalgam between organisations committing manifestly criminal and reprehensible acts and a whole set of associations and movements whose only wrong is to want to live by values different from those on which our society currently runs, and which therefore prove disconcerting to a majority of people.

I telephoned one of the people in charge at the ADFI in Paris to find out what the Brahma Kumaris were reproached with. She could not tell me, having no critical file. And she ended up admitting that the Brahma Kumaris were not classified as “cults” at the ADFI before the Parliamentary Report. So where did the report draw its negative information? And on what did it found its decision? We are in the realm of the purely arbitrary, you would think we were back to the lettres de cachet by which, under the Ancien Régime, anyone who “displeased” was sent to the Bastille - or to the stake.

I then looked into the book by the Centre Roger Ikor, Sectes : état d’urgence. Concerning the Brahma Kumaris, it gives:

they seek to free themselves from the passions in order to recover the state of original purity,
they invite the limitation of sexuality,
they advocate dietary restrictions (vegetarianism) and restrictions on sleep as a means of purification,
they accept the possible severing of family and social ties.

Anyone with a minimum of culture will immediately recognise there practices and principles common to all religions, in force in the monasteries of every tradition - and notably in Christian monasteries. It is clear that what most bothers the Ikor Centre and the ADFI is the severing of family ties. It remains for them to understand that this is part - today as in the past, and in every tradition - of a certain form of deep religious vocation. It is the eternal story of all the monks and nuns of all religions. Are they unaware of that famous sentence: “Leave your father and your mother, sell your goods, give the money to the poor, and follow me”?

Moreover, without wishing to be nastily ironic, if one wants to fight against the separation of couples, at a time when, it seems, one couple in two divorces, it would certainly be more fruitful to direct one’s energy in directions other than that of religious vocations! I am not seeking to defend the Brahma Kumaris in particular. I know that they are consultants to the UN and to UNICEF, that they have received several UN awards for their action in favour of peace, and that a stamp bearing the effigy of their founder has been issued by the Indian government. But for us, what matters, through this anecdotal story, is that one can measure the extent of our society’s intolerance and the fanaticism of those who have arrogated to themselves the mission of protecting us.

Just as every organism is endowed with an immune system by which it defends itself against external aggressions, so the human mind is endowed with a strength of character and of discernment by which it protects itself from “mental manipulations”. And just as everyone recognises that it is better to strengthen one’s natural immunity than to replace it artificially, so external overprotection weakens the mind’s capacities by making it ever more vulnerable.

There lies the real heart of the matter. In a society where dependence on assistance is becoming general, and personal irresponsibility commonplace, we claim for the individual:

the right to choose for himself
the right to an education in discernment through the confrontation of points of view
the right to reject the dictatorship of the “good conscience” and of “right thinking”,
the right to the audacity to think for himself - and possibly to think differently - which also includes the right to be wrong.

At the very moment when the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” is being celebrated, and in the country that saw its birth, it is rather rich to find thought fenced in like this. Who dares to permit themselves to impose on us which thought is good and which thought is bad? At the time of the affair, we had sent the right-thinking and indignant journalists a short communiqué. Of course, none of them published a line of it.

Here it is:

=== Communiqué ===

In the name of the freedom of citizens, the list grows longer of prohibitions, suspicions and trials of intent.

In the name of freedom of conscience, the right of all, each person is denied the faculty of discernment and the responsibility of thinking for themselves.

Have we then become so uncultured, so weak and so infantile, can we not exercise our critical sense or our “common sense”? Do we need to be made so secure and so protected? Henceforth, whoever speaks of spirituality necessarily belongs to a cult; whoever invokes God or the Absolute finds themselves labelled a fundamentalist or a reactionary; and whoever concerns themselves with ecology or natural medicine can only be an obscurantist, a sworn enemy of progress. Must we call democracy this dictatorship of the good conscience and this comfort of mass non-thought? Must we call freedom of expression this fear of thinking for oneself and of behaving differently from others?

We persist in believing that one can talk with people who do not have the same opinions and the same choices as we do, rather than condemning them a priori. We persist in thinking that the diversity of individuals is enriching, the opposite of the sectarian spirit that aims at the extinction of all singularity.

To meet the other is always a risk and an adventure. To exercise one’s thought and one’s judgement remains an audacity and a peril.

We choose these risks. We wager on life and on the individual.

= TERRE DU CIEL =

In 1997, after receiving our collection Cheminer, Jean Vernette - the Catholic Church’s specialist on cults and the “New Age” - had written to us:

“A great thank-you for this marvellous Cheminer en vivant le sacré, which meets everything that is my own quest and my own encounter with the women and men animated by the same search for Life, on paths all converging towards the Essential and the One thing necessary.”

Carrying out an interview with him is a good idea. Let us look for the opportunity. Faced with the social ills that are cults (the real ones!), drugs, violence, suicide… the true solution remains, for us, the strengthening of the individual’s immune resistance through the development:

of strength of character,
of the power of discernment,
of authentic direct spiritual experience, which ought to be recognised as the keystone of an integral flourishing of the individual and, as such, encouraged and favoured.
of the strengthening of the bond with nature. When we lose respect for nature, we naturally lose respect for man.

It is fashionable to stigmatise the “mental manipulations” of cults. Without denying that this is sometimes a real and serious problem, it is also a way of burying one’s head in the sand and failing to see something far more serious.

How can one fail to see that today the most important - and permanent - mental manipulations come from commercial advertising, which spends fabulous sums to hammer into our skulls that it is by drinking coffee X, or driving around in car Y, that we will find true happiness, that we will flourish, that we will be somebody? Advertising long ago ceased to be the simple presentation of a product and became an orientation of the mind towards a conception of life in which the product will occupy the centre.

There is no worse perversion than this hold of the economic over our lives - which operates through the insidious and permanent manipulations of advertising, and which today is leading an entire civilisation towards the abyss.

How can one fail to see the repeated lies, the double-speak, the hypocrisy of conduct, the cunning and the manipulation of the world of politicians as a whole? What counts today is no longer ideas, but tactics and skill. How can one fail to see the ever closer collusion between the media and financial power? The press has moved away from its “obligation of truth” to become an instrument of the economic power in place. It lives off it, it serves it. While making us believe that it serves us. Beside these mental pollutions, which we breathe at every moment along with car exhaust fumes, those attributable to cults remain very anecdotal.

Like the loves of Caroline of Monaco, cults sell a great deal of paper. They feed the imagination and get the adrenaline flowing, filling us with indignation and settling us into our good conscience. That the press uses and abuses this to earn its living, so be it! But one would wish that the people who truly have the public good at heart carried their reflection a little further.

Alain Chevillat is the founder and animator of the review Terre du Ciel, and the author of the Charter of the Europe of Consciences.

The Right to the Audacity to Think

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