What Is a Spiritual Minority? And What Is Held Against It?

What Is a Spiritual Minority?

And what is held against it?

by André Tarassi (January 2005)

What the CICNS designates by the expression “spiritual minority” is, for the general public, a nebula of diverse movements with beliefs often judged eccentric, indeed dangerous. This vague perception, skilfully maintained by the media and the authorities, has made it possible to stigmatise the most recent spiritual expressions for more than 20 years.

What is a spiritual minority?

In the sixties, with the rise of Eastern spiritualities in the West and a certain weariness of the young towards the majority religions, against a background of social contestation, groups formed, seeking to free themselves from the straitjackets of dogma and of the ancestral principles on which the conception of man’s destiny rested.

One of the values that shattered is the anthropomorphic perception of God which had long dominated among the practitioners of the great religions. God was losing his status as a superior man watching over his creatures from his Celestial throne. He was becoming, more and more, a transcendental reality, indeed the very substance or substratum of the universe. This God has become more accessible. It was no longer a matter of pleasing Him and fearing Him, but of “realising him in oneself”, as “in all things”.

The New Age currents, inspired by the mystical currents of the great traditions, invited a “communion” with the Divine which has ended up becoming the dominant trait of numerous current tendencies, even if each has developed its own characteristics (often by adding to the dimension of faith a “personal development”, a psycho-spirituality, which has made it possible in part to satisfy the need to “understand” and to “analyse”).

Today, even if we say “spiritual minorities”, in the plural, the differences are not so great from one to another, for the most part. They constitute a fairly coherent whole in which, often without knowing it, the general public sometimes recognises itself.

On the basis of this new perception of the universe, of this revisited cosmogony, groups are created to keep the flame of their quest alive, around a leader or a book, and tend to feel the world as chaotic and in decline by comparison with their internal organisation and the principles that govern it.

Even if this conflictual relation with “the world” can be at the origin of certain drifts — largely dramatised by the anti-cult activists — it remains that the inspiration to gather around a common perception of man’s destiny is a natural phenomenon, and every group, whether it be called political, religious or recreational, is constituted in this same manner. It would occur to no one to say that every association is a flight from the world or a menace to the Republic, for example.

So why so much hatred?

What has brought about a different view of groups with a spiritual vocation is not the reality of any menace they might represent more than others (except for the established religions) but their pure and simple, cynical and violent rejection by a rationalism dominant today which uses certain events in order to attack the spiritual search.

The spiritual minorities are statistically and resolutely inoffensive. They are made up of sincere people, even if the latter can sometimes be a little disoriented in a world that tends to offer nothing more to nourish an inner life other than through fantasies and neuroses.

Criminality in the spiritual minorities is practically nil. The scourge of the gurus is a manipulation by the anti-cult activists of a reality that does not belong at all to the spiritual minorities (the leaders of non-spiritual groups could advantageously draw inspiration from the great integrity of spiritual leaders, most often devoid of ordinary ambitions), and the demagogic question of money is a joke in an associative universe persecuted by the administrations and maintained in poverty.

A spiritual minority is, in the worst of cases, a group of inoffensive people who clumsily try to build a parallel universe so as not to sink into despair and, in most cases, a hearth of mutual aid and reflection where certain values lost in the strayings of our societies of profit and falsehood are beginning to be reborn. Among the latter, it happens that certain discreet groups, which will never receive — and would probably refuse — the publicity they deserve, are even at the origin of the resurgence of a richer inner life, free of conditionings, of a spiritual awakening which, if it makes dried-up hearts snigger, is nonetheless an essential reality of man’s destiny.

It is not criminality and deviances that anti-cult activism really attacks, but a whole dimension of life ridiculed, defamed and violently mishandled in France by people or interest groups whose true designs are disguised in false virtues.

It is this dimension of life, cherished by a few peaceful groups in France who ask to be respected, that the CICNS is determined to protect.

André Tarassi was born in 1961. He is the founder of the CICNS. An independent researcher, he has been studying the New Spiritualities for 25 years. He studied journalism and television in the United States. He has published, under another name, several works on the spiritual approach.