A Wretched and Fearful Society That Seeks to Smother the Spiritual Impulse

A Wretched and Fearful Society

that seeks to smother the spiritual impulse…

After twenty years of media hammering about the cults, the effects of the conditioning are being painfully felt in France.

Today, the greater part of the French believe they know what they are talking about when they evoke “the cults”. So much so that the most widespread understanding is that one ought to “have done with it” by force. A friend was telling me yesterday how his neighbour had come and confided to him through the open window of his house how he “would kill the Jehovah’s Witnesses if he came across them in the street”… and that he had hesitated until then only because he feared the courts would punish him for it (and even then, he did not seem entirely sure of undergoing such a sanction!).

Others have already moved to action by planting bombs (1) in front of premises designated by the media as the meeting place of a spiritual minority (Moon in Paris in 1996, Scientology in Angers in 1997; 3 months earlier, a representative of the ADFI declared on Europe 1, on the subject of the Reverend Moon’s visit: “Really, I understand if people plant bombs!”. The AMORC centre in Toulouse was entirely destroyed by arson on the night of 24 to 25 June 2007), and a man was even murdered in the street by his father-in-law (2) because he was said to have belonged to a “cult”!

Disinformation prospers on general ignorance and propagates itself in a form of violence that ought to alert us all.

At the present time, nothing of the sort. The scapegoat is designated and the authorities complaisantly accept — when some are not fanning it — that the situation should degrade to the point of creating a new form of segregation. “People” know nothing about spirituality and what motivates it. And yet we must all today endure the stupidest and most hate-filled statements on a question that demands the greatest subtlety.

It is necessary and urgent that this situation should change. Our site contains information to be widely diffused in order to counterbalance the ambient defamation and informing. If “people” do not know what they are talking about, and are inclined to lose their temper without discernment, they also have a desire to know the truth and not to undergo “brainwashing”.

It is high time, even if the task is great, to restore a little common sense, subtlety and spirituality to this debate, currently sclerotic and unhealthy.

Read on an anti-cult forum ( source ):

What I would like to know is “how do you get someone you know out of a cult????” My case is simple: my boyfriend left me to invest himself in the church he has been going to for 5 months!!! And from what he told me, it really is a cult and I remain totally powerless. He knows my point of view on the subject but persists in telling me that I am mistaken and that it is not a cult!!!!! Dialogue is impossible! So I would have liked to have the testimony of people who have found themselves in the same situation!!! I have already made contact with the ADFI!! Thank you for your help!

Do you not find this cry of distress “exemplary”? It shows the confusion in which the greater part of the population in France finds itself, as well as the so convenient “recuperation” that is made of the cult psychosis. It is interesting to note how this person utters her cry of distress with the certainty that one can “get people out” of where they are, against their will… especially those “who have left us”, of course, “the cult” being then an ideal party to hold responsible, since it is condemned in advance (if he had left for the army, she would have had to find other arguments). But still more revealing of the climate: she is just as certain that “dialogue” means “making the other see reason” (“dialogue is impossible!”). Her pathetic appeal for help is in the image of hundreds of others that arrive in the letterboxes of the ADFI, which takes pleasure in “bringing help” to all these “victims of cults”. I hope that one day we shall be able to smile at this masquerade.

Another extract, unfortunately more serious (source):

The seminar “Cults and Laïcité” took place from 8 October 2003 to 23 June 2004 at the Ministry of Research. Its realisation was carried out with the assistance of the office of the Minister of Research (…) Anne Fournier was the organiser of this seminar (…) The approach was intended to let divergent opinions be freely heard. This choice brought to light the gulf that separates the discourse of all those who work in the field and have had to deal with the direct and indirect “victims” of the cults, and the discourse of those who approach the subject only on an “intellectual” plane, often putting forward freedom of opinion and freedom of association. The approach undertaken by the MIVILUDES has only confirmed the differences of approach in this domain between France and the United States.

Numerous people today take advantage of the collective psychosis skilfully maintained around the spiritual minorities and present themselves as victims so that such an argument may be admissible. The question of “victims” is too important to be used in so unscientific a manner. If thousands of people claimed to be victims of the Republic, would the same discourse be held?

In her conclusion, Anne Fournier declares that “faced with the demanding obligation to respect public liberties and individual rights, faced with the sufferings demonstrated by the doctors and the psys and by the complaints of the victims [of the cults], the State has a legitimacy to act, and therefore so does the MIVILUDES.” Referring to Condorcet, she recalls that every “new truth” must pass “through the sieve of law and of reason”.

A new cult: “law and reason”?

If we are citizens subject to the law, we are not obliged to subscribe to the beliefs of Madame Fournier, nor of any other representative of the State, which, let us recall, and by its own will, is not supposed to intervene in religious or spiritual questions.

France is decidedly in great need of fresh air

Are certain opportunistic politicians seizing on the question of the cults to give themselves publicity or to compensate for their shortcomings elsewhere? Be that as it may, they are doing our society great harm and we have little hope that they will become aware of their aberration today.

The media feed terror and disinformation and have, in their great majority, moved so far away from the precious role they are supposed to hold that we expect nothing from them either.

Our attention is elsewhere, in the direction of the “general public”, which is truly the sap of our society, and which the CICNS works to inform, denouncing the lies in an attempt to breathe a little oxygen into the vitiated air of (single-track) thoughts and (conditioned) fears.

We live in a society where spiritual experience, absent from the foundations and from political choices, is moreover daily denied. Anyone engaged in a spiritual approach to the point of having made it the heart of their existence knows, deep within themselves, that their choice is today threatened, as in the worst times of the witch hunt or of McCarthyism; that the meaning of their life is designated as an error, an illness or a crime; and that the “sanction” will not be long in coming. To testify to a spiritual quest or experience is perilous today and, to read the hatred well orchestrated by the statements of the anti-cult camp (and if the most furious among them did not try to control themselves, we would not be very far from the time of the arenas and the lions)…

Daily injustices, scandalous judgements, mendacious crusades occur every day. Many, in the spiritual movements, are informed of the crudeness of the anti-cult activists, of the ignorance of the UNADFI’s arguments, and yet, despite this sword of Damocles hanging by a thread over the heads of spiritual seekers, the latter’s choice is still to hide, thinking that the sword will fall less quickly if they remain in the shadows than if they show themselves. You are perhaps one of those who have made that choice, and we do not doubt that you have numerous rational or more subtle arguments to justify it. But, in the survey of our contacts, it has been observed that it is in fact fear that is at the origin of this choice. Now, at all times when minorities have been thrown to popular vindictiveness, fear has prompted withdrawal. It has always been necessary for the drift of these attacks on fundamental liberties to reach considerable proportions before the people concerned sketched out some semblance of a response. Doubtless we are not there today, because a handful of people gathering to defend the essential foundation of humanity is little, too little… Today, observing that men draw no lesson from the aberrations of the past, we shall nevertheless pursue our action for an education of the victims of the anti-cult crusade, for information on the means of not yielding to it and, we hope, for a growing dynamic among those concerned in order to create a popular movement, representative of what man has best to propose to our disenchanted societies with their obsolete and reductive principles. The world is waiting for us to wake up, not for us to doze with the inert masses, hypnotised by fear and by the slogans of materialist “well-being”. There must be in each of us a feeling of living through an era that presents us, as in the past, with a set of points: either withdrawal into fear, or the affirmation of our natural rights to live the essential part of the project this existence proposes to us.

Yesterday someone said to us:

“But all the same, the cults really do exist?!”

The word “cult” has the power to animate impassioned debates. Everyone has their “idea” on the question.

Too few of the people concerned, however, question the origin of their “ideas”, which they take for “new” thoughts when it is most often a matter of a knee-jerk reaction or of the recitation of the most widespread commonplaces.

In the calmest discussions, one always finds someone who expresses their disagreement in the following manner: “I agree, but… the cults exist all the same!?”

Where does this certainty come from? What then is a “cult”?

We hear things said by the media that we never verify and that the greater part of the population takes at face value. People speak of the cults as they used to speak of the beast of Gévaudan. Those who had never seen it often had a precise description to give of it and, in any case, everyone had something to say about it.

When several million people, as is the case in France, begin to assert things they have heard as if they knew what they were talking about, we are dealing with a collective conditioning… and with its unhappy consequences.

But if we judge the consequences unhappy, they are not so for everyone. We then discover that the germ of division that has been planted a little everywhere, and not only by the wind (even in spiritual circles), is in full growth.

Next, one hears it said that “the cults are dangerous”. That is the precision that follows from the preceding assertion. A source of danger has been found and it would be a pity to abandon it! There thus hovers in the air of France a certainty about malevolent entities, ready to snatch us up should we approach them, and incarnating every risk that a civilised human being could fear: “they” are after your money, your sex and your power. Apart from the cults, the tripod of the ego’s life is safe.

In fact, the human being without consciousness is dangerous. The way he speaks of the cults demonstrates it. The dangers belong no more to spiritual groups than to any other human assembly.

That is where the manipulation begins.

If we accept quite willingly to deliver to Justice those who commit crimes (although Justice would certainly deserve to be better inspired as well), we can no longer accept that the amalgam be made between criminality and any group whatever with a spiritual vocation. As I said elsewhere, when firemen themselves set fire to a forest, as we saw a few months ago, one does not invent a “cult of firemen” in order to dissolve it or take it to court. When police officers or teachers commit suicide (the greatest number of suicides occurs in those institutions), the Police and the National Education system are not designated as dangerous suicidal cults!

This masquerade must therefore cease and, first of all, within the spiritual or therapeutic movements, where the conditioning is the most out of place and the most damaging.

The spiritual quest has a legitimate place in our societies, just as much as firemen or teachers. If that were not called into question by people or groups who have an interest in doing so, the spirituality-criminality association would not be so popular.

Someone else proposes a definition of the spiritual minority to us:

“A cult is a gathering of people free to come and go as they please around one and the same spiritual interest… no notion of unhealthy attachment”

This notion of “unhealthy attachment” forms part of the “negative culture” on the subject of the cults. Attachment, whether to a spiritual teacher, or to one’s parents, one’s husband or wife, one’s children, one’s profession, etc., may be judged unhealthy equally in all these domains. There is as much possibility of abuse in a family “of blood” as in a “spiritual” family, as there is as much possibility of healthy teaching and of love. The fact of playing up abuses, which we know to be very rare, in fact, in relation to what goes on everywhere in our societies, manifests an intention to discredit precisely where the human being questions himself most seriously about the important questions of our existence. Why this intention to discredit the spiritual approach? That is what we are trying to answer.

Someone asks us: “Why do we not question more those who have left cults of their own free will?”

One or several people leaving a spiritual minority, an established religion or a political party and having remarks — positive or negative — to formulate do not really constitute a reliable “database”. We have learned that for research to be called “scientific”, far more numerous and impartial criteria are needed.

It is unfortunately the contrary attitude that one sees most often in the anti-cult fight: a “former member” is brought onto every television set, as if he represented all present or past “followers” and, following a serious briefing (his language suddenly resembles that of anti-cultism strangely closely), he finally reveals “the truth”. My God! (permit me the expression.) For this suggestion to have a real pedagogical scope, it would be necessary for those who proclaim it to undertake to gather several hundred or thousand former followers, and for the questions put to them to respect the impartial rules evoked above. This somewhat forbidding work would certainly have the effect of dispelling the smoke and mirrors of the “made-to-measure apostates” presented to us at every opportunity in the traditional media.

Someone makes this comment:

“It is useful to know how to discern between an opinion and the knowledge of something. Thinking and having an opinion can serve as an approach to and a preparation for knowing, but knowledge is deeper, more accurate.”

We ask no one to have a “knowledge” of all the spiritual minorities and their motivations. Tolerance will suffice. The spiritual minorities do not ask to be understood but to be respected and, in particular, that people should stop harassing them for reasons that generally do not concern them.

We do not neglect the pertinence of this suggestion in saying that, but we know that not everyone will understand or seek really to “know” approaches they have judged eccentric and that they have been taught to believe dangerous for 20 years.

But it seems right to us to ask, in a country like France, that the diversity of orientations be respected.

Another remark from a visitor to the site:

“There are also abusive and dangerous groupings. Dangerous because their aim is not spiritual but to promote the ego of a founder, the accumulation of money, the abuse of goods or of bodies. It is important to recognise that too.”

Anti-cult activism is founded on this popular argument. It is a way of stoking fear and it seems to me that we have better things to do than to participate in the collective psychosis. The excesses are dealt with by the competent authorities. The fact that an excess occurs in a restricted spiritual circle ought not to lead to condemning the spiritual approach in general. That is nevertheless what happens, and it is on the basis of that observation that the CICNS was created.

In reality, who among us really knows whether a dangerous group exists? We hear it spoken of, we repeat what we hear and we thus participate unconsciously in the enterprise of destruction.

The first vigilance is here, in my view. Let us not participate in the lie, and let us gather our forces and our consciousnesses to restore the truth. The amalgam between criminal affairs and spirituality is already amply served up by the media. Do you not think that we could move on to something else, on “our” side?

A question is put to us: “How does one distinguish a religion from what is not one?”

We are not here to define something for others. We do not have to protect the other from a possible “error”. That is what is called “freedom of conscience”. Our conception of error often issues from our fears and our conditionings. It is thus that the “rationalists” would like to see religion disappear. The anti-cult camp wants to see the spiritual quest extinguished. And you would like to sort the wheat from the chaff. On the basis of what certainties? A little humility is therefore needed on this question.

The liberty of the human being is also that of making mistakes. It is for each person, in their soul and conscience, to make their choices. Today, we are supposed to believe that the choices of the anti-cult camp would be better inspired than those of spiritual teachers, for example. That is false. It is precisely because the “right choice” cannot be determined with certainty that we must affirm that the spiritual approach is an invitation to come closer to it. The criminal act today is to want to smother the spiritual quest and to participate more or less consciously in that crusade.

To which this person replies: “I have the right to want to protect children from abuses they have no idea of! That is my liberty too. As they say: ‘The liberty of some ends where that of others begins’. I have the right to inform, to give my opinion, so that people can make an informed choice. Especially the children.”

The right to protect is not called into question. But what protection are we speaking of? If you are afraid of something, you will instinctively want to protect those close to you from that same thing. But where does this fear come from? If you are afraid of butterflies, you will certainly transmit that fear to your children. There is no doubt about that. And if only someone runs a skilful campaign about the risks of butterflies, you will even have arguments to support your fear (there exists a theory in physics, chaos theory, which says that the beating of a butterfly’s wing in Australia can produce an earthquake in Japan!).

If the media have succeeded in feeding a psychosis on the subject of the cults, parents will soon all express themselves as you do and will say: “I have the right to protect my children from the cults”. But it is then only a matter of raw fear, not of a conscious choice based on reflection or on a genuine knowledge of the question. Consequently, “the right to give one’s opinion (…) so that (others) can make an informed choice” has little chance of being a good source of protection. “Opinions” are more often shaped by the media today than by wisdom. And to want to protect one’s children on the basis of collective fears has nothing wise about it, even if one may speak of a “right”. An informed choice never issues from unreasoning fears or from influences. Now, most of the people who believe they “think for themselves”, as is generally claimed, do nothing but repeat pre-digested arguments.

A great part of the “abuses” reproached to the cults, for example, are denounced on the basis of opinions that can be debated. When the government asserts that “the cults” cut people off from society, it starts from the principle that society is the source of all goods and that there is nothing to add or subtract. That is just an opinion. And the government can take itself for an “enlightened parent” by depriving its “children” of the new forms of spirituality.

Do you understand the interest of a new way of looking, which asks each of us to consider with humility a conditioning whose consequences we have all undergone, even while thinking ourselves “sincere” or “enlightened”?

Do you understand how people engaged in a spiritual quest ought to be the first seriously to revise the “compulsive opinions” they express daily, playing into the hands of the collective manipulations? Our energy ought to be devoted to restoring a healthy way of looking, without the weight of those unreasoning fears, come from the depths of the ages, and that some know how to awaken at the desired moment.

A final reply from the same person: “If one says: ‘There is ONLY the government that raves about dérives sectaires, because they do not exist at all’, one lacks objectivity. If one says: ‘All spiritual movements are dérives sectaires’, one also lacks objectivity. One must find the middle way.”

Yes, but it seems to us necessary to stop circumscribing “excesses” to the spiritual phenomenon, as if that had to remain a point of focus. Whether in a positive or negative manner, or more in the “middle way”, the fact of associating the spiritual approach with excesses is already a lack of objectivity in itself. It is a confinement. The debate tends to be confined (our dialogue is somewhat the demonstration of it) within this perspective, and that is why we invite people to broaden the debate.

It is the natural place of spiritual research in our society that suffers from this situation, and we have better things to do than to maintain this closed vision… And to reverse the process by saying that spiritual research has nothing to do with criminality does not seem to me an excess in the times we live in. It is just against the current of “single-track thinking”.

(1) The explosion of a bomb in front of the Reverend Moon’s Unification Church in the 14th arrondissement in 1996 was treated thus by a journalist of Le Figaro: “This a priori minor affair relaunches the debate on the proliferation of parallel churches in the capital”. In the same box, the journalist had listed “57 addresses in the sights, across 17 arrondissements of Paris.”

(2) On Tuesday 28 July 1992, in Lyon, Roger Dorysse, a 62-year-old pensioner, coldly fired several rifle shots at Jean Richard Miguères. His victim collapsed, hit in the legs. Roger Dorysse calmly returned to his car, reloaded his gun and coldly finished off his victim at point-blank range. Jean-Richard Miguères was the founder of a UFOlogist movement. He was Roger Dorysse’s son-in-law, and the young couple had just moved into a district of Lyon. The Dorysse couple are said to have been ardent militants of the ADFI Lyon, the CEIRUS being catalogued as a dangerous cult and, according to the declarations of its president, in the “sights” (sic) of the association. Moreover, as soon as the murder was revealed in the press, the president of the ADFI is said not to have hesitated to overwhelm Jean Miguères by accusing him of being a dangerous and malevolent man, without expressing the slightest condolences for his widow. The CEIRUS had never been talked about in the region and its activities were limited to the regular organisation of lectures on the subject of UFOs. Madame Dorysse declared to the press: “My husband of course regrets his act, but he is completely relieved and serene. He did it with a single aim: to save our little girl from the clutches of this dangerous character.”

Read also: What is freedom of conscience? What is a spiritual minority? What is an amalgam? What is the government’s intention? What is an apostate? What is communitarianism?

Read also “Petit traité de manipulation à l’usage des honnêtes gens”, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble (PUG), which demonstrates brilliantly how our daily life is saturated with manipulations, never denounced and often encouraged.