Cults: Faith, Healing and Coercion

Cults: Faith, Healing and Coercion: Medicine & Health Science Books @ leondumoulin.nl
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These people go on to study BA, masters, a second masters, a PhD, and so on. They love the titles, the rituals and the sense of purpose these educational ladder-rungs and their diplomas give them. Surveys show, like the protagonist of Fight Club, that most people try many different groups before settling into one. Charismatic groups are like spiritual buses: Excellent idea… I was thinking about this today, and realised that basically every organisation in human history would end up going onto that mind map.

I will look into doing something along those lines, though…. That would be very cool. Needs something to narrow the scope and 4 is not doing enough work on that front. Not sure what to suggest, not having read the book, but perhaps a variable that defines the group as marginal to society in some way excluding the military [sadly] and Cambridge and main stream religions. Which is not a bad idea, but a different one. I wonder how I can access it…. HRAF is an amazing resource.

Ebook This title is available as an ebook. To purchase, visit your preferred ebook provider. Overview Description Reviews and Awards. Praise for the first edition: What is Alcoholics Anonymous? International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology Alan Frazer. Spirituality and the Healthy Mind Marc Galanter.


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These appeared to be absent in the ashram. Caring and intimacy, reflective of the group's cohesiveness, seemed to mute any expression of animosity. There were kind words, offers of food, expressions of interest, and warm smiles, all from people I'd never met before. Any question was soon answered, sometimes even anticipated.

Having been invited by one of their members and defined temporarily as one of their own, I was made to feel as if I were entering a supportive envelope, to be protected from the rough edges of relationships in the outside world. To illustrate the healing offered by her newfound religious experience, Beth told me about Janet, a twenty-six-year-old premie whose case showed the vital role that social bonds within this group play in stabilizing the members' subjective state and behavior.

I later corroborated the details in interviews with the woman herself and her relatives and friends. Over the course of several hospitalizations dating back to her mid-teens, Janet had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. She had been placed on a variety of medications, usually major tranquilizers in modest to large doses. Despite this treatment, the intermittent hallucinatory periods, episodes of rage, and inappropriate behavior were not effectively brought under control.

When Janet was not in the hospital, she lived with her hapless parents, and was apparently quite demanding and easily upset by their presence. The parents, unable to move her into an independent living situation, were pleased that she at least retained a few friends, some of whom she had met while in the hospital.

Occasionally her tenuous equilibrium broke down at home, whereupon florid psychotic symptoms appeared, including delusions of persecution, and her unpredictable behavior often led to a return to the hospital. In the most tragic periods of her illness, fearing that her eyes were the source of demonic visitations, Janet actually blinded herself with her own hands.

The sight of her sunken eyelids confirmed this, as did a later physical examination; here was even more convincing evidence of unmanageable behavior than the hospitalizations and trials of psychotropic medication. But Janet was now behaving appropriately, even though she had taken no medication in the three years since joining the group. During my first visit she conversed with companions, apparently in good spirits, and was able to tell her story to me.

She said she felt relaxed with other premies and had expe-. It became apparent from observing her and speaking with other members that the group not only displayed affection and support, but also set clear standards for her social behavior. This was something her parents had tried but failed to do. While engaged within the cohesive structure of the group, she felt compelled to comply with the expectations of her fellow members, a process that aborted the downward spiral of regressive behavior regularly ending in a psychotic state at home.

This dynamic was illustrated by the comment of a friend and fellow member: She knows that we care for her, and that our scolding is done with love. This supportive atmosphere and sense of closeness apparently had a strong impact on the mental state of certain members, especially individuals like Janet. Somehow the sect was reaching some disturbed persons in a way that conventional psychiatry could not. Through intense togetherness and support, it seemed to have turned around their thinking and behavior.

Cults: Faith, Healing, and Coercion

But this was also true for members who had been well adjusted. Beth, for example, was profoundly changed by the sect. She had previously demonstrated herself to be highly intelligent and competent, and excelled academically without great effort. With independent-mindedness, she had assumed a leadership role in the antiwar movement of the late s, yet only a few days before my visit to the ashram she sat with me at the dinner table and seemed transfixed, removed from all worldly cares. Only when she spoke of her newfound commitment did she become animated.

She talked of the divine light she could literally see, the sacred nectar she could taste, and the divine music she heard. Under the group's influence Beth had somehow acquired a mental set entirely at variance with her previous attitudes. This development seemed no less surprising than Janet's; both women had apparently been transformed in their behavior, feelings, and perceptions.

Within a few months, I began to study this compelling phenomenon. I enlisted the help of Peter Buckley, a colleague at the Albert Einstein college of Medicine, and we conducted interviews and designed a questionnaire to evaluate two issues: I hypothesized that a relationship existed between the perceived emotional relief and fidelity to the group. The study was conducted on the outskirts of Orlando, Florida, at a national festival held by the Divine Light Mission, one of the conclaves regularly organized to allow members the opportunity for personal contact, or darshan, with the guru.

A field had been rented for the weeklong event. Events there showed how the group's cohesiveness could be mobilized as a potent social force and how nonmembers could be excluded. The atmosphere of belonging was pervasive, as some 5, young adults gathered to make preparations.

They interacted in a congenial and open manner, even when they had struck up acquaintance only moments before. To say the least, this was not an impersonal work site. It represented a network of people who hastened to assist each other and sought ways to further their common cause of making the festival a shared experience, something valuable to all.

As a group, the members looked as though they had been drawn from the graduate campus of a large university-bright, not too carefully groomed, casually dressed. They were lively, good-tempered, and committed to their mutual effort. Some set up tents; others sold religious tracts and pins with pictures of the guru, his American wife, and their baby.

Cults: Faith, Healing and Coercion - Wikipedia

Some handled food; others moved about with an air of eager expectancy. There was no idleness, brashness, marijuana, beer, loud music, or flirtation-all hallmarks of a more typical assembly of people in their twenties. The administrative structure for the event appeared informal, but no sense of disorganization pervaded.

The speakers addressed the group from a large floating stage on a lake. The program moved along smoothly from one event to the next, whether singing for the guru "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" or listening to various leaders deliver satsang. The group's congeniality apparently extended to anyone designated as acceptable, as long as the proper signal was made. Thus, because Beth, who held a position of respect in the group, had labeled my colleague and me "okay," we were acceptable. After being introduced to the appropriate parties, we were greeted warmly and made to feel a part of the group.

Help was offered as I began to query various organizers on strategy. Was it possible to pick out people at random from the registration lines to administer the questionnaire? There surely was a way, once I deliberated with them over the options available. Was space necessary for subjects to sit quietly and fill out research forms?

Something would be worked out for every need. Soon we were all sitting around and talking about experiences of mutual interest, even of a few remote common acquaintances. We also saw the other side of the coin-how the group defined and protected its boundary between members and the outside world. The demarcation could be drawn tightly, much as a droplet of quicksilver coalesces and separates from its surroundings, or as family members draw together and limit access of outsiders to their personal affairs.

Our own status suddenly changed from inside to outside when a more suspicious member of the administrative group asked me if the project had been "approved" by senior figures from the Mission. In the absence of a definite response, our legitimacy was now open to question. Although it was not entirely clear what this approval entailed, a request was quickly relayed to the upper reaches of the Divine Light hierarchy and was then-to my surprise and distress-peremptorily turned down. The members I had met quickly withdrew their offers of friendship, providing an object lesson on exclusion from a cohesive group.

I soon felt myself to be a nonperson, treated civilly but coolly, having become an outsider as. The very people who had hovered around us to help with our plans now found making conversation uncomfortable. People seemed to be looking through my colleague and me rather than at us. Toward the end of the day approval came as suddenly as it had been withdrawn, with the information that a decision had been made at the "highest" level, presumably in consultation with the guru himself.

Acceptance and offers of help came with rekindled warmth. As if automatically triggered, a renewed air of intimacy suffused our exchanges. This experience illustrates the considerable mobilization of support that such a cohesive group can generate, either informally or with formal sanction, as well as the strength of its controls over actions. The sect's ideology lends the control structure a legitimacy that penetrates the layers of the individual members' own decision making, eliciting group-sanctioned behavior.

At no point in the Orlando sequence was there any significant diversity in attitudes expressed toward us. Each group member adhered to the consensus and thereby assured unanimity. As in Ann's family, this intense mutuality reflected the need both for security in the face of an outside world that is perceived as threatening and to prevent internal conflict. Agreement in attitude and views serves to protect the integrity of the group as a social system.

Later in the festival I asked to interview people who had experienced psychiatric or drug problems, hoping that they might help clarify the sect's impact on psychiatric symptoms in individual members, as well as the function of its intense social influence in mediating psychological change. One member brought forward was Ellen, a thirty-four-year-old divorced, part-time clerk whose five children had been remanded to her mother's care by the court because they had been neglected during her protracted bouts of psychiatric and drug problems.

These problems had apparently come under control when she joined the Divine Light Mission. Her story illustrates two points. First, like many other initiates, she was attracted to a charismatic group at a time of psychological crisis, as if seeking aid to cope with extreme distress. Second, the support and structure offered by the sect allowed her to pull her psychological resources together. She used the strength of the group as an auxiliary ego to help regain her emotional stability.

Seven years before, Ellen had begun using drugs and was taking ten to fifteen barbiturate capsules a day. When psychedelics became popular, she began using LSD and later became addicted to a variety of opiates: Her opiate habit became very expensive, and for four years she survived through prostitution.

While on her roller coaster of drug abuse, she was hospitalized on several occasions for psychiatric problems, typically for a few days or weeks, during which she often smuggled a supply of heroin into the hospital. The despair that precipitated these hospitalizations led to several suicide attempts.

Ellen denied any history of hallucinations and gave no evidence of formal delusional thinking. Significantly, she reported that her mood improved. This history, along with her somewhat histrionic presentation of it, left the impression that she did not have a major depressive disorder. I thought she might have a borderline personality disorder, reflecting impulsive and self-destructive behavior and poor coping skills, and that the episodes requiring hospitalization were precipitated by drug use and environmental stress.

At one point, despairing of any escape from heroin addiction and the consequent need for prostitution, Ellen applied for methadone maintenance, which allowed her to stay away from illicit drugs and out of the hospital for over a year. She thought of herself as independent, though, and did not like the regimen of frequent visits to the clinic required by the program.

Like a number of patients on methadone maintenance, Ellen mistook her newfound stability for a genuine ability to withstand the pressures of daily life. Wanting to "take control of her life," she withdrew from the methadone program and soon began using marijuana heavily and taking barbiturates again. As she said, I used anything I could to stay off the heroin.

Her drug use rapidly increased, and she began to shoot heroin again.


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    • Feeling panicky over a likely full-fledged relapse, she fled to Colorado from her native Philadelphia, in the hope that life in a rural setting would save her from further deterioration. It did not, and she continued to use drugs, setting into life as a street person. She immediately felt comfortable with them and soon began to appreciate the merit of their religious devotion.

    She wanted to become part of he group to salvage herself from a profound sense of desolation. Each day he went to their ashram where she was accepted warmly, began to cut down her use of drugs, and attempted to meditate. Though living alone, she felt herself to be part of a "close, loving community.

    Dangers of Heresy, False Teaching & Occultic Practices

    Part of my exchange with Ellen was revealing of the role played by the group's cohesiveness. I was terrified, but I also felt that I had returned to a friend, one who would heal my wounded feelings but then hold me in its claws. I knew I couldn't control it …. Once I got to know them, I realized they loved me. They took me up, and it was as if they were holding me in their arms. I was like a baby whose mother guides its moves and cares for it.

    When I wanted to take heroin, or even to smoke [marijuana], I knew they were with me to help me stay away from it, even if I was alone. And their strength was there for me, even before I could hardly meditate at all. I could rely on their invisible hand, moved by Maharaj Ji's wisdom, to help me gain control. After a while it was everything they did that made me know I belonged. Just feeling their love was all I needed. The drug abuse syndrome that Ellen confronted when she arrived in Colorado was serious, and the likelihood of her aborting a decline into full-blown heroin addiction was small.

    A geographic escape generally is of little value. Few patients in the throes of an addiction such as hers, combining opiates and other drugs, are able to establish control over drug abuse on their own. Her description of the intense support she felt from other Divine Light members suggested an alternative dependency. Her reliance on the group for the strength to face the stress of everyday life paralleled the reliance she had placed on drugs. Both aided her in coping with conflict, but at the cost of independent action. The sect had exerted a remarkable influence on this woman's addictive problem, affecting her in a way that our usual psychological therapies do not.

    What produces such influence? We can begin to answer this question by recalling the discussions of the family and the therapy group earlier in the chapter. Further insights came from our studies of Divine Light members in Orlando. The objective study of behavior in charismatic groups is not a simple undertaking, and two issues complicating this research are relevant here: The problem of investigator bias reflects the very nature of charismatic groups.

    Faith, Healing and Coercion

    Such groups maintain their views even in the face of contrary evidence, and, as we just saw, do this with a mutuality that stands independent of contrary evidence. They also tend to elicit contrary views and animosity from the surrounding community, which itself may be no less biased regarding an alien sect. As a result, the investigator is almost always pressed to adopt a position that either favors or opposes the stands taken by the charismatic group. For example, at times my studies on charismatic sects were attacked as a reflection of my being "duped" by the Moonies; at other times the same studies were seen just the opposite, as evidence of the use of my "professional credentials to discredit" these groups.

    A second problem in carrying out this research lies in designing a valid methodology. We had to adapt approaches and techniques from a variety of disciplines, including psychiatry, social psychology, anthropology, and sociology. In addition, questions often had to be framed so as to make use of the methodology available, rather than what might be the most interesting to study. For example, my principal interest in initiating the Orlando study was to examine the major psychopathology found among some Divine Light members.

    Practically speaking, this could not be studied in a controlled fashion because reliable self-report measurements for the relevant diagnostic cate-. Even more broadly, the choice of a proper context in which to study the interrelatedness of group members in a charismatic group also presents a major paradox. The group phenomena observed among its members-their intense closeness, feelings, and beliefs-can hardly be re-created in a laboratory. Yet so many real-world variables impinge on the phenomena to be studied that to observe them outside the laboratory setting, without ample controls, would leave researchers vulnerable to a circus of external issues, let alone their own subjectivity.

    This paradox is illustrated by my previous research on the influence of social context on drug use and abuse. Volunteers in a laboratory setting smoked either active marijuana, placebo marijuana, or no drug at the outset of each of a series of professionally led encounter-group meetings. The question remained as to how such a controlled evaluation of group interrelatedness could be undertaken effectively. Outside the laboratory, studies on the peyote rituals of the Native American Indian Church in the Southwest United States 22 show that the tribe's cohesive social structure was closely integrated into this religious experience when the hallucinogen is taken in the context of a close-knit community.

    This religious context clearly cannot be reproduced in an ad hoc fashion, but one can surmise that these close ties are an effective vehicle for transforming a potentially disruptive hallucinogenic experience into a constructive and therapeutic one. In what setting can the role of the naturally emerging social ties of a religious sect be best studied?

    Access Check

    My access to the Divine Light Mission appeared to offer an opportunity for analyzing group cohesiveness in a systematic, controlled way within its natural setting. Specifically, a statistical assessment could be made of the relationship between such variables as group cohesiveness and other measures of the members' emotional status. In this respect, the sect presented an "experiment of nature. To conduct such an analysis, a fairly large sample of subjects was needed, and consequently it was not feasible to rely primarily on interviews, since personnel were not available.

    We developed a seven-page multiple-choice questionnaire and gave copies to subjects who were active members of the Divine Light Mission, selected at random from the festival registration lines. In framing the questionnaire, we had to address certain technical problems. One was the need to choose symptoms of mental illness or health that could be queried within this format. Some scales for evaluating major mental illness, such as the SCL, 24 have limited specificity and are fairly lengthy.

    I have found, however, that more independent sorts in less zealous groups can give an investigator no end of trouble. Since we needed to ascertain the subjects' perception of their psychological state both before and after joining the group, the scale had to be short and easy to fill out relative to the subjects' experience during more than one period in their life. For a brief ad hoc scale, it also seemed best to develop items that would have face validity, that is, they would clearly reflect the symptoms of psychological distress.

    This approach contrasts with self-report psychological scales such as the Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory the MMPI , a widely used but quite long schedule whose validity has been tested by standardizing items on large groups of people with different psychiatric diagnoses.

    Each of the MMPI questions in itself comparable to "I like to collect stamps" , however, does not have an obvious relationship to the symptoms measured by the test. Table gives the items developed for this Psychological Distress Scale, each rated from 1 "not at all" to 5 "very much" by the respondent.

    Subjects evaluated each symptom during four two-month periods: This made it possible to compare their estimation of the psychological distress they had experienced before and after joining. In addition to psychological distress, a second "outcome" variable, drug use, was studied. Each of six common drugs of abuse was listed, and subjects were asked to rate how often they used each drug during the same four two-month periods on a scale from 1 "none at all" to 5 "more than once on most days".

    Subjects indicated how much they felt this way, on a scale of 1 "not at all" to 5 "very much". Responses were then related to specific aspects of the group membership to find out how group membership might have led to any psychological and drug use changes. Group cohesiveness as a predictor of change, as well as other group issues such as meditation practice, to be discussed later, were also considered.

    Group cohesiveness was measured on the scale given in Table , adapted from the earlier study on marijuana use and social interaction. A member's cohesive feelings about three different groups were recorded: This offered a contrast between the subjects' feelings of affiliation toward people inside and outside the group. The survey produced revealing findings regarding the psychology of the charismatic group.

    First, the members' reports reflected a relief of distress on joining. Second, the members' cohesiveness toward the group was closely associated with this relief. From these findings emerged a beginning sense of what motivated members to comply with the group. Members who had joined the sect roughly two years before reported a considerable decline in psychological distress and drug use after joining.

    These findings formed the first objective evidence of the role psychological distress plays in recruitment to such groups. Furthermore, members' level of distress symptoms decline over the course of conversion. The average incidence for the items on the Distress Scale is given in Table , as are the figures for marijuana and heroin use, which reflect the all-around decline in both psycho-.

    Subjects rated their feelings toward the group on each item, on a scale of 1 "not at all" to 5 "very much". Outcome of Initiation into the Divine Light Mission. These figures indicate the percentage of subjects who reported the presence of symptoms during each of four two-month periods.

    These findings were confirmed in later research on the Unification Church where it was possible to study recruits as well as disaffiliated members. The cohesiveness scores showed that respondents felt considerably closer toward members of their sect than toward nonmembers whom they knew best. If valid, this would mean that most members felt closer toward the sect overall few of whose members they had actually met than toward the ten people outside the sect they knew best. Their connection to the group far outweighed their attachments to outsiders. To examine the relationship, if any, between the feeling of cohesiveness and the symptom changes reported, we statistically analyzed the average decline in symptom scores.

    That is, a large part of the enhanced well-being derived from joining this sect could be attributed to the members' feelings of relatedness with fellow members. Such findings were notable since the degree of neurotic distress experienced by individuals is determined by many factors, including differences in temperament, quality of life, and how people see themselves in relation to the rest of the world.

    But for the young adults in our study, the decline in feelings of psychological distress was directly proportional to the degree of cohesiveness they felt toward the group. One might have thought that members like Ellen, who were most emotionally troubled before entering the sect, would have benefited the most from joining. Yet the survey indicated that serious emotional problems before join-. Nor were serious emotional problems correlated with higher social cohesiveness score. These findings naturally raise the question of whether subjects overestimated the degree of distress before joining and the amount of improvement after.

    While this may well have occurred, a later study on the Unification Church see Chapter 8 supported the view that the effect on psychological well-being of joining the group was real. Such emotional gains reinforce members' involvement in the group by effectively "rewarding" them for their fealty to it. The reward, specifically, is enhanced well-being when the members feel closer to each other. And this reward may help explain the members' remarkable conformity to the group's expectations, since acceptance and conformity bring relief from distress.

    The beliefs held in common by members of cults are a vital force in the group's operation. They bind members together, shape their attitudes, and motivate them to act in self-sacrifice. I began to appreciate the importance of such beliefs in following the career of my friend who had joined the Divine Light Mission. At first it seemed certain that Beth's involvement would be ephemeral; surely this sensible and successful young woman would soon turn back to her roots in the Western mainstream.

    But this assumption proved wrong. Beth moved her home across country more than once to follow her youthful guru, and took a number of trips to India along with his followers. Several years later she married a fellow premie. After having a child, she obtained a university position and returned to teaching, but remained deeply committed to her belief in the guru. A few years after Beth joined the Divine Light Mission, it was obvious that she believed very strongly in something the group offered and that her involvement reflected an abiding faith, not easy to fathom but quite telling in its implications for the psychology of charismatic groups.

    Consider a letter in which she spoke of her belief in the guru, whose actual contact with thousands of followers must have been limited. His revelation of the Kingdom of Heaven within us all is a completely practical experience for each and every individual…. The gift of Knowledge that Maharaj Ji has given me is so deeply satisfying and joyfully constant that I can't imagine another being conveying the truth as he has revealed it.

    Beth accepted the guru's transcendent message in a way that others before her might have embraced the prophets and messiahs of old. This literal faith was hard to understand since it came from a woman whom I had known some. To understand the role such strong beliefs play in charismatic groups, we will examine a related historical example. People are more vulnerable to social influence when they are made to think, sense, and feel differently than usual, when someone or something disrupts their emotional balance. Such changes in subjective experience or alterations in consciousness can undermine the psychological matrix in which our views are rooted, so that we lose track of customary internal signposts.

    They may also introduce a feeling of mystery, or a sense that forces beyond our control are operating. Thus, they can prime us to accept unaccustomed explanations for our experiences and adopt new attitudes implied in these explanations. In this respect altered consciousness can help shape members' attitudes in a charismatic group. I was struck by the significant role of alterations in consciousness when studying the Divine Light Mission. From my first contact with this group, members mentioned the importance of the four "meditations" to their personal commitment.

    Each drew on a different sense, causing unexpected visions, tastes, and music. The sect itself was named for one of these sensory experiences, the "Divine Light," that members reported seeing during their personal meditation. At first these meditation practices did not seem compelling, perhaps because of my own inclination to dismiss as self-deceptive or pathologic those experiences that could not be verified by independent observation. Their importance became clear, however, as I spoke with one person, Raymond, whose views I tended to take more seriously, since he too was a psychiatrist.

    Sharing a profession made it easier to empathize with him. In addition, Raymond was a bright young man, well-versed in contemporary psychological thought, and willing to consider all sides of an issue. Nonetheless, in his recounting he seemed almost obsessed with the alterations in consciousness he ascribed to his religious experience. While in medical school, Raymond wanted to be a general practitioner and decided to do his internship in family medicine.

    Then he took a position in a small-town clinic to have the personal contact with patients he had long anticipated. After two years in this crowded clinic, he became disenchanted with the limited opportunities for working closely with patients and began to wonder about other possibilities. An acquaintance invited Raymond to attend satsang, the religious sermon of the Divine Light Mission. He did and found in the group members a sense of conviction lacking in his own life. He had begun to feel bored and the group offered a focus of interest.

    He attended satsang again, and described the following experience from his third visit. He was sitting comfortably in a group of a dozen people, mostly members, listening to a young woman speaking about the importance of the guru's mission. He was not attending too closely to her words, but was instead lulled into relaxation by the rhythm of her speech.

    Suddenly, he saw a bright light emanating from her body, forming a halo around her. He later recalled the light was intense. She glowed as if she were a religious figure in a movie, and it gave her the appearance of holiness. It was a real light, as real as the lightbulb in a lamp. So I sat there listening carefully to her words, and they were no different from the ones she had spoken minutes before. Now, I'm a fairly cynical guy, and I don't take the unexpected at face value, so I did a double take and looked away, expecting the light to disappear—but it was still there.

    No one had even told me to expect a light like this, and no one else seemed to see it. When she finished I got up to leave and, as I walked toward the door - she was still glowing - I realized that something had happened to me that I couldn't dismiss. The experience would somehow have to become a part of my understanding of the world around me. Over the next few weeks I found myself getting involved further with the group, and soon decided to ask to receive Knowledge [to join].

    Raymond continued to work at his clinic for a few months, but then decided that he had to carry the group's message to others, so he took a position in an alcoholism treatment program where he hoped to help his patients by conveying to them the sect's message. After six months in that program, his patients were unresponsive to his message, and Raymond decided that a career in psychiatry would offer him a better opportunity to deal with the spiritual issues his conversion had raised.

    He took his training in psychiatry and continued to meditate, occasionally experiencing intense visual and bodily sensations and changes in his sense of time. This episode of altered consciousness was not very different from many in the literature on religious conversion, but was nonetheless difficult to explain from a psychiatric perspective. Raymond's vision of the halo might be construed as a hallucinatory experience in conventional psychiatric terms, and thereby ascribed to causes of perceptual change such as a dissociative reaction, transient psychosis, or even mass hysteria.

    But his history, his behavior, and his demeanor as we spoke gave no hint of such a diagnosis. I was left with a tale told by a perceptive and lucid observer who described a phenomenon that did not fit into my handbook of diagnoses. Nonetheless, the experience had clearly served as a basis for the attribution of a new meaning to his life. It set him off balance and he turned to the philosophy of the sect to explain the puzzling event. From that point, Raymond's relationship with the Divine Light Mission followed with seeming inevitability, and served as a basis for his understanding of his own role in life.

    This experience had many counterparts in my interviews with other members of the Divine Light Mission, as it became clear that altered consciousness in the form of inexplicable perceptions and transcendent emotional states was common in their conversion and subsequent religious experience. These reports made a compelling argument for the role of altered consciousness as a force in the charismatic group, even though the phenomena reported were difficult to integrate into contemporary models of psychiatric function. Research on mental function is generally conducted at the level of observable behavior or neurophysiology, and does not usually address subjective aspects of experience.

    Nomenclature is based on what can be seen and measured by independent observers, whereas altered consciousness is usually only subjectively perceived. Altered consciousness, however, can be a prime motive force among both well-adapted and disturbed individuals. Like group cohesiveness and shared beliefs, it acts as a vehicle for the identity transformation and engagement that draw people into a charismatic group. As a starting point for understanding the role of altered consciousness in charismatic groups, we must turn back nearly a century to the work of William James.

    James reasoned that "the distribution of consciousness shows itself to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself. But given these definitions, what specific aspects of perception are actually altered in the altered state of consciousness? We can consider consciousness as if it were a multidimensional space, with each dimension representing some aspect of perception or sensation.

    We will discuss a variety of dimensions relating to charismatic groups, such as time sense, personal identity, appetite drives, and visual perception. Each dimension contributes to the to-. When altered by a charismatic group experience, each can serve as a nidus for the attribution of new meaning to one's experience. Consciousness and its alterations are grounded in physiology, so that states subjectively perceived as similar may also have similar physiologic characteristics. This is illustrated by the changes in neural function found in some states of mental relaxation and reflection. For example, electroencephalographic EEG studies of experienced practitioners of Transcendental Meditation reveal an increase in alpha wave activity 4 during meditation.

    This calming state can be compared to that experienced during marijuana intoxication when people are allowed to relax in the absence of social input. Here the EEG is characterized by alpha waves of greater amplitude. The fact that altered states may be substituted for each other also suggests similarities. For example, many members of the new religious movements switched from drugs to meditation to achieve similar mental effects.

    The Divine Light members who previously had "serious drug problems" and frequently experienced altered consciousness from drug use were more likely to practice meditation routinely after joining the sect than those who had not used drugs extensively. In the auditory sphere, for example, members were asked whether they had "heard something special that no one else could hear," the first item on this scale. Table reflects a widespread alteration in subjective and sensory states during meditation, but the way in which meditation was practiced is also. Each respondent indicated the extent to which he or she had the following experiences during meditation, using a scale of The first figure after each item is the portion of members who reported any such experience at all scale responses ; the second figure is the portion who reported the experience most intensely response 3.

    I heard something special that no one else could hear. I saw something special that no one else could see.