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Apocalyptic Dreams and Religious Ideologies: Losing and Saving Self and World
... Walliss's study follows others (Babb 1984;Skultans 1993;Howell and Nelson 1997;Puttick 1997;Howell 2005;Howell 2000) that track the organization's changing identity over time. Walliss noticed that the imminent destruction of the world, predicted on at least three occasions, had not yet taken place ( Beit-Hallahmi 2003)and, in consequence , the organization and its members became increasingly involved in world affairs. The movement had gone from one where members isolated themselves from the world, through being solely a teaching organization in India with firm ideas on the date of world destruction, to a social movement .Placed in a post-modern world, the Brahma Kumaris had adapted itself and started offering a variety of programs to suit the needs of different groups of people (Clarke 2006a). ...
... The imminent destruction of the world has still not taken place (Beit-Hallahmi 2003), and as a consequence, the organisation and its students have become increasingly involved in world affairs. "The movement has gone from one where students isolated themselves from the world, through being solely a teaching organisation in India with firm ideas on the date of world destruction [vinash], to (now being) a social movement" (Ramsay 2009: 18). ...
The Brahma Kumaris Ishwariya Vishwa Vidyalaya (Brahma Kumaris) has become a global spiritual movement with a membership of around 1 mil- lion in almost 130 countries. Its earliest history—in Sindh, India during the 1930s—was dynamic and controversial. With support from the male founder, children and young women asserted themselves against the weighty pres- sures of culture and tradition so that they could fulfil their vision of becoming maryadāpuruṣottam (the ideal human who adheres to the highest moral code throughout life). The Brahma Kumaris was revolutionary in its beginnings but today is comparatively conventional. The organisation is an exemplar of a contemporary movement with deep Hindu roots that, through various adap- tations, has both remained a haven for members from its beginning and has become more germane to the rest of the world.
The chapter begins with an introduction to the Brahma Kumaris and its connection to, and contention with, the Hindu community. Original docu- ments from the Brahma Kumaris’ foundation years reveal the esoteric nature of members’ early experiences. The impact of those experiences, and their as- sociated disciplines, upon the society in which they were embedded created social upheaval. This resulted in court cases and an eventual move to the then newly formed, post-Partition India. The compelling narrative of the early days, very different from the modern Brahma Kumaris, has inspired extensive spiri- tual endeavours in generations of members. I explore the persistence of Hindu ideas and the ways in which their endurance and fluidity have strengthened the adaptability of the Brahma Kumaris on its journey into Europe. Through shifting identities and tensions between both tradition and modernity, and Hinduism and secularism, I suggest that the Brahma Kumaris was born and is sustained by the purity of Hindu ideals in the lives of its students. With the ul- timate goal of world transformation, the Brahma Kumaris has become a social reform movement through the ascetic practices of its members, who have held fast to the founder’s vision that was established in twentieth-century Sindh, while fluidly adapting its offerings to ever-changing societies in India, Europe, and even further afield.
The messianic structure of human experience is manifest in the form of waiting—for an object who will alleviate suffering, and thereby, bring about change. The underpinning of such waiting is imagined here as messianic hope. In individuals, families, cults, religion, and politics, we may detect such hope—one that perhaps makes the unbearability of life bearable. This longing may get concretized in the shape of a person who comes to represent a link with God. From different vertices, messianic power may get located in the analyst, patriarch, the godman, or the political leader. Links that get forged between such figures and those who are waiting, may be thought of as messianic links. As a messianic group gets consolidated, it often displays certain primitive features. Such groups tend to veer towards a display of omnipotence, resolute action, a solution‐driven language. They may seek to cut off contact with painful reality and anoint someone who can enable that. Ideas of time are wrenched away from its painful association with loss. Time is made predictable and repetitive. Deliverance is promised, incertitude discarded. Messianic language is often evocative and enigmatic. It can be an expression of impotency. But language may also be used to fuel omnipotent longing, as with the use of omniscience by the anointed messiah. Such messianic groups may come together with shared magical beliefs in the annointed figure. But links by their very nature are dynamic and so, a link fueled by awe may also devolve into paranoia or else dependency or may be discarded altogether. This paper looks at two documentaries, and a novel, to give shape to messianic links. Here we see instances of how enigma may be replaced by charisma, and strength by hypervigilance. In that sense it seems that regardless of how they originate, they are condemned to move towards what Bion (1962) calls “minus links” or links that lead away from truth and the growth of the mind. We see that messianic links may either end catastrophically, or decay and degenerate to the point of disappearing, or else, lose the kernel, but assiduously preserve the shell, or finally institutionalized as deifying links.
Discusses a faith healing sect with excessively high perinatal and maternal death rates from the perspectives of psychoanalytic and archetypal psychology, as well as the theories of L. Szondi (1956, 1963, 1969). The founder of the sect and his doctrines of faith healing are described, along with 3 families whose infants died from practicing the founder's methods. These conditions are also interpreted in light of Judeo-Christian monotheism. Findings have theoretical implications for the psychology of religion and for psychotherapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This article reports the results of an ethnographic study of a millennial Baha'i sect whose leader predicted that the world would be devastated by nuclear war on April 29, 1980. Shortly before that date we began a participant-observer study of the sect, and during the following eight months we supplemented our observations by interviewing members and defectors in the four states where the group's leader had a substantial following. The purpose of the investigation was to replicate the classic study of disconfirmed prophecy reported in When Prophecy Fails by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter. They found that prophetic disconfirmation was followed by an increase in conviction and heightened efforts to recruit new believers. We report contrary findings and explore social psychological factors that might account for the difference between our findings and the results of the Festinger et al. study. We argue that reactions to prophetic failure are shaped less by psychological forces than by social circumstances existing at the time of disconfirmation.
The aim of this article is to present observations on individual cases of inter-generational conflict in the framework of the self-image crisis and the struggle for identity formation. The author discusses questions of therapeutic technique, which have a bearing on how therapists see themselves in relation to the rest of society and the social order itself.
It was hypothesized that violent inmates who refrain from disciplinary violations while in prison would express more fantasy aggression compared to violent inmates with discipline problems and to well disciplined, non-violent inmates. It was also hypothesized that sexual fantasies would be positively correlated with aggressive fantasies in the whole group. 65 inmates at a state prison, classified on the basis of criminal history and prison discipline, took a fantasy Questionnaire (FQ) and an Experimental TAT booklet (ETAT. The results did not support the first hypothesis, though the differences were in the predicted direction. The second hypothesis was fully supported.
The disciple of Muktunada spoke blissfully of peace and love, yet when her focus shifted to the world's suffering, that smile of serenity never perceptibly changed. She reminded me of a client in therapy whose smile remained frozen, even when talking of her mother's death. The disciple of Krishna lectured to the crowds not only in a monotone but in a voice reminiscent of every other Krishna; and during the serving of dinner, the Maharaji's student's eyes were beset by a glazed look of rapture. I reflected on a patient who spoke with a dull affect, another who always gave the impression that while looking at me he did not really see me, and a third who appropriated the vocal and facial patterns of the people around him. When the follower of Reverend Moon who had been discoursing tranquilly and eloquently, suddenly and inappropriately responded in anger to an innocuous question, it brought to mind the client who always gently spoke of love but would burst into anger when anyone would mistakenly sit in his chair. Raptured eyes, frozen smiles, dull affect, repressed aggression: there was a correlation between certain repetitive symptomatologies in cult disciples who appeared to be otherwise functioning normally, and the schizophrenic population with whom I worked. The connection became evident in. the research I had been doing in the psychology of religious experience. There is a process in early infancy whereby the mother is split into a separate good and bad mother. A similar dynamic emerges in adult religious experience when the individual bifurcates his or her world into an analogous dichotomy: a guru who is omniscient, while nonbelievers are in the "dark"; a God who is exclusively good, with a devil who is totally bad. The following pages will analyze the nature of the good/bad split in infancy and describe that phenomenon's reappearance in the religious experience of certain individuals.