Bringing about changes in the
thinking and behaviors of individual members in
single episodes
History of DLM
A study held at a national festival
held by the Divine Light Mission
Pages 7 -9
These traits of charismatic groups are often best
illustrated by the way they bring about changes in the
thinking and behaviors of individual members in single
episodes. One example comes from my own research
experience with the Divine Light Mission, a
Hindu-oriented new religious movement. Janice, an
eighteen-year-old American-born high-school senior, had
described her problems to a counselor from this group at
one of the group's religious festivals. I was studying
the group while visiting the festival site, and was able
to interview members at the counseling center.
The atmosphere at the center was highly cohesive;
strong feelings of camaraderie and a sense of shared
belief were evident as members arrived to discuss a
variety of psychological problems. Janice came to the
unit looking quite distressed. The counselor she
encountered was not a health professional, but was
contributing her time for Service, as religiously
motivated good deeds were called. She allowed me to sit
in as she spoke to the girl.
As the counselor approached her, Janice immediately
burst into tears, explaining her misery and feelings of
helplessness. She concentrated on her difficulty in
meditating properly, saying of their Guru, "Maharaj Ji
has given me Knowledge but I cannot see his light." This
was very important to her, she said, because she could
not be a premie, or a member of the sect, without this
transcendental experience, achieved through proper
meditation. She was further troubled because she felt
obliged to do more Service for the Guru to compensate for
her inability to meditate properly. This was best done by
engaging new converts, but, she reported tearfully, she
was too frightened to approach potential members.
The counselor listened to these expressions of
distress, implicitly conveying support by her presence
and demeanor. Her actions were in keeping with the
atmosphere of the counseling center; she was empathetic,
even affectionate, and alluded to similar problems with
meditation other members might experience from time to
time. She expressed her perspective from the vantagepoint
of the group's transcendent beliefs, and did not minimize
the need for proper meditation or Service. She did,
however, give Janice some examples of how problems like
hers may be overcome in time with full devotion to the
Guru, and reassured her that it was not necessary to
perform an undue amount of service at present. She said
the resolution of this distress might come through a
ritual called darshan, meeting with the Guru in
person, where such difficulties are often remitted. The
following exchange ensued.
Counselor: Now tell me how you feel toward the premies
you meditate with.
Janice: Of course, I am very close to them. They mean
so much to me, like brothers and sisters.
Counselor: So you know now that when you are with them
you confirm Maharaj Ji's Knowledge. You attend
satsang(religious sermons) with them, and you will be
going to darshan, too. You know that Maharaj Ji
will see that you are faithful, and this will soon lead
to your relief.
Janice: Yes I do, you are right.
By now the girl, like many others healed by faith, was
composed and reassured, even serene. I asked her
counselor how she understood the girl's distress. She
tried to explain, searching for a simple response, as a
professional would speak to a layperson. "She has somehow
lost the Knowledge. This happens often. She did not know
how to rejoin Maharaj Ji's path." This was stated more as
literal fact than as metaphor, an expression of the
charismatic role of their leader.
I was then able to speak with Janice. She had been
having an affair with an older married man at the time
she had become affiliated with the group. When he ended
their relationship two months before her arrival for
counseling, she became acutely depressed, withdrew from
social relations, and was unable to concentrate on her
schoolwork. At this point she also began having
difficulties meditating, clearly due to the anxiety
associated with her depressed state. This only compounded
her sense of guilt and probably prolonged the depressive
reaction that might otherwise have abated. She began to
feel the need to do more Service for the group, in part
to atone for her sexual liaison and also because she saw
herself as an inadequate sect member. She had not
discussed these matters with anyone. She felt her conduct
had run contrary to the group's principles and she was
ashamed.
The genesis of Janice's difficulties in meditating
seemed fairly simple to me, but she had not really put
the pieces together herself. Significantly this issue of
her disrupted affair did not have to be broached with her
Divine Light counselor because the cohesiveness of the
group and the explanatory nature of it's dogma ( Maharaj
Ji's Knowledge) were implicitly available without fuller
exploration. These group forces were mobilized to relieve
her feelings of guilt.
I spoke with Janice the next day after a protracted
KNOWLEDGE session, a religious experience conducted for a
large group of members by a principle of the Guru, and
asked her how she was feeling. She said that the
counselor was right to say that Maharaj ji could offer me
other ways to serve him. I could tell that when I was
with all the premies today, Maharaj Ji's wisdom was
touching me and that what I was doing was right….
It's clear that everything will work out; I have the
Knowledge in me again.
This young woman had been wrenched from anguish
compounded by her feelings of distance from the group,
and apparently relieved and then healed through a renewed
closeness. The norms for behavior set by the group were
used to construct her "treatment," and the resolution of
her problem was sealed by her commitment to the group's
charismatic goal of "Knowledge" or divine
enlightenment.
Page 21
A friendship led to my first encounter with
contemporary Religious sects or new religious Movements
ad served to highlight the influential role of group
cohesiveness in shaping the behavior of charismatic
groups. I had known Beth for 10 years, and we had kept in
touch while living in different cities. Her personal life
had been disrupted by a divorce and a move to a new
university teaching job. Soon after she gave up a
promising academic career to devote herself to the
philosophy of a teenage guru who had arrived in the
United States the year before; eventually the moved into
a commune of the guru's followers. How could she have
adopted such a deviant lifestyle after spending her adult
years at liberal universities?
The group she joined, the Divine Light Mission, was
introduced to the United States in 1971 by a
thirteen-year-old boy from India, scion of a family of
Hindu holy men; members believed in the lad's messianic
role. Divine Light was not unlike a number of
Eastern-oriented sects that emerged in the West around
this time. Along with others having a neo-Christian
orientation, these groups consisted of the bulk of the
emerging cult phenomenon, or, depending on one's view,
new religious movements. The introduction Beth gave me to
the Divine Light Mission led to a series of studies of
these movements.
A History of the Sect
Like many groups of Hindu orientation, the Divine
Light Mission originated as a religious practice in
India. It was founded in 1960 by Sri Hans Ji Maharaj,
father of Guru Maharaj Ji and a former member of the
Radhasoami Satsang Beas, one of several Sikh religious
movements in Northern India. Each of those movements
operated independently and was headed by a leader
regarded by his members as a satguru, or perfect master,
whose task was to lead his followers along a path to
God.
Maharaj Ji was the youngest of four sons of Sri Hans
Ji, and even as a young child participated with his
family in their public religious programs. Given this
status, he was accorded a great deal of attention from
his father's devotees and lived in luxury. When his
father died, eight-year-old Maharaj Ji was selected to
lead the sect instead of his older brothers because of
his unusual talent at delivering religious homilies.
Within a few years, the sect began to send mahatmas,
or apostles, overseas to preach the young guru's inspired
mission, and by the time he was eleven, Maharaj Ji
himself had traveled to London. Two years later he came
to the United States at the invitation of several
American premies (followers) who had received Knowledge
(enlightenment) in India. The young guru visited several
cities and was accorded a favorable reception by many
young people who were experiencing the uprooting of the
late counterculture era with its rebellions against
established authority. As he traveled, he began to
attract a following.
Maharaj Ji returned to India to tend to the members of
the Mission there, but came back to the United States a
year later and established a national headquarters in
Denver. Within months, hundreds of American youths
accepted the guru's invitation to receive Knowledge and
flew with him to India in several chartered jumbo jets
for a festival called Hans Jayanti. On their arrival, his
followers were taken to the family's ashram, or religious
commune, for several weeks.
By this time, about a thousand members had moved into
a dozen Divine Light communes in Denver, and soon there
were several thousand members nationwide. Commune
residents devoted their full time to the group, and took
an active role in developing a national organization for
the guru. The study I carried out then provided a profile
of sect members, revealing that they were typically
single (82%) whites (97%) in their twenties (73%). The
distribution of Catholics (32%) and Protestants (44%) was
not very different than the general population (38% and
57% respectively), but there was a greater proportion of
Jews (21% vs. 2%). The members' middle class background
was reflected by the large majority that had attended
college (76%), as had one or both parents (71%). Typical
group members were middle class young adults, many of
whom had interrupted higher education to join the
sect.
What were some of the trapping of religious practice
in this emerging movement? Potential initiates were
usually introduced to the Divine Light Mission at a
session of religious discourse called a satsang, where
experienced members presented the philosophy of the sect
to the assembled group. The satsang could be delivered to
active members or to those with only a casual interest.
It was something of a polemic interspersed with parables,
and because members were bright and sophisticated, these
discourses tended to be engaging, making use of both
Hindu mythology and Western philosophy.
After a period of acquaintance with the group, a
potential member might approach a mahatma from the sect.
These were long time Indian devotees designated by the
guru to initiate new members. Although their
pronouncements were often obscure, they lent an aura of
transcendence to the initiation. In the initiation
ceremony the mahatma rubbed the eyes of the newly
initiated members, producing a series of flashes that
were perceived as divine light. Initiates were
thereafter-called premies, or follower of the guru.
The premies undertook four types of meditative
experience during daily periods of silent repose, spent
with eyes closed. In the first meditation technique they
visualized a light, described as real and intense. In the
second they heard music, and this too was reported to be
not metaphoric but rather an essential sound of the
universe. In the third meditation technique they tasted
"nectar" supposedly a purifying fluid flowing from the
brain to the throat, and finally they spoke the "word"
said to be a primordial vibration that underlies all
existence. These meditations were recounted with great
zeal.
Performing Service, or good works, for the sect was a
requirement, and giving Satsang was one type of Service,
as it led others to hear that the knowledge was
available. Other Service included helping with
arrangement of speaking tours for the mahatmas and
drawing new converts into the group. Premies could live
in ashrams to devote themselves more full to Service.
Premies often worked part or full time outside the ashram
and gave a sizable portion-sometimes all-of their income
to the movement. They also practiced celibacy,
vegetarianism, and frequent meditation. The focus of this
ascetic existence was their religious mission rather than
personal pleasure or gain.
In 1973, the sect rented the Houston Astrodome for a
celebration of world peace and religious rejuvenation,
"Millenium '73", billed as" the most significant event in
human history." Devotees were flown from overseas, and
the event was promoted with considerable advance
publicity and a good deal of media coverage. A highlight
of the event was the participation of Rennie Davis, one
of the Chicago seven anti Vietnam War protestors who had
recently become a premie. The event, however, fell far
short of expectations. The stadium was only partially
filled; a variety of millennial expectations, such as the
arrival of world peace, failed to materialize, and the
whole undertaking left members of the group disillusioned
and in debt.
The guru himself however, was increasingly taken with
the enticements of American society. He was after all,
still a teenager, not above spraying his coterie with
shaving cream for fun. Such pranks led them to speak of
his "heavenly playfulness." He began dressing in western
clothes and adopted a luxurious lifestyle that included
setting up residence in a mansion and being ferried about
in a limousine.
Soon he married his secretary, an attractive American
woman several years older. This he did against his
mother's wishes and the event precipitated a schism in
the family, ultimately leading to the estrangement of the
American branch of the religious sect from its main body
in India, where his mother and brothers remained. His
mother revoked his title as satguru, an action he refused
to accept. Maharaj Ji now began to preach against the
betrayal he felt he experienced at the hands of his
family, couching his arguments in parables drawn from
Hindu mythology. In America too, the marriage caused
dismay, particularly among the premies in the ashrams who
had followed the strict path of celibacy dictated by the
guru himself. Perhaps half these members left the sect
over this issue.
Pages 27-29
"The study was held 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 of the group 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 non-members could be excluded.
The atmosphere of belonging was pervasive, as some
5,000 young adult 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 if 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. Some handled food; others moved
about with an air of eager expectancy. There was no
idleness, brashness, marijuana, loud music, of
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 delivering 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 within the group, had labeled my colleague and me
as "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 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 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 definitive 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 dismay- 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 non-person,
treated civilly but coolly, having become an outsider as
rapidly as I has been made an insider. 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 come 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.
The experience illustrates the considerable
mobilization of support that such a cohesive group can
generate, informally or with formal sanction, as well as
the strength of its controls over actions. The sects
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 towards us.
Each group member adhered to the consensus and thereby
assured unanimity. As in Ann's family, this intense
mutuality 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.