Snapping Read online

  In our travels, we talked with hundreds of individuals and heard innumerable testimonials about wonder cures and instant renewals and revelations; as we probed, many of these accounts broke down in nonsense or contradiction. More often, we were told vivid -- and surprisingly similar -- stories about individual quests for personal growth and spiritual fulfillment that culminated in what we call snapping. Time after time, we heard about people who were transformed "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye," people who, at the time, had no idea what had happened to them except that somewhere something inside them had "snapped." We heard, as well, about individuals whose transformations were only relatively sudden and slightly less dramatic, people who slid not instantly but in the course of a weekend or a month into states of mind that were equally baffling and, on occasion, even more bizarre.

  In this book, the people who have undergone these sudden changes speak for themselves. Our attempt to understand the depth of their experiences has led us to a new perspective on the nature of personality -- what it consists of, how it is formed, and how it can be transformed. Here we use the term "personality" in the largest sense of the word: the living system of the human mind in its combined individual and social nature, which finds its outward expression in the unique qualities observable in every human being. On this basis, we range freely through the various levels of this system, and whether we refer to the organic process of "awareness" in terms of the more philosophical notion of "consciousness" or use the general term "mind" in place of "personality," our concern always is to deal with the larger system of personality as most readers commonly use the term in its everyday sense.

  We offer our new perspective with one immediate goal in mind: to point out what we consider to be the hidden dangers in the techniques currently employed by many of America's religious cults and mass therapies. Given a comprehensive picture of these dangers, the reader may better determine the difference between a cult and a legitimate religion and may find some criteria for establishing when a worthwhile therapeutic method is being put to potentially harmful use.

  On a broader level, however, this investigation of snapping addresses questions that touch the whole of American society. Each American is vulnerable to snapping, even if he or she has never considered participating in a religious cult or mass therapy. The techniques used by America's cults and therapies permeate every level of American society, from government and business to our daily social interactions. Yet most of us have little understanding of the extent to which we ourselves -- not only our beliefs and opinions but our individual personalities -- may be shaped and changed by those around us and by things we experience every day.

  In the course of our work, Flo and I have encountered only one objection to the method of our investigation. "Why," some people have asked, "don't you participate in these cult rituals and therapies yourselves? You can't possibly understand them unless you have actually experienced them on your own."

  To that charge, we take no stand in defense of "objectivity" or of maintaining our professional "detachment." Obviously, we would be unable to gain any perspective at all if we subjected ourselves to each of the cult rituals and therapeutic techniques described in this book. Even if we did, it wouldn't work. No investigator -- whether journalistic or scientific -- who heads into a group in search of "the experience" can possibly capture the experience of those who have made a personal commitment to that group.

  In another sense, however, each of us has already experienced these cults and therapies in ways no cult member or group participant ever could. We have known close friends and colleagues to return from cult retreats and marathon encounter groups as complete strangers. We have been personally confronted on the streets, where our donations were solicited and our beliefs assaulted. We have attended private dinners and intimate gatherings at which we were matter-of-factly condemned to hell and told that we were agents of "Satan's world." And for over a decade, we have watched with special concern the use and what we consider abuse of our fundamental American freedoms, especially those expressed in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

  The phenomenon of snapping has changed the news, the law, the meaning of religion, and the people we live with and work around every day. In the pages that follow, we will explore this extraordinary phenomenon in detail: the attitudes it grew out of, the techniques those attitudes gave rise to, the experiences produced by those techniques, and the effects of those experiences upon the mind. We turn first to the search for self, America's legacy from the sixties, which has been transformed into something very different in the seventies.

  2 The Search

  The office of those who seek new worlds is to stumble upon those they

  never expected to find.

  -- Cervantes

  In the early sixties, with the increase in leisure and affluence, the advent of psychedelic drugs, and the rediscovery of Eastern thought, Americans set out to explore the underused, often dormant capacities of thought, feeling, imagination, self-expression, and relationship that have come to be known as their human potential. In the process, they crossed new thresholds of sensation and discovered the "high," the privileged domain of peak experience attainable through drugs, encounter groups, and meditation. For the first time, many people recognized this experience as a missing link in their development and were drawn to it. The search was on: for the highest high, the tallest peak, the deepest reach of experience.

  In addition to the immediate physical and emotional rewards, the tools and techniques of the new movement held an even greater promise of release: from childhood traumas, lifelong undesirable habits, conditioned roles, and traditional social expectations. Inevitably, however, this rich new world of personal growth became subject to exploitation and abuse as unlearned, uncommitted amateurs moved in to till the field. Without warnings or guidelines, America's searchers, in their earnest longing to find something higher and their sincere desire for self-improvement, had no way of interpreting their experiences, of separating the truly spiritual from the sham, or of distinguishing genuine personal growth from artificially induced sensation.

  And, not surprisingly, people started getting hurt, set back both financially and personally.

  It's not easy to locate the ones who have been hurt, for they rarely want to talk about it. The gains to be derived from the search are by nature a personal matter, and so its losses too become a torturous private ordeal. Very often, people are reluctant to admit that their best efforts yielded something less than the stunning breakthrough they were seeking. Many remain deeply embarrassed at what they consider to be a personal shortcoming or insurmountable flaw in their own capacity for growth, while others may be unable to overcome the fear and confusion that lingers for months, even years, following the traumatic climax of their quest. And some who have sought psychiatric care, even briefly, are obscured forever within the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship.

  As we began our investigation of snapping, we quickly learned that the traditional channels of communication would be virtually useless for our purposes. But when we passed a quiet word along the grapevine of the human potential movement, a large network of contacts opened up to us, revealing beneath the jubilant surface of the movement a substratum teeming with shocking, often tragic tales of snapping.

  A woman we will call Jean Turner is only one of an inestimable number of individuals of all ages who have wandered into this shadow world of human potential. The man who told us about her is a respected psychologist who had been active in the movement from its beginning, but recently he had become troubled by some of the paths down which it had strayed. He had known Jean Turner for several years. When he gave us her name, he explained that she had had an "extreme reaction" to one of the mass therapies we discussed, but he said that he did not want to prejudice our conversation in any way. He just told us to call her, which we did. She offered to come out to the small house we had rented for this particular round of interviews on the West Coast
.

  When she appeared at noon the next day, our first impression was of a tall, attractive, middle-aged woman whom we might have met anywhere. Her shyness, even apprehensiveness, as she sat down with us seemed quite normal under the unusual circumstances of our meeting. After brief amenities we told her something about our project and our backgrounds. She nodded, smiled, and said she would try to help us in whatever way she could. She told us she was fifty-two, a college-educated mother of three, now divorced, just visiting the West Coast from her home in a city some distance away.

  She had read a recent newspaper article which provided her with a term for her current social status. "Displaced Homemaker," she said. "There are so many of us and nobody has paid much attention to this group of women who, after years of raising children and husbands, come out middle-aged and without a skill. What do you do then? You have no money, no security, nothing. Who are you?"

  She smiled again, but her eyes were glistening with tears.

  "I had raised my children through every kind of crisis imaginable," she said. "When they were grown and healthy I felt pretty good about it, but it was as though the most important part of my life was over. I had to find meaning. That's when I started to search."

  Her search for meaning first led her into a new experience she was hearing about in the media and from her friends: Transcendental Meditation. The invention of the Indian guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, TM is the largest and most widely known of America's mass-marketed self-help techniques. It has been hailed as a nonchemical means of relieving nervous tension, and its relatively low cost makes it an ideal point of embarkation for the practical-minded or casual seeker.

  Its initial impact on Jean Turner was profound.

  "TM gave me glimpses of what it was like to be living on a different level. After a four-day residence course, I came back home and for two week my body and mind were completely one. I was just working and going about things, but every day would seem to fly by. I would look back and say, 'What an incredible experience to be moving on this level.' That was the beginning; it really opened me up to the search."

  Through TM, Jean told us, she found relief from stress, as the technique promised. She experienced enjoyable physical sensations of relaxation and bliss. These initial moments of fulfillment spurred the expansion of her search. For a while, she continued to pursue the Maharishi's path of exploration, attending several TM weekend retreats and enrolling in a TM "Science of Creative Intelligence" course. Then a friend invited her to participate in another new experience, a small-group encounter session.

  "I didn't even know what an encounter group was. I had no idea -- " She smiled. "I even stopped and bought a notebook thinking I was going to hear a lecture." Then she turned serious. "At first it was too much for me. I saw all this closeness and touching. I'd had no exposure to anything like that before, and at one point I just ran out of the room. Then a lovely young woman took me aside and we talked for an hour. I had never known what it was like to be close with another woman."

  After she got over her initial fear, Jean's first encounter-group experience turned out to be a pleasant one. There was nothing mystical about it, she explained, no overwhelming effects; but the experience of "sharing" touched something in her and prompted her to investigate other encounter groups.

  In the next one, she found a form of transcendence that surpassed anything she had become acquainted with in TM.

  "I thought I must be getting in touch with my psychic energy. How else could you explain it? It was all mind, nobody was doing anything or saying anything, and I just got high. I got so high I didn't know what to do with it. It was a beautiful feeling of well-being, warmth, and loving. It was so strange, at first, because nobody seemed to be making it happen to me. I went home and all night long these warm feelings kept coming up in my body. I didn't know what to do with them. I felt that I either wanted to have fantastic sex or be a four-year-old child."

  The "encounter high," as it has been called, the first great revelation of the consciousness explosion, not only gave Jean Turner new sensations of warmth and inner peace; it opened her up to whole new dimensions of experience through intimate encounters with other people in later groups and in her daily life during the next few years. When she first heard about the mass-group therapy called est, she explained, she was far from naive about the powerful effects of both meditation and encounter.

  Erhard Seminars Training, est, is the most successful mass-group therapy offered to Americans in the seventies. Described as "sixty hours that transform your life," the est "training" services 250 people at a time in four marathon sessions, usually held over two consecutive weekends. Est trainees gather in a hotel ballroom or other large meeting area, signing an agreement not to leave their seats without permission or to speak unless called upon. No eating, smoking, drinking, or use of drugs is permitted during the training. Bathroom breaks, which came every twelve hours in the early days, have since been increased because of frequent accidents.

  As our conversation turned to est that day, Jean Turner stiffened. Up to that point she had answered our questions with relative ease. Now she became guarded and oddly remote, as if suddenly threatened and wondering whether or not she could trust us.

  She hesitated, then recited a phrase we had heard frequently from others: "Let me say first that I feel est was one of the most positive things I've ever done."

  We said nothing. She looked back and forth between us, appeared to change her mind, and began again.

  "Est was extremely different from anything I had ever been in," she said, her voice low and shaky. "I say that because I was personally encountered by the trainer and taken through a lot of trauma. I'm still afraid to talk about it, because I haven't found people to be very understanding."

  We assured her that she was not the first person we had talked to who had expressed reservations about est. This seemed to help, and gradually her story emerged. It came out in jumbled sequence, in rushes of words interspersed with emotionally charged pauses and, occasionally, tears. It was as if her est experience still lay in fragments in her memory. Now and again we asked gently for clarification, but we did not try to force the pace or confront her with our own conclusions. Ultimately we got a chronological picture of her story.

  Est, she said, had been for her a grueling physical ordeal. "During the first body process -- it was a meditation technique -- I experienced a great deal of pain in my legs," she said. "After that first full day of training, we left very late, and I had this terrible pain from my knees down. The next day I was scared. If I hadn't paid two hundred and fifty dollars I wouldn't have gone back. I was tired. I was on the verge of tears, but I made myself go back. The first thing I did was tell the trainer how I felt. I said, 'I'm scared. I have some idea of what this is all about, getting things up from my past, but do I have to experience my whole life here?' That was when the trainer came over to me and encountered me, taking me back through the first time I ever experienced pain in my legs. Of course, it went back to when I had rheumatic fever as a child. I've always had weak legs; there were days when I couldn't walk to the bus stop because of the pain in my legs. I had been treated for arthritis over the years and I was in pretty bad physical condition when I started the training. The doctors had said they couldn't do anything for it. They said I had to live with it."

  She told us that her est trainer had wasted no time in excavating buried experiences and emotions from her past.

  Then -- "I had a healing," she said. "When the trainer focused on all that, it was indescribable. It was too much; the pain in my legs was so intense. Then I felt waves of heat come over me, and all the pain went away. I wouldn't choose to go through that pain again, but since that day I haven't had a single pain in my legs."

  Presumably, the intensity of that confrontation broke through something very deep and painful that had plagued her all her life. The resulting cure was real and dramatic, and it left Jean Turner in a state of physical ecstasy that kept up throu
ghout the following week. Toward the end of her next est weekend, however, she said she experienced a second overwhelming -- but very different -- emotional reaction.

  "It came up in me like a ball," she told us, her voice rising. "I thought I was going to be sick. At the same time I experienced a release from my body as though somebody had pulled a ripcord in me. It just shot up and unraveled out of my body. That whole day I hadn't known where I was. Then suddenly I found myself screaming at the trainer. I was calling him a son of a bitch. It came out at him, I don't know why, except that the sound of his voice was getting to me. He was encountering someone else when it came up and I let go. When I sat down, my body was just flooded with feeling. I think the fact that all this anger had come up in front of two hundred and fifty people must have had some effect. I was so humiliated. It just kept coming and coming in great waves. I felt all this heat in my wrists and I felt like I couldn't move my arms. But I sat there with it because I knew there was going to be a break soon, and I said to myself, 'I'm getting out of here.' And I did. I managed to leave the training at that point."