{"id":8495,"date":"2019-08-24T05:47:42","date_gmt":"2019-08-24T10:47:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/?p=8495"},"modified":"2019-08-24T05:47:42","modified_gmt":"2019-08-24T10:47:42","slug":"cult-classics-vs-cult-survivor-literature-what-will-your-spiritual-reading-be-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/cult-classics-vs-cult-survivor-literature-what-will-your-spiritual-reading-be-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Cult Classics vs. Cult Survivor Literature: What Will Your Spiritual Reading Be Now?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Stories of abuse and betrayal tremble beneath the veneer of spiritual groups. Silently. For decades.<\/p>\n

The veneer functions like money does in the Epstein world to write the laws, conceal the truth, and dispose of the evidence. Spiritual groups don\u2019t have Epstein-level money, but they have other shiny objects to distract and confuse. They have stories of extraordinary men, spiritual transformations, and a coming enlightened age.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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One type of question I often field is \u201cwhat makes the Jois story<\/a> a yoga story?\u201d or: \u201cWhat makes the Rigpa story<\/a> a story about Buddhism?\u201d I counter the deflection of this question by saying \u201cIt’s true: these are rape culture and high-demand group stories.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Then I add: <\/span><\/span>\u201cBut it\u2019s important that we see how they play out in environments in which they are explicitly not<\/em> meant to happen: places where vulnerable people come to be protected from abuse.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another reason I believe stories of spiritual abuse are important to investigate and understand. In some cases, the group has an outsize impact upon the broader culture, usually through having found a way to conceal its origins, manage its image, and secularize and popularize its techniques.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I\u2019m not talking about groups like Scientology, which unduly influence celebrities who carry a lot of social power, but which also have a hard time commodifying their core content. (One test here is that Dianetics<\/em> has always been published in-house, while much of the “advanced” literature is hidden altogether.) With Shambhala<\/a>, for example, the core content is sanitized, legitimized, and monetized through institutions like Naropa and a number of spiritual\/self-help books that became touchstones in the 1990s neoliberalism that believed it was progressive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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That core content is a group effort.<\/em> More importantly: the group effort conceals itself through the presentation of individual genius. Nowhere is this more efficient than in the spiritual book industry.<\/p>\n

Spiritual books are marketed on the basis of the awakened personality and the intimacy of the author’s written “voice”. The public ends up thinking they’re encountering the realized presence of Pema Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n on the page, for example. That page, and the buzz around it, gets her onto Oprah.<\/p>\n

But Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n’s ascent to Oprah isn’t driven by her personal wisdom or virtue. She gets that gig because she has risen to the top of a high-demand group as a spokesperson.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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As a writer for twenty-five years I know that the writing that makes it into broader public awareness has very little to do with individual effort or talent, and almost everything to do with who you know and who is pulling for you, or working for you. The J.K. Rowling rags-to-riches story is vanishingly rare.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been browsing through Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n’s books, precisely because of their origins in Shambhala and their outsize influence in popular culture. I\u2019ve been wondering why they did and do so well. The books are okay. They can soothe and entrance and present neo-Buddhist concepts in accessible terms. But the messaging isn\u2019t significantly different from dozens of other dharma and self-help books, or from hundreds of talks I\u2019ve heard given by yoga and Buddhism teachers of all stripes.<\/p>\n

So: why these books? Why this writer?<\/p>\n

Group effort.<\/em> Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n’s first three books weren\u2019t actually written, as in the close-yourself-away and grind out 500 or 1000 words per day. They are edited transcriptions of talks given to dedicated students over many years. The tapes were recorded by students. Then, students transcribed the tapes \u2014 a painstaking process back in the day, even if you did have a pedal-operated cassette transcription machine.<\/p>\n

In the forward<\/a> of When Things Fall Apart<\/em>, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n writes (it seems she actually wrote<\/em>-wrote the forward) that she first looked through the two cardboard boxes of transcripts and tapes while on retreat for a year of “doing nothing”, and then sent them to her Shambhala Publications editor, who \u201csifted and shifted and deleted and edited” to generate a draft. (I\u2019m wondering if the editor also did data input as well from hardcopies.)<\/p>\n

As if on a conveyor belt, the draft becomes a book. But it\u2019s not authored in a way that justifies the elevation of Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n as some kind of solitary realizer. It’s a collation of interpersonal moments generated by the feedback loop of charismatic exchanges in a highly-concentrated, high-demand setting. It\u2019s a record of speeches made to people on retreat, who were likely nodding at every turn of phrase. That in itself will factor into things like tone, cadence, and length of sections.<\/p>\n

By virtue of Gampo Abbey economics and the hierarchy of labour, the privilege of “a year of doing nothing”, and the work of a likely-underpaid editor, these moments wind up in print, and attributed to a single person, who then goes on to become a key public face of the group, helping to domesticate its \u201ccrazy wisdom\u201d past.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In publishing, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n has in some ways followed Trungpa\u2019s lead. The guru himself never wrote alone. Here’s early Trungpa devotee John Baker in a recent interview<\/a> describing how he and Marvin Casper basically co-wrote Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Shambhala Publications, 1973) \u2014 arguably the main stimulus behind the Naropa Insitute inaugural gathering in 1974 and a touchstone for recruits to Shambhala to this day. Trungpa’s meteoric rise in the U.S. was strongly fuelled by this single publishing event. It has sold more than 200K copies.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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JOHN BAKER:<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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[Trungpa] never wrote a book, but there was a book that was made out of his talks in England called Meditation in Action<\/em> and was published by Penguin. He told the story of his life and that was published in Born in Tibet<\/em> and that was in England. So when he got here, there was nothing that had been done. It was early and we decided: Well, let’s do a book here<\/em>.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

So he gave his first seminar and the students got together and they rented this house from a yoga instructor and I had a garage which was her yoga studio, just a little split level, you know, tract house with a little two-car garage. And she had turned it into a yoga studio and this group of students got together and they rented it and he named it, Trungpa Rinpoche named it Anitya Bhavan<\/em> because he didn’t think it was going to last; Anitya Bhavan<\/em> literally means in Sanskrit and Anitya<\/em> is impermanence. And Bhavan<\/em> is house. So it was the house of impermanence because it wasn’t going to last, and it didn’t.<\/p>\n

But he gave his first seminar there and we took those talks and maybe some others, I can’t even remember. And we edited them into the book Cutting Through<\/em>, Marvin and I.<\/p>\n

But I think the key thing is that neither Marvin nor I, especially I, knew anything about Buddhism. So when we took these talks, we went to him and we went over every word of the editing with him, every word in that book was gone over and changed in a lot of them. Because he talked to us and then we would re-write it. And we would say, is this what you mean? And he would say, “Well, yeah, you know, it’s kind of, but what about, so let’s talk about this.” Then he would tweak it and we went back and forth like that. <\/strong><\/p>\n

And finally what had happened was… I’ll just cut stuff out of the story: We decided to finish the book… by going into a retreat together, the three of us, and we rented a house in California. He was going to do a speaking tour in California. And before that tour started, we had this house up on the, at the mouth of the Russian River in Jenner, California. A cabin, out in the sands. And, uh, it was just a cabin with a couple of bunk beds and a big bed that we gave to him and Martin and I slept in the bunk beds and we stayed there for three weeks and finished Cutting Through<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[Emphasis added.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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There’s no way Cutting Through<\/em> gets published on Trungpa’s steam alone. So let’s think about this in relation to his published output of dozens of books, and the fact that his alcohol and drug use only increased over time<\/a>, which means that his daily hours of lucidity dwindled, even as his fame and the free labour available to him increased<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Not comparing myself here, but without drinking and with no secretarial or research support, <\/span><\/span>it takes me three years of almost full-time labour to finish a non-fiction book, and I\u2019m not exactly slow. It takes Michael Ondaatje about seven years to complete a good novel.<\/p>\n

So how did Trungpa publish? From the very beginning, he had a small army doing most of the work, which involved the careful sense-making of his students. Their job was to take the entranced group experience and make it work on the page, because it was through the page that they would attract more recruits to the group experience.<\/em><\/p>\n

Here’s Trungpa in 1985, two years before his death, extremely drunk, enabled by an entire mandala of attention. Note how the opening scroll indicates this is a commemorative release. Shambhala International thought \u2014 at least in 2011 \u2014 that this was a good talk, and a fitting legacy piece.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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