Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  There would be no more arbitrary Olympian interventions. The cosmos was ruled by a comprehensive plan, which men could understand if they applied themselves to it logically. Indeed, the cosmos thus created was itself a living being, with a rational mind ( nous ) and soul ( psyche ), which could be discerned in the mathematical proportions of the universe and the regular revolutions of the heavenly bodies. The stars themselves participated in the divinity of the creator; they were “visible and generated gods,” and Gaia, the Earth, was “the foremost, the one with greatest seniority”; she too had been created according to the perfect model. 98 In the same way, the nous of each human being was divine; each had a daimon, a divine spark, within him- or herself, whose purpose was to “raise us up away from the earth and toward what is akin to us in heaven.” 99 Human beings therefore lived in a perfectly rational world, the exploration of which was both a scientific and a spiritual enterprise. Plato had devised a new cosmic religion, which superseded the old Olympian vision and became the faith of the enlightened philosopher. It was accepted—though interpreted differently—by all Plato’s pupils, and would, once merged with the monotheistic vision, remain the basic cosmological vision of Western Europe until the twelfth century CE. Plato’s sacred universe was an inspiration to philosophers; it encouraged them to investigate the cosmos empirically and to believe that it was possible to solve the mysteries of nature. It assured them that their minds, which contained a trace of the sacred, were equipped for the task. It also brought the divine into a human frame and made it perceptible. It was possible to actually see the gods—the sun, moon, and stars—every day, shining in the sky. When they investigated the earth, scientifically, they were delving into the mystery of the divine. But Plato’s cosmic religion meant nothing to ordinary people who had no philosophical training. A deity who was uninterested in the human race could not give meaning to their lives. Plato tried to remedy this. The Olympian gods and heroes were now regarded as daimones, lesser deities who acted as tutelary spirits and carried messages to and from the ineffable celestial world. Nobody could ever have any intercourse with the supremely incomprehensible God, but they could revere Zeus, the guardian of city boundaries who took care of strangers; Hera, the patron of marriage; and Athena and Ares, who looked after hoplites during a campaign. 100 The Olympians had been reduced to guardian angels, *7 similar to the nature spirits who were being phased out of the Axial religions. The Olympians may have lost status, but Plato insisted that their cult was essential to the polis.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Hungry for an education outside the commune’s closed system—and desperate for a legitimate diploma that would allow him to attend college—when he wasn’t in a white coat (or playing the Game) he was sneaking off the settlement to attend an accredited high school in San Francisco, the only Synanon child to do so. He stayed quiet, flew under the radar, and privately interrogated everything. Even when I was a little kid, what always gripped me most about my dad’s Synanon stories was the group’s special language—terms like “in the Game” and “out of the Game,” “love match” (meaning Synanon marriages), “act as if” (an imperative never to question Synanon’s protocols, to simply “act as if” you agreed until you did), “demonstrators” and “PODs” (parents on duty, the rotation of adults randomly selected to chaperone the children’s “school” and barracks), and so many more. This curious lingo was the clearest window into that world. As the daughter of scientists, I figure some combination of nature, nurture, and Synanon stories caused me to become a rather incredulous person, and since early childhood, I have always been keenly sensitive to cultish-sounding rhetoric—but also beguiled by its power. In middle school, my best friend’s mother was a born-again Christian, and I’d sometimes secretly skip Hebrew school on Sundays to accompany the family to their evangelical megachurch. Nothing enraptured me more than the way these churchgoers spoke—how, upon setting foot in the building, everyone slipped into a dialect of “evangelicalese.” It wasn’t King James Bible English; it was modern and very distinct. I started using their glossary of buzzwords whenever I attended services, just to see if it affected how the congregants treated me. I picked up phrases like “on my heart” (a synonym for “on my mind”), “love up on someone” (to show someone love), “in the word” (reading the Bible), “Father of Lies” (Satan, the evil that “governs the world”), and “convicted” (to be divinely moved to do something). It was like the code language of an exclusive clubhouse. Though these special terms didn’t communicate anything that couldn’t be said in plain English, using them in the right way at the right time was like a key unlocking the group’s acceptance. Immediately, I was perceived as an insider. The language was a password, a disguise, a truth serum. It was so powerful. Creating special language to influence people’s behavior and beliefs is so effective in part simply because speech is the first thing we’re willing to change about ourselves . . . and also the last thing we let go. Unlike shaving your head, relocating to a commune, or even changing your clothes, adopting new terminology is instant and (seemingly) commitment-free. Let’s say you show up to a spiritual meeting out of curiosity, and the host starts off by asking the group to repeat a chant. Odds are, you do it.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  One particular episode was full of contrasts. I had found a space on one of those concrete benches with a really rough, grainy surface. A group had formed: I had the groins of three or four men around my head, wanting me to take them in my mouth, but I could also catch glimpses of the pale hands of the outer circle as they traced their rhythmic action on their dicks in the darkness, like coiled springs quivering to the touch. Behind them there were a few more shadows looking on. Just as someone was beginning to lift up my clothes, we heard the graunching sound of a car crash. I was left alone. We were in one of those little clumps of trees planted along the boulevard de l’Amiral-Bruix near the porte Maillot. I waited a moment and then went and joined the group in the clearing between the hedges. A Mini had run straight into one of the bollards down the centre of the avenue. Someone said there was a young woman inside. A crazed little dog was running up and down. The bulb inside the bollard and the car headlights were still on, creating a strange blend of yellow and white light. We must have heard the sirens of the emergency services quite soon, because I went back to the bench. As if the space inside the little copse had been elastic, the circle formed again and the actors picked up the scene where it had been interrupted. A few words were exchanged; the sight of the accident suddenly reinforced what had been a tacit link between us, and there I was back with my ephemeral little community, completely at one with its focused and very unusual activity.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  His account of these experiences, in which he tells of his initial fright, then his increasing willingness to take journeys out of his body, is startling indeed, and often very convincing. One cannot help but ponder the question: What “reality” can encompass such experiences, as well as the “real” experiences I know? How about Don Juan, the ageless Yaqui Indian, who opened whole new worlds to the stubbornly skeptical anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda? Worlds of magical events, of flights through the air, of a nonordinary reality where death is not different from life, where the “man of knowledge” has a spirit ally, where the impossible is experienced. Rubbish, you say? His own experiences were enough to force Castaneda (1969, 1971) to recognize that there exist separate realities completely alien to the thinking of the modern scientific mind. I think of John Lilly (1973), a scientist trained at the California Institute of Technology, who went on to study neuroanatomy, medicine, and psychiatry, and who is perhaps best known for his twelve years of work with dolphins, trying to communicate with these animals, who he believes are at least as intelligent as human beings. To trace his path from his beginnings as a scientist who believed only in mechanical models of reality, to his present view that there are various levels of altered consciousness (which he has achieved and helped others to achieve), is mind-boggling. Along the way, he became convinced that the dolphins could read his thoughts. Lilly’s experiences in a sensory deprivation tank, where he floated in warm water with absolutely minimal input of sight, sound, touch, or taste—were fascinating. He discovered that the inner world, without any external stimuli, was incredibly rich, sometimes frightening, often bizarre. In trying to understand this inner world, he experimented with LSD, with both illuminating and terrifying results. This led to meditation, unbidden thought transmission, and higher and higher states of consciousness in which he —like many before him, who were called mystics—experienced the universe as a unity, a unity based on love. Quite a distance from his Caltech training! These and other accounts cannot simply be dismissed with contempt or ridicule. The witnesses are too honest, their experiences too real. All these accounts indicate that a vast and mysterious universe—perhaps an inner reality, or perhaps a spirit world of which we are all unknowingly a part—seems to exist. Such a universe delivers a final crushing blow to our comfortable belief that “we all know what the real world is.” Where have my thoughts led me in relation to an objective world of reality? It clearly does not exist in the objects we can see and feel and hold. It does not exist in the technology we admire so greatly. It is not found in the solid earth or the twinkling stars.

• From Cultish (2021)

  How does language work, for better and for worse, to make people submerge themselves in zealous ideological groups with unchecked leaders? How does it keep them in the whirlpool? I began this project out of the perverse craving for cult campfire tales that so many of us possess. But it quickly became clear that learning about the connections across language, power, community, and belief could legitimately help us understand what motivates people’s fanatical behaviors during this ever-restless era—a time when we find multilevel marketing scams masquerading as feminist start-ups, phony shamans ballyhooing bad health advice, online hate groups radicalizing new members, and kids sending each other literal death threats in defense of their favorite brands. Chani, the twenty-six-year-old SoulCycler, told me she once saw one teenager pull a weapon on another over the last pair of sneakers at an LA hypebeast sample sale. “The next Crusades will be not religious but consumerist,” she suggested. Uber vs. Lyft. Amazon vs. Amazon boycotters. TikTok vs. Instagram. Tara Isabella Burton put it well when she said, “If the boundaries between cult and religion are already slippery, those between religion and culture are more porous still.” The haunting, beautiful, stomach-twisting truth is that no matter how cult-phobic you fancy yourself, our participation in things is what defines us. Whether you were born into a family of Pentecostals who speak in tongues, left home at eighteen to join the Kundalini yogis, got dragged into a soul-sucking start-up right out of college, became an AA regular last year, or just five seconds ago clicked a targeted ad promoting not just a skincare product but the “priceless opportunity” to become “part of a movement,” group affiliations—which can have profound, even eternal significance—make up the scaffolding upon which we build our lives. It doesn’t take someone broken or disturbed to crave that structure. Again, we’re wired to. And what we often overlook is that the material with which that scaffolding is built, the very material that fabricates our reality, is language. “We have always used language to explain what we already knew,” wrote English scholar Gary Eberle in his 2007 book Dangerous Words , “but, more importantly, we have also used it to reach toward what we did not yet know or understand .” With words, we breathe reality into being. A linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we are. That’s because speech itself has the capacity to consummate actions, thus exhibiting a level of intrinsic power. (The plainest examples of performative language would be making a promise, performing a wedding ceremony, or pronouncing a legal sentence.) When repeated over and over again, speech has meaningful, consequential power to construct and constrain our reality. Ideally, most people’s understandings of reality are shared, and grounded in logic.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Because with Scientology, as with all cultish religions, language is the beginning and end of everything. In a sense, it’s God itself. iii. This is the power of religious language: Whether it’s biblical words we’ve grown up with and know so well we never consider anything different (God, commandment, sin), or alternative phrases from a newer movement (audit, PC, Bridge to Total Freedom), religious speech packs a unique punch. Remember the theory of linguistic performativity, the one about how language doesn’t just reflect reality, it actively creates reality? Religious language, some scholars say, is the single most intensely performative kind of speech there is. “Much religious language ‘performs’ rather than ‘informs,’ [rousing us] to act out the best or the worst of our human nature,” wrote Gary Eberle in his book Dangerous Words. Religious utterances cause events to transpire in a way that feels incomparably profound for believers. “We used chants to manifest things, to make things happen, to make ourselves believe in things,” said Abbie Shaw, a twenty-seven-year-old social worker and ex-member of Shambhala, a controversial offshoot of Tibetan Buddhism, whom I met at a party in LA and interviewed a few days later. “Some of the language I loved and call on to this day, and some of it caused the most bizarre trauma I’ve ever experienced.” Think of all the performative verbs that come up in religious scenarios: bless, curse, believe, confess, forgive, vow, pray. These words trigger significant, consequential changes in a way that nonreligious language just doesn’t. The phrase “In the name of God” can allow a speaker to wed, divorce, even banish someone in a way that “In the name of Kylie Jenner” cannot (unless you truly do worship at the altar of Kylie Jenner, believing she has sole jurisdiction over your life and afterlife, in which case, I stand corrected, and I wish I’d interviewed you for this book). You could very well say “In the name of God” (and certainly “In the name of Kylie Jenner”) in a nonreligious way. Scriptural phrases pervade our daily secular lives—just think of Bible-themed slang like #blessed. But these expressions assume a special, supernatural force when stated in a religious context, because the speaker is invoking what they believe to be the ultimate authority to imbue their declaration with meaning. “Religious language involves us in the largest context of all,” Eberle writes.

• From A Grief Observed (1961)

  If this was a throw-up from my unconscious, then my unconscious must be a far more interesting region than the depth psychologists have led me to expect. For one thing, it is apparently much less primitive than my consciousness. Wherever it came from, it has made a sort of spring cleaning in my mind. The dead could be like that; sheer intellects. A Greek philosopher wouldn’t have been surprised at an experience like mine. He would have expected that if anything of us remained after death it would be just that. Up to now this always seemed to me a most arid and chilling idea. The absence of emotion repelled me. But in this contact (whether real or apparent) it didn’t do anything of the sort. One didn’t need emotion. The intimacy was complete—sharply bracing and restorative too—without it. Can that intimacy be love itself—always in this life attended with emotion, not because it is itself an emotion, or needs an attendant emotion, but because our animal souls, our nervous systems, our imaginations, have to respond to it in that way? If so, how many preconceptions I must scrap! A society, a communion, of pure intelligences would not be cold, drab, and comfortless. On the other hand it wouldn’t be very like what people usually mean when they use such words as spiritual, or mystical, or holy. It would, if I have had a glimpse, be—well, I’m almost scared at the adjectives I’d have to use. Brisk? cheerful? keen? alert? intense? wide-awake? Above all, solid. Utterly reliable. Firm. There is no nonsense about the dead. When I say ‘intellect’ I include will. Attention is an act of will. Intelligence in action is will par excellence. What seemed to meet me was full of resolution. Once very near the end I said, ‘If you can—if it is allowed—come to me when I too am on my death bed.’ ‘Allowed!’ she said. ‘Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I’d break it into bits.’ She knew she was speaking a kind of mythological language, with even an element of comedy in it. There was a twinkle as well as a tear in her eye. But there was no myth and no joke about the will, deeper than any feeling, that flashed through her. But I mustn’t, because I have come to misunderstand a little less completely what a pure intelligence might be, lean over too far. There is also, whatever it means, the resurrection of the body. We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least. Didn’t people dispute once whether the final vision of God was more an act of intelligence or of love? That is probably another of the nonsense questions. How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me. Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana. [image file=image_rsrcBR.jpg]

• From The Historical Jesus (Great Courses) (2000)

  3. The historian cannot say that demons — real live supernatural spirits that invade human bodies — were actually cast out of people. To do so would be to transcend the boundaries of the historical method 4. We certainly can say that Jesus was widely recognized by people of his own time — who did believe that demons existed and could be exorcised — to have the powers to cast them out. B. What is especially interesting for the historian is how these alleged miracles were interpreted by Jesus’ earliest followers. 1 . When Jesus is charged with casting out demons by the power of Satan, he responds by saying, “If I cast demons out by Beelzeboul, by whom do your sons cast them out? But if I cast demons out by the spirit of God, behold the Kingdom of God is come upon you” (Matt. 12:27-30; cf. Luke 11:19-23). 2. Notice that everyone — Jesus and his opponents — admits that both Jesus and other Jewish exorcists can cast out demons. Even more important, Jesus’ exorcisms are interpreted apocalyptically. They show that the kingdom of God was at hand. 3. It is striking that this apocalyptic view is the earliest understanding of the widespread tradition that Jesus could cast out demons. IV. Similar results accrue to a historical understanding of Jesus’ miracles of healing. A. The reports of his abilities to heal the sick and raise the dead are multiply attested, but they cannot pass the criterion of dissimilarity. B. Even more significant is the interpretation commonly given to his ability to heal. 1. His healing miracles were not taken to be signs that Jesus was God. They were the sorts of things that Jewish prophets did. Jesus simply 26 ©2000 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership did them better than anyone else. The earliest traditions assign apocalyptic meaning to these acts. 2 . Recall that in the kingdom, disease and death would no longer exist. Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead. In a small way, then, the kingdom was already becoming manifest. 3. According to an account in Q, when John the Baptist wanted to know whether Jesus was the final prophet before the end or whether another one could be expected, Jesus reportedly replied: Tell John the things you have seen and heard: the blind are regaining their sight, the lame are starting to walk, the lepers are being cleansed, the deaf are starting to hear, the dead are being raised, and the poor are hearing the good news! (Luke 7:22; Q; 4 4 . Again, Jesus’ miracles are interpreted apocalyptically to show that the end had arrived and a final climax was soon to come. V. This leads us to a final point: To what extent did Jesus proclaim that the end had already begun to make itself manifest? Scholars have long debated the extent to which Jesus thought that the kingdom had already arrived.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The monks of the Benedictine abbey of Cluny in Burgundy responded to the twofold crisis of internal violence and social protest by initiating a reform that attempted to limit the lawless aggression of the knights. They tried to introduce lay men and women to the values of monastic religio, in their view the only authentic form of Christianity, by promoting the practice of pilgrimage to sacred sites. Like a monk, the pilgrim made a decision to turn her back on the world ( saeculum ) and head for the centers of holiness; like a monk, she made a vow in the local church before setting out and donned a special uniform. All pilgrims had to be chaste for the duration of their pilgrimage, and knights were forbidden to carry arms, thus forced to contain their instinctive aggression for a significant period of time. During the long, difficult, and frequently dangerous journey, lay pilgrims formed a community, the rich sharing the privations and vulnerability of the poor, the poor learning that their poverty had sacred value, and both experiencing the inevitable hardship of life on the road as a form of asceticism. At the same time, the reformers tried to give fighting spiritual value and make knightly warfare a Christian vocation. They decided that a warrior could serve God by protecting the unarmed poor from the depredations of the lower aristocracy and by pursuing the enemies of the Church. The saintly hero of the Life of St. Gerald of Aurillac, written circa 930 by Odo, abbot of Cluny, was neither a king, nor a monk, nor a bishop but an ordinary knight who achieved sanctity by becoming a soldier of Christ and defending the poor. To further their cult of this “holy warfare,” the reformers devised rituals for the blessing of military banners and swords and encouraged devotion to such military saints as Michael, George, and Mercury (who was believed to have murdered Julian the Apostate). 29 In a related movement, the bishops inaugurated the Peace of God to limit the knights’ violence and protect Church property. 30 In central and southern France, where the monarchy was no longer functioning and society was degenerating into violent chaos, they began to convene large assemblies of churchmen, knights, and feudal lords in the fields outside the cities.

• From Cultish (2021)

  And in his later years, Jones insisted on the courtly title “Founder-Leader.” Jones moved his followers from Redwood Valley, California, to Guyana, promising a Socialist paradise outside the evils of what he saw as an encroaching fascist apocalypse in the United States. Grainy film prints of the place depict a veritable Eden—children of all races blissfully play as their parents braid each other’s hair and befriend the neighboring wildlife. In one image, a twenty-five- year-old woman named Maria Katsaris (one of Jones’s lovers and a member of his innermost circle) grins while placing a genial index finger on the tip of a toucan’s beak. Scrap the historical context, and it looks like the sort of humble, off-the-grid elysium where I could’ve seen any number of my progressive LA pals going to escape the Trump administration. A pet toucan sounds nice. Today, most Americans have at least heard of Jonestown, if not the name, then the iconography: a commune in the jungle, a manic preacher, poisoned punch, corpses piled in the grass. Jonestown is best known for the mass murder- suicide of over nine hundred followers on November 18, 1978. Most of the victims, including more than three hundred children, met their fate after consuming a lethal concoction of cyanide and trace amounts of tranquilizers, which were mixed into vats of grape-flavored juice made from the powdered fruit concentrate Flavor Aid. “Drinking the Kool-Aid” is a metaphor derived from this tragedy. Our culture erroneously remembers the elixir as Kool-Aid, not Flavor Aid, due to the former’s status as a genericized trademark (like how some people call all tissues “Kleenex,” even though there are also Puffs and Angel Soft). But Jonestownians died by the cheaper shelf-brand version, which they ingested—most orally, some by injection, and many against their will—under extreme pressure from Jones, who claimed “revolutionary suicide” was their only option for “protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Folks didn’t go to Guyana to die a bizarre death; they went in search of a better life: to try Socialism on for size, or because their churches back home were failing, or to evade the racist American police (sound familiar?). With the Promised Land, Jim Jones guaranteed a solution for every walk of life—and with all the right words delivered just so, people had reason to believe him. Jones, whose character alone has been the subject of several dozen books, made famous what are now recognized as all the classic red flags of a dangerous guru: On the surface, he seemed a prophetic political revolutionary, but underneath, he was a maniacal, lying, paranoid narcissist. As the story tends to go, his devotees didn’t find that out until it was too late. In the beginning, more than one survivor swore to me, there seemed nothing not to love.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The central current and ultimate aim of universal history is the Kingdom of God established by Jesus Christ. This is the grandest and most comprehensive institution in the world, as vast as humanity and as enduring as eternity. All other institutions are made subservient to it, and in its interest the whole world is governed. It is no after-thought of God, no subsequent emendation of the plan of creation, but it is the eternal forethought, the controlling idea, the beginning, the middle, and the end of all his ways and works. The first Adam is a type of the second Adam; creation looks to redemption as the solution of its problems. Secular history, far from controlling sacred history, is controlled by it, must directly or indirectly subserve its ends, and can only be fully understood in the central light of Christian truth and the plan of salvation. The Father, who directs the history of the world, "draws to the Son," who rules the history of the church, and the Son leads back to the Father, that "God may be all in all." "All things," says St. Paul, "were created through Christ and unto Christ: and He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. And He is the head of the body, the Church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the pre-eminence." Col. 1:16–18. "The Gospel," says John von Müller, summing up the final result of his lifelong studies in history, "is the fulfilment of all hopes, the perfection of all philosophy, the interpreter of all revolutions, the key of all seeming contradictions of the physical and moral worlds; it is life—it is immortality."

• From Cultish (2021)

  And most of all, her voice, which sounds like a siren’s hypnotic lullaby in videos of her saying it feels “delicious to die.” Normatively feminine and soothing, almost motherly sounding, Swan’s voice carries a private, homey form of power, especially since it’s something you consume alone in your house. “I’ve talked to people who said they would just listen to her all night,” said Jennings Brown, host of the investigative podcast The Gateway . Swan makes no effort to approximate male authority, but for her particular brand of nurturing “personal transformation” guru, it works. She’s not your politician or prophet; she’s your DIY self-actualization mom. She’s seeking exactly the breed of cultish leadership deemed acceptable for a beautiful, thirtysomething white woman—no more, no less. And to that extent, people follow. v.Techniques like us-versus-them labels, loaded language, and thought-terminating clichés are absolutely crucial in getting people from open, community-minded folks to victims of cultish violence; but importantly, they do not “brainwash” them—at least not in the way we’re taught to think about brainwashing. Jim Jones certainly tried to use language to brainwash his followers. Among the techniques he studied was Newspeak, the make-believe language George Orwell created for his dystopian novel 1984 . In the book, Newspeak is a euphemistic, propaganda-filled language that authoritarian leaders force their citizens to use as “mind control.” À la Newspeak, Jones attempted to mind control his followers by, for example, requiring them to give him daily thanks for good food and work, even though the labor was backbreaking and the food scarce. 1984 was a work of fiction, but with Newspeak, Orwell satirized a very real and widely held belief of the twentieth century: that “abstract words” were the cause of World War I. The theory was that the misuse of abstract words like “democracy” had a brainwashing effect on the world population, single-handedly spawning the war. To prevent it from ever happening again, a pair of language scholars named C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards wrote a book called The Meaning of Meaning and launched a program to reduce English to strictly concrete terms. No euphemisms, no hyperbole, no room for misinterpretation or mind control. They called it Basic English. But odds are you’ve never heard of Basic English, because it never caught on or fulfilled its intended purpose. That’s because language doesn’t work to manipulate people into believing things they don’t want to believe; instead, it gives them license to believe ideas they’re already open to. Language—both literal and figurative, well-intentioned and ill-intentioned, politically correct and politically incorrect—reshapes a person’s reality only if they are in an ideological place where that reshaping is welcome. Not to disappoint any aspiring cult leaders, but there’s a linguistic theory about the relationship between language and thought called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which says that while language does influence our ability to conceive of ideas, it does not determine it.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Learning and reciting their foreign prayers, all directed toward a man with a long peppery beard whose photograph was plastered throughout the dimly lit studio, cast a spell over tween Tasha. “It felt ancient,” she says, “like I was a part of something holy.” Who was this group in all white? The Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization, or 3HO—a Sikh-derived “alternative religion” founded in the 1970s, which hosts Kundalini yoga classes all over the US. The guy with the beard? Their captivating, well-connected leader, Harbhajan Singh Khalsa (or Yogi Bhajan), who claimed—to much contest—to be the official religious and administrative head of all Western Sikhs, and who was worth hundreds of millions of dollars by the time he died in 1993. The language? Gurmukhi, the writing system of modern Punjabi and Sikh scripture. The ideology? To obey Yogi Bhajan’s strict New Age teachings, which included abstaining from meat and alcohol, * surrendering to his arranged marriages, waking up at four thirty every morning to read scripture and attend yoga class, and not associating with anyone who didn’t follow . . . or who wouldn’t be following soon. As soon as she turned eighteen, Tasha moved to Los Angeles, one of 3HO’s home bases, and for eight years, she dedicated her entire life—all her time and money—to the group. After a series of exhaustive trainings, she became a full- time Kundalini yoga instructor and, within months, was attracting big-name, spiritually curious celebrities to her Malibu classes: Demi Moore, Russell Brand, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody. Even if they didn’t become full-time followers, their attendance was good PR for 3HO. Tasha’s swamis (teachers) praised her for raking in the dollars and allegiances of the rich, famous, and seeking. At the café, Tasha unsheathes her phone from an inky black clutch to show me old photos of her and Demi Moore, garbed in ghost-white short-shorts and turbans, twirling around a desert retreat, backdropped by Joshua trees. Tasha slowly blinks her eyelash extensions as a bewildered smile blooms across her face, as if to say, Yeah, I can’t believe I did this shit, either. Obedience like Tasha’s promised to yield great rewards. Just learn the right words, and they’d be yours: “There was a mantra to attract your soul mate, one to acquire lots of money, one to look better than ever, one to give birth to a more evolved, higher-vibration generation of children,” Tasha divulges. Disobey? You’d come back in the next life on a lower vibration. Mastering 3HO’s secret mantras and code words made Tasha feel separate from everyone else she knew. Chosen. On a higher vibration. Solidarity like this intensified when everyone in the group was assigned a new name. A name-giver appointed by Yogi Bhajan used something called tantric numerology as an algorithm to determine followers’ special 3HO monikers, which they received in exchange for a fee.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  I found it to be a profound spiritual experience. I felt the oneness of spirit in the community. We breathed together, felt together, even spoke for one another. I felt the power of the “life force” that infuses each of us—whatever that is. I felt its presence without the usual barricades of “me-ness” or “you-ness”—it was like a meditative experience when I feel myself as a center of consciousness, very much a part of the broader, universal consciousness. And yet with that extraordinary sense of oneness, the separateness of each person present has never been more clearly preserved.

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  One of the astonishing learnings in such large group experiences is the incredibly complex ramifications of any decision. In ordinary life, a course of action is ordered by authority, and unless it outrages us, we tend to obey the order, follow the rule. Although people may mutter, it appears that, in general, everyone accepts the regulation. All the complex reactions are hidden. But in a workshop community, where persons feel a sense of their own worth and a freedom to express themselves, the complexities become evident. Someone in the workshop proposes a way of dividing into small groups: “Let’s draw numbered lots. Then, all the ‘ones’ will constitute a group, all the ‘twos’ another, and so on.” It is hard to imagine the variety of responses. Reasons are given for this idea. Points are raised against it. Slight variations are offered. Exceptions are suggested. One discovers that there are not one or two, but dozens of personal reactions to this seemingly simple plan. Often the group seems on the verge of consensus, when one more member speaks up, “But I don’t like this because it doesn’t fit me.” Such a process can be seen as—and often is—a cumbersome, complicated, irritating, frustrating way of arriving at a decision. After all, does the wish of everyone have to be considered? And the silent answer of the group is that, yes, every person is of worth, every person’s views and feelings have a right to be considered. When one observes this process at work, its awesome nature becomes increasingly apparent. The desires of every participant are taken into account, so that no one feels left out. Slowly, beautifully, painstakingly, a decision is crafted to take care of each person. A solution is reached by a process that considers each individual’s contribution—respecting it, weighing it, and incorporating it into the final plan. The sagacity of the group is extraordinary. The process seems slow, and participants complain about “the time we are wasting.” But the larger wisdom of the group recognizes the value of the process, since it is continually knitting together a community in which every soft voice, every subtle feeling has its respected place. The Transcendent Aspect Another important characteristic of the community-forming process, as I have observed it, is its transcendence, or spirituality. These are words that, in earlier years, I would never have used. But the overarching: wisdom of the group, the presence of an almost telepathic communication, the sense of the existence of “something greater,” seem to call for such terms. As in other instances, a participant expresses, eloquently, these thoughts. She writes, some time after the completion of a workshop:

• From A Way of Being (1980)

  Examples could be given from every form of inorganic or organic being. Let me illustrate with just a few. It appears that every galaxy, every star, every planet, including our own, was formed from a less organized whirling storm of particles. Many of these stellar objects are themselves formative. In the atmosphere of our sun, hydrogen nuclei collide to form molecules of helium, which are more complex in nature. It is hypothesized that in other stars, even heavier molecules are formed by such interactions. I understand that when the simple materials of the earth’s atmosphere which were present before life began—hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, in the form of water and ammonia—are infused by electrical charges or by radiation, heavier molecules begin to form first, followed by the more complex amino acids. We seem only a step away from the formation of viruses and the even more complex living organisms. A creative, not a disintegrative process, is at work. Another fascinating example is the formation of crystals. In every case, from less ordered and less symmetrical fluid matter there emerges the startlingly unique, ordered symmetrical and often beautiful crystalline form. All of us have marveled at the perfection and complexity of the snowflake. Yet it emerged from formless vapor. When we consider the single living cell, we discover that it often forms more complex colonies, as in coral reefs. Even more order enters the picture as the cell emerges into an organism of many cells with specialized functions. I do not need to portray the whole gradual process of organic evolution. We are all familiar with the steadily increasing complexity of organisms. They are not always successful in their ability to cope with the changing environment, but the trend toward complexity is always evident. Perhaps, for most of us, the process of organic evolution is best recognized as we consider the development of the single fertilized human ovum through the simplest stages of cell division, then the aquatic gill stage, and on to the vastly complex, highly organized human infant. As Jonas Salk has said, there is a manifest and increasing order in evolution. Thus, without ignoring the tendency toward deterioration, we need to recognize fully what Szent-Gyoergyi terms “syntropy” and what Whyte calls the “morphic tendency,” the ever operating trend toward increased order and interrelated complexity evident at both the inorganic and the organic level. The universe is always building and creating as well as deteriorating. This process is evident in the human being, too.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  These secondary emotions themselves are assuredly for the most part constituted of other incoming sensations aroused by the diffusive wave of reflex effects which the beautiful object sets up. A glow, a pang in the breast, a shudder, a fulness of the breathing, a flutter of the heart, a shiver down the back, a moistening of the eyes, a stirring in the hypogastrium, and a thousand unnamable symptoms besides, may be felt the moment the beauty excites us. And these symptoms also result when we are excited by moral perceptions, as of pathos, magnanimity, or courage. The voice breaks and the sob rises in the struggling chest, or the nostril dilates and the fingers tighten, whilst the heart beats, etc., etc.

• From Cultish (2021)

  With a deep understanding of religious speech’s performative power, Manuel-Davis told audiences, “Life and death is in the power of the tongue. You have the ability to unlock somebody’s greatness by your words . . . not only to the people in your life, but to yourself. You are who you say you are.” These are some hard-core evangelical buzzwords, but Manuel-Davis attested she wasn’t using them to create insiders and outsiders, or to make others conform to her ideology. “I give people room to make it about what they need,” she told Harvard Divinity School. “This is about individual faith and spirituality.” Those who weren’t feeling it didn’t have to take Manuel-Davis’s credo with them outside the studio, or even come back at all—but a whole lot of people did. Manuel-Davis’s classes were known to sell out within minutes. * “I don’t go to Angela to get a workout; I go to hear a message,” one rider professed. “Angela sees you. . . . She speaks to your soul.” Even with more agnostic instructors, the language rituals of boutique fitness classes mimic those of religious services. Whether it surrounds God or crushing your goals, rituals help people feel like they’re a part of something greater. As Casper ter Kuile put it, they’re a “connective tissue tool.” Ritual also temporarily removes a person from the center of their own little universe—their anxieties, their everyday priorities. It helps mentally transition followers from worldly, self-focused humans to one piece of a holy group. And then, theoretically, it should allow them to transition back into real life. Just as Christian congregates will say the Lord’s Prayer at the same point in church every week, intenSati instructors and attendees open each class by joining in what Moreno calls the Warrior Declaration: “Every day in a very true way, I co-create my reality. As above, so is below, this is what I know.” Like ministers inviting parishioners to mingle before a service, SoulCycle instructors encourage students to hobnob with the riders next to them. “At the beginning of class, everyone has to turn and say hello, exchange a name, and chat,” explained Sparkie, a “master instructor” in Los Angeles who’s been with SoulCycle since 2012. “‘You’re going to be sweating next to them. Get to know them.’ It gives people an opportunity to connect, because connection is the key.” November Project’s boot camp–style workouts all start out the same way, whether you’re in Baltimore or Amsterdam or Hong Kong: Come six thirty a.m., participants kick off a rallying ritual called “the bounce.” Gathered in a tight circle, everyone joins in the same script, their voices crescendoing into a Spartan bellow: “Good morning!” “Good morning!!!” “Y’all good?” “Fuck yeah!” “Y’all good?!” “Fuck yeah!!!”

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  These and other unanswered questions about arousal lie at the heart of this book. To further our understanding we must broaden our interest beyond mere sex and explore the world of eroticism. The erotic landscape is vastly larger, richer, and more intricate than the physiology of sex or any repertoire of sexual techniques. The more mechanical and explicit aspects of sex are relatively easy to observe and translate into numbers and graphs, whereas the most rewarding and powerful secrets of eroticism are elusive, highly individualistic, and difficult to quantify. To make sense of it we must cultivate a whole new way of perceiving. WHAT IS EROTICISM?The modern concept of eroticism is rooted in Greek mythology. Eros was the young and playful god of love, son of Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. At the most basic level Eros is the source of attraction and the craving for sexual love. Some Greek philosophers also saw Eros as the force behind all creation, his absence leading to decay and destruction. Sigmund Freud was drawn to this interpretation, associating eros—which he conceived as energy rather than a god—with his concept of libido, a combination of sexual drive and life force.* Eroticism can best be understood as the multifaceted process through which our innate capacity for arousal is shaped, focused, suppressed, and expressed. We’re born sensuous and sexual, but we become erotic as we receive both overt and subtle messages about ourselves from our primary caretakers and gradually integrate these messages with our experiences of touch, as well as the highly personal mental images and emotions that go with them. As we grow, the demands and ideals of our culture, along with the interpersonal dynamics of our families and communities, influence our responses profoundly. Eroticism is the process through which sex becomes meaningful. By the time we reach adulthood we’ve all discovered that, by itself, sex can be little more than a collection of urges and acts. But the erotic is intricately connected with our hopes, expectations, struggles, and anxieties—everything that makes us human. Whereas sex can be simple, by its very nature eroticism is complex, and from this richness true passions are born. It is also through the magic of eros that sex and our search for emotional closeness become intertwined. Sexologist David Schnarch defines eroticism as “the pursuit and delight in sexual pleasure.”2 This beautifully idealistic definition certainly describes those notable moments when we are able to express and celebrate our erotic selves without restraint. But it leaves out the fact that eros is energized by the entire human drama, including the unruly impulses and painful lessons that no one—except those who retreat from life—can possibly avoid. No wonder the erotic mind conjures up images of debauchery as well as delight. Because it is connected with all aspects of existence, I define eroticism as the interplay of sexual arousal with the challenges of living and loving.

• From Cultish (2021)

  Hungry for an education outside the commune’s closed system—and desperate for a legitimate diploma that would allow him to attend college—when he wasn’t in a white coat (or playing the Game) he was sneaking off the settlement to attend an accredited high school in San Francisco, the only Synanon child to do so. He stayed quiet, flew under the radar, and privately interrogated everything. Even when I was a little kid, what always gripped me most about my dad’s Synanon stories was the group’s special language—terms like “in the Game” and “out of the Game,” “love match” (meaning Synanon marriages), “act as if” (an imperative never to question Synanon’s protocols, to simply “act as if” you agreed until you did), “demonstrators” and “PODs” (parents on duty, the rotation of adults randomly selected to chaperone the children’s “school” and barracks), and so many more. This curious lingo was the clearest window into that world. As the daughter of scientists, I figure some combination of nature, nurture, and Synanon stories caused me to become a rather incredulous person, and since early childhood, I have always been keenly sensitive to cultish-sounding rhetoric —but also beguiled by its power. In middle school, my best friend’s mother was a born-again Christian, and I’d sometimes secretly skip Hebrew school on Sundays to accompany the family to their evangelical megachurch. Nothing enraptured me more than the way these churchgoers spoke—how, upon setting foot in the building, everyone slipped into a dialect of “evangelicalese.” It wasn’t King James Bible English; it was modern and very distinct. I started using their glossary of buzzwords whenever I attended services, just to see if it affected how the congregants treated me. I picked up phrases like “on my heart” (a synonym for “on my mind”), “love up on someone” (to show someone love), “in the word” (reading the Bible), “Father of Lies” (Satan, the evil that “governs the world”), and “convicted” (to be divinely moved to do something). It was like the code language of an exclusive clubhouse. Though these special terms didn’t communicate anything that couldn’t be said in plain English, using them in the right way at the right time was like a key unlocking the group’s acceptance. Immediately, I was perceived as an insider. The language was a password, a disguise, a truth serum. It was so powerful. Creating special language to influence people’s behavior and beliefs is so effective in part simply because speech is the first thing we’re willing to change about ourselves . . . and also the last thing we let go.