Get Faith - Switch Off Your Mind
"As the preacher, I'm working with the crowd, watching the crowd, trying to bring them to that high point at a certain time in the evening. I let everything build up to that moment when they're all in ecstasy. The crowd builds up and you have to watch that you don't stop it. You start off saying you've heard that tonight's going to be a great night; then you begin the whole pitch and keep it rolling."
For Marjoe, who had seen it a million times, the divine moment of religious ecstasy had no mystical quality at all. It was a simple matter of group frenzy that had its counterpart in every crowd.
"It's the same as a rock-and-roll concert. You have an opening number with a strong entrance; then you go through a lot of the old standards, building up to your hit song at the end."
The hit song, however, was spiritual rebirth, the product of a time-tested recipe for evangelical religion to which the preacher and every member of the audience contribute some small but active ingredient. Afterwards, according to Marjoe, the only fitting encore to the overwhelming moment of being saved is a personal demonstration of the power of that newfound faith. This is the motivating factor that prompts speaking in tongues, also known as the 'receiving of the holy ghost.' As Marjoe explained it, this well- known evangelical tradition required even greater participation on the part of the tongues recipient and the entire audience.
"After you've been saved," Marjoe continued, "the next step is what they call 'the infilling of the Holy Spirit.' They say to the new convert, 'Well, now you're saved, but you've got to get the Holy Ghost.' So you come back to get the tongues experience. Some people will get it the same night; others will go for weeks or years before they can speak in tongues. You hear it, you hear everyone at night talking in it in the church, and they're all saying, 'We love you and we hope you're going to get it by tonight.' Then one night you go down there and they all try to get you to get it, and you go into very much of a trance - not quite a frenzy, but it is an incredible experience.
"During that moment the person forgets all about his problems. He is surrounded by people whom he trusts and they're all saying, 'We love you. It's okay. You're accepted in Christ. We're with you, let it go, relax.' And sooner or later, he starts to speak it out and go dut-dut-dut. Then everyone goes, 'That's it! You've got it!' and the button is pushed and he will in fact start to speak in tongues and just take off: dhandayelomosatayleesaso... and on and on."
Marjoe paused. We were dumbfounded by his demonstration, although he hadn't gone into the jerking, trance-like ecstasy that is commonly associated with the tongues moment. ...Yet even in this restrained demonstration, he seemed almost uncannily to be triggering some innate releasing or babbling mechanism. We asked him how he brought it about.
"You'll never get it with that attitude," he joked. Then he went on to explain the true nature of the experience.
"Tongues is something you learn, " he emphasized. "It is a releasing that you teach yourself. You are told by your peers, the church and the Bible - if you accept it literally - that the Holy Ghost spake in another tongue; and you become convinced that it is the ultimate expression of the spirit flowing through you. The first time maybe you'll just go dut-dut-dut-dut and that's about all that will get out. Then you'll hear other people and the next night you may go dut-dut-dut-UM-dut-DEET-dut-dut and it gets a little better. The next thing you know, it's elahandosatelayeekcondelemosandreyaseya... and it's a new language you've got down."
Except that, according to Marjoe, it's not a real language at all. Contrary to most religious understanding, speaking in tongues is by no means passive spiritual possession. It must be actively acquired and practiced. Although the "gift" of tongues is a product of human and not supernatural origin, Marjoe displayed tremendous respect for the experience as an expression of spirituality and fellowship.
"I really don't put it down," he said. "I never have. It's just that I analyze it and look at it from a very rational point of view. I don't see it as coming from God and say that at a certain point the Holy Spirit zaps you with a super whammy on the head and you've 'gone for tongues' and there it is. Tongues is a process that people build up to. Then, as you start to do something, just as when you practice the scales on the piano, you get better at it."
During his years on the Bible belt circuit, Marjoe came to see the evangelical experience as a form of popular entertainment, a kind of participatory divine theater that provided its audiences with profound emotional rewards.
"The people out there don't see it as entertainment," he confessed, "although that is in fact the way it is. Those people don't go to movies, they don't go to bars and drink, they don't go to rock-and-roll concerts - but everyone has to have an emotional release. So they go to revivals and they dance around and talk in tongues. It's socially approved and that is their escape.
"It was my duty to give them the best show possible," he said. "Say you've got a timid little preacher in North Carolina or somewhere. He'll bring in visiting evangelists to keep his church going. We'd come in and hit the crowd up and we were superstars. It's the charisma of the evangelist that the audience believes in and comes to see.
"When I was traveling, I'd see someone who wanted to get saved in one of my meetings, and he was so open and bubbly in his desire to get the Holy Ghost. It was wonderful and very fresh. But four years later I'd return and that person might be a hard-nosed intolerant Christian because he was better than anyone who drinks and better than the world because he had Christ. That's when the danger comes in. People want an experience. They want to feel good and their lives can be helped by it. But then as you start moving into the operation of the thing, you get into controlling people and power and money. "Moon's [Unification Church] is doing the same thing I do, only he's taken it one step further. He's suggesting to people that he IS the Messiah. In my religion, the old-time religion, it's total blasphemy to suggest that. Moon has gone too far, but that's a very heavy number on people, because everyone wants to meet a Messiah."
Marjoe was quick to point out that Moon's preaching powers, like his own, were by no means divine or even innate. Marjoe acknowledged that his power over an audience derived primarily from the skills he perfected as a child, techniques of rhetoric and public speaking that have passed down from the Greeks.
"It's the same whether you're a preacher, a lawyer or a salesman," he told us. "You start off with a person's thought processes and then gradually sway him around to another way of thinking in a very short time."
Many of the techniques he commanded were simple and age-old, but so effective that they proved equally powerful even when an audience had been explicitly forewarned of their use. Toward the end of our conversation, Marjoe told us a story that revealed the fineness of his skills. In contrast to the massive physical experiences, intense group rituals and intimate personal crises that [are popular in the New Age crowd], Marjoe demonstrated how words alone, artfully manipulated, may be used to influence groups and individuals, even to the point of evoking the overwhelming emotional response of being "saved."
"I lecture in about twenty colleges a year," he began, "and I do a faith- healing demonstration - but I always make them ask for it. I tell them that I don't believe in it, that I use a lot of tricks; and the title of the lecture is 'Rhetoric and Charisma,' so I've already told them how large masses are manipulated by a charismatic figure. I've given them the whole rap explaining how it's done, but they still want to see it. So I throw it all right back at them. I say, 'No, you don't really want to see it.' And they say, 'Oh, yes. We do. We do!' And I say, 'But you don't believe in it anyway, so I can't do it.' And they say, 'We believe. We believe!' So after about twenty minutes of this I ask for a volunteer, and I have a girl come up and I say, 'So you want to feel better?' You're just up here for a good time and you want to impress all these people and you want to make an ass out of me and an ass out of this whole thing, so why don't you go back and sit down?' I really get hard on her, and she says, 'No, no, I believe!' And I keep going back and forth until she's almost in tears. And then, even though this is in a college crowd and I'm only doing it as a joke, I just say my same old line, In the name of Jesus! And touch her on the head, and WHAM! They fall down flat every time!”
[Conway, Flo, Siegelman, Jim. 1978. Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change. Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins.]
So the programming begins. During the early contacts, a potential convert can be manipulated with absolute precision by the rhetorical ploys described by Marjoe. Conversations using similar Neuro Linguistic Programming techniques also build rapport, as does the use of confrontation and direct emotional assault.
Once the individual has been drawn into the teaching, they are bombarded with ideas and doctrines that they cannot fit together while at the same time being led through ceremonies or rituals that induce intense emotional highs and peak experiences.
They are then subjected to more personal encounters in which these experiences are given the prescribed interpretation that is being inculcated. During this period, they are usually involved in intensive repetitive things, which can be as simple as the "order of worship" in an ordinary church. There can be orders to "stand up, sit down, kneel, pray, sing, stand up, sit down, sing, pray" and so on. More intense formats include chanting and meditation that can induce physical and psychic highs. The end result is, of course, that all of this STOPS THE MIND! And when that happens, the individual is completely open to suggestion and command.
The convert is instructed at this time to "refrain from doubt," and "do not question the wisdom of the teaching." The oldest version of this mind program is, of course, what we consider to be the standard religious teachings. But we can certainly see from all of the above that they are as much mind control as any New Age teaching or so-called cult. As a matter of fact, the key to being a Christian is "the surrender of the intellect, the emotions, and the will." To whom? Well, it's said that it is to the "One, True God." But would the "One True God" really forbid doubt and questioning if there was no doubt or question that he WAS the "One, True God?"
In the end, however, the result of all of these programs is the same: under the cumulative pressures of whatever specific mode of programming is employed, the individual's will gives way and they slide into a state of mind in which they literally are no longer capable of thinking for themselves.
This type of comprehensive assault strikes at the very heart of consciousness by undermining the processes of thinking and reflection that are crucial to individual awareness and Free Will.
Yet, the converts and adherents of religions and cults or many "new age teachings," have a different name for what is happening to them: HAPPINESS! They have found PEACE! In the labor for the cult, they are in a daily state of spiritual high, an emotional peak experience that never ends! And, if it does falter for just a moment or two, the leaders and associates work quickly to bolster the high - to get them back down to the church for another infusion! And they go because then they can return to the state of bliss that is their reward or unquestioning devotion.
Successful self-help therapy, religious or New Age philosophy graduates often achieve a sustained state of euphoria. Their problems are solved because - well, because they HAVE no problems! They have stopped worrying about the things that were bothering them. They no longer strive to change and grow and learn and do and accomplish. They are content in their condition of a shutoff mind, their state of not thinking.
Conway and Siegelman ask:
“What kind of cultural environment breeds this widespread need to shut off the mind? It could be argued that the need is universal, that everyone -from Athenians to Sufis to voodoo tribesmen to modern Americans - must have some periodic release from the ordeal of being human. In that sense, the rituals and techniques which throughout history have been used to create peak experiences and moments of enlightenment may be looked on as vital sources of rest and relaxation for the mind, momentary breathing spells that hold great powers of insight, healing and renewal.
But what value can there be in engineering these experiences to shut down the workings of the mind altogether, to persistently stunt the processes of thought and leave people numb to their own feelings and the world around them? Throughout history, this systematic stilling of human awareness has proved an efficient method of controlling members of tribes, societies and whole nations in which little value is placed upon individuality. The state of mind it produces has a tradition that dates back to the dawn of civilization.
In the remote bush country of Australia, aboriginal tribes still engage in rituals perfected more than 16,000 years ago to induce a state of mind in their adolescents that is surprisingly similar to the plight of many of society's brightest youth today and people of all ages.
In recent years, aboriginal Dream Time has been hailed as a state of profound sophistication in human awareness. Anthropologists point to the aborigine's physical endurance, spiritual satisfaction and telepathic powers as marks of advanced evolution in a tribe that may represent humankind's longest unbroken line of cultural development. However, they make the error of implying that this efficient and admittedly remarkable form of social control in a primitive, unchanging environment holds some promise for the future of our vastly more complex and fast-changing technological society.” [Conway and Siegelman, 1978]
We need to make careful note that this mode of consciousness exists for the very purpose of keeping the aborigine PRIMITIVE and UNCHANGING! It's no surprise that they still live as they did many thousands of years ago. That should give us pause!
“In all the world, there is nothing quite so impenetrable as a human mind snapped shut with bliss. No call to reason, no emotional appeal can get through its armor of self-proclaimed joy.” [Ibid.]
It doesn't matter who it is, whether it is a graduate of some group therapy, a born-again Christian, a meditator, or the follower of this week's channel o'choice. If you ask a question, the individual will spin around and around in circles of nonsensical beliefs and dogma. If you interrupt and re-ask your question, they simply start right where they left off, or go back to the beginning and start over again.
Such people are not just simply incapable of carrying on a conversation they are completely programmed. And they don't have to be worked on by aliens or secret government mind control programs to get that way.
posted by ankhepiphan at 6:43 AM
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