Label: guru

Better late than never

Better late than never

This is so internal that I hesitate to post it. But do it anyway! It's part of my story. Perhaps some general message is even built in.

The movement around the Danish mystic Martinus Thomsen (1890-1981) has had its fair share of dissatisfaction, differences of opinion, position wars. Of course. Why would it be any different.

But such an old lock-in now seems to have released in any case. Earlier this week, a bid entered the Martinus Institute in Copenhagen, which they inform about in an email. With him he had - for those with an interest in the history of this movement at least - absolutely invaluable material. Many boxes of original manuscripts, films, hand-painted hundred-year-old glass plates (like the ones in the picture! this was before the slide projectors, that is), personal possessions, etc. As a close colleague and friend of Martinus Thomsen brooded over since his death & did not want to let go.

The message? That with age can come more sense, wider views, a greater ability for self-examination, to want to put things behind & try to reconcile while there is time, maybe.

And maybe because it's almost Christmas 🙂 🎁

(Photos: Jens Christian Hermansen)

Sad about Deepak Chopra

Sad about Deepak Chopra

Not to single out Deepak Chopra as particularly bad. But because it makes me think of something we've discussed several times before: The unregulated therapist-healer-(guru?) industry...

“At the end of our next meeting, he hugged me as usual. And then he kissed me again. This time, it was unmistakably on the lips. My heart sank as he confessed that he was beginning to have feelings for me. I recall him saying that we were karmically connected—and that he was falling in love with me.”

https://www.lioness.co/post/recovering-from-addiction-i-told-deepak-chopra-how-men-had-exploited-me-then-he-did-the-same

Idolism, idealization, sure, it's immature, something that doesn't really belong in adulthood. But I think the question is complicated.

If you stick to the therapy/healing area, where Deepak Chopra is still active... A certain amount of idealization, and with that strong trust, even infatuation, can be included? Purely be an active element in a profound process, transformation?

While the therapist is often – just that! - idealized, of course rarely the good, perfect, infallible person one paints. Exceedings such as Chopra's (if this story is true) would be much more common also in ordinary care, if that activity were not surrounded by strict ethical rules, that is quite obvious... The regulations are not only a protection for the client, as one might think, but equally a lot for the therapist actually. It is a serious game.

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak... He who thinks he stands must make sure he doesn't fall, etc... (Both from the Bible, right?)... Of course you wished that Chopra had managed to keep the trap closed, sad story, but, but … Beware of judging him too harshly.

The statistics are horrifying, to the extent that you can talk about statistics?, but then all revelations from more or less closed spiritual contexts. Sai Baba, Knutby, now Deepak Chopra... (Can't even bear to try to remind me or google for more. You hear about it now and then & for me most of it goes in one ear and out the other. "Sects" & what happening there is so predictable, banal. Not for the victims, but the phenomenon itself, the course.)

My point, or what I wanted to highlight with the post, is mostly the human aspect of it... Well, it's clear that there are really disturbed individuals, predators who start or seek to get to the top of these movements, and then to be able to take liberties . But it doesn't have to be that they are fundamentally different. Ordinary human frailty goes a long way. "Opportunity makes the thief", or "Power has a tendency to corrupt, and complete power corrupts completely", as the saying goes.

Collective action

Collective action

Can you raise the value of animals, without at the same time devaluing that of fellow humans? It's a question I've pondered quite a bit. (Myself, I think it seems difficult.) That's where I started.

But I stopped, or at least paused, reading a transcript of an interview with Jeffrey Masson.

Here is the YouTube video itself:

Jeffrey Masson's story is fascinating and absolutely unique. Just listen! He grew up with the "guru" Paul Brunton, who was close friends with his parents. He eventually trained as a psychoanalyst. And more than that. He became a personal friend of Freud's daughter Anna, gained access to material which he thought showed that Sigmund Freud had obscured essential matters. And he published this. (I have a feeling he overreacted.) This was frowned upon and Masson was driven away from the psychoanalytic movement. Instead, he fought for the plight of animals, becoming a prominent vegan.

Has written many books. About all the parts and shifts in one's life. This interview is an exposé on most things.

So, how are these things related?

There seems to have been a gradual humanization at least in our part of the world. Like a "climate change" that has gone gradually. Today, one cannot discipline one's children, one's wife, or even one's dog (or other "subjects", such as employees, students, etc.) without society wanting to intervene. It's magnificent. Attention is paid to the situation of animals in meat and milk production (most recently, it was Crown Bird that was criticised, because animals are allowed to suffer unnecessarily). Can't say anything about this. Mostly good, I think.

But then to where I am suggesting, something that can be problematic... That when you exalt animals, that they "are as valuable as humans", as it is sometimes said, can this then do something to solidarity or feeling for fellow human beings? Well, in some cases I actually think it is. Much like I think about the new spirituality. That it is like a scale. At one end no problem at all. At the other end more complicated. And then all degrees in between.

I don't care about the first one. A development to approve and applaud. But when the solidarity with the animals becomes one-sided and seems to "take away" from the warm feelings you can feel for your fellow species?

I'd like to bring up an old psychiatric term (which frankly seems to be completely unused today, because when I google tests I get next to no hits!), namely "collective querulance". It is about when the commitment to a vulnerable group becomes so passionate and unreasonable that you can feel that it is quite a lot about the person himself. Kind of like right-handedness, but there it's one's own single-minded crusade against the System at stake. How you yourself have become & are treated badly. In collective grievance, instead, you have sort of "adopted" a group you feel the rest of the world ignores, and you fight for them in an unreasonable and self-righteous way. But the psychology is similar. And the solidarity with the animals sometimes has features of this, that is my firm opinion.

I have had to feel it sometimes on my own skin, I think, in certain more pure-minded societies. As the tepid almost-lacto-vegetarian I myself was and am. That you are too easily portrayed as & relegated to the camp that doesn't understand or care at all, those who oppress and treat animals badly.

And it has then been possible to feel that alongside the strong solidarity people show with the animals, there is also a personal struggle against the outside world that is taking place.

Then, Jeffrey Masson, how does he fit into all this then? Yes, in short, it's my feeling that he's pulling in that direction too... (And in the end, he also abandoned the human world and stood in solidarity with the defenseless animals instead.)

But in his case, it was first expressed as a solidarity with victims of sexual abuse. As Masson experienced, or indeed, had been met with distrust by Freud & Co throughout the ages. A lot can be said about this. But it is as if he exaggerated, "took in" too much, "missed the mark", which raises suspicions.

It is usually claimed that it was only when Freud abandoned his "seduction theory" that psychoanalysis as a form of therapy came into existence... But it is this shift that Masson has been critical of. And he has substantiated this with letters he has found that seem to confirm that Sigmund Freud's early female patients were subjected to actual abuse, but that Freud wanted to hide, downplay this? And that psychoanalysts in Masson's environment generally wanted to see all testimonies from clients about abuse as rather fantasies? That may be. (And even that Freud himself experienced early abuse that made him finally abandon his theory).

But that doesn't really change anything. And Masson was too knowledgeable about psychoanalysis not to realize this. Those who have experienced real abuse can be helped by more concrete, empathetic trauma treatment. Which is usually about being supported to dare and have the strength to remember and talk about what you actually experienced. Psychoanalysis is something much more than that. Which in the best case should be able to deal with real trauma as well, not just the fantasy dimension of life.

Martinus Thomsen and his movement

Martinus Thomsen and his movement

It has probably loomed up here and there that I became interested in the Danish mystic Martinus Thomsen (d. 1981) and his visions. Here is a post I posted elsewhere this spring for the centenary of what he himself said was the starting point for his work. What makes me think of him right now? Yes, this week a verdict was reached in a protracted dispute over copyright that had been going on for ten years and which had split and divided the Martinus movement. Isn't that strange in and of itself, that kind of thing happens in most spiritual contexts.

This is not a debate post. No recruitment attempt either. A bit of new-spirited monitoring of the world and a VDN marking of me, you can probably see it as. And my opinion of right and wrong in the dispute does not belong here. Let the dead bury their dead, I'm just saying. Life goes on.
- - -

Behind this window, in the days a hundred years ago, something strange happened. The young dairyman Martinus Thomsen came home one evening, sat down in his wicker chair and immediately had some kind of prophetic experience that sent him in an unexpected direction for the rest of his life.

Well, it's actually remarkable no matter how you look at it. Philosophical of life, because of what he later shared, if you are inclined in that direction. Religious studies. A mystic in our local area with a large production of texts, lectures and "symbolic images" over half a century which - until now - hardly received any attention at all from the academic world.

Or psychologically. I never met him myself. I became familiar with Martinus Thomsen and his dizzying "cosmology" only the year after he died. But I have met many who knew him. And he seems to have behaved himself, no strangeness, no major scandals or extravagances. The picture you get is of a simple, friendly and fun-loving man. Indeed, over time he became a kind of cult leader, with a few thousand faithful followers. But there was never very much money involved, no missionary work, there was absolutely nothing you could become a member of.

So psychologically, he is not easy to understand, or explain away, either. That is, to bring the person together with the work. A psychotic, or at least disturbed, someone driven by a desire to impress and gain power over others, etc. He actually seems to have been a rather different neo-spiritual foreground figure. I often say that this movement is like my spiritual home. Nowadays hardly more than this. But I always think of Martinus Thomsen (1890-1981) with warmth.

(The chair is preserved at the Martinus Institute in Copenhagen. The house at Jagtvej 52 still stands and looks much like it did then. He himself rests in a small mausoleum in Frederiksberg's old cemetery.)

"Kumare" (2012)

"Kumare" (2012)

Vikram Gandhi impersonates the spiritual leader Kumaré and manages to gain followers. The film has previously been shown on Swedish television, and can now be ordered on DVD or downloaded online: Kumare Movie

Kumaré is a feature documentary film about the time filmmaker Vikram Gandhi impersonated a fake guru and built a following of real people. Winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at SXSW 2011. (From KumareMovie.com)

Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXUzG6YKuvo