The Construction of Reality - Part One
Cardinal Law -- lately of the archdiocese of Boston but, now, having been forced to resign in disgrace from that position –– is an ayat or sign for all of us. He knew about the molestation and sexual improprieties going on, and, yet, for decades, he continued to put parishioners in harms way, without, apparently, even trying to take effective steps to bring the tragedy to an end -- both in relation to the abused, as well as with respect to the abusers. He just kept moving the perpetrators around without telling anyone about the evil which was being parachuted into their communities and without appropriate safeguards being put into place to ensure that the parish children would not be placed in harm’s way.
Even in those cases where someone has had the courage to speak up and seek to address such situations –– whether administratively, legally, or in other ways -- there are many obstacles to overcome, along with an array of daunting biases with which to struggle. For example, there have been a variety of instances reported where some parishioners were angry that action was being taken against this or that abusive priest because, well, it was upsetting to those parishioners, and, moreover, the entire matter was quite inconvenient for the latter individuals because of the way the expose brought doubt, uncertainty and anxiety into their lives, as well as the manner in which it disrupted the life of the parish, and, in addition, the issue was just so embarrassing for everyone, and it undermined the peace of mind of these parishioners, and wasn’t anyone concerned about the opportunity that such a public washing of dirty linen gave to those seeking to point accusing fingers at Catholics, and so on.
Consequently, often times, anger, resentment, hostility, and vilification, would be directed toward those who had been abused. Surely, the latter individuals were lying, and/or seeking publicity, and/or were trouble-makers, and/or wanted to make money, and/or were angry about their own misery or lack of worldly success and were merely trying to shift responsibility for their own short-comings to others, and/or such people were crazy, and/or were alcoholics, drug addicts, people of low moral character, sexual degenerates, and/or social activists agitating to advance their own dubious agenda, and/or people who, for some irrational reason harbored resentments with respect to hard-working, spiritual men, or against religion, or toward God.
The abused should have kept their mouth shut. They should have gone about things quietly. They should have thought about the ramifications for others instead of being so damn self-centered and self-absorbed. They should have turned the other cheek. They should have remembered the beam in their own eye rather than whine about the mote in the eyes of others. They should have followed the advice about letting him who is without sin cast the first stone. They should have abided by the decision of those who are in authority and who know much more about spirituality than the abused. They should have left it to God and just got on with their life.
One of the most gut-wrenching, emotionally draining, and spiritually depressing dimensions of circumstances involving spiritual abuse –– of whatever variety –– is that almost everyone has a vested interest which they wish to protect and, that for such reasons, they really don’t want to hear what you have to say. Whenever abused people try to bring their abuse to the attention of others -- even family and friends -- the people who have been abused tend to be met with all manner of: disbelief, anger, hostility, fear, hatred, resentment, suspicion, ridicule, character attacks, ostracization, shunning, attempts to censor or discredit, rumor-mongering, as well as campaigns of threats, intimidation, and more.
In the process, the abused get exposed to more abuse. As a result, the abused feel even more alienated, depressed, rejected, and alone than they do already.
Many people want silence to be maintained about such issues, because they don’t want to be put in a position where they have to choose and make a moral stand which conflicts with what they perceive to be their vested interests in the matter. Before the abused person came along and began blabbing, those in whom the abused person tried to confide (and, initially, such people often are members of the same group), had -- or, so the latter supposed -- purpose, peace, meaning, identity, community, knowledge, position, status, understanding, happiness, stability, methodology, faith, certitude, trust, a guide, and so on.
These people don’t want anything upsetting their spiritual and existential applecart. After all, if one were to listen, with care and consideration, to the events and issues that an abused person is trying to relate, then, one might have to begin questioning the validity and truth of everything of importance in one’s life, since if the integrity of the teacher is being called into serious question, one can no longer be certain of how to distinguish between truth and falsehood -- given that the spiritual compass one has relied on, for some time, is none other than the guide –– who is the very person whose virtue and moral character are being called into question.
Someone once e-mailed another Internet Sufi list group and made an announcement about the existence of a Sufi Spiritual Abuse Recovery Assistance Group that had been created and which was available for anyone who might feel the need of interacting in order to learn more about such issues. The notice about the spiritual abuse group was made in the other Sufi group but there was an editorial comment attached to the posting.
In effect, the comment went something like the following: if you have a question, go to your shaykh; if you have a problem, go to your shaykh; if you have doubts, go to your shaykh; if your faith feels vulnerable, go to your shaykh. The person who added this editorial comment to the notice about a spiritual abuse group, just didn’t get it. How can one go the shaykh, if that person is at the very epicenter of all one’s questions, problems, doubts, and uncertainties?
To be sure, on the path, all seekers encounter the whisperings of Iblis and the machinations of nafs. Both of these forces will seek to undermine the resolve of anyone who steps onto the mystical path, and one of the techniques used by such forces in order to accomplish this is by going to work on weakening the initiate’s relationship with the spiritual guide through the raising of certain kinds of doubts, questions, and so on in relation to the teacher.
However, the sexual exploitation of a mureed by an alleged shaykh is not an instance of such whisperings and machinations. Furthermore, the use of lies, deceit, duplicity, manipulation, force, fear, intimidation, and authoritarian impositions in order to control how people think, feel, and behave is not a function of such whisperings and manipulation either.
Yet, so-called spiritual guides who are well-versed in these sorts of technique are so clever and subtle in the way they spin their webs that one is often left wondering whether one is actually witnessing what one feels one is witnessing. Even veteran politicians of the most corrupt kind would have a great deal to learn about how to spin and re-frame things in order to keep people off-balance and puzzled about the actual nature of what is going on.
Because of this, abused people who are disclosing their experiences are often seeking consensual validation from other people who are involved in the same group situation. They want to be told that what is going on is not in one’s imagination, or that what is going on shouldn’t be going on and that the tales one is being told by the alleged shaykh are just a means of misdirection to take attention away from the actual character of the abusive behavior.
Yet, when the abused begin to speak out, people often do not wish to hear what they have to say. Damn the abused for opening his or her mouth and raising such terrible issues. Damn the abused for caring and wanting to warn people about someone –– the teacher –– who is actively harming those who are gambling their whole lives on the veracity and alleged spirituality of such an individual. Damn the abused for making one feel so vulnerable and confused. Damn the abused for inducing one to question one’s own motives and the niyat or intention of the so-called guide. Damn the abused for throwing into doubt one’s assumed place in Paradise. Damn the abused for waking one from spiritual slumber. Damn the abused for undermining one’s sense of being among the spiritual elite and chosen. Damn the abused for introducing factual evidence which indicates that people are being conned, swindled, cheated, lied to, manipulated, misinformed, and turned into obedient servants of evil. Damn the abused for making people feel like fools who have turned over the keys to their hearts, minds, fiances, talents, time, resources, and lives to a spiritual fraud. Damn the abused for raising the possibility that one has been wasting x-years of one’s life.
The process which one goes through when one attempts to warn people about a spiritually abusive individual who professes to be a spiritual teacher is a very instructive one. It has taught me a great deal about myself and other people –– people whom I thought were my friends and people whom I thought cared about me or even loved me ... people whom I have lived with ... people whom I believed trusted me ... people who have known me for years and who have never known me to lie and who have sought out my assistance and counsel in many matters across the years ... people whom I would never believe would be capable of lying, manipulation, and deceit with respect to their interaction with me ... people who were willing to abandon relationships –– which had seen us sail many stormy seas together –– without losing a moment’s sleep over it ... people who were willing to believe lies about me simply because someone they trusted (but shouldn’t have) told them that the lies were true -- just as Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, had taught his staff to do –– and without them giving any consideration to such trifling details such as the truth of the matter concerning me, or the giving of evidence, or verification of such allegations.
Many of us are largely unaware of just how powerful some of the psychological and social forces are which manifest themselves in group dynamics or in the context of a teacher-student relationship. Or, perhaps, a more accurate way of saying this is that many of us have some awareness of these sort of forces but believe they are not all that powerful or apply, for the most part, to others –– not us.
When someone carries the label of shaykh, teacher, or guide, many people automatically will consider whatever such individuals say as being, without question, authoritative, true, sincere, based on acquired knowledge of a deep kind, expressions of Divine wisdom, and so on –– even though we may not be able to verify one thing the alleged teacher says. Degrees of freedom are awarded to such individuals by most of us such that whatever they say and do is assumed to be a manifestation of mystical, secret, spiritual insight and understanding that has been gifted to them across many years of ascetic practices –– even though we may have never seen them perform any of these austerities and even though we are not privy to the precise nature of their relationship with Divinity.
There is a phenomenon in social psychology which is known as the ‘halo effect’. This effect gives expression to the tendency within most of us that when we find people to be physically attractive, many of us tend to assign other positive qualities to these people as well, irrespective of what the truth of the matter may be. Similarly, if we consider people to be physically unattractive, then, many of us will assign other negative qualities to those people, quite independently of the realities of such situations.
When someone is called a shaykh and they are charming, charismatic, interesting, fun to be with, or play a musical instrument, and the like, the very fact of the ‘teacher- label’, together with whatever quality is displayed by the teacher which we, personally, find to be appealing and attractive in that teacher, then, these two factors are enough, quite frequently, to induce many people to assume –– without verification –– that such a person has many other positive qualities as well. In other words, we are dealing with a slight variation on the ‘halo effect’ outlined above.
No one really knows why there is this tendency in human beings. I’m only concerned, at the moment, with the fact that such a phenomenon does exist.
The presence of the ‘halo effect’ tends to lower our defenses and render us more receptive to whatever such a person has to say as well as makes us more vulnerable to whatever sorts of influence might be manifested through that person. There is a reason why advertising often features sexually attractive men and women because both sex appeal and attractiveness help generate a powerful halo effect which can shape how people think and feel about products and issues (there are also other themes involving modeling and learning theory that are applicable here, but, for the moment, the focus is on the way the presence of the ‘halo effect’ can affect our judgment and perceptions of reality).
To go in a slightly different, but not unconnected, direction, Henry Kissinger once said words, to the effect, that the greatest aphrodisiac was power. What greater power could there be than to be in the presence of a ‘friend of God’?
To be close to such an individual is heady stuff. Furthermore, to have such an individual know our name and to take an apparent interest in us and our lives, and to be willing to help one, is often quite intoxicating and exhilarating.
This is another kind of halo effect at work. If one is in close proximity to a ‘friend’ of God, then, perhaps, one is chosen and special just like this alleged Divine emissary is. One basks in the glow of juxtaposition and one feels or hopes or anticipates that some of the assumed qualities of God’s agent may belong, in some lesser fashion of course, to oneself, as well -- even though there may be little, or no, evidence to support the reality of such beliefs.
Quite a few years ago, Robert Rosenthall wrote about a phenomenon which he dubbed the ‘Pygmalion Effect’. To make a long study short, he found he could alter the degree of academic success among selected students merely by getting teachers to believe that such students possessed certain kinds of intellectual potential . By altering the expectations of teachers, he was able to show that these altered expectations led to significantly better academic performance in those students who had been randomly selected and labeled as students who were ready for academic success as compared with those children for whom such expectations had not been introduced among the teachers.
Teachers began to pay more attention to these designated students and extend assistance to them -- assistance which previously was not being extended to them. The teachers began to be more receptive to what these students said and did, now seeing intelligence and ability where, before, the teachers had seen not much of anything.
If reality is ‘framed’ in certain ways (whether by a clever psychologist, experimenter, sales person, or an alleged spiritual guide), we tend to develop beliefs and expectations in accordance with the nature of the framing process. In school settings, this can lead to academic success or failure (because there is also a ‘negative’ Pygmalion Effect with which all too many students are familiar) among students according to the expectations that teachers have of such students, and in spiritual circles, as well, the ‘pygmalion effect’ can lead to our having various expectations about the spiritual abilities and qualities of an alleged teacher -- once someone, whether the teacher, a friend, a book, or a follower introduces the idea that such an individual is a shaykh, guide, teacher, pir or mushid.
None of this necessarily has anything to do with the actual ability or quality of this alleged shaykh. Everything is just a function of our expectations and how these expectations alter our perception of reality as well as how we interpret the nature of our interaction with others -- in this case, a so-called spiritual guide.
We meet someone who is called a shaykh, and, immediately, many of us begin to see, imagine, feel, think, and believe things which may have little to do with the on-going reality. We read into events and construct our world view according to the manner in which our expectations create certain images in our minds and hearts. We filter reality through such expectations and often tend to disregard whatever experiential evidence there is which is inconsistent with these sorts of expectation.
A fraudulent spiritual teacher may do various things to cultivate our expectations, as well. One such individual whom I have met used to repeatedly say: “I never lie”, or, “I never use people”, or, “I am always sincere”, or, “I never interfere in marriages”, and, consequently, when people around him encountered evidence which contradicted what he claimed, and because they believed him to be a shaykh -- which, thereby, afforded the so-called shaykh quite a few degrees of latitude of good will -- they re-framed or reinterpreted the evidence to make it consistent with the mantra which he kept repeating –– well, since by his own account, this man ‘of’ God never lies, or uses people, and is always sincere, then, ‘obviously’, what is going on must be something else –– something which, because of the mysterious nature of mysticism we just don’t understand. In this way, many false spiritual guides are able to hide in plain sight, because we, ourselves, help to maintain that individual’s camouflage.
Solomon Asch, a social psychologist, devised a experiment in 1951 which examined the way that individual perception might be affected by other people. In simplified form, the study posed a task which, ostensibly, required subjects to judge which of three lines on one card matched, a single line on another card.
Subjects were placed in a group setting, and unknown to the subject, the other people in the group were all confederates of the experimenter. Each person in the group was required to make a judgement about which of three lines on card placed near the right side of the person was equal in length to a single line appearing on a card placed near the person’s left side.
One of the variables studied was the effect which a subject’s placement in the group had upon a subject’s response. In other words, the researchers wanted to know if a subject’s judgment, with respect to the assigned perceptual task, would vary with where, in the group sequence, a subject was asked to respond to the judgment task.
When confederates selected a pairing which was clearly erroneous (that is, the line selected from among the three on one card did not match the single line on the other card, and the error was very obvious), the experimenters found that about a third of the subjects went along with the erroneous judgment of the confederates when they were required to respond last in the group. Furthermore, the more confederates there were in the group who were asked to give a judgment before the subject gave his or her response, the more pronounced the influence of the group was on the judgment of a subject in cases where the confederates were clearly wrong in their ‘judgments’.
The explanations which the subjects gave, when debriefed after the experiment as to why they went along with the erroneous group judgment, are very instructive. Some of the subjects, when confronted with a group judgment that differed from their own, assumed that the group’s judgment must be correct and their own perceptions must be wrong.
Some other subjects knew that the group was wrong in its judgment, but, nevertheless, they went along with the group because they didn’t wish to be considered different from the group. Still other subjects claimed that they saw the mismatched pair as being equivalent, despite the obvious difference in length.
Now, someone may look at the Asch experiment and say: “Big deal –– so what if a few people were dumb enough to permit their judgment and behavior to be affected by what others in a group said or did. Surely, to discover that a third of the subjects tested were susceptible to being manipulated is not all that significant.”
The Asch experiment was intentionally designed in a very simple way. It focused on a perceptual task where there could be little doubt that the judgment of the other people in the group (the confederates) was erroneous, and, yet, people went along with that incorrect judgment, and some of the subjects even swore up and down that they ‘saw’ the two lines are being equal when such was very clearly not the case.
What if we were to take a context which did not involve a simple, visual stimulus –– a situation where the issues were more complex, iffy, ambiguous, muddled, and open to a variety of interpretations? Isn’t it likely that the percentage of people whose judgments might be affected by what others in a group said and did might rise significantly –– especially if those other people were all saying very similar things to one another?
One tends to feel very uncomfortable when one goes in a direction which is not consonant with the position of a group of individuals with whom one is friendly or associating. This tends to create stress, anxiety, alienation, and anomie in the one who is in opposition to the group.
We are creatures of consensual validation. We often seek out the opinion of others to shore up our own confidence about what we see, hear, feel, believe, think , and do, and in the absence of agreement about such matters, we tend to get nervous and uncomfortable, filled with existential angst about our status, vis-a-vis reality and the truth.
If one translates the foregoing considerations into spiritual group dynamics, one is likely to experience a great deal of dissonance when one tries to tell others that one believes the alleged teacher is perpetrating various kinds of spiritual abuse. More often than not, one will be met with considerable disbelief and anger toward oneself on the part of those in whom one confides or with whom one seeks to engage in discussion. More often than not, the abused person is perceived to be the problem, not the so-called teacher, and because of experiments like Asch’s, one begins to understand that there are powerful forces at work –– forces which can make an abused person wonder if the whole thing is just in her or his mind, just a figment of their paranoid imagination, and forces which can cause others who are listening to one’s ‘story’ to shift –– sometimes very rapidly –– between believing and not believing what is being said.
Elizabeth Loftus, who is a professor of psychology, as well as associated with the Law School, at the University of Washington, has been studying the relationship among imagination, memory, perception, and belief for a number of years. Her work in the area of false memory syndrome, together with the many problems surrounding the reliability of eye-witness testimony has shed a great deal of light on these processes.
Among the many things which Professor Loftus has demonstrated is how many of us have a tendency, under different circumstances, to invent reality based on the kinds of information or misinformation we are given by others that frames the way we remember and perceive events. This distortion of remembered events or the generation of false autobiographical beliefs (that is, beliefs which are not actually reflective of our past experience), or the confabulation (the interjection of imagined happenings to create a seemingly consistent story line concerning some event we have experienced) are all psychological processes that occur, from time to time, under a variety of settings in many, if not most, of us. We may not even be aware that this happening as we do it or as we are asked questions about our past or about on-going events.
The moral of the foregoing points is not that our understanding of reality or our grasp of the truth are total fabrications. At the same time, in the light of the sort of phenomena being studied by Professor Loftus, we should not be so quick to suppose that our understanding is accurately reflective of the truth of things, for there are many forces and factors which can alter and influence how we experience and interpret the events of life. In very important ways, we construct worlds within our consciousness and project these onto the reality of things, treating the former as if they were the latter, and conflating the two. Disentangling the two is not an easy or straightforward process.
When someone claims to be a spiritual master, the claim may, or may not, be true. But, it is a claim which should not be accepted at face value because there are just too many ways in which we are vulnerable to having our perceptions, beliefs, understandings, and judgments concerning the nature of reality or truth altered and influenced in distorted, misleading, false directions.
Yet, many people unaware of such possibilities, may insist that they ‘know’ that a given person is an authentic teacher, not realizing how their understandings have been shaped, colored, and framed by the use of a variety of psychological techniques and social forces. Under such circumstances, many of these people are unwilling to even consider or look at evidence which might contradict their constructed versions of reality concerning questions about the actual authenticity of a given, alleged spiritual guide or the legitimacy of a specific spiritual path –– moreover, many of these individuals may become quite hostile and mean when anyone approaches them with such evidence.
Attitudes and beliefs, once formed, are very resistant to change. We would like to claim that we are rational beings, who are willing to examine evidence objectively through the use of logic and impartial, methodical analysis, but, unfortunately, when push comes to shove, and we are faced with a choice of having, on the one hand, to change our attitudes and beliefs or, on the other hand, needing to reject evidence, many of us would prefer to ignore, hide, and re-frame evidence than we would be inclined to alter our precious attitudes and beliefs.
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