The man who passed himself off as Paramahamsa Nithyananda for
seven years, promised instant spirituality to hundreds, perhaps even
thousands, across India and abroad.
It might be too early to brand Nithyananda as a conman,
but what is emerging is that he is a psychopath who exploited people’s
credulity and played on the minds of youthful devotees who, before
joining his cultic order, might have demonstrated symptoms of psychic
distress, anxiety, depression, apathy, disinterest, meaninglessness,
isolation, social alienation and confusion. As a normative social
system, Nithyananda’s cultic order is an alternative healing mechanism
for the existential crises of contemporary youth.
Nithyananda, of
course, is no paramahamsa. He is an ordinary man who was intelligent
enough to capitalise on his youthful disciples’ loss of faith in the
“rationalistic western cosmology and loss of the extended family
system,” as sociologist Mansell Pattison has pointed out. But
Nithyananda also tapped into the dissatisfaction caused by the impact of
the prevailing economic paradigm which has created stress and anxiety,
especially among those in the 30-40 age group whose members may have
deliberately turned away from traditional psychotherapies toward his
religious cult as the ultimate remedy for their anxieties.
These
young men and women found in him and his cult — which is a strange and
often frightening mix of the Vedic and tantric with an attractive and
appealing focus on phallus worship — the path to physical and spiritual
healing. What might also have appealed to the devotees was the stress on
mental seduction and enslavement or mind control, so much so that they
were prepared to abandon family, loved ones and well-wishers.
Some
psychologists and sociologists agree that intensive conditioning (or
brainwashing) is designed to compromise the devotees’ psychological
integrity and indoctrinate them in a world view in which the ends
(salvation, bliss and even personal health and wealth) justify the means
(deceptive recruitment, fraudulent fund-raising and psycho-sexual
practices).
The rest of Nithyananda’s so-called spiritual and
healing prowess was built by aggressive and purposeful public relations
directed not at the poor from our urban ghettos or despoiled rural
backwaters. Rather, these are middle class, affluent, educated, and
sophisticated youth. A network of branch heads in some southern Indian
cities and those in the United States, mostly non-resident Indians with
deep pockets helped Nithyananda catapult to spiritual stardom. It would
not be out of place to point out here that the website of one of
Nithyananda’s subsidiary organisations in US suggests that more than a
spiritual enterprise the Nithyananda mission is commercial enterprise.
Brief
interviews with some of Nithyananda’s disciples at his ashram near
Bangalore and over telephone, with the primary question “what drew you
to his order?,” elicited confused response. Emails from followers in
support of Nithyananda were also important sources to understand what
attracted the youth to his alternative spiritual system that offered a
radical world view in distinction from the common culture, with explicit
sanctions in regard to one’s behaviour, with a strong emphasis on
separatism from the ‘world at large’ that is reflected in some degree of
small group communality ranging from total communal living to frequent
communal gatherings.
Beliefs
The standard
replies typically comprised two strains of belief: a) he helped heal
their physical ailments and psychological distress and b) we experienced
truth and enlightenment, two very abstract concepts that souls far
greater and intellectual than ‘Nithyananda, our Master’ have not been
able to fathom within the context of Indian philosophy.
The likes
of Osho Rajneesh, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Satya Sai Baba, Ma
Amritanandamayi, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar and sundry other self-proclaimed
television-propelled godmen have, in their own distinctive styles, tried
to peddle Indian spirituality, with their base and esoteric twists, to a
gullible audience within India and abroad.
They have met with
varied levels of successes and then faded away as the spiritual ferment,
shaped in large part by globalisation and television, spawned other
unconventional, secretive and deviant cult movements. They were sought
to be given legitimacy and acceptability within society by obtaining the
crucial backing of political parties and enlisting the support of the
rich and the powerful, an approach that has almost always benefited the
organisations in more ways than one.
But such groups have often
elicited extreme hostility and distrust and have, moreover, been
perceived as fundamentally subversive of civil order and the ideals of
Hinduism. To some extent, part of the popular uproar about cult groups
such as Nithyananda’s comes from bewildered, frightened and angry
parents and other elders who cannot comprehend why the youth, otherwise
socialised into the mainstream of society with many seeming advantages,
should abandon their cultural and religious heritage to enter such
‘separate reality.’
The Nithyananda cult operated as a surrogate
extended family and provided novel, if questionable, therapeutic and
spiritual alternatives that confer meaning on individual lives and
experiences, even if the devotees were deluded into believing so because
of their existential vacuum. In doing so, he and some of his close
confidantes exploited the weaknesses of existing institutions like
Hinduism, family and modern psychiatry.
This is not to say that
cults necessarily threaten the social order. After all, people are at
liberty to exercise their preference for one religious movement for
another. But what may endanger society is the return to obscurantism,
superstition and blind faith that once constituted the bane of India.
A
study of Nithyananda’s cultic order — the reference to an ‘energised
banyan tree’ and ‘energised puja items,’ besides a host of weird
teaching practices that go toward deification of the occult — indicates
that its devotees, drunk on their ‘sadguru,’ their ‘Enlightened Master’
of merely seven years’ experience, should exercise some caution in
distinguishing between the truly pious and the charlatan.
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/57807/cult-preying-feeding-anxieties.html
