Steven Hassan on Huffington Post

Have you been reading any of the articles about the current schizm in Sikh Dharma? If so, what's your response as a 2nd generation adult?

Here is the op-ed piece by cult recovery expert, Steven Hassan. From there, is a link to a piece in the Santa Fe Reporter. The Eugene Register Guard also has a slew of articles. Below is the comment I left for Steven Hassan at the Huffington Post. I hope he reads it.

I'm often left with feelings of dismay and anger that, although there is word slowly making it to the public that 3HO/Sikh Dharma/Kundalini Yoga is a cult, perhaps now and imploding cult, but a de-facto cult nonetheless, no article has, to date brought up the experiences of those of us who were raised in it, shuttled about, and never even given the choice to "join or not". These articles, over and over, simply express your own schadenfreud for the business-side of 3HO's troubles, and the unfolding drama among its 1st generation baby-boomer converts. Not one mention of Sikh Dharma Foreign Education. Not one mention of GNFC School, or GRD Academy. One mention of Miri Piri Academy, that mentions it is a "training camp". It is not a training camp. It is a boarding school located in India which runs ten months out of the year. To call it a camp is completely misleading.

This implosion is yet another indicator of the 1st generation's callousness toward their 2nd generation - their children - and the 1st gens. willingness to suspend parental duties to please their guru, Yogi Bhajan. It is safe for me to say that 100% of us feel betrayed and abandoned. Perhaps those 2nd generationers who have remained in the Sikh Dharma community are experiencing this sense of betrayal differently, and probably cling to the faith even more. I still have a sense of comraderie with them - because we have all shared the same experiences as children. It hurts me to imagine them hurting over the things we did not start, and that we did not ask for.

So, enough of the schadenfrued. Enough of quoting Kamall Rose Kaur, who I am beginning to think is the leader of "the exes cult". Enough of the fanatics who railroad blogs and forums as a soapbox to preach their version of what "true Sikhsim" is.

If any of us 2nd generation are to participate in the dialogue, it will only be after we are recognized as autonomous individuals, not as puppets. Sherri has asked me to go on the record if she is to write an article about the schools in India. Does she have zero clue about what it means to recover from an upbringing in an abusive cult? Steven Hassan's approach is also problematic. What he seems to not understand is that the more one tries to "bust" a cult, the more divisive you are, and therefore the more futile it is. No one who is in a cult will ever admit that it is a cult! And the world will always have cults. One only realizes something is a cult after one has left - and then, the process of transition is extremely perilous and traumatic, that to have the cult-busters banging down your door to rally around their cause feels like just another version of thought reform.