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BlancheFromage 2 points 10 months ago
I asked a friend that meditates a lot why I feel better when I chant, she replied that I developed a habit over the years.
This is something we have analyzed in some detail - here are some links if you want to see the material for yourself. Long story short - if your SGI connection told you to "Try it for 90 days and you can see for yourself whether it works or not", that person did not tell you that's how long it takes to get a habit established. If that person had said, "Try it for 90 days (or 100 days) and by then it will have turned into a habit you'll have trouble breaking", would you have been willing to try? That's the standard invitation into the cult, BTW - I don't know if they're still doing that, but there it is. Do ANYTHING for 90 days and it becomes a habit. And you're more likely to continue with something once it's become a habit.
Chanting is an unhealthy practice that can create an endorphin dependency habit that can be difficult to break, just like any habit. The life of the person chanting the magic chant is passing him/her by just as surely as the life of the opium addict lying on a couch in thrall to beautiful drug-induced visions. We do not condone that sort of time-wasting here. Source
The time a person spends chanting is time that is forever lost. This is bad for several reasons:
1) Spending that time further isolates the person 2) Spending that much time alone within one's own thoughts, especially chanting to bend reality to one's will, simply reinforces one's own attachments and delusions 3) Being isolated and within one's own mind will cause one's social skills to atrophy and degrade
It is in a cult's interests to isolate the members within the cult and its practices. SGI is no different.
All that time chanting, all that time going to activities - this leaves less time for outside interests and outside friends.
People who have been SGI members for any length of time will likely have no friends at all "on the outside" - this serves SGI's purposes wonderfully. When all your friends are inside the cult, that raises the costs of leaving for you, because you know you're going to walk out alone.
What passes for "friendship" within SGI is "we see each other at SGI activities". You KNOW that without your shared belief in SGI, you have nothing in common to serve as a basis for a friendship. And you've heard how they talk about people who leave, so you know what they're going to be saying about you after you're gone.
No one will be willing to risk being seen with such a "bad apple".
Chanting produces an endorphin addiction
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Chanting meditations not recommended
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There's a reason that SGI meetings all start with gongyo and chanting. It's the same reason church services always start with hymns and shared recitations/call-and-response style segments. The music/singing/chanting and recitations serve to induce a trance state, in which the person being thus affected unawares "feels better" and is rendered more suggestible, more gullible, more open to accepting whatever the speaker is then going to pour into his/her consciousness. It's a tactic to disable critical thinking. And it works.
When you stop doing something that has become a habit, you will inevitably feel an empty space in your psyche. RE: SGI membership, I refer to this as a "cult-shaped hole".
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For example, let's suppose you get laid off from work. You go home, go to sleep, wake up the next morning - and you automatically start your routine of getting ready for work! But you don't have a job to go to now! Sure, you can get busy looking for work and filling out applications, but it's going to feel weird and awkward - you're suddenly aware there's a job-shaped hole in your psyche.
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And you may well feel anxious and stressed until you find some other similar job that fits into that hole.
When a person leaves SGI, they suddenly have a lot more free time because no more activities, particularly if they see no reason to continue with the personal practice. What I recommend is to try a breathing meditation instead. It's something you can do anywhere. What you do is to start taking deep, slow breaths and focus entirely on the sound of your own breath, the feeling of the air coming into your nose and down into your lungs, the feeling of your chest expanding, and then the sound and feeling of the air being expelled.
It's very relaxing, and will provide you with a different way of calming yourself/relaxing until you've managed to break your chanting habit.
The longer you don't do something, the less you'll feel driven to do it. When people leave a cult, they often feel "I must find a different religion to do instead." Unfortunately, having just left a cult, the hole is cult-shaped, so it's VERY likely this person will end up diving right into another cult. The longer this person can hold off on joining a religion, the less likely s/he will end up saddled with another cult.
Now that you have all this time freed up, think about all the things you used to enjoy that you didn't have time for because SGI. Think of the things you might have enjoyed trying, TV shows you kind of wanted to watch but didn't have time. Now you can get caught up! One of the first TV shows I watched post-SGI was HBO's The Tudors. I'd wanted to see it years back, but we didn't have HBO and besides, I was too busy with SGI. Really enjoyed that one.
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"Do Anything for 90 Days and It Will Become a Habit"
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