Monastic life was supposed to be an exalted path to self-realization, spiritual enlightenment, and God. But the pain of feeling “stuck” was greater than my fear of leaving the Order. I had to get out.
Reasons why I left the Order and left God was the focus of my conversation with Scott D. Jacobsen, Editor at Conatus News, and Founder of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal and In-Sight Publishing.
Our conversation was published on Patheos / Rational Doubt1 blog. With permission from Rational Doubt editor and cofounder of The Clergy Project2, Linda LaScola, my interview with Scott Jacobsen is reposted below.
Scott Jacobsen: You published the story of your personal transition from being part of a monastic order called the Self-Realization Fellowship Monastic Order to not being a part of it. The story is on The Clergy Project website, dated May 27, 2015. You were known as Brahmachari Scott. Now, you’re just Scott (me, too). For those leaving monastic orders, what are important things to keep in mind?
“Scott” creator of Skeptic Meditations: It was a big deal to leave the Self-Realization Monastic Order (the Order or SRF) after 14 years. It was a pivotal decision in life. I joined the Order when I was 24, expecting to be a monk for the rest of my life. I took vows of loyalty, obedience and chastity. All, purportedly, for finding God and self-realization. My justification for being a monk was that purpose. But it was complex.
For reasons as complicated as life can become, I felt out of place. I realized the monastery was not for me. This wasn’t the end, though. In the most important ways, my journey unfolded when I chose to come back to the world.
Before leaving the Order, I spent months acclimating myself to the outside world. It was like dipping toes into cold water before the plunge.
Instead of attending the regularly scheduled monastic classes, I joined a local Toastmasters club. I practiced public speaking. Rather than turn my doubts and fears inward—as I did for decades, I visited an outside psychotherapist, and confided my hopes and fears to her. Before seeing that psychotherapist, I spent years weighing the pros and cons of staying in or leaving the Order. I built an underground support community of trusted current and former monastics, church members and biological family.
At the time, I had a motto:
I’m not moving away from anything. I’m moving towards something.
Something great, I hoped. I did not know, but I felt I was moving towards something great based on a vision. I was developing a plan for a new life. That energized me. The pain of feeling “stuck” was greater than my fear of leaving the Order. I was one of the lucky few. I escaped. When I say “escaped,” I mean physically and psychologically.
Many monks from the Order I lived with still live in the monastery. Many others left. However, some of those who left still psychologically stuck within the Order. The monastery is still with them. It is more important where one resides psychologically rather than physically, in my opinion, speaking now from over a decade of experience. Some people have the privilege to move. Several monks stayed in the Order who were instrumental in helping me become who I am today. For me, leaving the Order was about moving towards, rather than away, from something.
What are some expected difficulties—personal, familial, and professional—in transitioning out of a monastic order?
The difficulties included learning how to reintegrate into society. We had extremely limited access to the outside world. The monks were allowed to watch one movie a month, and even that was censored. The Monks’ Library contained only censored materials: books of saints and yogis, the LA Times newspaper and magazines like National Geographic and Sports Illustrated. Access to the internet, during my tenure, was blocked or filtered and our phone calls were monitored for ‘billing’ purposes. We were charged for long-distance calls, which discouraged outside contact. Censoring of our exposure to the world, we were told, was for our own spiritual development.
Life inside was like a cult.
Upon re-entry into the world, I felt woefully inadequate in practical matters of daily life.
To transition, I learned how to be an adult, and to be assertive, to negotiate and pay my bills. I had to reintegrate into society, rebuild my life, relationships, and start a career. When I left, I had no job, no home and no family to live with. I had to prove to myself that I could make my way in the world. Within two years of leaving, I enrolled in university and graduated with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree while working for a corporation.
I was intrigued by your description of monastic life on The Clergy Project website:
…monks didn’t just sit all-day chanting, praying, and navel-gazing.
Monastery routine consisted of meditation, classes, recreation, 9-to-5 jobs: ministering to a worldwide religious congregation at the Self-Realization Fellowship churches, temples, meditation centers and groups, and spiritual retreats. Each monk received $40 per month cash allowance, room and board, paid medical care, and all-you-could-eat lacto-ovo vegetarian buffet.
You were working in rather extreme conditions. What was running through your mind? What is the insight gained since you left about monastic life, e.g. working conditions?
I was convinced by church doctrine and the spiritual mythologies. They stated that renunciation and self-sacrifice was an exalted path to God, self-realization and spiritual freedom. However, a few years after leaving, I was able to step back and take a stern look at the conditions of the Order.
In the monastery, I lived inside a closed, cult-like system. SRF is a Hindu-inspired meditation group.
The followers—consciously or unconsciously—buy into false premises taught by the church. Once one believes the false premises, it becomes easy to surrender to the work and spiritual routine for hours, days, weeks, months and years. You hand over control to teacher, guru, church or religion.
SRF puts a premium on meditation techniques as the highest way to spiritual development or self-realization.
Examples of some of the premises3 we believed:
- You are unaware. Meditation is the way to unbroken awareness. If you are not fully aware, keep meditating.
- You are one with God, but don’t know it. Meditation is the path to God. If you don’t know God, keep meditating.
- You are asleep and don’t know it. Meditation is the way to wake spiritually. If you are asleep spiritually, keep meditating.
Now, I look back and regret having spent precious years in the pursuit of the Order’s false premises. But, better late than never, I outgrew them.
The Scientific American article was the linchpin to becoming an atheist within your social circle, friends and family. What seems to be the main reason for transitioning out of monastic life?
There’s so many reasons why I left.
Mostly, I needed to change and grow. The Order wasn’t about change or growth. Lord knows, I tried. Ultimately, the church and its leader were about perpetuating the “revealed” teachings of the teachers. I was lucky; I saw through the false premises of the church. I never regretted leaving it.
There are local agnostic, atheist, humanist, and freethinker organizations to provide support for people. How can friends and family give support?
Family and friends play a vital role in supporting people like me who leave extreme religions or cult-like groups.
My family accepted me. I can not think of anything special that family and friends can do that is different that what true friends and family do: laugh, care, and do things together. Naturally, different friends and family serve different needs for us. It was most helpful for me to connect with a variety of people from different cultures or worldviews. Having a good therapist helped, I did not become a burden for friends and loved ones with my issues.
You created Skeptic Meditations as well. It is a general resource on skepticism with a blog. How can people become involved with Skeptic Meditations?
I created Skeptic Meditations to critically examine the supernatural claims of yogis, mystics, and meditators, and to muse and critique my experiences inside the SRF/the Order.
Christians have many resources to question and doubt, if they choose. After coming out of the Order, which is a Hindu-inspired meditation group, I found precious few resources for people like me who had left Christianity and questioned Eastern religion, especially yoga meditation. Skeptic Meditations explores the hidden, sometimes darker, side of yoga, mindfulness, and meditation.
Thank you for your time, Scott.
I’ve enjoyed your questions and chatting with you. Thank you.
After our interview was published, I asked Scott Jacobsen his reasons for founding In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal and In-Sight Publishing.
Jacobsen: Whether religious leave or irreligious find religion, I want individuals to have the freedom to choose the path for their own lives. Often, danger comes from restriction of belief, conscience, and movement of people caught in unhealthy communities, which are often religious or cultish, or outright cults”.
Scott D. Jacobsen, interviewer and founder of In-Sight, may be contacted at Scott.D.Jacobsen@gmail.com.
Question for readers: In your own life, in what unhealthy communities may you have been “stuck”? What did you do to leave, to learn and to grow after leaving the group for your better life?
Notes
1,2. Patheos / Rational Doubt is a blog where the public and non-believing and doubting [religious] clergy can interact. Contributors include founders of The Clergy Project, including Linda LaScola, and both “out” and “still-closeted” members of a private forum. Active or former clergy-persons who no longer believe in their faith in God, Higher Powers, or supernatural can learn more about The Clergy Project private forum.
3. Read my post Duped by Meditation? for an explanation of false premises peddled by many meditation teachers and groups.
Excellent website… I browsed through many articles here and found them very interesting.. I do agree that critical thinking and scientific approach is necessary to establish substantial proof for many claims made by mystics…
I myself have been a spiritual seeker for many years and read books from many different traditions with contradictory concepts, claims and paths.. I read many books of Osho and have been associated with Isha Yoga as well.. Right now, I am skeptical about many of the paranormal claims, reincarnation, staying always in bliss etc except one thing… In my experience, mindfulness did relieve me from depression, made me more peaceful, gave me less emotional reactivity and there has been a change in the perception of self.. You can go through my story here: My Journey with teachings of Osho, Isha and mindfulness .. It explains how I moved from totally irrational thinking to critical thinking in more than two decades of my journey in seeking self-realization.
My current assumption is that techniques like mindfulness and self-inquiry causes some neuro-plastic changes in the brain that reduces much of the activity in default-mode network of the brain which leads to peak experiences, being in the flow and eventually a state of mind with peace, less emotional reactivity, less rumination and mind wandering etc… I read some of your articles on mindfulness but I am sure that mindfulness is more beneficial than how you have explained in those articles.. Here is a paper published in 2011 that sums up the benifits: How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective.
But there is absolutely nothing supernatural or paranormal about it.. So, other than the fact that mindfulness does improve ones subjective well-being, I am skeptical about any other claims… And, I don’t really believe that gurus are infallible, saint-like and free of cognitive bias…
I would like to see more articles here in the future in unbiased way.. It may encourage more research on these concepts..
@Shanmugam: Thanks for taking the time to comment here.
I read sections of your blog. Happy to hear you are skeptical and critical of meditation or mindfulness practices and ideologies. Happy that you found meditation or mindfulness helped you. It has helped me too.
But, after years of practice, and more recently going into critical analysis and literature of the practices and ideologies–
I’ve yet to find meditation practices any more helpful than many other simpler methods available, other methods which carry much less psychological and ideological baggage, such as sleep, exercise, or listening to music. All these three (to name only a few) provide nearly everyone significant benefits–improve brain, psychological, and physical health.
The published studies of the benefits from sleep, exercise, and listening to music are seldom as sexy, nor do they garner the flashy headlines today as do headlines about meditation.
My hypothesis is that society interprets meditation as some exotic, mystical, spiritual practice, along with the new age notions of “self-improvement”, spirituality, and superiority complexes of finding oneself.
There’s little awareness required in giving too much credence to these thousands of year old authoritarian traditions, systems, and ideologies. Plug and play. Plug into the system and play back the same old tired tropes of ancient authoritarian promises to improve humanity and society. Wishful thinking or sham.
I’m biased in this way now, after decades of meditation practice and learning the hard way (myself) that meditation is nothing special itself. For me after I stripped away the baggage of interpretations. I believe meditation practices provide what people are told, interpret, or believe it does that brings them the benefits. Benefits provide no proof of efficacy of a treatment. Only of the person’s belief system. Placebos are beneficial.
The longer I meditate, research, and think critically the more I’m not afraid to be biased towards being critical of meditation practices and ideologies. My hope is not to be right, but to be less wrong than I have been in the past.