I really like this post. I’d been previously pointing people to the checklist from Bill Hamilton’s Saints and Psychopaths for lack of anything else readily linkable but will start linking this.
In trying to write some responses to some of the things I have personal experience with and feel like I want to add to it highlights what you said at the beginning, it is really really hard to think clearly and write clearly about this topic because there are always multiple interpretations of the behaviors in question. Thank you for the effort of writing it.
WRT positive things to look for I’ll add this:
A palpable sense of the frame moving around organically. With frame controllers, if something threatens their frame there is a palpable sense of tension within the group.
Fuzzier: do people make fun of the leader(s)
To their face
Behind their back
Not at all
My favorite scenes have always had 1 as far as I can remember.
Below an excerpt from something I recently wrote about abusive patterns in spiritual communities:
Good teachers don’t encourage hungry ghost dynamics in students. This touches on a bunch of entangled dynamics which I’ll do my best to describe. The people coming to a teacher often fall into the category of looking for someone to fix everything that is wrong with their life. Even if the seeker logically rejects this narrative it can often be an emotional reality that they are looking for a dharma daddy. Bad teachers will encourage this dynamic in a few ways, an important one being that they don’t undermine seeker’s tendency to look to them for all the answers. I’ve seen this first hand where everything the teacher in a space said was a corrective, with the underlying principles never clearly expounded. This lead to an evaporative cooling process whereby people not susceptible to this sort of attack simply left, leaving an environment where everyone is deferring to the person all the time. New people entering who don’t know any better then copy what they see. There was also a sense of pride for masochistic tendencies, that others ‘couldn’t handle’ the ‘real’ things that were going on in the scene.
Hungry ghosts feel highly uncertain about themselves and the world, they always feel they are doing everything wrong. They are drawn towards the overconfident people who act as though they are doing everything correctly. This will select for narcissistic or exploitative teachers. This dovetails with the Guru model which, as I understand it, has been poorly translated to the west. A good teacher is less like a priest and more like a PhD advisor. This also ties in with the point about questions mentioned previously. Hungry ghosts will be satisfied by glossy answers, assuming that any lack of understanding is a failure on their part. They will also create an environment hostile to real questions as they don’t want anything deflating the bubble of the infallibility of the teacher. There will also be a lot of interactions that seem to be about mutual validation of being on the correct path instead of openness to multiple approaches.
Such hungry ghost dynamics can be detected by how engaging with a scene makes you feel. If you exit feeling agitated, like you are doing something wrong, like others are making more progress than you and you need to ‘hurry up’, like there is winning to be done, like you are overloaded with things you need to learn, these are all bad signs. Good teaching creates more relaxed looseness, more playfulness, more freedom, more feeling of confidence and the tractability of practice. In short, the teachings themselves creating a palpable sense of less dukkha.
This would seem to be counter to what I’ll call the high discipline focused schools. I won’t say there’s nothing to discipline, especially as specific periods of formal practice. But given how poor most schools are in producing people with obvious levels of insight I think the burden of proof lies with them to show that what they are offering works. A higher level of commitment that is asked for should also come with a higher level of demonstrated effects. (I’ll add here abusers will avoid any explicitness about the commitments they are actually asking for and receiving from you. This is for deniability later. After all, you did those things of ‘your own volition.’)
And just because it can never be said too many times: if something looks hierarchical, cloistered, with members sleeping with each other, and personal finances becoming entangled in the org run far far away very fast.
I appreciate that you shared the checklist so I did a positive vote, but I’d like to explicitly note that I disagree with a lot on this chart as a diagnostic tool. Is this from a study of cults or something? Things like “Saints tend to have 1 name, Psychopaths tend to have many names” seem “obviously dumb” to me, so I suspect there is either something I’m missing or I disagree more deeply with some of these ideas.
I really like this post. I’d been previously pointing people to the checklist from Bill Hamilton’s Saints and Psychopaths for lack of anything else readily linkable but will start linking this.
In trying to write some responses to some of the things I have personal experience with and feel like I want to add to it highlights what you said at the beginning, it is really really hard to think clearly and write clearly about this topic because there are always multiple interpretations of the behaviors in question. Thank you for the effort of writing it.
WRT positive things to look for I’ll add this: A palpable sense of the frame moving around organically. With frame controllers, if something threatens their frame there is a palpable sense of tension within the group.
Fuzzier: do people make fun of the leader(s)
To their face
Behind their back
Not at all
My favorite scenes have always had 1 as far as I can remember.
Below an excerpt from something I recently wrote about abusive patterns in spiritual communities:
Good teachers don’t encourage hungry ghost dynamics in students. This touches on a bunch of entangled dynamics which I’ll do my best to describe. The people coming to a teacher often fall into the category of looking for someone to fix everything that is wrong with their life. Even if the seeker logically rejects this narrative it can often be an emotional reality that they are looking for a dharma daddy. Bad teachers will encourage this dynamic in a few ways, an important one being that they don’t undermine seeker’s tendency to look to them for all the answers. I’ve seen this first hand where everything the teacher in a space said was a corrective, with the underlying principles never clearly expounded. This lead to an evaporative cooling process whereby people not susceptible to this sort of attack simply left, leaving an environment where everyone is deferring to the person all the time. New people entering who don’t know any better then copy what they see. There was also a sense of pride for masochistic tendencies, that others ‘couldn’t handle’ the ‘real’ things that were going on in the scene.
Hungry ghosts feel highly uncertain about themselves and the world, they always feel they are doing everything wrong. They are drawn towards the overconfident people who act as though they are doing everything correctly. This will select for narcissistic or exploitative teachers. This dovetails with the Guru model which, as I understand it, has been poorly translated to the west. A good teacher is less like a priest and more like a PhD advisor. This also ties in with the point about questions mentioned previously. Hungry ghosts will be satisfied by glossy answers, assuming that any lack of understanding is a failure on their part. They will also create an environment hostile to real questions as they don’t want anything deflating the bubble of the infallibility of the teacher. There will also be a lot of interactions that seem to be about mutual validation of being on the correct path instead of openness to multiple approaches.
Such hungry ghost dynamics can be detected by how engaging with a scene makes you feel. If you exit feeling agitated, like you are doing something wrong, like others are making more progress than you and you need to ‘hurry up’, like there is winning to be done, like you are overloaded with things you need to learn, these are all bad signs. Good teaching creates more relaxed looseness, more playfulness, more freedom, more feeling of confidence and the tractability of practice. In short, the teachings themselves creating a palpable sense of less dukkha.
This would seem to be counter to what I’ll call the high discipline focused schools. I won’t say there’s nothing to discipline, especially as specific periods of formal practice. But given how poor most schools are in producing people with obvious levels of insight I think the burden of proof lies with them to show that what they are offering works. A higher level of commitment that is asked for should also come with a higher level of demonstrated effects. (I’ll add here abusers will avoid any explicitness about the commitments they are actually asking for and receiving from you. This is for deniability later. After all, you did those things of ‘your own volition.’)
And just because it can never be said too many times: if something looks hierarchical, cloistered, with members sleeping with each other, and personal finances becoming entangled in the org run far far away very fast.
someone grabbed a helpful img of the other checklist mentioned: https://imgur.com/a/hKu5U3c
I appreciate that you shared the checklist so I did a positive vote, but I’d like to explicitly note that I disagree with a lot on this chart as a diagnostic tool. Is this from a study of cults or something? Things like “Saints tend to have 1 name, Psychopaths tend to have many names” seem “obviously dumb” to me, so I suspect there is either something I’m missing or I disagree more deeply with some of these ideas.
(I like the above in part because I find it reassuring.)