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----- Original Message -----
From: "Al-Kafir Al-Kabir" <kafiralkabir@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.religion.bahai
Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2003 12:29 AM
Subject: Spiritual abuse
> The following is taken from a Sufi list and perfectly articulates the
> kind of spiritual abuse rampant inside baha'ism.
>
>
> Spiritual abuse is any interaction which seeks to:
>
> compel -- whether through force, pressure, intimidation, emtional
> blackmail/duress, or other metods of covert control -- anyone to
> believe or act in certain ways. At the heart of any spirital/mystical
> path is the inherent, God-given freedom to accept or reject the
> Divine purpose of life, and while individuals may wish to disagree or
> discuss various possibilities concerning the precise nature of what
> that Divine purpose is or what this purpose might entail, no one has
> the right to impose on others what this should be or demand that
> people must comply or conform with such possibilities. The freedom to
> choose -- which is a Divinely given gift -- should not be curtailed
> through coercive means -- physical, emotional, psychological, social,
> or spirtual.
>
> Or, approached from another direction, spiritual abuse is:
>
> any interaction in which the intention or niyat of one person is to
> corrupt, obstruct, undermine, interfere with, subvert, mislead,
> destroy, or impair the essential relationship which each person
> enjoys with his or her Creator -- that is, spiritual abuse is any
> interaction in which there is some intention, agenda, purpose, or
> goal other than a wish for the constructive enhancement of another
> person's life -- not according to what one may believe is in someone
> else's best spiritual interests, but according to what God's plan for
> that individual is and, ultimately, the only person who has the
> responsiblity for deciding or judging what God's plan is for an
> indvidual is the individual himself or herself. Others -- such as a
> spiritual guide, teacher, shaykh, murshid, guide or pir -- may be
> called upon as resources in assisting an individual to try to reach
> the best informed decision possible, but it is a breach of spiritual
> adab or etiquette to seek to manipulate that decision making process -
> - especially when this is done for self-serving purposes ... no
> matter how nobly and beautfully packaged this manipulation may be.
>
> Or, approached from, yet, another direction, spiritual abuse is:
>
> any form of interaction which seeks, intentionally, to treat
> deception, disinformation, lies, misinformation, and falsehoods as if
> they were spiritual guidance rather than error ... it is one thing to
> have differences of opinion about this or that teaching and to
> explore those differences in methodical, rigorous, but diplomatic
> ways, and it is quite another to use discussion as a tool of
> obfuscation for the purposes of influencing people to seek other than
> the truth -- for the truth is all that stands between us and error.
>
> And, finally, one might also say that spiritual abuse is:
>
> any form of interaction which is authoritarian in nature and which
> provides few or no degrees of freedom for full disclosure -- or, as
> much as is feasible at any given time -- with respect to critically
> examining -- in an appropriately respectful and discrete manner --
> issues involving identity, doubt, faith, truth, quesions, concerns,
> purposes, meaning, methodology, justice, knowledge, understanding,
> integrity, adab, morality, duty, responsibility, or disparities
> between what is said and what is done with respect to any of the
> participants.
>
> The foregoing is not exhaustive, but it serves as something of a
> beginning I believe, for further discussion and critical exploration.
>
> (The above was written by a member of the Sufi Spiritual Abuse
> Recovery Group and is posted here with the permission of the author.)
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