VOLUME 9 |ISSUE 2 |2018 2317
About the Reviewer
Joseph Szimhart began research into cultic
influence in 1980, after ending his 2-year
devotion to a New Age sect called Church
Universal and Triumphant. He began to work
professionally as an intervention specialist
and exit counselor in 1986.
Since 1998 he has worked in the crisis
department of a psychiatric emergency hospital in Pennsylvania.
He continues to assist families with interventions and former
members in recovery, including consultations via phone and
Internet. In 2016 he received an ICSA Lifetime Achievement
Award at the Annual Conference in Dallas, Texas. n
he really was as a person. He had developed no special and
miraculous powers of mind. It was all fake, because he came to
see that the lamas were faking it too. Unfortunately, he found
no therapist who could address what he was talking about
until he met me so he had stopped bringing up his tulku
dilemma in sessions. Chandler points out that the therapy
community wants to believe that the mindfulness aspect of
Buddhism cannot be bad and may be a solution to depression
and other anxious ills, including war.
Of course, few Western children living in Tibetan dharma
develop mental illness but they may as adults remain in the
service of the Tibetan Buddhist agenda as ambassadors:
The Shambhala dharma brats are in high gear these
days, as actively “engaged Buddhists,” spurred on
by the spiritualized, Buddhocratized, eco-world
citizenship movement that Trungpa’s son, Osel
Mukpo, is helping to create. (p. 395)
Chandler worries about a “Buddhocracy,” or a totalist agenda
among the lamas. The links with New Age groups are apparent
in the Crestone, Colorado area, where wealthy supporters
Maurice and Hanne Strong (both deceased) helped drive the
dream of “global citizenship” with what they claimed was their
United Nations-endorsed Agenda 21 (p. 472). Chandler and
her husband had relocated to Crestone for the final phase of
their devotion. Crestone harbored “twenty-five major, eastern
cults, foundations and sects” (p. x) on land grants from the
Strongs’ Baca Ranch. Chandler reiterates her belief in a right-
wing political fear that the left wants to redistribute America’s
wealth to support a global village. George Soros is mentioned
as in league with the Dalai Lama for this purpose:
Crestone is the petri-dish of the late Maurice Strong’s
Agenda 21 his template for slowly eroding the
“affluent middle class,” along with U.S. national
sovereignty and its representative democracy, and
replacing it with a spiritualized eco-communitarian
world citizenry that will be taxed to death, like Old
Tibet, to “redistribute” the world’s wealth mostly into
the hands of the few, from the many. (p. x)
I find that many former members of cults get derailed in their
recovery by becoming missionaries for truth, as if they found
it. I would have liked to see more of Chandler’s personal story
and less of how Tibetan Buddhism is an evil force in line with
an occult conspiracy to rule the planet. Chandler’s book has
enough slings and arrows against Tibetan Buddhism to keep
all lamas in America ducking and dodging for years. It is worth
reading for its effective gutting of Chogyam Trungpa’s legacy
and that of other elitist and abusive lamas such as Sogyal
Rinpoche, who in my opinion deserve every lash of Chandler’s
whip. However, there is not much in the book to show the
more elegant expressions of the Buddhist enterprise, though I
found a few contrasting references to Mahayana Buddhism as
more benign in philosophy than the Tibetan Vajrayana of the
lamas. Buddhism, like any old tradition, has many faces and
expresses itself through the cultures and cults that adopt it.
A more careful criticism, for example, appeared in tricycle:
The Buddhist Review, a magazine that promotes the Buddhist
mindfulness agendas that Chandler excoriates. “A More
Enlightened Way of Being,” written by Seth Zuiho Segall
for the winter 2016 edition, explores the conflicts and
adjustments with Western modernism among Buddhist
practitioners. Segall’s careful critique could easily apply to
other religions that struggle with modernist science and
cultural advances. Segall ends his essay thus: “The foremost
principle of Buddhism is that everything changes. It is a law
that governs Buddhism too” (Segall, p. 98). Perhaps the real
value of Chandler’s book is to help Tibetan Buddhists better
address their outdated, medieval principles and make some
healthy changes to the way lamas behave, are raised, and are
indoctrinated. n
Reference
Segall, S. Z. (2016, Winter). A more enlightened way of being.
tricycle: The Buddhist Review (27)2. Available online at https://
tricycle.org/magazine/a-more-enlightened-way-of-being/
I would have liked to see more
of Chandler’s personal story and
less of how Tibetan Buddhism
is an evil force ...there is not
much in the book to show the
more elegant expressions of the
Buddhist enterprise…
About the Reviewer
Joseph Szimhart began research into cultic
influence in 1980, after ending his 2-year
devotion to a New Age sect called Church
Universal and Triumphant. He began to work
professionally as an intervention specialist
and exit counselor in 1986.
Since 1998 he has worked in the crisis
department of a psychiatric emergency hospital in Pennsylvania.
He continues to assist families with interventions and former
members in recovery, including consultations via phone and
Internet. In 2016 he received an ICSA Lifetime Achievement
Award at the Annual Conference in Dallas, Texas. n
he really was as a person. He had developed no special and
miraculous powers of mind. It was all fake, because he came to
see that the lamas were faking it too. Unfortunately, he found
no therapist who could address what he was talking about
until he met me so he had stopped bringing up his tulku
dilemma in sessions. Chandler points out that the therapy
community wants to believe that the mindfulness aspect of
Buddhism cannot be bad and may be a solution to depression
and other anxious ills, including war.
Of course, few Western children living in Tibetan dharma
develop mental illness but they may as adults remain in the
service of the Tibetan Buddhist agenda as ambassadors:
The Shambhala dharma brats are in high gear these
days, as actively “engaged Buddhists,” spurred on
by the spiritualized, Buddhocratized, eco-world
citizenship movement that Trungpa’s son, Osel
Mukpo, is helping to create. (p. 395)
Chandler worries about a “Buddhocracy,” or a totalist agenda
among the lamas. The links with New Age groups are apparent
in the Crestone, Colorado area, where wealthy supporters
Maurice and Hanne Strong (both deceased) helped drive the
dream of “global citizenship” with what they claimed was their
United Nations-endorsed Agenda 21 (p. 472). Chandler and
her husband had relocated to Crestone for the final phase of
their devotion. Crestone harbored “twenty-five major, eastern
cults, foundations and sects” (p. x) on land grants from the
Strongs’ Baca Ranch. Chandler reiterates her belief in a right-
wing political fear that the left wants to redistribute America’s
wealth to support a global village. George Soros is mentioned
as in league with the Dalai Lama for this purpose:
Crestone is the petri-dish of the late Maurice Strong’s
Agenda 21 his template for slowly eroding the
“affluent middle class,” along with U.S. national
sovereignty and its representative democracy, and
replacing it with a spiritualized eco-communitarian
world citizenry that will be taxed to death, like Old
Tibet, to “redistribute” the world’s wealth mostly into
the hands of the few, from the many. (p. x)
I find that many former members of cults get derailed in their
recovery by becoming missionaries for truth, as if they found
it. I would have liked to see more of Chandler’s personal story
and less of how Tibetan Buddhism is an evil force in line with
an occult conspiracy to rule the planet. Chandler’s book has
enough slings and arrows against Tibetan Buddhism to keep
all lamas in America ducking and dodging for years. It is worth
reading for its effective gutting of Chogyam Trungpa’s legacy
and that of other elitist and abusive lamas such as Sogyal
Rinpoche, who in my opinion deserve every lash of Chandler’s
whip. However, there is not much in the book to show the
more elegant expressions of the Buddhist enterprise, though I
found a few contrasting references to Mahayana Buddhism as
more benign in philosophy than the Tibetan Vajrayana of the
lamas. Buddhism, like any old tradition, has many faces and
expresses itself through the cultures and cults that adopt it.
A more careful criticism, for example, appeared in tricycle:
The Buddhist Review, a magazine that promotes the Buddhist
mindfulness agendas that Chandler excoriates. “A More
Enlightened Way of Being,” written by Seth Zuiho Segall
for the winter 2016 edition, explores the conflicts and
adjustments with Western modernism among Buddhist
practitioners. Segall’s careful critique could easily apply to
other religions that struggle with modernist science and
cultural advances. Segall ends his essay thus: “The foremost
principle of Buddhism is that everything changes. It is a law
that governs Buddhism too” (Segall, p. 98). Perhaps the real
value of Chandler’s book is to help Tibetan Buddhists better
address their outdated, medieval principles and make some
healthy changes to the way lamas behave, are raised, and are
indoctrinated. n
Reference
Segall, S. Z. (2016, Winter). A more enlightened way of being.
tricycle: The Buddhist Review (27)2. Available online at https://
tricycle.org/magazine/a-more-enlightened-way-of-being/
I would have liked to see more
of Chandler’s personal story and
less of how Tibetan Buddhism
is an evil force ...there is not
much in the book to show the
more elegant expressions of the
Buddhist enterprise…
