Acem was founded in 1966. The organization was established during a decade that has been characterized by some as the most marked reaction against central tenets in European thinking during the twentieth century.
The founders of Acem were students at the University of Oslo in the 1960s; they were influenced by certain aspects of the prevalent ideas of that time. When discussing Acem’s earliest years, it seems useful to examine some of those ideas, as well as some of the ways they were encountered.
The counter-cultural movement of the 1960s had a myriad of forms – utopian revolutionary metaphysics and politics, flower power and terrorism, beat culture and interests in Zen, populism, Maoism, Indian religion and philosophy, free love and drug use. One common denominator to them all seemed to be a preoccupation with consciousness; not a clearly defined concept, but in general, it was regarded as a way of perceiving the world, the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, a means to see the limitation or injustice of various contexts. Consciousness was classified as something that may restrict and falsify, an active structuring element that could hamper the recognition of the true reality, and that could impede liberation and freedom. The limited and restrictive consciousness in society was held responsible for nearly everything the counter-cultural movement attacked: a civilization full of oppression, discomfort, disgust and suffering.
The neo-Marxists were concerned with false and true consciousness. Their solution was the raising of consciousness by adopting the perspective of the working class. Young political leaders with the right political consciousness let their lives be shaped by the new understanding, and their goals and actions were strongly anchored in this new frame of reference. The drug ideologists focused on the limitations of consciousness and announced the need for expansion of the mind by drugs. From Asia came another kind of emphasis on expanded awareness: meditation that would lead to cosmic consciousness, divine consciousness – states of mind with enlightenment and complete innocence.
Different groups in the counter-cultural movements recommended various routes to this altered, liberating consciousness. Indian gurus guaranteed new consciousness by the use of mental techniques. In 1960, the American psychologist Timothy Leary (1920-1996) tried the psychedelic drug LSD for the first time. He pronounced LSD as ‘the key to cosmic consciousness’. An entire culture believed in strong experiences. Intoxication, music, therapy, living things out, mysticism and meditation were going to break the limitations of consciousness, changing the individuals and the masses. The politicized part of the counter-cultural movement believed in political revolution, in addition to discussions, demonstrations and the raising of awareness of the leaders of society and the people. The belief was that, in this way, the foundations could be laid for what eventually would bring about a total change in consciousness on a collective level, once and for all – by means of revolution.
The idea that consciousness could be developed also came from psychologists such as Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965), Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), Karen Horney (1885-1952) and Erich P. Fromm (1900-1980). Maslow argued that a neurotic person not only reacts neurotically, but also senses and perceives reality in distorted ways. Accordingly, for Maslow personality development or self-actualization became rather important. Man has a drive towards development that would lead to a more adequate experience of the world that is less bound by limitations, theories and models.
The counter-cultural movement of the 1960s was supported by scientific insights. Over almost 100 years, scientists had accumulated data indicating that consciousness is, in part, a personal construction; a person develops various models and perceives the world through them. Moreover, the left half of the brain was discovered to be concerned with logical, analytic thinking, verbal and mathematical tasks. The right half specializes in synthesis and totality, i.e., more intuitive understanding. Western culture had focused mostly on expressions and understanding derived from the left half of the brain. The counter-cultural movement focused on the right half of the brain and turned the old notions upside-down. This was voiced most strongly in hippie culture and in the views inspired by the thinking of the East. The logical and analytical aspects were despised, while the utopian, emotional, sentimental, idealistic and intuitive sides were worshipped.
Why this strong focus on consciousness? What were the reasons why the subjective dimension became a common denominator in so many of the counter-cultural movements?
The most likely answer indicates that these movements fitted well into a wave that had been flowing back and forth over a number of centuries in European history. Scientists and their emphasis on the objective were the target for many of the reactions at the time. Traditionally, scientists held a prestigious position in Western culture: to a very large extent, science had liberated society from illness and distress, from toil and dark destinies, from superstition and irrationality. The objective scientific approach had made it possible for man to master nature. By treating everything as objects or relations among objects, considerable advances had been achieved. Even the subject facing the objects was treated as an object itself – a neutral medium that made unbiased observations possible. At the same time, scientists were objectifying consciousness and constructed a science about man’s inner life that was analogous to the natural sciences: intellectual analysis and objective, empirical research was regarded as the only true basis for all sorts of knowledge. Such views are strongly rooted in European thought. Where did they come from?
The origin of such views probably dates back to the Renaissance and the philosopher Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). His thinking had a lasting impact, and he has been named the father of modern natural science. Galileo is considered the first scientist who brought nature into the laboratory for investigation under controlled conditions. The motto was: ‘Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured’. Quantitative measurements would reveal the essence of nature. The Creator had written nature’s book in the language of mathematics and measurements. Therefore, anyone who wished to see the depths of Creation had to measure and calculate, according to Galileo.
In this way, his thinking constituted a reaction to metaphysics and speculation over nature during the Middle Ages. Galileo refused to accept that recognition of the truth required a clerical position or confirmation in the writings of Aristotle. He claimed that anyone could simply observe God’s plan if they could only master proper scientific method first. Thus, the heritage of Galileo implies that the involvement of the subjective is not desirable in order to recognize the truth. The only thing that is required is to know the key to opening the book of nature and to be able to measure and calculate correctly.
Thus, the subject was reduced to a passive receiver, and consciousness became a neutral medium. One of the consequences of this view was that consciousness was ignored as a possible source of error. This is what the German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) later called false consciousness. Galileo was living in an era totally dominated by rigid religious views about the world, and his thinking was in stark opposition to it. Accordingly, his life was in danger, and he chose to deny his ideas. In this way, he avoided the problem of openly reconciling the truths derived from natural science with the prevailing metaphysical and religious beliefs. One of the French philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, René Descartes (1596-1650), attempted to solve the problem. He influenced European thinking and cultural developments deeply – for better and for worse. By constructing a dualistic philosophical system, Descartes made room both for the theological views of the world and for the new emerging natural science. To put it simply: he gave the soul to the theologians and matter to the scientists. By doing so, he distanced himself from the philosophers of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, who considered the body and the soul as two facets of the same organic totality. The body, maintained Descartes, is part of the physical matter and as such, it is totally defined by the mathematical laws of nature: res extensa, the extended matter or corporeal substance. Because man has a soul, human beings also exceed res extensa; the soul has access to a non-corporeal realm: res cogitans, the spiritual world.
Through this division, Descartes was able to unite new and old, finite and infinite, time and eternity, matter and spirit. But the soul, this mysterious entity without matter and extent, was lost from scientific vision. In the tradition that followed Descartes, the soul, the consciousness or the subject almost became a ghost in the machinery. ‘Lay people became used to asking for news from the world of science. Because there rarely was any news about the soul, people eventually tended to forget most of what their ancestors had known for several thousands of years about it,’ wrote the Norwegian Nobel laureate, the author Sigrid Undset (1882-1949).
The significance of this division in modern thinking has often been the subject of debates and analyses. Like the Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim (1926-1999), some claimed that Descartes’ dualism, i.e., the sharp boundary between the researcher and what he is studying, has been a disaster for modern thinking, and that it has made it hard to progress from scholastic or Aristotelian thinking.
The shift of emphasis towards a strict reliance upon objective, rational thinking had already been emphasized by the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626). He rejected the possibility of intuitive comprehension and claimed that all forms of understanding should arise from induction based on perceptions made by the senses. Many reckoned that the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) brought this ideology of denial of the subject to its extreme with his positivistic philosophy. Comte described man’s development as a move forward, passing through different stages. The first and most primitive was the religious one. From there, man moved into the metaphysical stage, and now – during Comte’s own time – the highest stage was reached, i.e. the positivistic stage, governed by science alone.
Above, a development from Galileo to Comte has been outlined, in which a belief in reason and objective, logical and analytical thinking had taken over from a belief in God and metaphysics as a means to comprehend the deepest truths. At the same time, views on man’s development as a continuously advancing process had given rise to central elements in Western culture: the optimistic belief in unlimited progress, i.e., a belief that a golden age may be reached by using science and technology. All material, as well as all social and individual problems, may be lessened or even completely solved thereby.
The counter-cultural movement of the 1960s was not the first in history to challenge the myths of rationality. For almost 200 years, European philosophers had argued that consciousness was an actively structuring element: it constructs reality, it imposes limitations and, partly, it falsifies. The view that the subject is a neutral and rational agency was incorrect.
This way of thinking was mainly introduced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He maintained that, to a large extent, the world is a product of consciousness, exactly the perspective that became so important during the counter-cultural movement. Kant himself said that his views represented a Copernican shift in the history of philosophy, equally as important as Copernicus’s shift to the heliocentric view had been for astronomy. But Kant remained a developmental optimist. Reason cannot be trusted unconditionally, but it may be purified from its faults. Later followers of Kant maintained that they had achieved such purification.
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) established the dialectic method for the comprehension of truth. Even more strongly than Kant, he underscored how consciousness shapes comprehension. According to Hegel, consciousness develops in a historical and dialectic process that goes on in its own way; it will reach the final stage, the stage of complete spirit, through the expression of Hegel’s dialectic system. Thus, he rendered history and society responsible for the removal of false consciousness more than each individual alone.
The German philosopher and revolutionary communist Karl Marx (1818-1883) was fundamentally influenced by Hegel, and by no means less far-reaching in his intentions. However, different from Hegel, he claimed that what would fulfil the historical process and establish utopia was not thinking, but rather a material force: the proletariat. According to Marx, consciousness is only defined by material conditions in society. The most vociferous members of the counter-cultural movement in Western Europe and North America gradually adopted this view.
Despite criticism of the belief in pure reason and neutral consciousness, despite all the reactions in Western culture to the heritage of Galileo and Descartes – through romanticism and neo-romanticism, surrealism and hippie culture – an optimistic belief in progress was not only nurtured by thinking. Natural science had provided impressive results. It had rendered man able to master nature in ways that were fundamentally different from all other epochs in the history of man.
‘Man has reached closer to his idealized image of the divine’, wrote the Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), but only in the way humans may come closer to their ideals – not to perfection, and only in some aspects, and only partially in other aspects. Man has almost become like a god using prostheses, quite magnificent with all his helping tools. The future is likely to provide us with enormous advances, according to Freud. But at times, the advances may also cause a good deal of trouble.
In his play Beyond Human Power – II (1895), the Norwegian author and Nobel laureate in literature Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832-1910) dreamed of the happiness of mankind once railways and the telegraph would connect people all over the world. This dream of a golden age created by technology was dealt a hard blow on the very bloody battlefields of World War I and World War II and by the enormous atrocities of those wars. The counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s stated a clear ‘no’ to the belief that more inventions, more industry, more manufacturing, greater consumerism, more welfare, more material goods would rescue us. For those young people, disgust over a scientific, rational and capitalistic civilization was a lot stronger than their admiration for the benefits it had provided.
In their quest for solutions and ways to dampen their disdain, the counter-culturists naturally centred on what Descartes’ descendants had often left untried and ignored: res cogitans or consciousness. A new age must arise through new consciousness; this could be achieved in various ways, as already mentioned, and the suggestions were many – by the use of drugs, meditation, strong experiences or collective revolution. However, like most of the earlier reactions to unilateral faith in natural science and technological advancement, the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s did not deny utopianism, the belief in a golden age. On the contrary, utopianism was central to their battle against the beliefs of earlier generations.
We are heading towards the good, classless society (neo-Marxists), towards the mutated, free man (Leary), towards happiness for all generations to come (Mahesh Yogi), towards eternal world peace (Maharaj Ji), towards the redeeming of the Age of Aquarius (the hippies and astrologers), towards freedom from personal problems (the growth groups), and towards immortality (the scientologists). What science had been incapable of, i.e., the expansion of consciousness, was now to be accomplished.
In this way, the counter-cultural movement fitted well into the classical European pattern, in which one dream about great developments was exchanged for another. New utopias and universal ideologies replaced the prevailing ones. In Western thinking, belief in a society with no discomfort or no evil was central, and the fundamental tenets of this belief were not much questioned. The younger generation, who was choosing their direction in life at that time, adhered to dreams of a golden age that brought with it anti-rational and irrational attitudes, hostility against contemporary culture and the imperial personality. In the 1968’ers, totalitarian attitudes – evoked by gurus, drugs or revolutionary ideas from Marx, Mao and Mahesh – were thriving well into the 1970s.
Thus, a central intention of the counter-cultural movement was to bring the world a new consciousness characterized by a high degree of purity and innocence. The ideas about restrictive and falsifying consciousness were not new; they had been established earlier. The neo-Marxists drew heavily on century-old analyses. The drug ideologists were regular readers of Aldous Huxley’s (1894-1963) book from 1954, The Doors of Perception. Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), the proponent of a free lifestyle, went on his journey in the 1950s. Ideas about growth had been present for thirty years. Groups and concepts inspired by the East had existed for the last 100 years, from the Indian gurus like Ramakrishna (1836-1886) and J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986) to Mahesh Yogi (1918-2008). The Norwegian essayist Stein Mehren (1935-) suggested that ‘Not a single new thought was created in the 1960s’. Novelty lay in the fact that the post-war baby-boomers placed these ideas at the very centre of their attention; the impact was both due to their numbers and because their parents had made these ideas clearly visible. This body of thought became prominent at the expense of other viewpoints.
In this climate of uprising and utopianism, rife with political struggle and totalitarian ideas, reactions against the Vietnam war, idealization of drug intoxication and a quest for strong experiences, youthful spirituality and the breaking down of boundaries – it was from within this multitude of beliefs and actions that a group of students at the University of Oslo in Norway formed an organization and started to develop the technique of meditation known today as Acem Meditation.
Until the 1960s, very few Norwegians were involved in any form of meditation. Furthermore, those who were had barely any clout with their contemporaries or within their culture. Amongst them were a few Catholics with affiliations to contemplative traditions going back centuries in time, some were anthroposophists with their spiritual reflection, and a few Lutherans practised quiet reflection over Biblical passages or Zen meditations brought home by missionaries. Also, prior to the 1960s, the concept of ‘meditation’ had a completely different meaning for most people than it does today; it signified some kind of reflection, contemplation or pondering on the meaning of texts, images, existence or aspects of nature.
Usually, in the Western world, the concept of ‘meditation’ is still a rather broad term without specificity for the many differences in instruction and outcome that exist. ‘Meditation’ in this sense is something anyone can do when they let their thoughts pass while sitting in an easy chair, or when lying in a bath-tub, or enjoying the scenery of nature. However, with the growing focus on consciousness in the counter-cultural movement, an interest in meditation was also awakened, and the concept was redefined. Partly because the meditative traditions of the West were rather invisible, or were confined to a few religious believers, inspiration was sought instead in the meditative traditions of the East.
The American poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) triggered a virtual tidal wave when going to India in 1962. He stayed there for two years, and he was strongly influenced by his stay. The gurus of the East promised major changes in consciousness. They were addressing starved Western longings for spirituality, cosmology, comprehensive world-views, ideas about deeper unity and mysticism. Crowds of young Americans and Europeans travelled to the East, and Indian gurus were quite successful when establishing themselves in the West. They were met with wide open and often totally uncritical arms and minds. Characteristically, an Indian guru opened the world’s biggest pop festival ever: the Woodstock festival in 1969.
For the generation of the counter-cultural movement, the concept of meditation gained a new meaning: it was a mental activity that might elevate or expand consciousness. Interest was enormous, especially with all the publicity that followed when influential pop stars such as The Beatles and The Beach Boys spent time in India with gurus. In 1968, more than 2,000 students at University of California, Berkeley were practising some form of meditation. New books on the subject were released monthly in the USA. In Norway, the number of students interested in learning Acem Meditation was so high that there were waiting lists for the beginner’s courses.
This interest in meditation was just as diverse, complex and heterogeneous as the counter-cultural movement itself. Inspiration, ideas and experience were explored from various sources as different as Sufism, Tantra yoga, Lamaism, the teachings of St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), Zen traditions and Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961).
There is good reason to ask how sincere much of this search really was. Moreover, several of the gurus who were met with massive adoration were probably not the most worthy representatives of the wisdom of the East. Their claims or promises – from instant Samadhi and Cosmic Consciousness to occult powers like the ability to fly in the air, walk through walls and cure all diseases – were so extreme that they featured a magical-mythological world-view and aspects of what may be called a psychotic ‘spirituality’. Later, when their claims began to be challenged by reality and knowledge, the number of devotees shrank considerably and the number of followers regressed into small, esoteric circles. Among those in the West who picked up meditation, rather few added any major contributions to the understanding of the phenomenon. For most people, an interest in meditation was looked upon as a fad, as something trendy for a while that subsequently would be dropped in search of the next fad.
When evaluating what remains of this wave of interest in meditation decades later, when assessing the new perspectives generated after those years, it seems rather obvious that the development of Acem Meditation has been atypical in many ways. The students who gathered in Oslo in 1966 and founded Acem had learned Transcendental Meditation, or Deep Meditation as it was first called. This implied that Acem arose in a setting in which meditation sounds were used for personal growth. The Indian guru Mahesh Yogi became a well-known representative for this orientation in the West. He himself added ‘Maharishi’ (great seer) to his name, but this was never accepted by his superiors in the Shankaracharya tradition at Jyotir Math. Towards the end of the 1950s, he started to teach his meditation outside of India as a kind of japa, though without a rosary. Japa is the Indian word for repeating a mantra by the use of a rosary or “mala”. At the outset, he only drew a few followers, until the counter-cultural revolution placed him at the forefront of the Indian-inspired part of the mass movement of those years. From 1975, his popularity rapidly dwindled. He died in 2008. Films have been made and books written about him, also dealing with his misleading of the organization and the marketing of himself and his teaching.
For many meditation movements, there was a cultural reorientation in America, Australia and Europe in the 1980s and 1990s away from the Asian movements. Most of them shrank in size as well as in popularity. Critical books were published about gurus and their cults. Several scandals added to the reorientation. Already by the early 1970s, Acem had taken a firm stance against issues related to gurus, non-Western clothing, lifestyle, cults and the like. Alternative perspectives anchored in Western values and scientific orientation had been developed. Probably as a result of this approach, the Acem organization experienced substantial growth and popularity at the time. In addition, the beginner’s courses were further adapted to people leading regular lives, and the experienced meditators in Acem explored new dimensions of the psyche, particularly during the deepening retreats and long meditation. Profound existential issues were dealt with in the silence and processed further in the interpersonal exchange of the meditation guidance. Many meditation movements advise against discussing the meditative process, while in Acem, this is encouraged as a means to reach new goals.
The practice of sound-based meditation, initially combined with studies of Asian philosophy and some features of the counter-cultural movement, formed the foundation of Acem; yet headway was made in independent directions. The organization developed its own understanding and interpretation of meditation within a framework based on modern psychology and health sciences. Instead of adhering to a guru, ancient texts or religious beliefs as the ultimate authority, persistent and systematic work has been carried out over time to understand the meditative experiences and processes in terms of modern psychology in a secularized context. Particularly in hindsight, it seems clear that this development was only possible because Acem’s starting point was not an ideology, not a philosophy, but an analytic, experience-based approach to exploring meditation and its influence on people’s lives. Gradually, new concepts were formed, and a user-oriented meditation psychology emerged. The emphasis was less on promising great results, but instead to train the motivated meditator to optimize his meditative practising and to understand and enhance his meditative processes. Anyone who looks at Acem concepts such as ‘paradoxical results’, ‘actualization’ and ‘the free mental attitude’ would not be able to find any close parallels in the Asian schools of meditation or in their traditional texts. They are educational concepts, not ideological, religious or metaphysical terms. When used in the right manner, Acem Meditation is an inner activity that may confront the meditator time and again in soft and subtle ways with the governing forces and ideas of his mind, ideas from which he interprets and acts in the world. These psychological ideas do not usually belong to the meditator’s declarative memory; they are more fundamental, to a large extent implicit or anchored in the unconscious of the person’s outlook on life. The psychological structures of the individual, with their related ideas, values, propensities and limitations, are challenged by the regular practice of Acem Meditation.
Most groups in the counter-cultural movement in the 1960s and 1970s built their commitment on established ideologies, philosophies or religions and analyses. Acem took the opposite stance: the starting point was the accumulation of experience over years in many people’s lives and in the practice of meditation. Working models were gradually derived and revised in relation to this ever-growing reservoir of meditation experience. Moreover, a fundamental goal for the organization was to develop concepts and working models that did not conflict with the modern psychological, physiological and scientific knowledge about the body, the nervous system and the mind. Theories were not primary, but grew out of practice as a way of systematizing and structuring experience; the development of user-related concepts was given first priority, and theory-building was second.
Often, meditation has been associated with a passive orientation towards life; some have even argued that it promotes passivity. This view has been strengthened by the quest for altered consciousness, the search for peak experiences via drugs and an avoidance of commitment in the counter-cultural movements – which in part may be characterized as a narcissistic cultural orientation. Acem’s way of working distinguished it from the many counter-cultural movements – from the passivity of the drug culture, from the narcissism of the therapy and growth movements, and from the denial of a primary role of psychological problems within the mass-oriented political movements.
In the 1970s, Acem started to disentangle itself from much of the Asian orientation, as well as from many of the metaphysical conceptualizations that tended to make people flaky and avoidant of serious work with their meditation. Also during the early 1970s, Acem temporarily explored various Western institutions with contemplative traditions, i.e., mostly parts of the Catholic Church. Inspiration was also sought from other sources, such as psychoanalysis, existential and cognitive psychology.
The fundamental view in Acem’s teaching is that meditation is an inner action or inner behaviour in which the meditator relies completely on himself or herself. In the ‘here and now’ during the sitting, the meditator is the only person who can make a difference for himself or herself. He is responsible and reliant upon himself in opening new avenues within and in tackling the positive or negative challenges of meditation – for progress, the handling of resistance and the like. No one but he or she can solve the issues at stake. Growth lies in the ability to strengthen the self in creating more freedom in areas in which limitations and inhibitions used to prevail – in meditation as well as in life.
The development of the specific teaching of Acem Meditation did not imply a rejection of Western values and culture, which otherwise was so characteristic of the counter-culture. However, Acem did not fully embrace Western culture either. The practice of meditation helped to clarify elements in Western values and culture that pose major limitations to meditative development: Western scepticism towards introspection and the subjective dimension of existence, the undermining of personal responsibility in life, and the fact that so much hope is placed in society and systems, not in individuals – to mention a few. In the same vein, Acem’s development was not a rejection or devaluation of Asian traditions in their true forms, but rather an effort to redefine meditation and the associated understanding in such a way that it might become part of a universal and modern life orientation fairly independent of culture and religion. It is an activity of which the effects are not only for the individual, but also have interpersonal, cultural and societal ramifications.
Acem’s approach to meditation has provoked opposition and criticism from political groups which like to see the collective and structural aspects of society, particularly those related to class issues, as the primary means of raising man’s consciousness and of being capable of alleviating man’s problems and struggles. Criticism also came from those who preferred the more colourful, magical-mystical versions of spirituality still quite prevalent in parts of the counter-cultural movement, such as in the New Age orientation. Others have found it hard to engage with the down-to-earth views of Acem that emphasize personal change as laborious, slow and incremental, and not at all grand. They found more inspiring the golden promises which convey that personal or societal inadequacies could be remedied by drugs, revolution and fairly instant salvation as suggested by Timothy Leary, Marx, Mao and Mahesh Yogi.
Another reaction, however, came from within the Lutheran Church. When faced with the intensity and the success of the counter-cultural movement in consciousness, philosophical, religious and existential questions, parts of the Lutheran Church in Norway probably felt at a loss when trying to enter into dialogue with these groups. Without clear perspectives or answers to the big questions of the time, some in the Church resorted instead to admonition in relation to meditation. A proponent of the Lutheran Church in Norway wrote: ‘The totally rationalized view of the world, in which all factors in principle are subject to human planning and control, strengthens the perception that society is a prison’. Furthermore, it was argued that the common goal for all the varying forms of the contemporary revolt was the expansion of consciousness: ‘Behind the introverted meditation as well as the extremely extroverted movements of beat music, lies a need to break the narrow frontiers of the established secularized society’. A warning was issued: ‘The Gospel cannot be transformed into an offer of expanded consciousness. The problem with the human condition is not rooted in a limited self, but rather in that the self wants to flourish in the boundlessness called sin in the Bible. And the “solution” does not lie in exceeding the boundaries encountered by the self in the world, but in the absolution from sin.’ Postulations were made against ‘the Asian wave’; the meditations taught, including Acem, were said to be hidden forms of Hinduism. Even in the mid-1970s, when in principle Asian views and notions had been removed from Acem, some Norwegian theologians still claimed that only Western designations had replaced equivalents of Asian origin; the underlying Eastern views were the same. Some pronounced that the organization was hiding its religious features in order to attract followers. Others chose a more theological approach and stated that Acem’s views were incompatible with those of the Lutheran Church.
From the middle of the 1970s, the Norwegian Lutheran Church’s arguments against Acem started to subside, but among some hard-core believers the conclusion mainly remained: it was not possible to combine Acem Meditation and an ‘exclusive faith in Christ’. There were circles within the Church that had other, more favourable views in relation to Acem, but they were not officially voiced. Thus, the Church appeared as a rather sceptic and condemning observer. Representatives of the Catholic Church in Norway, however, did not support the Lutheran Church in their views; they maintained a rather favourable attitude towards Acem and its meditative orientation.
These views would not have been of much interest if the Norwegian Lutheran bishops had not conjointly, and quite unexpectedly, issued an official statement in 1979, in which they supported the criticism against Acem that had already been voiced by several of their church members. The bishops concluded that by practising Acem Meditation, ‘one becomes receptive to a view of life that is totally alienated from the Christian view of life’. For many practising Acem Meditation, this statement came as a major surprise. It appeared not to be based on adequate knowledge of Acem and its teaching. A common response was that this statement did not change attitudes towards Acem but rather towards the Church, since the statement was seen as superficial, judgmental and prejudicial.
In private, several bishops later expressed regret for this statement, and they also admitted that they had limited knowledge about the phenomena in question. In a debate made available in a Christian newspaper at the turn of the year of 1980/81, two of the three theologians who had written the statement revoked several of their original views. Subsequently, allegations of Hinduism, pantheism and the like seemed to have been officially terminated. Nevertheless, within some Christian groups, scepticism towards meditation still prevails.
These attitudes towards Acem Meditation from the Lutheran Church of Norway made it necessary for Acem to clarify its stance regarding the degree to which human beings can improve ethically. Is the only freedom worth striving for available through faith, mercy and salvation? It seemed that the theologians had not sufficiently clarified their own views on modern psychology, since aspects of their reasoning related to Acem could also be applied against psychotherapy in general. There is probably no real antagonism between psychotherapeutic experiences of change and relief on one hand, and the views of human nature by St. Augustine (354-430) and Martin Luther (1483-1546) on the other.
No action, be it legislation, revolution, meditation, psychoanalysis or therapy can render humans ethically perfect or solve the problem of evil. Certain proponents of Humanistic psychology hold the view that all suffering can, in principle, be avoided, and that ‘the sky is the limit’ for human growth (as stated by American author Wayne Dyer (1940-2015)). This can be characterized as a utopian growth psychology.
Particularly in the second decade of the new millennium, there has been a growing interest in Buddhist meditation in the Western world, usually under the label of ‘mindfulness’. Self-observation or mindful awareness is carried out within two principally different kinds of tasks: during daily activity or in meditation. The first is usually practised with open eyes during activities such as walking, eating or doing chores at home. The point is to act with higher awareness – being mindful – in every detail of the undertakings. On the other hand, there is mindfulness meditation, and its meditation object may be the breath, sensations in the body or even the ongoing thinking. As already emphasized in previous chapters, the primary point in mindfulness meditation is not to relax but rather to be mindful or self-observant. Mindfulness meditation is also promoted as stress management; it is supposed to help people de-stress, but does not display the very deep physiological changes released by the relaxation response and the free mental attitude. Moreover, the reader should also know that mindfulness meditation is not a unified concept. Various versions originate from quite different countries and cultural backgrounds and traditions such as Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Tibet, China and Japan. The concept of mindfulness may include mild to intense concentration. Also, in the attitudes to the wandering mind or to spontaneous activity, there are considerable differences between the teachings of the various mindfulness schools. Most of them do not engage in the inclusive, free mental attitude, which makes them rather different from Acem Meditation. In relation to the wandering mind, the task in mindfulness meditation is to keep on observing, and not let the mind be captured by the content of the stream of consciousness.
The students who established Acem in 1966 experienced a major turnout. At the beginning of the 1970s, the student organization was one of the most active at the Norwegian universities. From 1972, the activities of Acem spread to all levels of society, and later to several countries outside of Norway. Gradually, Acem became an international organization. Retreat centres in quiet country areas in Scandinavia, as well as regular centres in the cities in several countries, were established. This development happened without much notice from society. In retrospect, this may have been an advantage. In the years after 1970, the counter-cultural movements of Norway were dominated mainly by left-wing groups. They captured the right to define the news that was of relevance to society. In this way, they exercised a relatively high level of control over what would gain public attention. Despite the number of people learning to meditate and a common interest in Acem and Acem Meditation, it was not of interest within the prevailing ideologies of the day; Acem was vehemently overlooked. At best, it was seen as a derailment or as escapism, at worst as reactionary in support of the establishment. However, as those who held these views did not consider meditation important, there was not much confrontation or debate regarding these issues.
Acem’s time and resources were consistently spent on fostering individual change by teaching meditation and giving meditation guidance; the aim was to help individuals to cope, to gain more energy and to develop their personality. The organization did not participate in vociferous, politicized actions targeting structural changes in society. Acem focused on helping individuals disentangle themselves from destructive relationships and formative life events. It did not see its value in arguing the pros and cons of ideologies and political opinions. Both Acem and the political groups aimed at fundamental changes and improvements in the human condition, yet at opposite ends of the spectrum – the structural societal end versus the individual psychological end. Acem Meditation helped in resolving existential issues in the individual, and thereby in society from the bottom up, while the political counter-cultural movements aimed at structural societal changes by political means – from the top down. Revolts and revolutions were romanticized as a means of bringing about quick and major changes in the lives and consciousness of individuals.
In many ways, hero-worshipping and quick fixes in the guru movements, utopian ideologies and the drug culture were typical of the times and were influenced by characters such as Marx, Mao and Mahesh Yogi. For Acem, confrontation with the dark side of such radical visions was an eye-opener contrasting with the utopianism of the 1960s and 1970s, i.e., the belief in strong ideas, strong experiences, revolutionary changes, romanticism and idealization of prophet-like characters – be they political, religious or New Age oriented. Acem’s work had a non-dogmatic attitude in the interpretation of reality; it did not favour the strong totalitarian elements in the contemporary ideological involvements, whether they were political or metaphysical. For many in the counter-cultural movement, intense engagement was rooted in a well-known characteristic of European tradition: the conviction of possessing the ultimate truth and the inquisitorial right to strike against anyone who opposed it.
Acem Meditation does not result in any specific ideology or religious view. Nevertheless, the meditative practice underscores the existential responsibility of the individual. The meditative process tends to help a person mature and develop; people have ontological needs for understanding and reshaping parts of their lives and existence, and for understanding the essence of the self, their family and personal life history, as well as their culture. In a quiet and gentle manner, Acem Meditation brings the regular meditator in touch with central existential dimensions and choices of the present and the past. The development of such self-understanding also involves the body, emotions and cognition. For a few, self-disclosure and related priorities are provocative – if not right from the outset, then later on, further down the line. For most, however, this is a fascinating journey of self-discovery involving the realization of new, deeper dimensions of existence for the individual, and for the common good of society as well.