Patrick Ryan
I saw Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on a TV show, and got involved with him when I was 17. I spent five years at his university, where we were told things like we could walk through walls to save the world. Since his followers were Nobel Prize winners in physics and governors, we believed these claims. We did 22-hour-long meditations which pushed people to extreme points, many of them even jumping out of windows. Maharishi would also send people into war zones in Iran and Mozambique, often putting them in danger. Over time, I realised that despite everything, I couldn’t in fact levitate or walk through walls. So, I sued him for fraud and negligence.
After doing cult mediations for 38 years, I can tell you that while models are important tools to assess the approach of cult interventions, there is no one method to help someone. One of my most important learning experiences was in the early 2000s. I was in Australia to help a member of the Church of Scientology. The Church has a policy that they have to be against someone trying to “expose” them or telling their members to leave. So they had two private detectives follow me from my house in Philadelphia to Australia.
On my last night in Australia, I was served a lawsuit which said I had verbally molested a 17-year-old woman, and that she had demanded a restraining order. I had never met the woman in my life, but what they wanted to achieve through this is to frame a media narrative to affect my credibility. Also, according to Australian law, if I was at a restaurant and this woman walked in, I could get arrested. I had to fight a long legal battle, and ultimately, the judge ruled that I wasn’t guilty. But the church did everything to stop me.
Once, I was flying to Australia to attend my hearing and decided to carry a box of pancake mix when I was stopped at the airport. Turns out, the church had tipped them off saying I was a drug courier. When the authorities opened my bag, they saw white powder all over my stuff because the pancake mix had popped open. But after I told my story to the interrogating agent, he gave me a ten year visa to work in Australia, so even that backfired for the church. When dealing with the church, I’d have armed members parked in front of my house in Philadelphia, blankets covering all my windows from the outside and even people pressing their hands on my door’s keyhole so I was cut off from the outside world.
That’s also when I realised that instead of criticising a cult to its members, I needed to find a way to make them feel heard, especially by their family. If you can appreciate what I like, then you have a right to criticise it. So what I try to do is teach families why people find something beautiful in the cults they join.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/former-cult-members-help-escape-exit-counsellor-intervention-conspiracy-theories/
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