New 'warriors' bare their souls

Jim Greenhill
The Durango Herald, Colorado

August 21, 2005

Bill Stanley did not like what he saw in the mirror, but the Durango salesman couldn't tear himself away.

"I got to a point where I screwed up my life so profoundly that I couldn't get away from my own reflection," he told nine other men at a chiropractic office Thursday.

"Men have lost the ability to communicate," Stanley said, holding an aspen talking stick decorated with black, red, white and yellow ribbons representing the four primary directions.

"We've lost our ability to connect with each other spiritually and emotionally and to be authentic and real with each other and with ourselves," he said.

Stanley completed a weekend called the New Warrior Training Adventure, and on Thursday he was among a half-dozen initiates describing his experience to area men who responded to recent advertisements in local publications.

For $600, the nonprofit ManKind Project, based in New York City, offers the training weekend with a motto "changing the world one man at a time." Men who cannot afford the fee are welcome anyway, members say.

The project's Web site explains that:

Every man has a warrior side. Many repress this, substituting a distorted "shadow form."

But new warriors confront the shadow, releasing a healthier energy.

"Our intention is twofold," according to the Web site. "To enable men to live lives of integrity, accountability and connection to feeling. To be of service to the community at large."

Its statement of purpose proclaims: "We are an order of men called to reclaim the sacred masculine for our time through initiation, training and action in the world."

Specifics are hidden in secret ceremonies during the initiation weekend and in the variety of succor that different men seem to find.

Thursday evening's group included a carpenter, educator, chiropractor, counselor, three salesmen, an unemployed political science major, the owner of an excavation company and a man who requested anonymity. Ages ranged from early 20s to, perhaps, late 50s.

The group talked about lost initiation rites for youths and the lapsed tradition of elders who guide youths to manhood. About how sometimes it seems modern men relate only over business, spectator sports, beer and women.

"Prior to initiation, my relationship with men was nonexistent," said Arthur Riegel, a counselor. "Men were competition."

Riegel called other men mere measuring sticks. Who had the "better" girlfriend, car, motorcycle or sports team?

"My relationship with women wasn't very good, either," he confessed. "It was dishonest. It was manipulative. It left me very much alone … feeling disconnected, feeling separated."

Riegel completed his New Warrior Training Adventure weekend in 1992, heading into it with 200 others, fearful and cursing the man who'd invited him.

Afterwards, "there were men in my life who were closer to me than blood brothers had ever been," he said.

Based on interviews and the group's literature, the Mankind ManKind Project appears to be part men's movement, part service organization, part group therapy, part spiritual healing and part fraternity.

For Mike Clark, a Durango excavation business owner, it was an accelerator of growth.

"I had been so separated from my feelings," he said. "I had an emotion, I didn't even know what the hell it was."

The weekend and subsequent meetings in small groups changed that, he said.

"I am really, really thrilled. I feel better than I ever have."

When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying-Saucer Group - Diana G. Tumminia

Oxford University Press
July 14, 2005 - 
Social Science - 240 pages

Of the approximately fifty percent of Americans who believe in UFOs, a fraction are devotees of one of the numerous UFO-based new religious movements.

The Unarius Academy of Science is one of the oldest of these groups. Founded in 1954 by "Cosmic Visionaries" Ruth and Ernest Norman (also known, respectively, as Archangels Uriel and Raphiel), Unarius is devoted to teaching the all-encompassing Uranian Science.

Combining elements of pop psychology, new age thought, and science fiction, the Science asks its students to channel messages from the infinitely intelligent Space Brothers and to heal themselves through the practice of past-life therapy. Unarians await the arrival of spaceships, manned by the Space Brothers, that will bring to earth advanced intergalactic technology that will benefit all humankind. Tumminia has been conducting research on Unarius for over a decade - attending meetings, inteviewing members, and studying official Unarian literature and videos. Here she offers an inside look at this fascinating movement. She pays particular attention to the ways Unarians adapt when their prophecies - and particularly their prediction that the Space Brothers would land in 2001 - don't materialize. This is the first in-depth study of any UFO religion.

A dangerous war on psychiatry

Raj Persaud
The Independent (UK)
June 30, 2005

Commentary

The public's fear of psychiatric drugs has itself become a serious public health problem

Tom Cruise denounced psychiatry as a "pseudo science" this week when questioned by the American NBC-TV host Matt Lauer about his stance against anti-depressant drugs. The actor had criticised Brooke Shields for taking drugs for post-natal depression, which in turn has drawn a rebuke from the American Psychiatric Association. In response to Cruise's comments, it stated that: "It was irresponsible for Mr Cruise to use his movie publicity tour to promote his own ideological views."

The Association, which represents more than 36,000 physicians specialising in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, challenged Cruise's assertion that psychiatry lacks scientific merit. "Rigorous, published, peer-reviewed research clearly demonstrates that treatment [of mental illness] works," they asserted.

Cruise's comments come as no surprise to many psychiatrists, not because much of his recent behaviour has been found so strange by the press, but more because it is widely reported he is a follower of the Church of Scientology, which is virulently against psychiatry. Stephen Kent, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta in Canada, points out in a recent paper in the academic journal 'Religion' that the "war" against psychiatry was integral to the mission of the founder of Scientology, Ron Hubbard, since his first book, Dianetics, in 1950, and continues to this day. Hubbard indicated as far back as the 1960s that one of the key enemies of Scientology was the profession of psychiatry. This small but internationally connected group, Hubbard claimed, according to Professor Kent, was behind the "lies and slander" that both the press and government agencies received about Scientology.

But Hubbard went further, Kent points out, and argued that psychiatry was not just a threat to Scientology but was a vehicle to undermine and destroy the West through purveying techniques like electric shocks and brain operations. Hubbard believed that psychiatrists had sought to obtain power by becoming the contemporary "confessors" and counsellors of not just the ordinary person but also the politically powerful.

Kent's paper, entitled 'The globalization of Scientology: Influence, Control and Opposition in Transnational Markets' shows that psychiatrists took on the classic characteristics of evil in a cartoon printed in the first International Edition of Scientology's publication, Freedom, where a front-page drawing depicted eight psychiatrists as horned, goateed, tailed, and cloven-hoofed devils injecting "patients" with drugs, and performing electric shock and lobotomies. Since psychiatry is Scientology's alleged cosmic enemy, his followers want to see the profession destroyed, and its functions in society replaced by Scientology.

Kent demonstrates the specific social action group designed to eliminate psychiatry through political and press lobbying is the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, whose efforts are coordinated worldwide under Scientology's Office of Special Affairs International. Its efforts to portray psychiatry in a negative light has led CCHR to support the rights of patients, occasionally uncovering instances of questionable, if not calamitous, psychiatric care. In 1981, for example, Scientologists received national attention in Canada for exposure of the demonstrably detrimental effects of institutionalisation upon a psychiatric patient, Henry Kowalski, who was confined with the criminally insane while receiving unpleasant drug treatments and electric shocks.

While patients have occasionally benefited from the Church of Scientology publicising examples of poor psychiatric care, this doesn't mean that the general thrust of Scientology's case against psychiatry stands up. They appear to be reflexively against medication and other scientifically supported treatments which often are needed and are indeed life-saving.

Some psychiatric patients in the US and Canada recently became so convinced about the alleged dangers of psychiatric treatments, as a result of Scientology's campaigns, that they stopped taking their medication. US psychiatrists have concluded that the public's fear of psychiatric drugs has itself become a potentially serious public health problem, as people begin to avoid and fear treatment.

The most irresponsible aspect of Cruise's comments, as well as the approach of Scientology, is not so much their criticism of psychiatry as their failure to provide a valid alternative response to major mental illnesses. What are the treatments they advocate? Do they run centres for the clinically depressed where they take legal responsibility for their care? And do they publish data proving the effectiveness of their methods?

Cruise should outline what treatments he would recommend and show us the evidence that they work. Otherwise, he is just launching a War of the Worlds in his provocative comments. This may make good film publicity, but it does no service to the mentally ill.

The writer is Gresham professor for public understanding of psychiatry

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/raj-persaud-a-dangerous-war-on-psychiatry-497016.html

1985 bombing in Philadelphia still unsettled

Martha T. Moore
USA Today

May 11, 2005

Philadelphia -- The last block of Osage Avenue is a half-abandoned and lonely place. Most of the houses on the narrow street are boarded up.

Twenty years ago this Friday, city police dropped a bomb on this block and let it burn. Five children and six adults, members of a small radical collective called MOVE, died; 61 homes in a middle-class neighborhood were destroyed. As the nation watched, Philadelphia became the city that bombed its own people.

A generation later, MOVE is still around, its members still agitating for the release of eight who have been in prison since a 1978 cop-killing. Most of the other two dozen or so members, all of whom take the surname Africa, live in a house 3 miles from Osage. The mayor who approved the bombing, Wilson Goode, 66, is a pastor who runs a youth-mentoring program. And the residents of Osage Avenue are still trying to get their homes back.

Philadelphia has spent $42 million in financial settlements, investigation and rebuilding to try to fix what happened that day. It was a law enforcement failure so spectacular that it would not be equaled until the siege near Waco eight years later. A month ago, 24 homeowners won a $12 million suit against the city for the botched rebuilding and repairs of their homes.

"We're still in it," says Mayor John Street, who was a city councilman in 1985. "It's the never-ending story."

The memory of the bungled decisions and bad judgment that led police to drop a satchel of explosives from a helicopter onto a residential neighborhood — and the horror that resulted — still stings.

"Every year when May comes around, I think of it, of course, because I'll never forget that it's May 13, 1985," says Mary Ellen Krober, a lawyer for the city who negotiated settlements with 11 MOVE families.

'Grossly negligent' actions

When the Rev. Isaac Miller arrived in Philadelphia shortly after the bombing, there was little discussion of it, he says. It was too disturbing: The city's first black mayor had dropped a bomb on a black neighborhood.

"In many ways, for African-Americans, it's painful to remember," says Miller, an Episcopal priest who will speak Friday at a commemoration. "But ... it has to be" remembered.

A commission that investigated found that Goode and two other officials, police commissioner Gregore Sambor and fire commissioner William Richmond, had been "grossly negligent." The deaths of the MOVE children "appeared to be unjustified homicide," it said. Police had not taken them out of the house when they had the chance. They had used excessive force in firing 10,000 rounds of ammunition into the house. The plan to drop explosives was "reckless" and "unconscionable." And they let the fire burn until it was too late to control.

Sambor resigned six months later. Richmond retired in 1988. Goode apologized tearfully on TV and was re-elected in 1988

"Everybody was shouting at the television set, 'Put out the fire!' " says Carl Singley, a lawyer who was counsel to the MOVE commission.

That five children died, huddled in the basement of the MOVE house, brings tears to his eyes. "I imagine those last hours down in the basement," he says.

Police have changed tactics

The confrontation came after months of complaints from neighbors about MOVE, which is not an abbreviation for anything. Members broadcast political harangues on bullhorns day and night, threw garbage and filth into their yard and kept their children naked as part of a dedication to "Mom Nature." The violence was touched off when police tried to evict members and arrest some of them.

"You can say whatever you want about the adult MOVE people in the house and whether they got what they deserved," says John Anderson, co-author of Burning Down the House, a book about MOVE. "But there were kids in the house."

Eight years later, the standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas, echoed the MOVE scenario. Since then, says Henry Ruth, who served on commissions investigating MOVE and Waco, police have changed their tactics. In 1996, the Montana Freemen standoff ended peacefully when federal agents simply waited out the Freemen. "They learned a lot from Waco, and I think they learned from MOVE about the inevitability of tragedy when you start raiding a cult where you have no contingency plan," Ruth says. "Law enforcement has seen the need to wait and wait and wait. I think we've learned a lot of lessons. But it took MOVE and it took Ruby Ridge and it took Waco to learn that, and that was over 100 lives."


One of the two who escaped the fire, Ramona Africa, 49, spent seven years in prison for riot and conspiracy. Today, she earns her living speaking about MOVE and Mumia Abu-Jamal, a death-row inmate convicted in an unrelated 1981 killing of a police officer.

"I am angry, and bitter, and justifiably so," she says. "Not a single official went to prison for murdering my family," referring to the whole Africa clan. The bombing, she says, was "not bad judgment. That is murder."

Members now live in a big house in West Philadelphia, eat "a lot" of raw food, Africa says, and home-school their children. But the tactics have changed, she says, since the bombing drew the world's attention. "It's not necessary for us to be on the bullhorn now. People are calling us for information."

Today, the site of the bombed house, 6221 Osage, is occupied by the police Civil Affairs Unit. The city rebuilt Osage Avenue, but the construction was so shoddy that years of repairs failed to fix the homes. Finally, the city condemned them and offered owners $150,000. Many took the buyout, but 24 families went to federal court. The city is appealing the judgment.

"I'm really disgusted," says resident Nan Chainey. I'm tired, and I want to end this thing."

Twenty years of struggle left the residents of Osage Avenue distrustful of the government they asked in 1985 to help them with their neighbors.

"They want us, the people, physically out," says Gerald Renfrow, a roofer who has lived on the block since 1959. "When we're out, that means there's no one left on Osage to tell the story of what happened."

CultNEWS101 "MOVE" Collection.

Interrogation Methods Can Elicit Confessions From Innocent People

Sharon Begley Staff Reporter 

The Wall Street Journal

April 15, 2005

For cops, this was as good as it gets: The 14-year-old boy they arrested in the February murder of a man who found an intruder in his parked car in Rockford, Ill., didn't just confess. After the police took him from his home around midnight and isolated and interrogated him until dawn, he also re-enacted the crime for them, describing the inside of the car and relating how he had broken into it, struggled with the victim and shot him in the chest.

There was only one problem. After the boy had spent two weeks in detention, police, acting on a tip, discovered the real shooter was a 17-year-old.

Scientists who study false confessions aren't surprised. During the hours-long interrogation, says Shelton Green, the boy's public defender, detectives called the boy a liar, told him he would go to prison for 10 to 15 years if he didn't admit his role, suggested he shot the man in self-defense and promised to help him if he would own up.

"This was almost a perfect storm of criminal injustice," says Rockford prosecutor Paul Logli, president-elect of the National District Attorneys Association.

Suspects confess for a number of reasons. "But the most important," says Saul M. Kassin, professor of psychology at Williams College, Williamstown, Mass., "is that standard interrogation techniques are masterfully designed to leave people with almost no rational choice but to confess."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB111351995072807538

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David B. Caruso
Associated Press

March 31, 2005

Philadelphia -- Mayor John F. Street spent 90 uncomfortable minutes before a federal jury Thursday explaining how the city has treated families who lost their homes when police dropped a bomb on their neighborhood during a battle with the militant group MOVE.

The explosion, on May 13, 1985, is remembered as one of the sorriest moments in city history.

Police trying to evict armed members of the cult dropped the explosive from a helicopter, then ordered firefighters to keep their distance as flames killed six adults and five children inside the MOVE compound and consumed 61 adjacent homes.

Embarrassed city officials promised to rebuild, but the project lurched from scandal to scandal.

A contractor went to prison. The new houses were defective. Cracks opened in the walls. Electrical systems failed. The city spent millions of dollars on repairs, but couldn't solve the problems.

After Street became mayor in 2000, he suspended the repair work in mid-construction, declared the buildings on Osage Avenue too dangerous to live in and offered the remaining families a $150,000 buyout.

Most took it. The remaining 24 families went to court.

Testifying Thursday, Street said he believed the city had a "moral obligation" to help the families, but didn't think it was possible to repair the houses "in any fiscally responsible way."

"I had made a decision that the houses were dangerous, and the residents shouldn't be living there," he said.

He added that $150,000 was easily three or four times the value of other homes in the neighborhood.

"I thought it was fair. I thought it was more than fair," Street said.

But, pressed by the families' attorney, Adrian Moody, Street seemed unable to answer the most basic of questions about how he reached that decision.

Street said he didn't know how much it would have cost to do further repairs, or how much the city had spent trying to fix the buildings so far. When he was shown city documents and letters he had signed, he claimed he had no memory of them.

Several times, he said he was unaware the city had actually constructed new homes for the families after the old ones burned.

His inability or unwillingness to answer questions elicited moans from homeowners packed into the courtroom, and finally prompted an angry rebuke from U.S. District Judge Clarence C. Newcomer.

"Has there ever been an event in the city of Philadelphia as traumatic as the events at Osage Avenue?" Newcomer asked.

Street, a city councilman for 20 years before he became mayor, sat quietly for several moments before responding, "This is right up there."

"Then can you explain why you don't have a better recollection of the questions that are being asked of you?" Newcomer said.

Street bristled, faced the judge, and in a raised voice responded that, as the mayor of the nation's fifth largest city, he couldn't be expected to remember the details of each city problem he dealt with.

"In the course of a given week, I look at 10 issues as complicated as this issue," he said.

The trial is expected to last several days.

The 24 families involved in the suit are seeking between $250,000 and $300,000 apiece for their homes, plus additional damages for what they claim was an unfair attempt by the city to pressure them into taking the buyout.

Street sent the families a letter saying that if they didn't accept the offer, the city would seize the homes by imminent domain. His decision to halt repair work also left the families living in unfinished buildings with missing doors and walls.

"This is a disaster. It really is," Moody said in an interview. "To me, it is up to the jury to make a decision on this now. I think closure is necessary for all concerned."

The trial is the first civil suit related to the MOVE bombing since 1996, when a jury ordered the city to pay $1.5 million to a MOVE member who survived the bombing and the families of the people who died.

CultNEWS101 "MOVE" Collection.

A San Francisco Examiner Religion Reporter More Than 30 Years Ago

John McCaslin 

Washington Times

March 4, 2005 

Inside the Beltway

As a San Francisco Examiner religion reporter more than 30 years ago, veteran White House correspondent Lester Kinsolving sensed something sinister about Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple — long before the sect leader, 912 of his followers and a U.S. congressman perished in the jungle of Guyana.

"I went to the religion editors of 40 newspapers — including The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times — begging them to send reporters" to the temple's California headquarters during the early 1970s, he says.

On numerous occasions, the reporter was told and even witnessed for himself bizarre behavior by Jones, his armed guards and the temple's congregation.

"Not one of them sent anybody," Mr. Kinsolving tells Inside the Beltway. "They refused."

Besides newspaper editors, the sect leader was fooling most everybody in those days, from San Francisco's mayor to the future vice president and even the first lady of the United States.

"We had exposed this [sect activity] in 1973," Mr. Kinsolving recalls. "Then, wouldn't you know? Rosalynn Carter invited Jones to have dinner with her [at a California hotel]. She had a whole bunch of Secret Service agents with her, and when Jones showed up with his 'gunslingers' they still managed to work it out.

"And can you believe Walter 'Fritz' Mondale entertained Jones on his campaign plane?"

Not everybody was so enchanted.

Armed with Examiner newspaper articles questioning the activities of the temple and its subsequent exodus to South America, Rep. Leo J. Ryan, California Democrat, traveled to Jonestown, Guyana, to investigate. Before he could report back to Capitol Hill, the congressman was slain by Jones' followers on Nov. 18, 1978 — hours before the mass suicide.

"I remember when the news hit Washington that more than 900 people died ... and all the major media began acting as if it was something new," Mr. Kinsolving says. "Any way you look at this, it was such a terrible refusal of the major media not to tell the whole truth.

"There was only one person that I had gone to [in the early 1970s] who later apologized for not looking into it further — Brit Hume [now with Fox News]. He worked for [syndicated columnist] Jack Anderson then."

Now, about three decades later, somebody else has apologized to Mr. Kinsolving, who suffered a heart attack recently and is recovering in his suburban Washington home.

Tim Stoen, the former outspoken chief legal adviser to Jones who is a California deputy district attorney, wrote a lengthy letter to Mr. Kinsolving in recent weeks asking for forgiveness.

"You were right... I was totally wrong," wrote Mr. Stoen, having once filed a libel lawsuit (later dropped) against Mr. Kinsolving to squelch his reporting. "From my heart, I apologize for my mistreatment of you ... and castigating your motives."

"I was very surprised to receive the letter," Mr. Kinsolving tells this column. "I am very grateful."

John McCaslin, whose column is nationally syndicated, can be reached at 202/636-3284 or jmccaslin@washingtontimes.com.

http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:Kp4lfS5H_TkJ:www.washtimes.com/national/inbeltway.htm+As+a+San+Francisco+Examiner+religion+reporter+more+than+30+years+ago&hl=en 

On Avatar

Elliot Benjamin, Ph.D.
2005

I was first introduced to Avatar at an evening workshop at a metaphysical bookstore in Bangor, Maine in the summer of 1997. Avatar, founded in 1986, is Harry Palmer's New Age spiritual, philosophical, and psychological organization. There were only three people (including myself) attending this event, and one of the people described what he heard as the "new est," Werner Erhard's popular New Age, large-group experiential organization prominent in the 1970s that merged Western psychology with Eastern spirituality. [1]

Harry Palmer' known to all Avatar students as simply Harry is a psychologist, ex-hippie, and ex-Scientologist. He professes to not be a guru, but I'm afraid that I do not entirely agree with him on this point, for Palmer's impact upon his followers is quite similar to that which Erhard had upon his followers in est.

And Palmer is an exceptional businessman who has made a fortune with Avatar. The costs of doing Avatar are quite high: My tuition for the 1997 course was $2,300, not including costs for traveling approximately 1,000 miles in my car over the nine days. The workshop leaders are called Avatar Masters, who all spend an additional $3,000 (not including the extra travel, motel costs, etc.) for an advanced Masters' workshop. The Avatar Professional course is $2,500 plus extras. And for the supreme experience to be with the most enlightened beings on the planet, 'the Avatar Wizards' course costs $7,500 plus extras. Approximately 100,000 people have taken the Avatar training, and it is being offered in more than 60 countries all over the world. So, as you can see, Harry Palmer is quite the businessman.

Palmer has not written very much, and his writing style is quite terse but it is also quite high impact. His books have been translated into a number of different languages. His primary book is Living Deliberately, and his follow-up book is Resurfacing, which describes the first section of the three-section Avatar nine-day training course. [2] A few years ago Palmer wrote The Masters' Handbook, [3] which is presently available only to Avatar graduates (I am considered to be one of these enlightened beings). The Masters' Handbook is chock full of excellent business advice on successfully selling and becoming a professional Avatar Master.

Palmer's marketing and salesmanship abilities remind me of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology (in my opinion a cultish organization, which I experienced for two years in the 1970s [4]). Hubbard and Palmer share many philosophical, spiritual, and psychological similarities, as well.

In July 1999, two years after I had done the nine-day Avatar training (without quite completing it) in the summer of 1997, I did a review and completion of the Avatar course. Avatar graduates commonly do a review of the training, and the review costs are reasonable in the neighborhood of $200.

Both my original Avatar course and my review course were quite meaningful to me. In particular, I like the way the Avatar masters encourage, support, and train you to not give up on your dreams. They call these dreams your primaries, and if the course goes well, you end up feeling as if you are capable of attaining your life s deepest goals, dreams, and desires. [5] The emphasis in these courses is very much upon going into your deepest spiritual self, referred to in Avatar as going into 'source.; This concept is not very different from the notion of empty mind, or Buddha consciousness, achieved thru meditation. The Avatar techniques to achieve this state of mind are actually quite simple and pleasant, having to do with feeling and noticing what is in your environment through a series of exercises called feel its. Once you achieve this state of calm and relaxation, it is time to learn how to put total intention into overcoming the barriers to attaining your cherished goals. These barriers are called 'secondaries.' So the Avatar process can be described as going into source to eliminate your secondaries, in order to attain your primaries.

The bottom line of Avatar is that you decide how you feel and what you experience. In other words, you have the capability to control what you experience in life by coming from a place of source and visualizing what you want. This basic Avatar technique has remarkable philosophical similarities to the essential beliefs in both Neale Donald Walsch s Conversations with God philosophy (see my essay On Conversations with God in ICSA s E-Newsletter) and Helen Schuman s Course in Miracles. [6] But the nine-day training ground of Avatar is tremendously powerful and high impact, and extremely intensive.

I must also give credit to Avatar for not interfering in what a person decides his or her primary to be. As for me, at the time of my training, I was in the midst of wanting to believe that the new relationship I was involved in was going to be the beautiful life-long relationship I so much wanted to experience. The Avatar masters at first tried gently to convey to me that the lack of communication in this relationship was a very poor sign for attaining my primary in this particular relationship. But I was so stubborn and persistent that I refused to be open to what they were seeing, obviously more clearly than I was. However, true to Avatar form, they let me continue to work on making this goal my dominant primary and finding ways to attain it, though they did convince me to leave a little room for openness, in case this relationship turned out not to be the one for which I had been praying for such a long time. When the relationship did finally end about six months later for many of the reasons my Avatar masters saw in advance, I felt a strong appreciation for Avatar for allowing me to experience the relationship i.e., choose to experience it, in Avatar language in the way I apparently wanted to.

But what happens after the nine-day Avatar training ends? Well, there are the regular mailings of the Avatar journal every two months or so; the journal is full of inspirational writings by Harry Palmer and various Avatar graduates, Masters, and Wizards. And there are new books and tapes put out by Harry Palmer. But the real emphasis is on the Avatar graduate taking the next step: to do the Avatar Masters course and become an Avatar Master himself/herself.

Aside from the extreme expense involved in the Masters course, my basic feeling after having completed the Avatar review course was that I already had what I wanted to get out of Avatar. There are some valuable tools in the Avatar training make no mistake about this. But the follow-up courses in Avatar are financially exorbitant, and I could see the dangers of becoming addicted to Avatar if I were to succumb to these temptations. However, it was also true that I had gotten a jolt from Avatar that I had not experienced from anywhere else in quite the same way. This high-impact jolt, coupled with a smooth sales pitch from one of the Stars Edge trainers (the elite of Avatar) at a vulnerable time in my life, persuaded me to go to California in May 2001 to do the Avatar Masters course.

The Avatar Masters course was held in a luxurious hotel in the plush surroundings of the island of Coronado, outside of San Diego. I spent approximately $5,000, including hotel and transportation, and maxed out my credit cards to take this training. Why did I do it? I suppose I was ready to take a plunge into something uplifting and self-supporting after having gone through an extremely upsetting personal experience in a romantic relationship that involved losing important aspects of my self. And it was most certainly a plunge: 200 people, many of these Avatar masters reviewing the course, from all over the world. Six Stars Edge trainers and three assistant Stars Edge trainers the elite of Avatar were running the course. And we even got a surprise visit from none other than Harry Palmer himself and his quite-intense wife, Avra.

I ended up completing the course with only an Assistant Avatar Masters license, however, which meant that I could not teach Avatar to others. I would have had to do a review of the Masters course to upgrade my status, which would have meant a few thousand more dollars for hotel and transportation, even though the review course itself would be free.

What actually happened on this course? Well, I got myself into a great deal of trouble with the Stars Edge trainer who appeared to have the most power and influence over who was given the privileged status of becoming an Avatar Master and allowed to teach Avatar. I was quite outspoken in my concern over the expense of Avatar and the emphasis on selling Avatar to find my own students, and I freely questioned the Stars Edge trainers about how much money they were making for delivering the Masters course. The particular Stars Edge trainer with whom I had my difficulties took offense at my brazenness and became suspicious that I was taking the course for fraudulent purposes. He even asked me if I was a reporter for The New York Times. He gave me various self-repair processes to work on, but I have no doubt that, in the end, he was not willing to trust me to deliver Avatar to others.

In fact, I was being open to becoming a truthful and bona fide Avatar Master, and I had even formulated a plan to codeliver Avatar with a woman who was a professional sales/marketing director from Cincinnati. She was going to do the sales/marketing part and I was going to lead the actual teaching. We had planned to do the Section 1/Resurfacing part of the course in Cincinnati on a weekend in August 2001.

But all of this fell by the wayside once the course trainers gave me my Assistant Master status. It is true, as they tried to explain to me, that my status could have been lower: Some students got no license at all. The only benefit of my status compared to having no license was that I was allowed to assist a Qualified Master (official status with many Avatar requirements) on an Avatar course, which I would need to pay for unless I brought my own students. I was one of the first ones to finish the actual course (which, in terms of content, was little more than the original Avatar training course). I received many compliments on how I was working with other Avatar students and masters, and many people who were not completing the training as quickly as I were given the higher licensing status of Intern Master, which enabled them to teach the Section 1/Resurfacing weekend.

I felt extremely hurt, embarrassed, and dejected when the leaders told me my status, and my efforts to persuade them to reconsider fell upon deaf ears. But deep down I knew that there was a good, higher reason for this. My limited status was a signal to me that I was not supposed to take the easy way out and become a bona fide Avatar Master, feeling the comforts and camaraderie of being part of a New Age spiritual organization, learning how to be a successful New Age businessman, selling Avatar to the world, and so on. I had chosen to be myself at the Avatar Masters course, and I got what I got. I had chosen to not sell the ideas of Harry Palmer to the world because I had so many problems with the financial ethics, and I also felt uncomfortable with some of the philosophical beliefs and practices.

I think back to my essays on Scientology, described in my book Modern Religions: An Experiential Analysis and Expos�, in which I discuss the problems with the 100% mentality that is, in the case of Scientology, following 100% the ideas and techniques of the person in charge, L. Ron Hubbard. And I realize that Avatar is essentially no different from Scientology in this regard. Harry Palmer has come up with some significant and effective ideas and techniques to help people actualize their dreams. But the procedures are to be repeated verbatim according to Palmer s instructions, from Source List, to the Creative Handling Procedure, to the Initiation Session. This verbatim repetition most certainly reminds me of the Dianetic Auditing sessions of Scientology, and I have no doubt that it is far more than a mere coincidence that these similarities of procedure exist between Scientology and Avatar, given that Palmer himself is an ex-Scientologist.

So the viewpoint I choose to adopt (in Avatar language) is that my low status of Assistant Avatar Master enabled me to make a narrow escape from yet another New Age spiritual organization. I had spent roughly $8,000 on Avatar, and there was an intensive sales pitch at the Avatar Masters course to sign up for the next Avatar Wizard s course, the 13-day training in Florida that costs $7,500 plus all the extras.

But I have learned so much both about Avatar and about the dangers of New Age spirituality in the 2000s. To paraphrase the first statement on the Avatar Source List: I am happy to be who I am. And this I has been telling me that it is time to go back into action not do any more course work on Avatar, and not teach Avatar officially to others. Instead, it is time to offer to others what I have learned about Avatar and all my other New Age spirituality studies, and to facilitate heartfelt dialogue and discussion concerning the search for authentic spiritual truth.




_____

[1] See, for example, Adelaide Bry, Est: 60 Hours That Transform Your Life (New York: Avon Books, 1976); Steven Pressman, Outrageous Betrayal: The Real Story of Werner Erhard, from est to Exile (Emeryville, CA: St. Martins Press, 1993); and my est essays in Elliot Benjamin, Modern Religions: An Experiential Analysis and Expos� (Swanville, Maine: Natural Dimension Publications, 2005).

[2] See Harry Palmer, Living Deliberately (Altamonte Springs, Florida: Stars Edge International, 1994) and Harry Palmer, Resurfacing (Altamonte Springs, Florida: Stars Edge International, 1994).

[3] See Harry Palmer, The Avatar Masters Handbook (Altamonte Springs, Florida: Stars Edge International, 1997).

[4] See, for example, L. Ron Hubbard, The Modern Science of Mental Health (Los Angeles: The American Saint Hill Organization, 1950, 1975); Joe Atack, A Piece of Blue Sky: Scientology, Dianetics, and L. Ron Hubbard Exposed (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1990); and my Scientology essays in Modern Religions... (book information in endnote 1).

[5] For more personal information about my experiences with Avatar, see my Avatar essays in Modern Religions... (book information in endnote 1).

[6] See Foundation For Inner Peace, A Course in Miracles (New York: Penguin Books, 1975, 1996); Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue: Book 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1993), Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue: Book 2 (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Co., 1997), and Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue: Book 3, (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Co., 1998); Elliot Benjamin, On Conversations with God (ICSA E-Newsletter, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2004 at http://csj.org/infoserv_articles/benjamin_elliot__conversationswithgod.htm); and my Course in Miracles and Conversations with God essays in Modern Religions... (book information in endnote 1).

Beyond belief

The Observer, Saturday 11 December 2004

With the likes of Madonna and Guy Ritchie giving celeb cred to Kabbalah, cults have never been more fashionable, nor more contentious. Nick Johnstone meets US cultbuster Rick Ross who, for a fee of $5,000, offers to deprogramme 'victims' and return them to their families

This is a story about believing too much. It's a story about losing sight of the boundary, the invisible line between believing in something and letting it take over your life. It's also a story about a man who has built his life and career on saving people who he thinks believe too much.

It's December 2003 and I'm sitting in a room full of tanned, good-looking Californians, at the Kabbalah Center in Los Angeles, waiting for a rabbi to give us a free introductory lecture. I'm wearing a white name tag, my name scrawled across it. A few days earlier, in the Kabbalah Centershop, I nearly bought the 'red string' ($26 for a piece of thread that 'protects us from the influences of the Evil Eye'). Always on the lookout for a cure-all for my recurring anxiety/depression problems, here I am, ever hopeful, wondering if the Kabbalah Center will be the answer to my problems.

The lecture reminds me of some New Age, self-help nightmare, visions of Tom Cruise in Magnolia passing through my mind as the rabbi talks endlessly about how the Kabbalah could make our lives so much richer. Quite literally. We are told that financial wealth, career success, love, happiness - all these things are within reach.

The next day, at a Hanukkah party, I mention I've been to the Kabbalah Center. Clearly, this is not the thing to say. One woman says she's heard the Kabbalah Center is a 'cult'. Her partner says he's read that the Kabbalah Center lures you in and then tries to get its hands on your money. Another woman tells me about Rick Ross. She says he is America's top 'cult expert', that I should visit his website, rickross.com, and read the file on the Kabbalah Center.

I go home confused. What is so bad about the Kabbalah Center? Given that its ideas are a Deepak Chopra-style interpretation of basic Kabbalah ideas, re-cast to suit our rehab, Prozac, self-improvement times, I found what it teaches useful in the same way I find therapy useful.

Later, scrolling through the 'Group Information Database' onrickross.com, online home of the Rick A Ross Institute for the Study of Destructive Cults, Controversial Groups and Movements (RRI), a non-profit, tax-exempt archive, public-information service based in New Jersey, I find files on many different organisations, categorised both alphabetically and ideologically. There are files on 'Hate' groups (Aryan Nations, Stormfront and Westboro Baptist Church, whose web address isgodhatesfags.com). There are 'Religious' groups (International Church of Christ, Order of Christ/Sophia, Children of God, Jesus People, the Jehovah's Witnesses, The Brethren), 'Neo Eastern' (Sai Baba, 3HO, Integral Yoga), 'Satanic' (First Church of Satan), 'Human Potential' (Scientology, Landmark Education), 'Bible Based' (The Holy Order of Mans, House of Yahweh, Jews for Jesus, Victory Church), 'Sci-Fi/UFO' (Chen-Tao/God's Salvation Church, Raelians, Beta Dominion Xenophilia) and so on.

Within these categories are individual files both surprising - Deepak Chopra, Nation of Islam, Patty Hearst, Kim Jong-il - and expected - al-Qaeda, the Manson family, Jim Jones, David Koresh/Waco Davidians, Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Although Ross keeps files on almost all of the estimated 5,000 active groups in the US (and on many of the estimated 500 groups in the UK), he is keen to stress that a group or individual's inclusion on his website does not necessarily mean they are harmful, or a cult. He also stresses that no religious, political or personal agenda motivates the opening of a file. He only opens a file if a group or individual's behaviour starts attracting controversy.

So who is Rick Ross, and why has he appointed himself both judge and jury?

Rick Ross was born to a Jewish family in November 1952. His father was a plumbing contractor and his mother a helper at the Jewish Community Center in Phoenix, Arizona. After high school, Ross worked for a finance company, then a bank, before falling into trouble with the law. In 1974, he was convicted for the attempted burglary of a vacant show house and sentenced to probation. The following year he was sentenced to five years' probation after he and a friend embezzled property from a jewellery company. Ross then went to work for his cousin's car-salvage business. In 1982, aged 30, he had his first introduction to the world of groups and cults when a Christian missionary group infiltrated his grandmother's nursing home.

After successfully campaigning to have the group removed, Ross immersed himself in the psychology and methodologies of group activity, working as a volunteer, researcher and lecturer for various Jewish organisations, before striking out in 1986 as a private consultant and deprogrammer (an Orwellian-sounding term for someone hired to 'unbrainwash' people). Today, deprogrammers are known as intervention specialists, thought-reform consultants or exit counsellors.

In 1992, his reputation was sealed when the FBI sought his advice on David Koresh and the Waco (or Branch) Davidians. A year later, as the Waco siege raged, CBS hired him as on-scene analyst. Meanwhile, he was in court again, after Jason Scott, the 18-year-old subject of an involuntary intervention, filed charges of 'unlawful imprisonment'. Scott's mother had authorised Ross to hold Scott against his will in a bid to deprogramme him from the Life Tabernacle Church, an intervention method no longer practised by professionals in Ross's field. After the court ruled in Ross's favour, Scott won a civil suit in 1995 and was awarded $3m damages. Out of the ashes of bankruptcy, Ross launched rickross.com and left Phoenix for Jersey City, where he founded the Rick A Ross Institute.

Looking over his career, his moral credentials seem shaky at best. But then, taking into account his claimed 75 per cent success rate for interventions (he has worked on more than 350 cases, at a typical cost of $5,000, everywhere from the US to the UK, Israel to Italy), he has rescued many people from harmful situations and has worked as an expert court witness in cases relating to controversial groups.

Fast-forward to July 2004 and Rick Ross is telling me, via phone from his office in Jersey City, about an intervention case he worked on the previous summer involving the Kabbalah Center. Like most intervention cases, it began with an inquiry from a family; this time, a British family concerned about their daughter's involvement with the centre in Los Angeles.

'Their daughter Sarah was becoming increasingly disconnected from her family,' Ross recalls. 'Her personality seemed to have dramatically changed. Her entire life revolved around the Kabbalah Center. She worked there, spent most of her after-work time there, lived with other members and apparently had no romantic life.'

Despite working long hours, Sarah did not receive 'meaningful compensation, nor benefits such as medical coverage. She appeared largely incapable of making her own decisions, or critically examining how her life had changed, or of considering the practical consequences of her involvement at the centre, such as her personal finances.' After years of her involvement with the Kabbalah Center, Sarah's family believed the situation was deteriorating. 'They called me, hoping to find a way to intervene and discuss their concerns without the centre's interference,' says Ross.

When Sarah told her parents she would be coming home to the UK for the first time in years, for the opening of the London Kabbalah Centre, Ross hatched a plan. The family would rent cottages in the Cotswolds - something they had done often when Sarah was a child - and invite her to take a mini-break. Sarah agreed. And when she arrived, Ross was waiting.

Initially, he explained who he was, why her family had hired him, and why he believed she was being exploited in her position of 'chevra' (a full-time volunteer worker at the centre). After three hours, she stormed off, telling Ross and her family, 'I understand what you're trying to do here. I'm very upset, I'm very angry at everybody. I'm going to pack my stuff and I'm going to go back to London. You've disappointed me, you've tricked me. I'm not going to continue with this.' This being a typical scenario, Ross had already appointed one of her brothers to handle any upsets. After several hours of discussions, Sarah's brother persuaded her to give Ross one more hour of her time.

'I told her that Philip Berg, the founder of the Kabbalah Center, once signed documents "Dr Philip Berg", but in fact he has no PhD, though he may have an honorary, unaccredited or mail-order doctorate. And Berg paid himself $2.5m for intellectual property rights regarding books and tapes - $2.5m out of the [organisation's] non-profit.' Ross also explained to her that the school Philip Berg claimed to be closely associated with in Israel had denounced him. 'Now, these would be things that I would not usually say to someone in the very beginning of an intervention,' Ross says, 'because they might become angry and walk out. I made these points quickly and she looked at me rather startled and said, "Can you prove that?" And I said, "Yes, I have all the documents with me."'

At this point, Sarah and Ross began talking. Three days later, their discussions came to a close. By then, she and her family were being bombarded with calls from the Kabbalah Center.

'They were sending urgent messages to her parents' London home, saying, "Where is she?",' Ross remembers. 'And Sarah was someone Madonna knew personally through the centre and who worked with her daughter as part of their programmes. Guy Ritchie was expecting to see her at the opening of the new centre. When the Kabbalah Center was sending her emails saying, "Where are you?" she was in a mental health facility, Wellspring Retreat, a rehab centre for ex-cult members in the US. Wellspring Retreat and Resource Center is 'a residential treatment facility specialising in the rehabilitation of victims of cultic abuse'. It was founded in Albany, Ohio, in 1986 by Dr Paul Martin and his wife Barbara. Like Sarah, Dr Martin crossed that line between a harmless belief in something and a faith that almost wrecked his life when he got involved with The Jesus People in 1971. At the time, he was a doctoral student at the University of Missouri, studying psychopharmacology (his specialist research field was hallucinogens).

'This bunch of people came through campus in a VW van with a rock'n'roll band,' he tells me, 'proclaiming that Jesus was a better revolutionary than Marx or Che, and it was pretty impressive. They had better music and better-looking girls and I thought, "Maybe this is it," so I dropped out of grad school.'

Believing himself to have been increasingly indoctrinated, Martin left the group in 1978, in the throes of a nervous breakdown. 'I started having dissociative episodes. I couldn't tell if I was dreaming or awake. It was like a Fellini movie.'

As he recovered, he looked for answers as to how this had happened. 'I picked up a copy of Robert Jay Lifton's Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism and it gave me cold chills because the similarities were really uncanny. I said, "Oh my god, I was in a cult!" I always thought cults were something that only happened to the weirdos, and I wasn't a weirdo. The people in my group were the boy and girl next-door, the class valedictorian, a Vietnam war vet - a cross-section of regular people.'

After finishing his PhD and undergoing training in psychology and mental-health counselling, Dr Martin decided to focus on helping people put their lives back together after leaving groups and cults. Today, Wellspring has 15 full-time staff and nine beds. It's a kind of Betty Ford Clinic, where patients conquer their addiction to beliefs, groups and leaders.

There is a formal screening process. 'We make sure these people are really suitable for our programme,' Martin explains. 'Are they really cult victims or are they mentally ill? You have to make sure they're not so sick or suicidal or debilitated that they could not even participate in a programme where there's a lot of talk or dialogue.'

To verify Sarah's story, I email a transcript of what Ross told me to the Kabbalah Center in Los Angeles (earlier I had requested an interview with Philip Berg, which was declined), asking for their comment. In response, I receive a curt email from its publicist, Andy Behrman, informing me: 'Rick Ross has never met anybody at the Kabbalah Center and to the best of our knowledge this story and the facts are entirely false.' I forward the statement to Ross. 'Mr Behrman knows very well who I am speaking about,' he insists. 'The young woman was a full-time "chevra" worker at the LA centre and well known to everyone there.'

I mention to Ross that while Sarah's experiences with the Kabbalah Center sound troubling, her story is hardly comparable to the mass suicides of Waco or Jonestown, nor the killing sprees carried out in Charles Manson's name. He explains that he is always careful to distinguish between a cult and a destructive or controversial group.

'The Kabbalah Center is not stockpiling weapons,' he says. 'They don't have a compound. I've received no complaints of physical abuse. They seem to be focused on money: buy the Kabbalah water, buy the red string, buy this, buy that, give us 10 per cent of your income, and so on.'

To determine whether a group is benign or destructive, Ross - like most professionals in his field - uses Lifton's 1961 book as a diagnostic tool. Lifton details eight characteristics that typify a destructive group environment: dictating with whom members can communicate; convincing members they are a chosen people with a higher purpose; creating an us-versus-them mentality, whereby everything in the group is right and everything outside is wrong; encouraging members to share their innermost secrets and then purge whatever hinders their merging with the group; convincing members that their philosophical belief system is 'the absolute truth'; creating an 'in' language of buzzwords and groupspeak which becomes a substitute for critical thinking; reinterpreting human experience and emotion in terms of the group's doctrine; and reinforcing the idea that life within the group is good and worthy, and life outside evil and pointless. During an intervention, Ross brings out Lifton's book, usually having picked apart the group's own literature.

As a recovering alcoholic, I still think about where the line is between heavy drinking and alcoholism. In the same way, I ask myself when a life-enhancing involvement with a group, guru or individual becomes damaging? Ross explains that the process is gradual, insidious. 'When people typically join, they only see what the group wants them to see. Then they are gradually spoon-fed more on a need-to-know basis. So,' says Ross, 'there's this escalating involvement, a process of baby steps to deeper involvement in the group. You aren't told the more radical beliefs of a group until you've been so heavily indoctrinated that you're no longer able to critically evaluate those beliefs.'

According to Ross, the kind of person who typically becomes unhealthily involved with a group is looking for ideals and a sense of purpose. They're very altruistic, he says, 'because to be a good cult member you have to make a lot of sacrifices'. They may have been going through a difficult period in their lives. 'When people are lonely, depressed, experiencing a major setback and some group comes along and says, "Look, we've got the answers, we can give you whatever you want, just put the red string on, drink the Kabbalah water and everything will be OK," it's very appealing.'

Carol Giambalvo is now retired, but she was once America's leading thought-reform consultant. (She got into the profession when her stepdaughter became involved with Iskcon, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.) To her, it's less about a personality type than a matter of circumstance. 'People don't join cults,' she tells me. 'They simply join a group that seems to have answers for their life goals: getting closer to God, self-improvement, getting rich, getting power, getting a feeling of belonging to something real special. People are deceived and their best attributes are used against them.'

As Giambalvo points out, the one unifying factor, according to research, is that people who get involved in a cultic group are in a major transitional stage in life: 'A mid-life crisis, going to college, graduating college, loss of a loved one through death or divorce, moving to a new country or community - these are all normal transitional stages when we're just a little more vulnerable to undue influence.'

Marguerite Corvini, now 24 and studying for a masters in social work at New York University, fits this definition. 'A lot of people who get sucked into these groups are at a vulnerable point in their lives,' she says. 'That was certainly the case for me.'

From a wealthy family, she fell in with mystical Christian group Order of Christ/Sophia after graduating from college in 2001. Unsure what to do with her life, she was taken to Order meetings by her brother Michael, then a doctor in residency at Yale University. He had been introduced to the group by his then-girlfriend Shanti, daughter of Father Peter Bowes, who co-founded the Order in early 2001 with fellow ex-Holy Order of Mans priest, Mother Clare Watts. Michael introduced Marguerite to Father Bowes.

'I was so freaked out by him,' Marguerite says, getting breathless, his power over her still evident. But her brother's devotion and reverence to Father Bowes caused her to cast those thoughts aside. Soon after, Michael moved into the Order house in Boston and asked her to do the same.

She was torn, but having always looked up to her brother, she moved into the house in February 2002 to become a 'Novice', a commitment that required her to take a vow of celibacy and obedience for a year.

'It was a very monastic life. I had to break up with my boyfriend. My teacher, Reverend Beatrice, would tell me not to be sexually involved with my boyfriend, because if you're having sex with somebody, you're releasing that sexual energy and that energy should be focused on God. And if we had any sexual thoughts about anyone, we were urged to confess to our teachers.'

Eventually, Marguerite was given a clear message. 'I was told that having a boyfriend was not right for my soul.' Marguerite 'cut off' from her boyfriend, group-speak for severing communication with non-members. 'He would call me, leave me messages, send emails.'

Finally, Reverend Beatrice put a stop to it. 'She called him and said: "She can't talk to you any more, she's made a commitment to the programme and is celibate."'

Didn't Marguerite find this strange?

'I was upset, I was angry, but all the time in my head I was like, "But if this is what God wants for me, I want to be good, I want to reach my potential as a human being."'

In early 2003, Mr and Mrs Corvini, having both been diagnosed with cancer within a matter of weeks of one another, contacted Rick Ross. They said their dying wish was to have their children free from the Order of Christ/Sophia. Ross began planning an intervention. Meanwhile, when Michael and Marguerite received the news of their parents' illness, they were encouraged not to react by Father Bowes.

'Michael didn't see them while they were sick,' Marguerite remembers. 'Whatever reason he had, it was probably a spiritual thing - "They want you to talk to them, that's why they're getting sick, they're trying to manipulate you with their illness."'

Michael's initial reaction was to sever ties. 'He sent them this letter and basically cut off my mom,' recalls Marguerite, who was by now training to be a deacon. 'And I sent a letter, too. That's something that Father Peter does, he has everybody send letters. It's almost like he wants the parents to be so mad they cut off their kids.'

Soon after, Marguerite was urged to cut off her friends. Father Peter, she says, explained that she was free to leave but added, 'When you meet Jesus, he's going to say, "What happened Marguerite? You were on the right track and you strayed." Then you are going to have to start all over again, and it's going to be even harder to get to where you are now.'

We were just happily doing our thing and then this whole smear campaign against us starts,' says Mother Clare Watts, mother of four (one is in the Order) and co-founder of the Order of Christ/Sophia, in her Southern drawl from the newest Order house, in Seattle. 'It's been so frustrating to us. Rick Ross goes after every single group he can because it's a money thing. Money and power and anger. He's such a slimy character, he's just a sleaze. We actually ended up talking to some Scientologists and they said, "Oh dear, poor you, we've been putting up with this for 30 years. You're just the latest victim." They ended up sending us a ton of stuff about Rick Ross and the whole deprogramming history. I had to start learning about all this stuff. The word "cult" meant very little. Scientology even had us get advice from their attorneys.'

I ask her to explain the Order's basic ideology. 'Our core ideology is the inner path, the mystical path, where we are teaching people how to go inside their being and connect with the God-self inside of them.'

During our conversation, she talks enthusiastically about Rumi, the Kabbalah, Sufism, St Teresa of Avila - all the great mystics. It all sounds harmless. So why does she think Marguerite Corvini is calling the Order a 'cult' and Rick Ross has a file about their activities on his website?

'Well,' she sighs, 'Father Peter and I are both psychotherapists, so we work with all of our students on the psychological and emotional pieces of their healing and their growth; we bump into people's family issues, where there are still wounds from childhood in the way of their spiritual growth, where they're holding anger and resentment and where they're still under the control of their families' emotional or life control. We put a high value on honesty. This is where we get in trouble.'

With the Corvinis' health failing, Ross had to invent an opportunity for an intervention. He coached Mr Corvini on how to call Marguerite and ask if she would come home and drive her mother to hospital. Mr Corvini put the favour to his daughter. Marguerite told him she first needed to speak with Mother Clare, who is revered within the Order for her ability to communicate with the Virgin Mary. (When I ask Mother Clare if that is true, she says, 'Yes, I have received revelations from Mother Mary, but we teach everyone to do that. The way Marguerite puts it, she makes us look like freaks. We teach everyone to make those connections with Master Jesus and Mother Mary.')

'I went to Mother Clare,' remembers Marguerite. 'And she said, "Let's ask guidance." So we sit down and ask God and she gets an answer and the answer is no, you shouldn't go.'

Mother Clare had been suspicious. 'I said to Marguerite, "You know, it feels like they're up to something, but your mom may be dying some time in the next few months, so why don't you go visit her? This may be goodbye."'

As soon as Marguerite got home, her father had her car taken to a garage for a service. Then, also on Ross's advice, Mr Corvini had the phone lines cut. In the morning, Marguerite stepped out of the bathroom to find Ross, her parents, her grandmother and her best friend, all waiting for her on the landing. The intervention had begun. She thought of her car - then remembered it wasn't there. The phone was dead. Trapped, she heard Ross out. He managed to win her over. The next day, she collected her belongings from the Order house and flew out to Ohio, where, like Sarah, she was admitted to the two-week treatment programme at Wellspring, which she credits with changing her life.

'They used a lot of cognitive behavioural therapy to help me work through the thoughts and the whole process of how this happened to me. I'm a smart person, I'm well educated, I had pretty high self-esteem when I walked into Order of Christ/ Sophia, but by the time I came out I didn't know who I was. Initially, I would just be driving in my car, chewing a piece of gum and listening to whatever radio station I wanted, and that was immense freedom.'

Marguerite could be talking here about drugs, sex, alcohol, gambling. It sounds like a typical 12-step recovery story. Now she's had time to get her life back together, I ask her how she managed to lose herself so completely.

'Well,' she says. 'You put a frog in boiling hot water, they're going to jump out. You put them in lukewarm water and turn up the heat. By the time they realise they're in a pot of boiling hot water, they're kind of used to it. That's what happened to me.'

And what did the Order make of her leaving? When she arrived home, there was a note waiting for her from Father Bowes. All it said was: 'Where the hell are you?'

Soon after Marguerite left the Order, Ross set up an intervention to get Michael out as well, but as soon as Ross introduced himself, Michael fled his grandmother's house. Today, he's still a priest within the Order. Since then, other exit counsellors have tried to 'free' other members of the Order. None has been successful.

'With Marguerite, we didn't know yet to warn them about these interventions,' Mother Clare tells me. 'Now we warn people and people are aware. And they haven't caught anybody again.'

Such is the impact of Ross's attentions that there is now an 'Open Letter to the Parents and Friends of Our Members' by Father Bowes on the Order of Christ/Sophia website, which begins: 'Families of some of our members in the Order of Christ/Sophia have expressed concern about whether we are a cult. The answer is simply, no we are not a cult.' He goes on to attack 'anti-cult experts' who 'attack legitimate spiritual communities simply because they are not mainstream. They select families that have money and charge high rates to help families force their adult children to leave.'

Two decades into his crusade, Ross has made a lot of enemies, ranging from groups anxious to protect their reputations, recruitment potential and profit margins, to group members fiercely loyal to their beliefs, such as Neo-Nazis who send Ross almost daily anti-Semitic messages. And then there's the litigation. Presently, he's facing three different lawsuits from groups who claim he has made slanderous, damaging statements about their activities.

'I don't think a day goes by when I'm not threatened by somebody,' he sighs. 'Whether it's the threat of a lawyer or maybe something a little more colourful about how my anatomy might be re-arranged ... I've had death threats. I've had people say they would not only kill me but would then wash my remains down the sewer personally. But if I wasn't being sued and I wasn't being harassed I'd honestly ask myself, "What difference am I really making? Am I really doing my job very well?" If Scientologists sent me a box of chocolates with a thank-you card, I'd think, "Boy, I must be in bad shape!"'

As he says this, it dawns on me that everybody in this story believes or has once believed too much. Everybody thinks they're right. Why did the Order of Christ/Sophia seemingly wreck Marguerite's life while her brother Michael clearly feels it's the best possible life path for him?

Why does Madonna credit the Kabbalah Center with enriching her life, while involvement with the very same centre appears to have resulted in Sarah being admitted to Wellspring?

Or is it less about the group and more about the individual? Maybe certain individuals, with pre-existing psychological problems, join one of these groups, have what they perceive to be a bad experience and end up blaming the group for everything wrong in their lives. For every Sarah or Marguerite, there are many others claiming that their lives have been enormously enriched by their affiliation with a particular group or organisation.

Why does Ross keep going? Is it really, as Mother Clare and many other critics and groups claim, a 'money thing'? After a summer's worth of correspondence with Ross, I believe his motives are genuine, even if there are many groups out there who claim he's driven by profiteering.

But he, too, believes in the rightness of his moral compass. Everybody in a position of power or authority in this story, from Mother Clare to Rick Ross, believes they're right. And then, lost somewhere in the gulf between them, are the people who don't know how to believe in something without that faith taking over their lives.

· Some individuals' names have been changed

Remember when: A yacht moored on the Broadwater was linked to a Denmark-based cult leader

Gold Coast Bulletin
November 27, 2004

 

A MULTIMILLION-dollar superyacht moored on the Broadwater was linked to an accused cult leader facing fraud and embezzlement charges in Denmark

Mogens Amdi Petersen was called a hard man to track down.

After all, he once went missing for 22 years.

When he seemed to slip off the face of the Earth in 1979, most people saw Petersen as a throwback to the 1960s — a charismatic do-gooder out to help the Third World.

The Danish teacher espoused Marxist-Leninist principles, set up radical teaching colleges in his homeland and sent young disciples to Africa.

Then, one day, he disappeared.

Despite this, the `charitable’ causes he founded didn’t miss a beat. In fact, they grew stronger — much stronger.

Some people started calling the elusive boss a cult leader.

Others wondered whether the millions of dollars were reaching the right places.

All wanted to know where they could find Mogens.

Petersen had access to luxury homes dotted around the world, had a multimillion-dollar Florida apartment just for his dogs and enjoyed the use of an elegant superyacht. At 40m, it was once the biggest fibreglass luxury vessel in the world.

If you took a stroll to the Broadwater that weekend you could see it for yourself in all its three-masted, teak-inlaid glory.

Named Butterfly McQueen, the Bermuda rigged schooner was previously owned by Tvind offshoot the Teachers Group.

Petersen was acquitted in 2006 but the case was appealed — he remains at large today and as of 2016 was understood to be living underground in Mexico.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/remember-when-a-yacht-moored-on-the-broadwater-was-linked-to-a-denmarkbased-cult-leader/news-story/536ade0a01152a13a518a8f82840ec43

St. Paul Massacre: First indications point to an international sect

"L'express Outlook

WWRN

 August 31, 2004

Friday afternoon: the police go to the Mawooas’ home in St Paul to look for Rajesh Dhayam. A few minutes later, they break their way into the locked house where they find ten bodies. The enquiry points to links with an international sect.

After being taken out of the house, the ten bodies were subject to autopsy. Cyanide was found in all of them.

After being taken out of the house, the ten bodies were subject to autopsy. Cyanide was found in all of them.

The discovery of ten bodies in a state of decomposition in a house at Béchard Lane Saint Paul is surely a heavy blow for the whole country. After three days of enquiry, the investigators have concluded that an “international sect” could be at the origin of the collective suicide. The police are now looking for clues in the past of Critika Mawooa, who seems to be responsible for this massacre. People having contact with the woman say she had a ‘mystical’ side.

Several clues brought the police to investigate further into the habits of this 37 year-old woman, the first being the fourteen-page suicide note found near her body. The letter, which has not been authenticated yet, states how unfortunate she was and how miserable her whole life was. It was because of her sentimental and financial problems that she decided to put an end to her life. So did the nine other persons found in the padlocked house of their own free will, according to the letter. Cyanide was found in all the bodies.

Two medallions carrying initials EK were found on the corpses of Crithika Mawooa and Rajesh Dhayam. These indices led the investigators to the assumption that the Eckankar sect is behind deaths.

The bodies may have remained there for some days before being found by the police. The neighbourhood did not really wonder about their absence as the Mawooas have always been very “discreet people.” The rest of the family were not worried either since they were told that the group was going to Rodrigues.

This macabre affair started on Friday afternoon. The members of the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) of Quatre-Bornes went to the Mawooa’s house to look for Rajesh Dhayam, Critika’s lover. This administrative assistant at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute had been reported missing since 6th August. The police went to Béchard Lane after finding Critika’s picture in his house.

As soon as they arrived at the house, they found padlocks on the doors. They had to break them to discover the ten bodies spread out in the house. Four other members of the Mawooa family were found dead in the house; Critika’s brother, Ravi (36), her sister, Chinta (30), their mother, Coontee (69), and her son, Devesh Nunkumar (11). Rajesh Dhayam’s body was also found in the house. Hervé Janvier, a tramp aged around 50, was also found among the dead bodies.

Maya Jhowry and her two children, Khesha (17) and Bhavesh (15) were found dead in the house as well. Maya had left her marital home on 22nd July after making a statement at the police station of Long Mountain stating that her marriage with Suchit Jhowry was not going well.

However, according to people around them, Critika had a strong influence on Maya. They had met at the Victoria Hotel where they used to work together as beauticians. Maya was a strong believer and practising member of a branch of Hare Rama Hare Krishna. But one of her relatives admits, “Overnight Maya suddenly abandoned all her habits to follow the precepts of her new guide, Critika.” On Critika’s side, people say that she has always been involved in strange religious rites.

Maya is also said to have vouched for the Mawooa family. According to one of her relatives, she took a certain number of loans for Critika and paid them back. In August 2003, Maya is said to have enrolled Critika and her sister and brother as shareholders of a credit union in Long Mountain. They vouched for each other and finally succeeded in obtaining a total loan of Rs 76,000.

The few details the investigators have on this massacre indicate that it is the result of Critika, a desperate woman gnawed at by her problems since her childhood, being caught up in the precepts of an international sect. Likewise, everything points to the fact that the other people were caught up in this suicidal fever.

The letter, the traces of cyanide… Everyone seemed to be ready for death at Béchard Lane.

However, there is still mystery around these deaths at St Paul. Although the police are seriously investigation the theory of the international sect, they are not neglecting any clues such as the fact that the doors were all closed from the outside when they arrived on the premises.

The police will thus continue their enquiry on the cause of this dramatic event. Unfortunately, the victims may have taken their secrets – and the real cause of all this – to their graves…

“The few details the investigators have on this massacre indicate that it is the result of Critika, a desperate woman gnawed at by her problems, being caught up in the precepts of an international sect.”

https://wwrn.org/articles/12143/

In the Company of Men Mankind's 'New Warriors' Embrace Nature, Each Other, 'Sacred Masculinity'

Nathaniel Popper
The Jewish Daily Forward

January 30, 2004

By the hearth of a crackling fireplace at the Deer Park Church Camp in rural Pennsylvania, Josh Shaneson was welcomed into a brotherhood of men, for the second time.

Shaneson, 19, had been inducted into manhood once before, as his yarmulke and ritual fringes indicated. But unlike his bar mitzvah, at this initiation he had plenty of company.

The 20 or so men flanking Shaneson - some with baseball caps and gold-cross necklaces, others with yarmulkes - had just emerged from a three-day New Warrior Training Adventure, a ritualistic weekend that aims to open up men to the "sacred masculine."

Following a round of drumming and a blessing from one of the group's "elders" at the "homecoming" ceremony, the men discussed the initiation experience while passing around a feathered staff. Between speakers, the men would simultaneously emit a guttural "Ogh!"

Since 1987, some 20,000 men from all religious backgrounds have gone through the New Warrior Training at 27 sites around the world. Though the organizers at The Mankind Project - the nonprofit organization that organizes the weekends - do not collect information on religion, past participants and leaders say they have been surprised by the number of Jewish men, like Shaneson, who have found their way to the training. The Deer Park weekend, with six Jewish participants, was not atypical; in fact, there often are more Jewish participants.

The apparent appeal of the training for Jewish men in particular, from all levels of observance, shines light on the complicated relationship so many Jewish men have with their masculinity.

"The ideal of the Jewish man is more the scholar than the athlete," said Harry Brod, an associate professor at the University of Northern Iowa, where he specializes in men's studies, and editor of the anthology "A Mensch Among Men: Explorations in Jewish Masculinity."

"Because standards of Jewish masculinity are different than in the dominant culture, there are already questions about masculinity in the minds of Jewish men," Brod said, "and the tendency toward sensitivity in Jewish men makes it okay to explore those questions."

Judging from attendance at New Warrior Training sessions, many of the men caught in this bind are observant Jews. On Shaneson's weekend, all six of the Jewish men were Orthodox. The weekends have grown so popular with Orthodox men that this winter, for the first time ever, a Washington-area training was rescheduled to begin after sundown on Saturday so that five Lubavitcher chasidim could take part.

But many of the Jewish men who came forward to talk about their Warrior Training experiences at the Pennsylvania homecoming had not been to a synagogue in years.

Stan Sherman, one such man, who is the enrollment director of the national organization, said that on his first training weekend, in 1997, he turned to a friend and remarked on the incredible number of fellow secular Jews who independently had found the training.

"Yeah, think how much money we're saving on therapy," his friend shot back.

The training does demand a bit more than the typical session on an analyst's couch. While the exact activities are kept secret from nonparticipants, the leaders talk about a ritual hunt (though they are quick to add that no animal is actually killed) and intense emotional confrontations between the initiates and the leaders. Secrecy is an integral part of the weekends, about which information is spread solely by word-of-mouth.

The physical challenge promised by the weekend would naturally be attractive for many Jewish men, says Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor who researches masculinity at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

"Growing up in my own Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn," said Kimmel, editor of "The Politics of Manhood," "there was a lot of shame to being a Jewish man…. I think this weekend, like a lot of contemporary Jewish politics, comes out of a similar impulse to never let anyone push us around again."

But the more emotionally in-touch Jewish man of lore does not get left behind in the training. Like a good bagel, the weekends promise that elusive combination of crunchy and chewy.

"It's not like you go out and eat raw deer," said Andrew Epstein, 54, a graphic designer from Chicago who went to his first New Warrior Training in 2003. "You go into the woods and process," Epstein said, "and in the process I, for one, met a network of men who I've been able to rely on."

The Mankind Project is one group in the so-called "mythopoetic men's movement," which sprang up during the 1980s with inspiration from the writings of Robert Bly, author of the bestseller "Iron John." The movement, mocked by its critics for its appropriation of Native American rituals and reliance on New Age self-help models, aims to get men in touch with some sense of "primitive masculinity" by creating trusting relationships between small groups of men.

At the Deer Park graduation, all of the initiates talked about the love they felt for their new "brothers." At the back of the room, men locked in silent, 30-second bear hugs.

The tribal resonances of such communal bonding are a neat fit for members of the Jewish tribe. Yet the tribal language used during the weekends takes its cue from Native American spiritual rituals, some of which create uncomfortable friction with Jewish tradition.

Group leaders strive to incorporate these rituals into an nonreligious context; at the Deer Park Church Camp, the Mankind Project banner had been draped to obscure a tiled replica of 'The Last Supper.'

But many Jewish men said that some of the spiritual elements made them nervous, at least initially.

Rabbi Jeffrey Greenberg, 26, who helped lead the training session for Orthodox men near Washington, said that during that weekend he had supervised the kitchen for kosher restrictions and helped provide substitutes for the rituals that had made him uncomfortable during his own training.

Greenberg, a teacher at a Jewish day school in New York, said that many of the rituals were easily infused with a Jewish spirit. The ceremonial sweat lodge, for instance, had an easy precedent in the old-fashioned shvitz.

Such substitutions, though, are not usually made, and many Jewish men came to the weekend looking for a spirituality they felt was lacking in their Jewish experiences, most of all in their first initiation into manhood.

"My bar mitzvah was just a big party," said Hal Klegman, a 56-year-old executive recruiter from Chicago who completed his first training in 1987. "Spirituality was not what my parents were looking for in a synagogue. Spirituality was the lacking component."

For Shaneson - a regular Hillel attendee at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a student - the weekend brought him to see a more intricate set of problems in his own Jewish education.

"We always read what we should be, and we don't focus on what we are, and how to appreciate that, as the New Warrior Training teaches," Shaneson said. "The ideal of Judaism can be limiting and restricting."

For Shaneson, and many other Jewish participants, the weekend caused a re-evaluation of their Jewish connections. In the end, though, most of them talked about feeling closer to Judaism.

Kourosh Babaian, a 25-year-old clothing salesman from New York, said the Deer Park training weekend helped him to "feel more comfortable as a Jew doing everything" and "to experience my religion in a spiritual way."

The pathways through which this happens have been criticized by a number of feminists, who see the entire mythopoetic men's movement as reestablishing the old gender hierarchies, a criticism Brod expanded upon.

"The idea that there is some essential manhood that lies in separation from women is a dangerous idea," Brod said. "Where comes this idea that men can only learn nurturing and emotional support from other men?"

But most of the wives and mothers at the homecoming ceremony seemed thrilled with their new, improved husbands and sons. And the leaders were full of talk about all the old, artificial categories that are broken down by the experience.

"It allowed a bonding opportunity with other men and with the outside world that might not have been possible otherwise," said Greenberg of the Lubavitcher men who went through the weekend. "They put aside those religious labels, and other externalities, and allowed their core person to come out."

Holy Rollers: Murder and Madness in Oregon's Love Cult

Frank MacHovec, Ph. D.
Cultic Studies Journal
Vol. 3, No. 1, 2004

Holy Rollers: Murder and Madness in Oregon's Love Cult
T. McCracken and R. B. Blodgett Published by: Caldwell, ID: Caxton Press, 2002, 295 pages, paperback. $16.95 ISBN: 0870044249
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The authors, a naturalist and a paleontologist with an interest in northwest U.S. history, refer to their topic as the “long suppressed” story of Edmund Creffield’s Holy Roller movement, started in 1903 in Corvallis, Oregon. (They explain that older folks in Corvallis don't want to talk about the Holy Rollers.)
Writing for the general public, the authors present the Holy Roller movement chronologically, with many anecdotes of the people involved and their life situations. The book includes 30 brief chapters averaging 10 pages each, and a 3-page epilogue. Also included is an impressive 15-page bibliography that includes birth, marriage, and death certificates, census data, and newspaper articles of the time.

Creffield, a German immigrant who came to the United States at age 20, was a Salvation Army dropout. His real name was Franz Edmund Creffield. He converted an experienced Salvation Army officer sent to discredit him, and the Salvation Army later left town—both events evidence of his charisma and verbal skills. Also impressive is how he was able to intrude into the personal lives and lifestyles of leading families in the community. Five feet six inches tall and weighing 135 pounds, Creffield was not physically an imposing figure. His strength was psychological, called a “hypnotic effect” by some who observed him. He began recruiting members using a traditional Christian approach, and then he claimed to be Joshua. Ultimately, he became a self-proclaimed apostle and gradually added his own version of the ideal religion.

Creffield’s strategy was to claim a direct divine connection and the power to “relieve suffering” by the laying on of hands. He appealed to those sensitized by guilt or a deprived childhood, although many otherwise normal people were also converted. His technique was to lower defenses and disinhibit by sermonizing for up to 24 hours to followers, mainly women, who rolled on the floor seeking forgiveness. This ritual, by which followers believed they became “God’s anointed,” was often repeated daily. Creffield’s ability to have women cancel their engagements to be married, deter married couples from having sex, and have others drop out of work or school demonstrated his power.
Members of the movement burned their furniture and prized possessions, belongings that Creffield called “carnal.” Nonmembers were “infidels” to be shunned, even if they were spouses or a member’s children.

As the result of growing public outrage, the sheriff had two local physicians examine Creffield in the presence of a judge and city attorney. They found him legally sane. Released, he escalated his message, prophesying an imminent end of the world, which drew public interest. Media coverage spread. So did rumors of this man surrounded by women, amid growing suspicion that he had sexual contact with them. He urged followers to remove clothing to be like Adam and Eve. Because the law didn’t stop him, a vigilante group of men calling themselves “white caps” descended on Creffield. He was tarred, feathered, and run out of town. A follower took him in and allowed him to continue his ministry in the family home. Creffield chose to marry a 16-year-old follower, but her family committed her to the Boys’ and Girls’ Aid Society (she was too young for the insane asylum). There, she was diagnosed as “bright but deranged, mind almost unhinged by religious fanatics.”

Creffield moved to Portland, Oregon and claimed he was “the second Saviour.” Page 62 refers to Maud Hurt vowing “to have nothing to do with him”; but, on the next page, she is referred to as Creffield’s wife, an unexplained gap. His effect on the mainly female group members was strong and destructive. They prided themselves on being “brides of Christ,” and allegedly to Creffield as the second Christ. This behavior further enraged the public. When he was seen nude with a scantily clad woman, he was arrested, tried, and convicted of adultery. He fled but was discovered hiding under a follower’s house. Sentenced to two years in the state penitentiary, he was a model prisoner and won release seven months early.

Creffield then moved to Seattle with his loyal followers. He claimed to have caused the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. This claim impressed group members and strengthened his hold on them. A brother whose sister was “ruined” by Creffield shot and killed “the second Christ” on a Seattle street. The brother, in turn, was killed by the sister he avenged. She later committed suicide, as did Creffield’s wife, bringing this tragic history to an end.
The book is written in a style more journalistic than scientific, although it is well referenced. Its major contribution is its description of how a destructive cult can develop in an average community. The narrative shows the vulnerability of otherwise normal people, and the escalation of a charismatic leader’s control over them. Parallels to modern-day destructive cults are obvious, with similarities to Jim Jones’ People’s Church, Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate, and David Koresh’s Branch Davidians. The book offers evidence that wielding total control over others may somehow contribute to a slow deterioration of the leader’s mental state. On the negative side, the book misleads when the authors present whole paragraphs in italics, written in the first person, as if they were direct quotes, when they are obviously conjecture and speculations about what people thought and said at the time. However, this is a minor flaw.
The book provides useful information about the developmental dynamics of cult-like groups and their leadership; as such, it is a valuable addition to the database of how destructive cults develop and to the psychopathology of their leaders. Recommended.