Using the Bounded Choice Model as an Analytical Tool: A Case Study of Heaven’s Gate

Janja Lalich, Ph.D.

California State University, Chico 

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to describe the “bounded choice” theory and to illustrate how this new model can be used as a tool for examining and analyzing high-demand groups, sometimes called cults. Based on findings from a comparative study of two cultic groups, a social-psychological theory is developed to interpret the behavior of true believers in a closed, charismatic context. Based on textual analysis and interview data, the Heaven’s Gate cult is used to illustrate the conceptual framework, which is comprised of four organizational aspects: charismatic authority, the transcendent belief system, the system of control, and the system of influence. The result of this interactive dynamic is a “self-sealing system,” that is, a social system that is closed to disconfirming evidence and structured in such a way that everything reinforces the system. Drawing on Anthony Giddens’s (1984) theory of structuration, Herbert Simon’s (1955, 1956, 1976) theory of bounded rationality, and Robert Jay Lifton’s (1961) theory of personal closure, “bounded choice” theory helps us understand the seemingly irrational behavior of the most dedicated adherents. The theory attempts to take into account individual choice within the context of an authoritarian, transcendent, closed group.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the “bounded choice” theoretical model and to illustrate how this new model can be used as a tool for examining and analyzing high-demand groups or situations, sometimes called cults. This new approach uses a conceptual framework of four interlocking dimensions that I submit are integral to the social dynamic found in cults. The four dimensions are charismatic authority, transcendent belief system, systems of control, and systems of influence. The dimensions involve both structure and process. That is, they make up the framework of the social system, and they include social processes that uphold and reinforce that social structure. The four dimensions are defined briefly as:

Charismatic authority: This is the emotional bond between leader and followers. It lends legitimacy to the leader and grants authority to his or her actions while at the same time justifying and reinforcing followers’ responses to the leader and/or the leader’s ideas and goals. The relational aspect of charisma is the hook that links a devotee to a leader and/or his or her ideas.

Transcendent belief system: This is the overarching ideology that binds adherents to the group and keeps them behaving according to the group’s rules and norms. It is transcendent because it offers a total explanation of past, present, and future, including a path to salvation. Most important, the leader/group also specifies the exact methodology (or recipe) for the personal transformation necessary to qualify one to travel on that path.

Systems of control: This is the network of acknowledged, or visible, regulatory mechanisms that guide the operation of the group. It includes the overt rules, regulations, and procedures that guide and control members’ behavior.

Systems of influence: This is the network of interactions and social influence residing in the group’s social relations. This is the human interaction and group culture from which members learn to adapt their thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors in relation to their new beliefs.

The interrelated and interlocking nature of the four dimensions form a “self-sealing system,” a social system closed in on itself and closed to the outside world. It is characterized by ideological totalism and processes of influence and control that may lead adherents to a high degree of commitment that I have identified as “charismatic commitment.” Now the dedicated adherent becomes a “true believer” in the sense of being a deployable agent for the group or leader. Living within the bounded reality of the cultic social system, the cult member encounters no meaningful reality checks and becomes more and more enmeshed with and invested in the closed world of the group. For some, this may lead to a state of “personal closure,” or the individualized version of the self-sealing system. The member’s life and choices are constrained not only by the system but also, and perhaps even more powerfully, by the close-mindedness of the individual him- or herself who is functioning in alliance with that system. Now the dedicated adherent has entered a social-psychological state of being that I am calling bounded choice: in essence, life outside the cult has become impossible to imagine.

The exemplar group studied here is the Heaven’s Gate cult, which came to prominence when the members committed collective suicide. On March 27, 1997, thirty-nine dead bodies were found in a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California. The deceased were followers of Bonnie Nettles and Marshall Applewhite (known to their devotees as Ti and Do).^[i] In addition to the male leader, Applewhite, among the dead were twenty-one women and seventeen men. According to announcements by the local coroner’s office, the deaths had been caused by ingestion of a mixture of drugs and alcohol, and suffocation by plastic bag over the head. Because the group’s Web site (www.heavensgate.com) garnered so much attention after the suicides, this group, previously known as the Bo Peep cult by those who had some familiarity with the group, came to be called Heaven’s Gate.

The data for this study include interviews with former group members, sympathetic followers and believers, and families of members and other associates. Additional data were drawn from my content analysis of archival material including the group’s written documents, Internet postings, and audio and video recordings. Also I relied on the work of Robert Balch and David Taylor, who have been studying and writing about the group since the mid-1970s, as well as reviewing other scholarly and popular articles and media reports.

Charismatic Authority

The first dimension in the four-part framework is charismatic authority, characterized by leadership and specialness. The concept of charisma was introduced by sociologist Max Weber in his study of ancient religions, bureaucracy, and institution building (Weber 1946a, 1946b, 1964, 1968). Charisma is often thought of as traits that inhere in special individuals, but more to the point, charisma is a powerful social relationship. In this vein Weber wrote, “What is alone important is how the individual is actually regarded by those subject to charismatic authority, by his ‘followers’ or ‘disciples’” (1968, 48).

In relation to this aspect, I examined and analyzed charismatic attraction, the leadership principle, and the charismatic community that grew around the leaders. Applewhite and Nettles had met by chance in their hometown of Houston, Texas in the early 1970s (Balch 1982, 1995; Balch and Taylor 1976, 1977, 2002).^[ii] Each gave up a “normal” life to live with the other. Nettles had worked as a nurse, and was married with four children. Applewhite had been a music professor and choir leader at southern religious colleges. He, also, had been married and had children, but was already divorced for several years before meeting Nettles. Applewhite had lived both openly and “in the closet” as a homosexual. The two met at a time of psychological crisis for Applewhite, and apparently Nettles convinced him that they were meant to be together, as platonic soul mates—and for a higher, more spiritual purpose.

Separating themselves from family and friends and living as mystics, in 1974 and ’75 Applewhite and Nettles went on a recruitment drive across the southwest and westernUnited States. Through what they described as their “awakening” experience, they became convinced that they were the two messengers talked about in the Book of Revelations in the Bible. They believed they were here to bring word of the Second Coming. Their first real success at recruiting came at a meeting in Los Angeles in April 1975, from which they amassed a few dozen followers. Afterwards, with their new band of eager followers, they staged similar meetings, finding audiences on or near college campuses or in progressive or alternative-type locales. Their advance posters tended to draw curious individuals from communities of seekers and people with an interest in UFOs and supernatural phenomena. The two leaders appeared self-assured and a little mysterious, projecting a certain aura that tended to appeal to the crowds before them. Before long, the group’s numbers swelled. They gained more than one hundred followers from their first four public meetings in California,Oregon, and Colorado.

Recruits ranged in age from late teens to sixties; many had at least some college education; some had completed undergraduate and graduate degrees and other specialized training. Most of the early followers self-identified as seekers of truth who had experimented with various religious and spiritual paths, from Scientology, Eastern religions, and Catholicism to spiritualism and magic. Some had been engaged in social activism, such as environmentalism and the women’s movement. Even though some gave up seemingly successful lives and careers, most were less situationally stable at the time they ran into the group—for example, they were close to graduation from college, had just ended a relationship, had just lost someone important to them, were dissatisfied with their life in some way, or were simply on the hippie trail, as were so many others at that time.

The appeal of this group was rooted in the fact that Applewhite and Nettles were offering something different—something unique, yet familiar. They talked of reincarnation, spirit beings, UFOs, and cosmic consciousness—all familiar concepts in the growing New Age movement of the 1970s. At the same time, this was not the same old trip with the best hit of acid or the same old long-haired group spouting the same old verses out of the same old Bible or Hindu text. What these two were offering seemed to be better, combining a little bit of everything and it came across as really “far out.” If nothing else, it was original. These two prophets and their newly gathered disciples sounded knowledgeable enough and mysterious enough to entice the curious and the sincere. They appeared to awaken a dormant yearning in the hearts of those who responded. One follower, who had been in and out of the group since 1976, remarked, “I knew I was linked to them in a way that I couldn’t explain. It was such an intense experience.... After the second meeting I went outside and cried for joy.” Another former member said, “I just felt drawn to them. You could feel the goodness.”

Most of the time most members did not know the whereabouts of their two leaders. The Two (as they were often called in those days) simply arrived for meetings, and on occasion, entertained visits at their home from their Elders or Helpers. The two leaders continuously maintained that being around others lowered their vibrational level. Ultimately, though, their reclusive behavior was a useful pattern in keeping them apart from their followers, while adding to their mystique and perpetuating the leader myth. Yet, the pooled money of their followers was supporting them in that elusive behavior. The members’ fear of losing their leaders and/or their sense of frustration over their absences were emotions that were handily transformed into a sense of stimulation and anticipation. “We never knew if we would see them again,” said one former follower who had been among the first batch of recruits. Some drifted away during those times, but those who stayed and became the core group developed an ever-increasing dependency on their leaders.

Transcendent Belief System

Humans create symbolic models, or belief systems, from which they organize their social and psychological processes. Without these “symbolic templates,” human behavior would be too diffuse, without boundaries or guidelines. The power of any particular belief system inheres in its ability to formulate social realities for its adherents (Geertz 1973). A belief system, then, serves to mediate complex realities for the individuals who are drawn to it, or guided by it.

A transcendent belief system, as used here, is one in which the symbol system provides a template for going beyond the ordinary everyday reality; it offers grand solutions by means of authoritative concepts and persuasive imagery. It is transcendent in the sense that it looks to, indeed predicts, a radical change—either progressive or reactionary—in the social order (Giddens 1984). It not only holds forth a utopian vision, but also offers the actual means by which to get to the new world (Smelser 1962). When that aspect is present, a belief system becomes an ideology. “Ideologies always assume that one idea is sufficient to explain everything,” wrote Hannah Arendt in her classic work on totalitarianism (1951, p. 168).

To examine and analyze this particular dimension, I looked at the appeal of the message, the moral imperative embedded in the beliefs, the sense of urgency and freedom, and the responses to and consequences of crises and shifts in various tenets of the beliefs. The Heaven’s Gate belief system tended to be both transcendent and intensely ideological in that it was a single-tracked, insular thought system. It could also be described as totalistic. To the extent that members were true believers, they accepted the certitude with which their respective leaders put forth, developed—and sometimes changed—aspects of the belief system. For the most part, devotees accepted their leaders’ points of view and adaptations without question. When they did not do so, when they dared to question, individual members (or groups of members) left (or were ejected from) the group.

There are two major components to their belief system. The first is a visionary component, which consists of the transcendent ideal. It is illustrated in this quote from a follower: “For the first time in my life I have a firm faith that there is something higher.” The second component is organizational and consists of the methodology for achieving the goal embedded in the vision. This is exemplified in this quote from a devotee: “We represent the only way that exists that can offer anyone true freedom—liberation—from what binds them.” These two components were intertwined and inseparable; they upheld and reinforced each other—one might say that together they sealed the fate of the believer.

The Heaven’s Gate belief system was an amalgam of Theosophy and spiritualism. The two originators drew on Nettles’s metaphysical background (as a medium and follower of New Age thought) and added a heavy dose of fundamentalist Christianity from Applewhite’s background (as the son of a Baptist preacher with years of seminary training). When The Two needed to explain or justify a particularly strict regime or code of conduct, such as separation from families, they turned to select scriptures from the Bible or New Age precepts to bolster their own authority.

The foundation of the belief system was built around the idea that Ti and Do would be killed by opponents (most likely the authorities), and three and one-half days later a spaceship would arrive to lift them off to the “Next Level,” or the “Level Above Human.” The Two dubbed this event “the Demonstration” in that it was to demonstrate the truth of their message. The Next Level was portrayed by them as an actual physical place, not a spirit world as in other belief systems. They called it “home.” To be saved, one had to follow these Two who claimed to be “Representatives” of the Next Level. Initially, this demonstration was to be imminent, then soon, then when? Days, months, years, even decades passed as Ti, Do, and their followers waited for the spaceship to retrieve them, all that time living within their specially constructed social system.

Meanwhile, their immediate goal was to evolve via individual transformation into the genderless ideal, the “Next Level creature.” Such a transformation was required in order to get on the spaceship. The specific methodology for generating this change, which was conceived of as a physical metamorphosis, was known to them as “The Process.” The idea was to overcome all human tendencies and habits, especially human emotions. The change would occur by each member meeting the tests given by the Next Level and striving at all times to be connected to “Next Level Mind” via their leaders, also called “Older Members.” In her written exit statement one devotee, who joined in 1976, described this relationship as follows:

The only REAL “family” relationship that can be maintained is that between an Older Member and a younger member. As long as the younger member keeps his eyes on his Older Member, and wants with all his heart, mind and soul to please his Older Member, that relationship is forever.

Walking out of the door of one’s life was the first step toward transformation, while other detailed daily routines and more complicated practices evolved over time as the group went into seclusion. Being engaged in The Process bound members to each other and to their leaders, just as it solidified their belief in the message. Over time, the group-defined reality became the only reality by which to live.

Systems of Control

In relation to the systems of control I examined and analyzed the group’s hierarchy and command structure, organizational structures and processes, and the rules and regulations that guided everyday life in the group. The systems of control in Heaven’s Gate can be characterized by discipline and subjugation. As one devotee said, in discussing the requirements for this group, “It will not be easy for you, or anyone.” In self-sealing systems such as this one was, typically, the operating philosophy is “the ends justify the means.”

The context for the transformation described in the previous section was “the Class,” established in April 1976. The Two called their followers together in a campground in the national forest in Laramie, Wyoming. Quickly, the group’s size reduced by half or more as stringent rules and regulations were established to guide the members’ daily lives. Before the formation of the Class, the group had been erratic in its behavior and its own internal discipline. But the Class changed everything, giving structure and a great deal of order to what was until then a rather diffuse movement with little direct leadership. The followers were now “students” of the Next Level, and Ti and Do were their “Teachers,” to be emulated as Older Members of the Next Level. Students were subjected to extensive and extreme regimentation, such as each student reporting every twelve minutes to a central post to see if Ti or Do needed something. If they were away from the group’s central location, students were to “report” in their minds, stopping everything to “tune in” to their leaders. Also Ti and Do conjured up bizarre diets and exercise regimens, and instituted other routines and disciplines, such as expanses of time without speaking and prolonged periods of students covering their heads and faces with hoods. Exercises such as those and more were used to encourage a type of extreme conformity. All of this was explained as their recipe for change, the necessary personal transformation. As Do described it, speaking of his followers:

They will attempt to rid themselves of their old minds, their identities, in exchange for the mind that flows through me, as they attempt to be accepted as one of my “children.” It will “cost” them everything of this world—which they will desperately desire to be quickly rid of.

Immediately upon joining the group, members were to choose new names. At first, they took Biblical names; later, their names changed and were reduced to symbolic ones, with three letters in the first syllable, followed by “ody.” In their writings and in his exit video^[iii], Do explained that the “ody” names were considered diminutives: “These” (as he referred to his followers in a neutral and distanced tone) are “young’uns, children of God, children of the Next Level,” he explained. Thus, the transition to being students carried with it another identity shift, a regressive one. Students were thought of—and thought of themselves—as children, younger, inexperienced, and learning. Their task was to get themselves ready for space travel and for acceptance by the Next Level. The rules only got more severe as weak-willed, disinterested, and skeptical followers drifted away or were ejected from the group. As resistance dwindled, the pressures of the mechanisms of conformity and control were all the more effective.

Ti and Do were always clear about being in charge, although their leadership style was one that relied primarily on indirect methods—for example, explaining what they thought about something or what they were going to do, and then telling their followers that it was up to them to decide for themselves what they were going to do; yet, all the while it was quite clear what the preference was. That particular leadership tactic set up what might be called the illusion of choice, for, indeed, followers knew exactly what was expected of them if they wanted to remain students in this particular Class. Ironically, alongside the indirect leadership method were plenty of rules and regulations for practically everything, from the exact diameter of a breakfast pancake to the exact amount of toothpaste to put on a toothbrush. Errors and backsliding were handled through criticism sessions called “slippage meetings.” The process was not easy, and students clung together in their determination to succeed. Ridding themselves of any semblance of individuality was a main task, as was purging their minds of any tendency to question or to challenge.

Systems of Influence

In relation to the final dimension of the social structure, I examined and analyzed group norms, peer influence and modeling, and commitment. The push to conform was very strong in this group, but in some ways not too different from the norms of conformity found throughout our society. The specifics of this particular context—the ideas, their appearance, their language, the deference to Ti and Do—may seem odd to the outsider, but such conformism is rampant everywhere, as citizens flock to buy the latest fashion or “hot” product or kowtow to their boss or their political leaders. It is the very normalcy of that behavior that made it easy for Ti and Do’s followers to go along with the program. Yet the specifics of this program were excessive and very strict. The Heaven’s Gate systems of influence can be characterized by rejection and self-renunciation.

One former member explained that at all times students were to ponder, “What would my Older Member have me do?” when considering how to behave or react in any activity. An important factor of social influence in this group was the fact that at the time of the group’s formation, both leaders were in their mid-forties and were quite a bit older than most of their followers, who, for the most part, were in their twenties when they were recruited. In that sense, The Two played a parental role, and often fit the part. In interviews after the suicides, one long-time member who had left several years before made the point that when he and his “Classmates” became followers, Applewhite did not look like a “bug-eyed, bald-headed fanatic,” as seen in the media clips taken from his exit video; rather, this follower noted that originally both leaders had soft, gentle appearances and were “just like your folks, only nicer.”

But at the extreme, a feeling of self-hate was instilled in Heaven’s Gate members, reframed as a hatred of their human self, known as the “vehicle” in their parlance. Distaste and disdain for anything human was fostered in them, an attitude that some have speculated had its roots in the self-hatred Applewhite may have experienced in his own troubled life regarding his sexuality. In the exit video recorded by the group members, the troublesome vehicle was one of the most talked-about themes. Evidently struggling with one’s vehicle was a requirement, and a daily reality; yet, the vehicle also served as the intermediary between the human world and the Next Level. This made having a vehicle (or human body) necessary in order to be a student, but at the same time this vehicle was to be rejected because it originated outside the Class and students understood that it would not be needed in the Next Level.

Such a dichotomous worldview becomes all encompassing. Given how sequestered the group was, this worldview rather swiftly became their reified version of reality. For them, life here on planet Earth was merely a training ground, and a torturous one at that. Ti and Do’s students understood that they had to completely separate from the human world in order to achieve their goal. Anything associated with human existence was seen as a threat to their advancement, to their ultimate goal of getting off the planet. Earth and its inhabitants stood for everything that was negative; this world was described as corrupt, polluted, evil, primitive, and barbaric. Human life was equated with ignorance and death. With their leaders as the ultimate role models, the students worked long and hard to achieve their goal.

Charismatic Commitment

The conflation of the four dimensions of the social structure with their accompanying social processes generate in the most devoted members what I call charismatic commitment. This is the juncture at which there is fusion between the ideal of personal freedom (as promised in the stated goal of the group or its ideology) and the demand for self-renunciation (as prescribed by the rules and norms). At this point, the believer becomes a true believer at the service of a charismatic leader or ideology. In such a context, in relation to personal power and individual decision making, that person’s options are severely limited as the devotee lives in a narrow realm of constraint and control, of dedication and duty.

Ti and Do spared no effort at conveying the seriousness of their mission, which helped to foster such a deep commitment. In early meetings as far back as 1975, they had asked their followers how far they would go for the cause. Former members recalled Ti and Do asking such questions as: “Would you be willing to bear arms for this cause?” “Would you do anything?” “Are you prepared to do anything for the Next Level...to adjust that fast?” At other times, students were asked to write commitment notes describing the extent of their commitment. And Applewhite readily conveyed the need for such a commitment in his writings, talks with his followers, and audio and video recordings.

To seal the deal, members were motivated by a compelling moral imperative. Rather early on in the life of the group, adherents learned and came to believe that at an earlier time in their lives they had received a “deposit” of Next Level knowledge. Believing you had such a deposit was regarded as proof that you were destined to be with the group. It meant that you had had some connection to Ti and Do in a previous life. In other words, once you knew,you had to act. Having a Next Level deposit was acknowledged by the group as a sense of “knowing,” or an internal recognition. The opposite of having this special knowledge, of course, was to be ignorant, which meant having no knowledge of the Next Level, or perhaps once having had it and rejecting it. This growing sense of elitism in the group was expressed by one long-time member when he said, “The Class is only open to people that are part of this family, that have that deposit of Next Level mind.” That right was both an opportunity and an obligation. Even if someone had the deposit, he or she still had to go through the tests, train to develop, and prove readiness to the Next Level. Ti and Do, as the Next Level’s representatives here on Earth, were key to that process. Nothing was given, except that which was given by their leaders.

After a time, based on group discussions, adherents understood something even more significant than the deposit of knowledge. They came to understand that they, like their leaders, were also beings from the Next Level who had assumed, or taken over, human bodies. Thus, it was not only Ti and Do who were not human, but also the students were not human, had never been human, and did not belong here. They were all part of an extraterrestrial crew sent here for training and now waiting to go home. This is a very significant factor affecting the group’s sense of cohesion, as well as a major source of each member’s loyalty to the group. This idea, perhaps more than any other, bound them to the system, to each other, and to their leaders. The Heaven’s Gate worldview cleverly served to make sense of the adherents’ pre-group lives by reframing their past experiences. The alienation prevalent among many of their generation was particularized in each one of them by the group’s teachings. The result was that students believed that any sense of alienation they might have felt was directly attributable to a prior connection to the Next Level and their real purpose here on Earth, which was to leave and go back home.

The Self-Sealing System: Bounded Reality

As the social dynamic closes in on itself, adherents find themselves living within a bounded reality whose parameters are enclosed and defined by the self-sealing system. This is evidenced in each dimension as follows:

Charismatic authority: leadership was secretive and inaccessible

Transcendent belief system: group doctrine was inviolable, came down from on high, and required personal transformation according to a formula set out by the leader/group

Systems of control: rigid boundaries defined inaccessible space and topics closed to discussion or inquiry

Systems of influence: internalized norms, all-pervasive modeling, and constant peer monitoring ruled out inappropriate questioning

In the case of Heaven’s Gate, this social reality evolved as a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the years passed, Applewhite and his students grew old together. During the many years of being sequestered, the members had bonded into a closed, unified group. In August 1994 they produced a poster with a bold, all-capitalized headline blaring out at the world:

UFO TWO AND CREW SAY:

“THE SHEDDING OF OUR BORROWED HUMAN BODIES MAY BE REQUIRED IN ORDER TO TAKE OUR NEW BODIES BELONGING TO THE NEXT WORLD.”

IF YOU WANT TO LEAVE WITH US YOU MUST BE WILLING TO LOSE EVERYTHING OF THIS WORLD IN ORDER TO HAVE LIFE IN THE NEXT.

CLING TO THIS WORLD AND YOU’LL SURELY DIE.

From this statement it is apparent that the physical metamorphosis talked about in the early years had evolved into an understanding that they would be leaving behind their human bodies, mere “vehicles” to be shed “like an old used car,” as one student remarked in his exit statement.

Over time the group’s discourse had turned more to evacuation and leaving the planet. On the Internet members were posting more and more statements about leaving and about the wasteland of planet Earth and human life. Apparently their messages were not well received by Netizens, which added to Applewhite’s and his followers’ level of frustration and growing sense of demoralization, as well as contributing to the decision to depart. They wrote, “The weeds have taken over the garden and truly disturbed its usefulness beyond repair—it is time for the civilization to be recycled—‘spaded under.’” The Heaven’s Gate book (a self-published historical rendering written primarily by Do but which also included other documents, such as flyers, newspaper advertisements, various position papers, and members’ exit statements) was added to their Web site in April 1996, along with a notice implying that this might be their last interaction with the human level (Representatives from the Kingdom of Heaven 1996). By this time they were referring to themselves as the “Away Team.” They were completing their task and about to leave for home. In February 1997 members posted an Internet message and also left a message at the entry to their Web site about the Hale-Bopp comet. They indicated that it was a sign of the end, the marker they had been waiting for.

Personal Closure and Bounded Choice

Apparently at the time of his death Marshall Applewhite was suffering from severe heart disease and had been at high risk for a heart attack (Clark 1997). Within the grapevine of former followers, cult-watchers, and academics who studied the group, there were rumors that Applewhite thought he had liver cancer or prostate cancer. He had told at least some of his followers that he thought he was dying. Whatever the final decisive factor—and surely, there were at least several—it is likely that the members of this close-knit group, who waited so patiently over the years for the spaceship to come, and who submitted to a life of struggle and deprivation, were ecstatic that the time had come when they were finally going to be able to leave. Some had been waiting more than twenty years.

Ironically, the biggest draw of Ti and Do’s belief system was related to its promise of overcoming death. Members who joined and worked hard enough were supposed to be saved from death. Even if they did not make it this time, their soul would be put on ice for a later pickup. Following Ti and Do was believed to be the only way to end the cycle of reincarnation; suicide was not in that picture. Yet, in the end, Applewhite and his followers decided the time had come and that suicide was acceptable, even though he and they maintained that they were not dying but were going to the Next Level. In the end, he and his followers precipitated their departure by imbibing a fatally poisonous drink. From their video-recorded farewell statements, we can surmise that they expected to wake up aboard a spacecraft on their way home. As Do said in his exit video, in a spirit of resolve and with a tinge of anger in his voice:

Our cause is to let you know we are returning to life after a visitation with death….

Suicide is separation from the Kingdom when the Kingdom has reached out and offered life to you.

It is suicide not to leave.

It is to take life to leave.

This is not life to us. This is primitive, barbaric. This is history.

We are about to regain life.

Given the degree of dependency the followers had on Applewhite and Nettles, it is not surprising that they chose to go with him when he was ready to exit. Perhaps the fear of being left alone was greater than confronting the possibility that perhaps Applewhite was wrong. One followers exit statement expressed that sentiment clearly:

I know who my Older Members, Ti and Do, are. I believe in, cleave to, trust in, and rely totally upon them. I know my Older Member, Do, is going to his Older Member, Ti, at this time. Once He is gone, there is nothing left here on the face of the Earth for me, no reason to stay a moment longer. Furthermore, I know that my graft to Them would be jeopardized if I linger here once They have departed. I know my classmates/siblings feel the same as I do and will be choosing to go when Do goes. I want to stay with my Next Level family. Choosing to exit this borrowed human vehicle or body and go home to the Next Level is an opportunity for me to demonstrate my loyalty, commitment, love, trust, and faith in Ti and Do and the Next Level.

Ultimately, the devoted and enmeshed Heaven’s Gate students stayed with their leader, going wherever his decision and course of action would take them. As time wore on, the formerly unthinkable option of death by their own doing (suicide) became an acceptable act because it meant they could finally leave. Leaving took precedence over overcoming death. The final promise of freedom from life on Earth was theirs at last.

To help make some sense of this picture I draw on the works of Anthony Giddens (1979, 1984); Herbert Simon (1955, 1956, 1967, 1979); Edgar Schein (1961, 1992); and Robert Jay Lifton (1961, 1968, 1986, 1987, 1999). A closed, self-sealing system, as exemplified by Heaven’s Gate, holds both positive and negative aspects for its adherents. The positive, or lure of personal salvation, must be there or no one would ever be attracted to it in the first place. In cultic groups, this positive and negative dialectic unfolds constantly, as adherents twist and turn to adapt to the dualistic system. Given that expressing negatives is not allowed, members focus primarily on their positive interpretations in order to minimize their feelings of distress as they increase their expressions and acts of faith. If a member wants to stay with the group—this newfound family—then he or she quickly learns that engaging the negative is counter to the system. It is through that adaptive (and sometimes coercive) process that the adherent becomes caught in a self-sealing, cultic system in which she or he acts, but is also acted upon.

One outcome of this process is a social-psychological state called “personal closure” (Lifton, 1961). The dualistic dimensions of the self-sealing social structure create personal boundaries around and within the person and constrict the new self, the group-identified self. The member feels completely separated from his or her pre-group identity and cannot imagine life outside the group. The state of personal closure is the individualized version of the larger self-sealing system in which he or she participates and is bound by. The person turns inward, refusing to look at or consider other ideas, beliefs, or options. The personal closure that is the culmination of cultic life is profoundly confining because the individual is closed to both the outside world and her or his own inner life (Lifton 1961). In this instance, the adherent’s value structure has been altered, or shifted, by the depth and quality of the belief change and participation in the social processes (Zablocki 1998). When such a shift occurs, individual choice is no longer an individual matter.

In this context, human agency (and therefore, free will) is constrained by the duality of structure—a social-psychological state of being that I have identified as “bounded choice” (Lalich 2001, 2004). The decision-making process is skewed in favor of the collectivity. In general, organizational choices are made by the leader, for no one else is qualified or has the authority to do so. Personal choices, if and when they arise, first of all, are formulated within and constrained by the self-sealing framework and style of consideration, which always puts the organization first. Second, those choices are limited and bounded by the constriction of the member’s thought patterns, which, once more, always put the organization first. Choice is constrained by both external and internalized sanctions, both real and imagined. This is the heart of the concept of bounded choice.

This perspective, although bleak, helps us understand how behaviors or actions that might look crazy or irrational to the outsider (such as committing suicide or perpetrating violent, illegal, or sectarian acts) tend to look completely rational from the perspective of that person living inside and in alignment with the cult’s reality. As for free will, there is not exactly loss of free will or free choice, but free will is subsumed under the will of the group/leader and is altered and distorted. Thus, as the case of Heaven’s Gate revealed, individual choices are constrained by the close-mindedness of the system and the equally limiting close-mindedness of the individual who functions in alliance with that system. If we recognize free will as voluntary choice or an informed decision, one that is “not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention” (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary 1993)—then what choice does the truly devoted cult member have? In my opinion, based on this study, none—other than those “given” by the bounded reality of the cult context.

Summation

It is my hope that through systematic study we might gain an understanding of the sophistication of groups such as Heaven’s Gate. I have tried to do so by unraveling, describing, and analyzing the interlocking nature of the charismatic relationship, the principles of the belief system, and the mechanisms and processes of influence and control. The result, in this case, was a combination of organizational structure and human agency that served to constrain individual choices within the group context by encapsulating the worldview of the true believer. Indeed, charisma and belief make up the foundation upon which such an ideological system is constructed. But a totalistic ideology gathers its strength when it is put into practice. Making such a belief system an everyday reality requires more than just inspirational rhetoric and urgent messages of destruction and salvation. It also requires organizational and social controls—and the energy of true believers.

References

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Balch, R. W. (1982). Bo and Peep: A case study of the origins of messianic leadership. In R. Wallis (Ed.), Millennialism and charisma (pp. 13-72). Belfast: The Queen's University.

— (1995). Waiting for the ships: Disillusionment and the revitalization of faith in Bo and Peep's UFO cult. In J. R. Lewis (Ed.), The gods have landed (pp. 137-166). Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press.

Balch, R. W., & Taylor, D. (1976). Salvation in a UFO. Psychology Today, pp. 58, 60-62, 66, 106.

— (1977). Seekers and saucers: The role of the cultic milieu in joining a UFO cult. American Behavioral Scientist, 20, 839-860.

— (2002). Making sense of the Heaven's Gate suicides. In D. G. Bromley & J. G. Melton (Eds.), Cults, religion and violence (pp. 209-228). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Clark, C. (1997, April 12). Cultist Applewhite had a severe heart disease. San Diego Union-Tribune [on-line, www.uniontrib.com/reports/cult_suicide/news_in12reports.html/.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and contradiction in social analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

— (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Lalich, J. (2000). Bounded choice: The fusion of personal freedom and self-renunciation in two transcendent groups. Ph.D. dissertation, Fielding Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA.

— (2004). Bounded choice: True believers and charismatic cults. Berkeley, CA: University ofCalifornia Press.

Lifton, R. J. (1961). Thought reform and the psychology of totalism. New York: Norton.

— (1968). Revolutionary immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese cultural revolution. New York: Random House.

— (1986). The Nazi doctors. New York: Basic Books.

— (1987). The future of immortality and other essays for a nuclear age. New York: Basic Books.

— (1999). Destroying the world to save it: Aum Shinrikyo, apocalyptic violence, and the new global terrorism. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (1993). Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.

Representatives from the Kingdom of Heaven (1996). How and when "Heaven's Gate" (The door to the physical Kingdom Level Above Human) may be entered. Santa Fe, NM: Heaven's Representatives.

Schein, E. H. (1961). Coercive persuasion. New York: Norton.

— (1992). Organizational culture and leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Simon, H. A. (1955). A behavioral model of rational choice. Quarterly Journal of Economics69, 99-118.

— (1956). Rational choice and the structure of the environment. Psychological Review 63, 129-138.

— (1967). Motivational and emotional controls of cognition. Psychological Review 74, 29-39.

— (1979). Models of thought. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Smelser, N. J. (1962). Theory of collective behavior. New York: Free Press.

Weber, M. (1946a). “Bureaucracy.” In H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (pp. 196-244). New York: Oxford University Press.

____ (1946b). “The sociology of charismatic authority.” In H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (pp. 245-252). New York: Oxford UniversityPress.

____ (1922/1964). The sociology of religion. E. Bischoff, trans. Boston: Beacon Press.

____ (1947/1968). “The nature of charismatic authority and its routinization.” In S.N. Eisenstadt (Ed.), Max Weber: On charisma and institution building (pp. 48-65). Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Zablocki, B. D. (1998). Exit cost analysis: A new approach to the scientific study of brainwashing. Nova Religio 1, 216-249.

---

[i] Real names (Bonnie Nettles and Marshall Applewhite) and their chosen names (The Two, and Ti and Do) are used interchangeably throughout this paper.

[ii] I am indebted to Balch and Taylor for much of the detail about the lives of Applewhite and Nettles at the time of their meeting, as well as for some of the information about their early years together and the early years of the group.

[iii] Exit videos, sometimes referred to as goodbye videos, were left behind by the group, and were sent to sympathetic followers to distribute to various media outlets to announce and explain their “departure.” There were two videos: one of Do speaking, seated before his followers, which was recorded the night before the suicides began; the other was of the students, mostly in pairs, speaking for several minutes each and saying their final farewells.'

---

[i] This paper was originally prepared for and presented at the annual meeting of the American Family Foundation, “Understanding Cults, NRMs, and Other Groups,” Edmonton,Alberta, Canada, June 12, 2004. Much of the material is drawn from my book Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults (Lalich, 2004).

Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), has just published (October 2, 1991 - Vol. 266, No. 13) a lengthy rebuttal article to an earlier one on the TM movement and Maharishi Ayur-Veda.

Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), has just published (October 2, 1991 - Vol. 266, No. 13) a lengthy rebuttal article to an earlier one on the TM movement and Maharishi Ayur-Veda. 

A multitude of letters (according to one spokesman for the AMA, the largest response to a single article they have ever received) deluged The Journal. Because the authors failed to report in the financial disclosure form required by JAMA that they were affiliated with "organizations that promote and sell products and services about which they wrote, "the rebuttal letter writers have all had to submit such disclosures. AFF president Herbert Rosedale, Patrick Ryan, Dr. Ralph Smith, Marcia Rudin, Kevin Garvey, and Dr. Hohn Hochman were among the many respondents published.

TM-EX is Founded to Aid Former Transcendental Meditation Practitioners

From "Group Claims TM Movement Is a Cult," the Washington Post, July 2, 1987, p. C3

On the eve of a "yogic flying" demonstration for members of the U.S. House of Representatives by followers of Transcendental Meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a group of former TM practitioners and concerned members of the Cult Awareness Network gathered at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington to debunk the "flying" and warn about cults.

The group charged in a press conference July 1 that TM, of which "yogic flying" is an advanced stage, is not simply a method of relaxation through meditation, but a cult that ultimately seeks to strip individuals of their ability to think and choose freely.

"They want you to dress and think and speak in a certain way and not to ask questions. They go into hypnotic trances and shut off who they are as a person," said Steven Hassan, a former member of the Unification Church who has studied cults for a decade. He said that TM adherents suffer a "destruction of personality. It's an addiction, akin to alcohol and drugs," and stressed that "physical and psychological harm" may result from using TM techniques "even if only for a short time."

But Mark Haviland of Maharishi International University's College of Natural Law maintained that TM is "not a philosophy, a life style, or a religion," but "a very simple, useful thing [with] practical benefits of relaxation, of increased inner potential."

Haviland said that so far only the first stage of yogic flying, "hopping," had been achieved, but that "given the results we've experienced so far, we feel that it won't be long before we'll be getting onto the second and third stage" of "hovering" and "actual flight." He said the important thing is the."coherence" that the "flying" creates individually and collectively, "which leads to world peace."

Joe Kelly and John Taity, two former TM adherents who studied yogic flying at MIU in Fairfield, IA, demonstrated the technique at the press conference. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, they hopped in an awkward forward motion that lifted them into the air a few inches.

"It's strictly physical exercise," said Kelly. "There's nothing spiritual about it."

Former MIU student Patrick L. Ryan said he studied yogic flying in a "totalitarian environment" where every minute of his day was programmed, but that he "never saw anybody fly."

Ryan said that a new group called TM-EX is being formed to offer support to those leaving the TM movement. He said that when he left the movement he received help from CAN and a related group, FOCUS, which offers support for those seeking to leave "cultic or totalistic involvement."

Ryan has sued the Maharishi for compensation for the eight years he said he devoted to raising money and promoting TM.

Ex-members of TM said at the press conference that TM is in fact a religion for its adherents, and that the Maharishi is seen as a god.

Patricia Ryan, daughter of California Representative Leo J. Ryan, who was shot to death in 1978 in Guyana by a member of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple, said that "bright, idealistic people are the most vulnerable" to movements such as TM, of which "they become unsuspecting victims."

Meanwhile, a spokesman for Republican Representative Jim Leach of Iowa said the congressman set up a room in the Rayburn Building for the TM adherents to demonstrate yogic flying after receiving a request from MIU in Fairfield, which is located in Leach's congressional district.

The spokesman said that Leach, after being told of the criticisms of the TM movement, responded that MIU is "accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools and also recognized by the Federal Interagency Commission on Education." He quoted Leach as saying that he has "no objection to any American citizen expressing their First Amendment rights on Capitol Hill or elsewhere."

Cult Observer, Vol. 4, No. 4, 1987, p. 7

Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View

Stanley Milgram

Tavistock, 1974 - Authority - 224 pages

In the 1960s Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram famously carried out a series of experiments that forever changed our perceptions of morality and free will. The subjects--or "teachers"--were instructed to administer electroshocks to a human "learner," with the shocks becoming progressively more powerful and painful. Controversial but now strongly vindicated by the scientific community, these experiments attempted to determine to what extent people will obey orders from authority figures regardless of consequences. "Obedience to Authority" is Milgram's fascinating and troubling chronicle of his classic study and a vivid and persuasive explanation of his conclusions. 

Girl Forced Into Blood Transfusion Can't Sue

Jeff D. Gorman

Court House News

July 12, 2013

(CN) - It is too late for a 15-year-old Jehovah's Witness to fight the appointment of a guardian who forced her to undergo a life-saving blood transfusion, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled.

Sheila W., as she is named in the decision, was 15 when she was diagnosed in early 2012 with aplastic anemia, an illness in which the patient's immune system attacks the bone marrow.

She declined to undergo life-saving blood transfusions, and her parents supported her decision. They are Jehovah's Witnesses and believe that God does not allow blood transfusions.

Citing the biblical passage Acts 15: 28-29, Sheila told a Dane County judge that a transfusion would be equivalent to "rape."

When the county petitioned for temporary physical custody, the court held a hearing at the hospital and appointed a temporary guardian to decide whether to consent to the recommended transfusions.

With the guardian's consent, "an undetermined number of blood transfusions were administered to Sheila," according to the ruling.

Sheila appealed, but the order to appoint the guardian expired while the action was pending and the Court of Appeals dismissed the case as moot.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed Wednesday.

"No determination of this court will have any practical legal effect upon an existing controversy because the order being appealed has expired," the unsigned opinion states.

While all of the parties agreed on the mootness subject, Sheila wanted the state's highest court to rule on the issue of whether Wisconsin recognizes her rights as a mature minor to make medical decision and whether the appointment of the guardian violated her constitutional rights.

Despite their acknowledgement that the case "undoubtedly presents issues of public importance," the justices declined to rule on the merits of the case.

"We deem it unwise to decide such substantial social policy issues with far-reaching implications based on a single fact situation in a case that is moot," they wrote.

Justice David Prosser wrote a longer concurrent opinion.

"Permitting a minor to refuse lifesaving medical treatment comes uncomfortably close to permitting a minor to commit suicide," he wrote.

Justice Michael Gabelman wrote in dissent that the court should have ruled on the merits of the case.

"The Sheila W.s of this state may have to wait a long time before the legislators on white horses arrive," Gabelman wrote. "In the meantime, the actual problem of what to do with minors who refuse life-saving treatment will remain unresolved."

One week earlier, the court affirmed the convictions of Leilani and Dale Neumann, a "Pentecostal" couple whose daughter died as they prayed over her instead of seeking medical treatment.

(CN) - It is too late for a 15-year-old Jehovah's Witness to fight the appointment of a guardian who forced her to undergo a life-saving blood transfusion, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled.

Sheila W., as she is named in the decision, was 15 when she was diagnosed in early 2012 with aplastic anemia, an illness in which the patient's immune system attacks the bone marrow.

She declined to undergo life-saving blood transfusions, and her parents supported her decision. They are Jehovah's Witnesses and believe that God does not allow blood transfusions.

 Citing the biblical passage Acts 15: 28-29, Sheila told a Dane County judge that a transfusion would be equivalent to "rape."

When the county petitioned for temporary physical custody, the court held a hearing at the hospital and appointed a temporary guardian to decide whether to consent to the recommended transfusions.

With the guardian's consent, "an undetermined number of blood transfusions were administered to Sheila," according to the ruling.

Sheila appealed, but the order to appoint the guardian expired while the action was pending and the Court of Appeals dismissed the case as moot.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed Wednesday.

"No determination of this court will have any practical legal effect upon an existing controversy because the order being appealed has expired," the unsigned opinion states.

While all of the parties agreed on the mootness subject, Sheila wanted the state's highest court to rule on the issue of whether Wisconsin recognizes her rights as a mature minor to make medical decision and whether the appointment of the guardian violated her constitutional rights.

Despite their acknowledgement that the case "undoubtedly presents issues of public importance," the justices declined to rule on the merits of the case.

"We deem it unwise to decide such substantial social policy issues with far-reaching implications based on a single fact situation in a case that is moot," they wrote.

Justice David Prosser wrote a longer concurrent opinion.

"Permitting a minor to refuse lifesaving medical treatment comes uncomfortably close to permitting a minor to commit suicide," he wrote.

Justice Michael Gabelman wrote in dissent that the court should have ruled on the merits of the case.

"The Sheila W.s of this state may have to wait a long time before the legislators on white horses arrive," Gabelman wrote. "In the meantime, the actual problem of what to do with minors who refuse life-saving treatment will remain unresolved."

One week earlier, the court affirmed the convictions of Leilani and Dale Neumann, a "Pentecostal" couple whose daughter died as they prayed over her instead of seeking medical treatment. 

Sex and Death on the Road to Nirvana

One of America's most controversial gurus had a plan to take Tibetan Buddhism mainstream. Then one of his converts died in the Arizona desert and the secrets started spilling out

by NINA BURLEIGH

For the past two months, Christie McNally and her husband, Ian Thorson, who had both recently been kicked out of a nearby Buddhist retreat she was leading, had been on their own, living in a cave, imitating the Indian and Tibetan sages in the ancient stories they had studied. They slept curled together on a futon he had dragged up the mountainside so that his wife wouldn't have to lie on the earthen floor. Between them, they had one sleeping bag to protect them from the howling winter winds. They meditated for hours each day, believing they'd made a deep connection with the sudden storms and the wild animals, especially a family of coatimundi that visited and shared their meals. The sun heard their thoughts, too. McNally felt it rise in response to her pre-dawn meditations, and she woke in the dark to bring on the light. For sustenance, they sipped a little of the rainwater they collected and nibbled canned food they'd hauled uphill.

The Hugging Saint
When the EMTs finally showed up, helicoptering in from an Air Force base in Tucson and rappelling down into their cave, Thorson was already dead. Though he was only 38, he looked like an old man; over six feet tall, his corpse weighed barely 100 pounds. McNally was severely dehydrated, but she survived. The couple's water jug was empty except for about a cup of brownish liquid. Bins of dried peas were stashed outside another cave. Among their few modern conveniences were a cellphone and a tracking beacon.

Everything about the case astonished authorities. This was a wilderness so forbidding, so haunted by angry spirits and infested with rattlesnakes, that even the local Navajo refused to spend the night here. But as the details emerged, it became clear that the way Thorson died was just the tragic conclusion of a saga of obsessive love and religious fervor run amok.The story of how two educated people ended up living – and one dying – alone in a spiritual retreat in a tiny Arizona cave, like the ancient hermits, begins and ends with a man named Michael Roach. A 60-year-old boyish, impermeably cheerful one-time diamond merchant, Roach claimed to have achieved the highest levels of Tibetan Buddhism and had adapted the principles of that tradition into a uniquely American practice.

The ideal of Mahayana Buddhism – the branch of Buddhism that Roach has studied and teaches – is a spiritual hero called the Bodhisattva. He can be divine or human, but a hallmark of the Bodhisattva is that while he attains a level of enlightenment enabling him to exit the cycle of birth and death, he chooses to remain behind and help others.

To his followers, who know him as Geshe Michael (a Geshe degree is one of Tibetan Buddhism's highest academic achievements and often takes decades to acquire), Roach is one of these rare beings. They speak of a man who can walk through walls, see into the future and, some believe, cast powerful spells against those who cross him. He is also a highly controversial figure, who has rejected some of the orthodoxy of Tibetan Buddhism and molded the practice to suit his own private purposes and goals, selling the notion that meditation is not simply the path to enlightenment but to earthly love and worldly riches. He travels the world as a business consultant often draped in robes, teaching karma to Chinese businessmen, Russian oligarchs and their employees, and European and American entrepreneurs who want to know how Buddhist precepts can help them get and stay rich. "Ancient wisdom, modern success" is his motto.

He has also broken his monastic vows by getting married. He has saved and translated ancient texts into simple English, but he has also fashioned a new lifestyle religion by incorporating yoga into his teaching and made what many in the world of Tibetan Buddhism see as a devil's bargain with the Chinese. In 2006, the Dalai Lama's office admonished Roach, saying that his "unconventional behavior does not accord with His Holiness' teachings." American Buddhist scholars veer between scorn and horror.

Since Thorson's death, neither Roach nor McNally have spoken to the press. But both agreed to interviews with Rolling Stone – Roach on the condition that he would not answer questions about Thorson's demise, and McNally responding with a sprawling 44-page document.NAs a teen, he grew out his hair, opposed the Vietnam War, did mescaline in the desert and played Crosby, Stills and Nash covers in a band with his brothers. Precociously smart, especially with languages, he won a scholarship to Princeton. There, studying religion, he found the path to Buddhism. During his junior year, his mother was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. Roach was devastated. He took a semester off to go to India, where he met Tibetan Buddhists in exile and eventually was able to take his dying mom to meet the Dalai Lama himself. "A lama told me to bring my mother to India, to let them teach her how to die," he says. "It was very beautiful."

It was on that trip that he decided to devote his life to Tibetan Buddhism, both as a way to come to grips with the tragedies that would envelop his life (soon after his mother's death, one of his brothers committed suicide, and not long after that, his father died of lung cancer) and as a vehicle for his intense worldly ambitions.

After Princeton, Roach moved into a house in Howell, New Jersey, with a high-ranking Tibetan monk named Khensur Rinpoche Tharchin, who would help him gain entree to Sera Mey, a college at one of the three main Tibetan monasteries in India. Roach's branch of Tibetan Buddhism is the most conservative of the four main lineages. Tibetan monastic training is medieval in its rigors, requiring thousands of hours of self-denial, study and debate. Out of a handful of non-Tibetan students at the monastery, Roach claims he was the only American who survived the course. "And it was very hard on me."
But as the Tibetans welcomed his money and honored him with ordination, he began to openly flout their ancient teachings. Over the years, he has suggested he achieved the highest Buddhist meditative level possible for human beings, called "seeing emptiness." For a monk to publicly state he saw emptiness is a breach of vows; not even the Dalai Lama will make this claim.
By the early Nineties, Roach was teaching his own brand of Tibetan Buddhism to a small group of New Yorkers. The essence of Roach's evolving approach – now available in 13 books and thousands of video and audio teachings over the years – is that to get what you want, you must first give it away. In his words, altruism will "sharpen" the "seeds" of your karma. If you want money, you must help a poor person start a business. If you want love, find a lonely elderly person and become a constant selfless companion. Traditional Buddhism preaches that it can take a lifetime, if not longer, to attain what one desires. But Roach teaches his followers that these desires can be fulfilled almost immediately – you can be rich and beloved as early as next week.

In addition to teaching that karma can be sped up if one knows how to do it, Roach also tantalizes followers with the promise of revealing the greatest esoteric secrets from inside the ancient monasteries – the tantra. Tantra is a mystical Buddhist practice that takes monks years to achieve, involving arcane ritual, mantras and mandalas;­ self-identification with deities; secret initiation ceremonies; and altered states of consciousness that can lead to out-of-body or extreme, even orgasmic, experiences. As Roach teaches it, tantra is the ultimate key to quickening the karma.

But Roach's easy-to-grasp teaching has a flip side. Good acts bring you good things, but negative thoughts or actions cause bad things to happen to a person. If your husband beats you up or you get cancer, it's a reflection of your bad karma. "Here in New York City, with all these people who want to think they are the smartest person in the room, you think on this and you can decide that you caused the war in Iraq by stepping on an ant," says Kelly Morris, a prominent New York yoga teacher who says she brought hundreds of acolytes to Roach. "He taught how everything experienced, be it a hangnail or cancer, is the result of one's own imperfect karma. It's the ideal worldview for a control freak – and insanity-inducing."

Roach dispensed with some of the orthodoxy, but one tenet he maintained was feudal-age lama reverence. To underscore the importance of one's teacher, Roach's acolytes consumed dutsi, pills that supposedly contain bits of symbolic scatological material going back to Buddha (a secretive practice among Tibetan Buddhist initiates). "People worked for free in order to catapult their karma out of the prosaic shitter," says Morris. "So you had a lot of people eating shit, literally and figuratively."In the late 1990s, Christie McNally met Roach at one of his seminars in New York. In her early twenties at the time, she'd recently graduated from NYU and was fresh off a trip to India. Raised in L.A. by her mom, who was divorced from her lawyer father, McNally quickly became an important figure in Roach's growing spiritual empire, and she and GM – as he was known to followers – became inseparable. In fact, in 1998, they were secretly married in Rhode Island, breaking the cardinal rule forbidding monks to marry.

During their courtship, Roach invited McNally to join his inner circle, a small group of students he had invited to study the "secret teachings." "Tantra is a word that gets imaginations rolling, but in reality it meant we would get together somewhere and go through some highly secret Tibetan text," McNally recalls. "People would see us all sneaking off together and were very curious. I think all the drama was created so we would feel like it was a really special teaching. And it made other people jealous, which is one of GM's specialties."
The vow "presented certain difficulties," McNally admits. Anyone with an appointment with Roach had a de facto appointment with her, too, so not only their own but other people's privacy was compromised. "There was a lot of complaining about that one," she says. For McNally, it also meant she was unable to come and go as she pleased, which limited visits to her mother in California. "Families were a useless distraction to his path," she says. "This was hard for my mom."

They moved to a 10-acre piece of land near Tombstone, Arizona, given to Roach on loan. He recruited a group of his students as unpaid volunteers to move to the ranch as support staff and keep everyone fed, while he and his silent followers meditated 12 hours a day, never spoke and communed with birds, snakes and the stars.

The first retreat, as it came to be known among the followers, raised Roach's spiritual credibility in parts of the greater American Buddhist community. Though many Buddhists engage in silent retreats, few do so for more than a short period of time. When he emerged in 2003, he gave interviews to Arizona papers who reported on the curiosity of a real­life Rip Van Winkle who was saying he had only just learned about 9/11. But inside the retreat, which they'd dubbed "Diamond Mountain," the truth was murkier. According to one volunteer, there were complaints that Roach was having sex with some of the women. (Roach's camp states, "In the three years, there was not a single occasion when Geshe Michael was alone with any retreatant other than his partner.")

That volunteer eventually decided the retreat itself was a sham. He says he saw a radio in one of the yurts and believed that Roach and his followers actually knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks within hours. Contrary to the ascetic veneer, he says Roach also flew in New York yogis to teach private classes and ordered lavish vegan meals, prepared by the band of volunteers who had forsaken their own bank accounts and careers to serve the retreat. One of the original silent followers, now a California-based Buddhist nun, says that if anyone saw a radio, it would have only been used for sacred music and teachings, not keeping up with news. She declined to comment on the sex, noting that they meditated in isolation.

Emerging from the retreat, Roach and McNally announced to the Buddhist community that they were now a couple – though they still kept the fact of their marriage a secret (it would remain secret until they were divorced in 2010). Their relationship was highly idiosyncratic. "I did not marry GM because I was in love with him," McNally says. "And he did not marry me because he was in love with me. That was not the nature of the relationship. He was my lama. And for him, I was an emanation of a divine being."
In public interviews, Roach maintained that he was still technically celibate, saying that he had not consorted "with a human female" – because McNally, he claimed, was the incarnation of the goddess Vajrayogini, a feminine Buddha deity.

In a 2003 interview with a Buddhist journal, Roach said that spiritual sex with McNally/Vajrayogini was an ordeal. "In the actual practice of higher physical forms of tantric yoga, these are extremely difficult, physically – they are unpleasant, quite unpleasant for the physical body and quite . . ." (At this point, McNally interrupted to say, "Exhausting!") "Difficult for the physical body," he continued. "It's not fun."

McNally's mother disapproved of the union ("She did not trust GM," McNally recalls). And Tibetan Buddhists were also not amused by the relationship. The office of the Dalai Lama issued a rebuke, and Roach's associates urged him to remove his robes to indicate that he was not celibate. When he refused, Robert Thurman, a former ordained monk, tried to reason with him. "I asked him to meet," says Thurman, who is married and long ago resigned his robes. "He finally came with his consort to Columbia. I told him to go back to being a lay minister, to take off the robes. Bottom line is, he said he wouldn't give up the robes. He said, 'I have never consorted with a human female,' and I said to Christie, 'Are you human?' And she didn't say yes or no. She said, 'He said it, I didn't.'"

Thurman felt McNally was young and naive and being manipulated by Roach, but McNally felt empowered. According to her, the retreat had altered their dynamic. She had gone into it as Roach's lesser, emerging as his equal. "The roles in the play now had changed from teacher and student to 'partners,'" she says, and goes on to say that since Roach was interested in embracing his feminine side, "normal sexual relations between two married partners were absent from this relationship."

Instead of waiting for new acolytes to come to them, Roach and McNally began holding classes at popular New York yoga studios like Jivamukti, whose clientele included Wall Street bankers, fashionistas like Donna Karan and celebrities such as Sting, Russell Simmons and Madonna. He had translated the Yoga Sutra from Sanskrit and spoke of how yoga could lead to enlightenment. "His teaching was the missing link in the writings on the Yoga Sutra," says Morris. "Nobody had accomplished what was described in there, and here was somebody who had. I was moved. He was a good, holy, honest man then."

Soon Morris and other members of the yoga community were teaching their own students yoga-Buddhism – the Roach way. And, as Roach had hoped, the world beyond the small community of American Buddhists was starting to pay attention.

Roach and McNally began traveling the globe, spreading their gospel. Though the American Geshe was persona non grata in Dharamsala, in South America and especially in Asia, Roach's fast-and-easy prosperity yoga-Buddhism was gaining him a following. But there were those who were turned off by his merger of capitalism, Buddhism and yoga.

"Bringing yoga in was so far off base," one former follower says. "I asked Michael, 'What in hell were you doing trying to blend this yoga crap into Mahayana Buddhism?' He said that with his teachings and tapes, how many people can I reach? 10,000? 50,000? But with yoga, I can reach millions. He is the best carny barker I have ever seen."SSoon after the retreat ended, Roach purchased a new property with funds collected from supporters – a 1,000-acre ranch in a valley beneath the ruins of Fort Bowie in the Apache Highlands. They christened the property Diamond Mountain University. "We designed it to be like Aristotle's academy," Roach says. "It would be a place for true intellectual inquiry and things like that."

Students came, some with money to build their own small adobe cottages or yurts, others flying in for weekends. Within a year, hundreds of people were coming and going, seekers of all sorts, from Ph.D.s in physics to never-employed hippies, some staying for a few weeks, others moving in and helping clear the tumbleweed and serve the spiritual leaders in exchange for wisdom.

Locals began talking about the "crummy carnival" and swapped stories of young women bending low on the dirt road that leads out of the property and kissing the tire tracks of cars carrying VIPs. Shrines sprouted among the cacti, with offerings of food for Buddha that attracted bears, which the state wildlife rangers had to come in and kill. Roach taught that Buddha had a special affinity for expensive chocolate, so the students put dark chocolate and other goodies at the outdoor shrines. One of their neighbors' dogs died after devouring one of these offerings.

The environment of Diamond Mountain began to trouble outside observers. "Certainly, it had become a cult," says Thurman, "defined as a religion-based community where the leader is given complete authority over his followers and is not accountable for his actions."

There was a disco ball in the temple. Every two weeks the lights went down for a wild bacchanalia to celebrate Vajrayogini, which they called a tsechu. Alcohol, normally forbidden to practicing Buddhists, was on the menu. Roach denies drinking, but Morris says, "He won't admit to the partying, because everything that happens at the tsechus is supposed to be secret."

At the tsechus, Roach encouraged male adherents to better access their feminine side and honor Vajrayogini by dressing as women. Roach himself turned up at the temple on these evenings dressed as a "preppy girl," with eye shadow, eyeliner, skirts and blouses. One night, he dressed as a woman to go to dinner with a group of Diamond Mountain students at a Tucson restaurant. Thomason once bought Roach a bra and panties from a Japanese company that makes them especially for men.

The cross-dressing had a higher purpose. Besides fast-tracking students into tantric secrets, Roach was layering another American-style improvement on the ancient teachings: equality. "In Tibetan Buddhism, women are worshipped as divine, while they are told they are lower than men," says McNally. "GM did a radical thing asking me to teach beside him."

Although the subject of their "spiritual partnership" was a key part of their appeal to followers, by 2009 theirs was unraveling. "He was wonderful to me in front of an audience," McNally says. "In private, it was different."In the spring of 2009, McNally and Roach officially split up. McNally says Roach announced their separation without consulting her. Around the time of the split, McNally began seeing Ian Thorson, a skinny,­ quiet follower who had served her and Roach for years as an assistant, always walking two steps behind, hauling their bags and bottles of water. Thorson wasn't the most obvious choice of mates for the hottest lama on the compound.

Thorson was smart and well-educated – having majored in comparative literature at Stanford – and had been a charismatic young man who morphed into an introspective, withdrawn spiritual seeker after encountering Roach. Thorson's mother sees Roach as a cult leader. "His courses are for a wide audience and are free of charge," she says. "Gradually, classes and activities of the group take over the person's time, priorities and life. I watched my son change until he became unrecognizable to family and friends."

Thorson's family and two cult specialists staged an intervention in 2000 and pulled him away from Roach's influence. Thorson moved to Berlin, where he found a girlfriend, with whom he had a child, and reportedly worked as a language tutor. But he brought anger-management issues with him. According to a Berlin police report, in May 2004, Thorson dragged an Australian female who had been house-sitting­ for him through his home and threw her out in front of his girlfriend and their three-year-old daughter. Thorson's girlfriend claimed Thorson "got angry frequently," and she eventually told him to move out.

Thorson returned to the U.S. in 2004, and Roach and McNally welcomed him back into the fold at Diamond Mountain. There, according to Ekan Thomason, he was clearly in thrall to McNally. "She was his lama," Thomason says, breaking down in tears at the memory. "I think they knew each other in a past life."

But as devoted as he was to his new girlfriend, he still had trouble keeping his temper in check. One day, he flung a cup of almond milk – which he delivered to her every morning – in McNally's face.

Roach says Thorson's troubles stem from a "bad childhood," without going into detail. But shortly after Thorson's death, Roach posted a letter describing him as violent. "Ian was an accomplished poet, linguist and spiritual practitioner. . . . Sometimes those of us who spent time around him would see him get overwhelmed by this sensitivity and fly into windmills of unintended physical outbursts, which at times caused potentially serious physical harm to those close by."

Kay Thorson blames her son's problems on what she calls the cult. For a short time after her son married McNally in 2010 – weeks before McNally's divorce from Roach was finalized – she thought they were on their way to freeing themselves from Roach's orbit. "There was this happy period when it looked like they were going in a different direction from Roach," Kay told Psychology Today. "It looked even like they could be the next great yoga couple." McNally and Thorson published a yoga book together called Two as One in 2010.

As the McNally-Thorson relationship flourished, Roach turned a page and took a trip to New York. He showed up at Jivamukti and other venues and made the pages of the New York Post, reportedly hitting on a pretty, young yoga teacher and going to a club in an Armani suit. Roach denies the incident and says he never owned an Armani suit or drank alcohol.As Diamond Mountain's first decade drew to a close, there was a lot of turmoil in the air for a space supposedly dedicated to inner peace. Roach and McNally had always referred to their students as their "kids," and now 130 adults were behaving like children caught up in a bad divorce. One student was kicked off the premises for attacking his girlfriend and rupturing her eardrum. Another broke down a door when his girlfriend switched partners. Roach himself ordered one couple to split up because of violence. Police were called to evict people on occasion, most memorably when a Canadian student named Stella strode into the dais where Roach was teaching and flung a glass of wine in his face, shouting, "You're the greatest diamond salesman in the world."

Relationships frayed in the isolation and also under the pressure of Roach and McNally's "spiritual partnership" teachings. Couples who arrived together broke up and connected with different partners. One acolyte hit on single girls, according to a former student. He "preyed on young women. . . . After they have been praying all day imagining themselves as Vajrayogini, they come out wide open, and he goes in for the kill. General assholeness."
"Good-looking girls got pawed a lot," says Diamond Mountain's closest neighbor, Jerry Kelly, who befriended a lot of the young people at the university over the years. "Kind of a sex cult" is how one former Diamond Mountain follower described it to a student.

Rumors circulated among the students about Roach's and McNally's black magic and special powers. One says she saw them walk through the temple wall together. Another says that Roach was capable of "getting inside you and seeing through your eyes." The students insist these beliefs were not connected to any drug use, although at the tsechus there was sometimes pot in the air, along with a "nectar" of some kind of punch. One student says he found Ecstasy in the temple bathroom.

Besides the metaphysical auras and experimental relationships, the teaching itself was increasingly DIY and unconventional. In 2010, McNally encouraged the students to participate in another three-year silent retreat, like the one she and Roach had undertaken nearly a decade earlier. But this one would be somewhat different. For one thing, there would be many more students taking the enlightenment challenge – nearly 40 people would sign up. But McNally had also begun worshipping the Hindu goddess of death and destruction, Kali, despite the fact that Kali is not a feature of Tibetan Buddhism. In preparation for the retreat, she decided that students should undergo a "Kali initiation." 
So, with Roach's acquiescence, she ordered the temple walls decorated with weapons – swords, guns, knives and chain saws. Students were led in at night, one by one, and sat down in candlelight before McNally, who said Kali required their blood, and handed devotees a lancet with which to prick their fingers and spill a drop on a piece of paper. Some of the students cried.

With Roach away and McNally planning her silent retreat, the former couple allowed the university's board of directors to keep everyone fed and cared for. The board consisted of five people, some from the nonprofit world, who would make executive decisions for the silent followers (with Roach still at the helm). Brannan, a follower who'd been there since the early days, didn't approve of McNally's Kali obsession and was afraid she was cracking up. She seemed to have succumbed to magical thinking, claiming the property was protected by an invisible diamond wall and that she could wake up the sun with her mind. "I stopped attending her classes because I couldn't shake the mental image of standing up and saying, 'What the fuck are you talking about?'"In December 2010, 37 students, plus McNally and Thorson, said goodbye to the world and went into cottages scattered on the mountainside, while the board of directors and a cast of unpaid volunteers worked out of view on the periphery to support them. Almost nothing would be heard from them until February 2012, when McNally emerged to give a series of teachings. What normally would have been a routine appearance shook Diamond Mountain to its core.

McNally sat before the board and spectators, blindfolded so as not to break her vow and see the gathering of outsiders – and for three or four days, she talked about what she was learning. On the final day, to the astonishment of her audience, she began describing what sounded like episodes of domestic violence, including having stabbed Thorson with a knife sometime during the previous year. And she talked about a troubling incident with Roach during their teacher-pupil days in the first retreat. "If the lama doesn't like something you are doing, he whacks you over the head," she says today. "And on rare occasions, GM did it with me."

Over the next few days, the Diamond Mountain board of directors called the sheriff and lawyers, and they began taking written statements from the silent followers. A local dermatologist named René Miranda wrote a letter – from within the retreat – to the Diamond Mountain board describing how in March 2011, about three months into the retreat, she'd been summoned to tend to cuts that Thorson had sustained that day. She said she'd been told, "'Lama Christie McNally and Ian Thorson had been goofing off when, accidentally, Ian was cut by a knife.' I sutured the wounds."

Former student Brannan wrote a letter to the board urging it to seek psychiatric evaluations for McNally, Thorson and the rest of the followers. The board did not do so. The board's president, Rob Ruisinger, says McNally's refusal to cooperate made getting psychological help for her and Thorson impossible.

"When we found out about the domestic violence, it was addressed," Ruisinger says. "It had apparently been going on for a while. I went to the sheriff myself. We also asked for more information from the parties involved. But she refused to converse with us about it."

McNally says that the day after her "teaching," Roach gathered the community and gave his own lecture, "ridiculing my teaching, denouncing me and saying how DM was his place and he was not going to let it go. . . . GM began campaigning for our abrupt excommunication. GM told another group of people that I was the dangerous one. Dangerous for him, perhaps."
"He had been having a lot of physical aggression at the time (nothing too serious), and I simply didn't relate to it and wanted to understand it better," she wrote. "I wanted to understand how he felt."

She assured everyone that she and Thorson had found bliss in their "retreat place in the sky" and concluded, "I love you all very much, do not worry about us, we are still impossibly very happy – more and more joy each day."McNally's final days in the cave were far from blissful. She says that no sooner had they handed the message to their assistant than she got ill. She was "bedridden for days," possibly sickened by bacteria in melting snow they drank. "Ian was taking care of me. We had water but not so much, and we were rationing – a couple of bowls a day. Ian could have gone and gotten more, but he did not want to leave me. We could have texted someone, but Ian wasn't too keen on people knowing where we were. And, as I discovered, even if you described the place, it was still almost impossible to find."

When McNally recovered enough to "stumble out of the cave," Thorson was felled by the same disorder. She woke up to find him unconscious and called her assistant, who told her he would bring help. "It took nine hours before anyone found us," she recalls. "Actually, the first person to find us, thankfully, was the nurse from the retreat. She was the one to break the news to me. So gently, she said, 'I'm sorry, Lama Christie, he's gone.' That single moment will forever be the worst moment of my life."

McNally stayed with Thorson's body at a nearby funeral home, believing that she needed to assist Thorson's soul on its journey out of the body: "I would come each day and sit and hold his hand and just be there for him."

After Thorson's funeral, McNally disappeared, declining all interviews. Her followers have reported they heard she was seen in Kathmandu, Nepal, but she won't reveal her current whereabouts. "I have spent this past year in various places," she says, "none of which matter very much, except for the fact that they were far from both my former community and from all the various people trying to contact me for 'my story.'"

She says the letter from the Diamond Mountain board expelling her made it clear she should stay away. "It said something like, 'The DM board feels that your teachings are not in keeping with the vision we have of DM.'"Ayear later, nothing seems to have changed at Diamond Mountain. Most of the acolytes who took the vow of silence are still at the retreat. The temple's altar table remains the same. There's a photograph of Lama Christie in her trademark white, garlanded with dried red flowers. Across from it, a portrait of Geshe Michael, smiling beatifically, in maroon robes. "We didn't know what to do with their pictures when they broke up," board member Nicole Davis says. "So we left them together."

Of Thorson, there is no sign at all, not even a memorial stone among the manicured walkways and shrines around the temple. This fact upsets Jerry Kelly, the university's next-door neighbor, who got to know Thorson on his hikes outside the grounds. "I don't understand why the police didn't ask more questions," he says. "If I had stabbed my wife, and then she died next to me in a cave, you can bet they would have been hitting me with phone books in the police station."

This spring, almost a year after Thorson's death, Roach agreed to meet me at his favorite eatery in downtown Glendale, Arizona. The restaurant is near where he grew up, and about two hours from his house in the mountains near Flagstaff.
Roach is particularly proud of a new client he has engaged, a Russian banking conglomerate. "The owner is worth $8 billion," Roach says. "He was a colonel in Afghanistan, and when the Soviet Union fell, he got his hands on some oil, became an oligarch and then became spiritual." He also says that his Diamond Cutter seminars are very popular in China, Tibetan Buddhism's greatest foe. ("When I ask the Chinese about Tibetans," he says, "they say, 'Geshe Michael, you live on Navajo land. When you give the land back, we will.' ") His assistants say they need to hire bodyguards to keep at bay the adoring audiences who want to touch him. His picture is on public buses. In the Chinese industrial­ city of Guangzhou (population 8.4 million), Roach's program is advertised as "King Kong Rules of Success."

"I dream of this thing," he says. "Judeo-Christianity in its secular form has become democracy. I want to do the same with Buddhism. I want it to become the golden rule, where corporations understand that making money comes from serving other people and helping the poor make their own money. That's my dream."

As for his critics in Tibetan Buddhism, he says, "I don't care. I don't have much connection with American Buddhists anymore." Thurman thinks China is a key part of Roach's plan. "The big source of his money is Chinese Buddhists," he says.

Roach's supporters say he barely breaks even on the retreats and habitually hands off donations. He insists the tragedy of Thorson's death at Diamond Mountain is a matter of the past. "I will talk about Diamond Mountain if you want, but in three months nobody will care about what happened there. In a year, everyone will have forgotten about it." He spoke with the certainty of a man who believes he can make his own reality. He says that Diamond Mountain's days as a school are numbered anyway. "We should just make it online."

McNally is sad to hear this but not surprised. Roach, she says, told her he "hated the place" and used to call it "Demon Mountain" in private.
"My life is so beautiful," he says. "I just want to share that with other people. I'm not interested in being a cult leader. I want to teach people to farm, and then they can go farm for themselves, and I can see them once a year. I don't need to have a church."

To that end, he has written yet another book, this one, despite the sordid demise of his relationship with McNally, about finding and keeping love – The Karma of Love: 100 Answers for Your Relationship. He told a packed audience in New York this winter that the book, which contains tips about matters such as how karma can help a man rekindle his wife's desire for him, will "automatically save the world." But despite the diamond ring on his finger, Roach says he has no plans to remarry.

This story is from the June 6th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.

JUNE 06, 2013

The call came into the Cochise County Sheriff's Office early one Sunday morning in April. The female voice explained that a couple camping in a remote spot in Arizona's Apache Highlands were in severe distress. Two days earlier, they had been quarreling and the husband had struck himself in the head and now he was unconscious. 

In the days before the sheriff's office was notified of their plight, McNally, 39, had been worried that her body was not in harmony with nature. She'd been violently sick to her stomach and couldn't eat. But as she recovered, her husband grew ill. For more than a week, neither could muster strength to clamber down the steep slope to fetch water. They took their suffering to be another karmic lesson.

Robert Thurman, a Columbia University religion professor and a leading expert on Eastern religions, calls Roach's version of Tibetan Buddhism "an American pop-religion knockoff.

Nothing about Roach's upbringing suggested he was headed for spiritual greatness. Born in 1952, he grew up an Episcopal altar boy in midcentury Glendale, Arizona. He was the second of four crew-cut brothers, whose builder dad and schoolteacher mom divorced when Roach was in the sixth grade. Both parents were hard drinkers – "killed by alcohol," he says.

In 1983, Roach was ordained as a monk and received his robes. He says that his lama took the unusual tack of ordering him to go to work in the business world. (Roach's lama died in 2004, without ever commenting on Roach's stories.) Roach spent the next two decades living with monks in New Jersey and commuting to New York's diamond district, working at a company started by two Israelis that grew into a $250 million manufacturer of mass-marketed jewelry. At his busiest, he says, he was in charge of "processing 30,000 stones a day." He donated half of his salary to Sera Mey and to a program he founded, the Asian Classics Input Project, which has, for 25 years, been transferring the decaying texts of Tibetan theology into digital files.

By the time Sera Mey granted Roach the title Geshe, in 1995, some of his critics in the Buddhist community suspected that it was because of his money, not his holiness. According to one ranking monk, he "circumvented nearly 12 years of debate time. It is highly unusual. I have never heard of such an exception being made."

McNally says she was the last one to be invited into the "secret society," but her presence changed the group dynamic. She could be stubborn, imperious and a diva, who by her own estimation attained such an exalted status that "a mere glance or tilt of my head could make things happen." As their relationship became closer and more intense, the two of them took a vow never to be out of each other's sight. "Not only did I stay with him for 12 years," she says, "I stayed right next to him for 12 years without a single break."

In 2000, Roach surprised many in New York by announcing that he was quitting the diamond business and embarking on an ambitious spiritual project. With McNally and four other female followers, he would be moving to the Arizona desert, and for the next three years, three months and three days, they would dedicate themselves to a silent retreat, like the storied Buddhist monks of yore.

According to former follower Matthew Remski, students were taught the tantric practice of picturing Vajrayogini as a 16-year-old in the flush of a sexual awakening, with "her vagina dripping to the floor" and holding a skull filled with the gore of her former self. Remski says the practice "links the verge of orgasm with understanding reality."

In 2004, about 80 people signed up for the first six-year Diamond Mountain University course of study, a series of weekend teachings by Roach and McNally. The advanced degree in Buddhist studies promised participants the key to the mystical and super­secret tantra. In the Tibetan monasteries, monks are typically not initiated into the tantra until they have completed 20 years of rigorous study. Roach claimed to have found a way to boil it all down for busy modern laypeople.

Roach was a Geshe, but McNally was the queen of Diamond Mountain. "She was pretty and flirtatious," says one former student, Michael Brannan. "Christie was not shy about deploying her charms to acquire whatever her heart was set upon getting." She was a "tough" meditation teacher and didn't discourage extreme devotion. DMU student Ekan Thomason recalls a celebration of McNally's birthday in November 2008: "The students spent days decorating the temple for her party and carried her in on a litter. She loved it."
Devotees flocked to McNally's meditation classes, but life at Diamond Mountain was definitely not all contemplation. Roach encouraged the students to meditate on a dakini, or ideal lover – not necessarily their partner or spouse – which inevitably led to broken relationships and jealousy.

Although McNally says Roach did not have "any physical relationships," she began to get jealous of his meditating on "other women who he saw as angels." By 2009, she was reaching the end of her rope. "Eventually, I told him, 'Listen, I can't do this anymore,'" she says. "Either be a faithful partner to me, like you are claiming – in body, speech and in mind – or I will start behaving the same way you do.' His response was that this was the situation I had walked into, and he had no intention of changing. Long story short, he started moving away from me and pushing me toward Ian."

"He was thin and wispy," recalled former student Matthew Remski, "perhaps anemic, with impeccable­ lotus posture, and distant, entranced eyes. He'd sit at the front of any teaching, his eyes rolled back, clothes unwashed, hair tousled, by turns elated and catatonic in his trance."

Around this time, Roach moved to a house in northern Arizona his followers and students had bought him for $195,000, and focused on building his international corporate-consulting practice, the Diamond Cutter Institute. McNally stepped into the void, as the chief leader of the upcoming retreat.
She and Thorson looked forward to the retreat as a kind of three-year honeymoon. They began furnishing their cottage with a cast-iron bathtub and wall tiles. "We did cute newlywed things like buying our first set of silverware," she recalls. "It was very fun for me, who had never gone through any of this before."

The board then wrote McNally and Thorson a letter, asking them to leave the property within an hour. They were offered several thousand dollars, a rental car, flights and prepaid cellphones. One influential follower was able to persuade the board to give them five days to leave. Then, she and Thorson simply disappeared.

McNally says the reaction to the stabbing was overblown and blames Roach. "There were no swords," she says. "There was no fight. It was a very frightening accident that happened when we were playing around with a kitchen knife. Frightening to me, at least. Ian thought the whole thing was funny. He also thought it was a divine message."

In a public letter after Thorson's death, Roach said he and the board together agreed to eject the couple because they were afraid of more violence. "Some of us felt that Lama Christie, by mentioning the abuse publicly at the only talk which I attended, was making a conscious or unconscious cry for help."
McNally and Thorson left Diamond Mountain, but instead of returning to speech and civilization, they continued their retreat on their own. A pair of Diamond Mountain students serving as McNally's assistants – a chef from Houston and a young hedge-fund analyst from Wall Street – begged them not to move into the desert. But McNally and especially Thorson were adamant, so the assistants agreed to buy them camping gear and stay in contact with them by phone. Roach and McNally had ordained the two men as monks with the Tibetan names Chandra and Akasha. Akasha (who asked that we not use his real name) says that other followers were aware the couple had remained nearby, but that nobody knew exactly where they were camping.

"We had a wonderful adventure, at first," McNally says. "We started out pitching our tent fairly close to the edge of DM property." But they heard voices and saw flashlights and figured the Diamond Mountain board was pursuing them, so they moved to a more remote location. "It was pure luck that we found the cave," she says. "It was kind of luxurious for a cave, and there were all these signs of the Apaches living in different places all up and down that same mountain ravine."
Two months passed, and the couple subsisted on canned food and water collected in a tarp. McNally says they imagined they would stay there for a year.

A few days before she activated the SPOT emergency call, McNally – through one of the assistants – released a rambling treatise. In it, she described how Ian, who she was calling "Ein," had been subject to fits of aggression during the retreat. McNally wrote that she decided to take up martial-arts training, not to defend herself but in order to "learn" whatever lesson Thorson's violence was supposed to teach her.

Three days after the letter was delivered, Thorson was dead.

Kay Thorson lays the blame for her son's death squarely on Roach because he "induces people to value enlightenment above communication and personal safety."

McNally believes Roach has been vindictive in ostracizing her from her former community. "In addition to losing my husband, I had no home to go back to, no more job, and it seemed like almost every person I knew was somehow turned against me by the person I used to trust with my very life. . . . I did not realize the intensity of GM's bitterness toward me. He is a formidable enemy, especially when you do not even realize you have one."

In the darkening banquette of a Mexican diner, Roach's limpid blue eyes frequently roll upward so the whites show beneath, in the manner of medieval saints. Faced straight on, he is less a messiah and more of an aging Beach Boy with a long fringe around his bald spot, exactly what one would expect of an aging boomer. But toward the end of the evening, he turns his head, and in profile, in shadow, for a moment, he is transmogrified into a man even older and smaller, a Mickey Rooney as the Wizard of Oz.

I ask Roach if he had, in fact, seen emptiness, the sine qua non of the Bodhisattva. "I can't say," he says. "It would be like seeing God for a Christian." The only thing he will confirm is that the vision involved the hardest substance known to man. "Diamonds," he says, explaining his side career. "I only wanted to be around them because of my dream." As he talks, he lifts his lip to show me the diamond implanted in his left canine.
He insists his worldly goal is to do one thing: to teach everyone how to "farm" seeds of good karma. And he's expanding beyond the Chinese and the Russian oligarchs to more immediate converts: He says that several prisons in Arizona are considering offering inmates Diamond Cutter Institute's entrepreneurship program.

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/sex-and-death-on-the-road-to-nirvana-20130606 

A new and unique attempt by The Almost Daily Cult Newspaper (Daily Cult News) of journalism concerning cults, religion, and spirituality

ICSA Annual Conference, July 4-6, 2013 Trieste, Italy

Abstract

The Almost Daily Cult Newspaper (Daily Cult News) is a news blog, which is officially recognized as news media by the Google news and which specializes in the issues of social problems concerning cults, religion, and spirituality. It was founded on Oct 1st, 2009, by Yoshiro Fujikura, a Japanese journalist who has zealously done much coverage in this field. There are nine correspondents including Fujikura, all of whom are volunteers. Not all of the groups or individuals covered by the Daily Cult News are necessarily considered as cults, because this paper handles all topics concerning the friction between religion, spirituality and society. The Daily Cult News believes that wit, humor, and sarcasm, in addition to earnest coverage leveled at issues often passed over by conventional media, will help to foster and refine "cult watch culture" among "Netizens".

A measurement of Islamic religiousness among Pakistani migrants in Spain: analysis of their sectarian affiliations

Ana Ballesteros , Maria Jesus Martin Lopez, PhD; Jose Manuel Martinez Garcia, PhD

ICSA Conference Talk Abstract

Trieste, Italy, July 4–6, 2013 

The study we present here is the result of a PhD research on Islamic sectarianism in Pakistan. The fieldwork was done on the Pakistani community in Spain, mainly settled in Barcelona. Extensive qualitative interviews were undertaken with leaders of the different religious communities as well as its members, whereas quantitative data was provided through the analysis of questionnaires based on the Psychological Measure of Islamic Religiousness (H. Abu Raiya, K.I. Pargament, A. Mahoney & C. Stein, 2008), where some scales were used, and some not (the conversion scale was not included, considering we were interested in Pakistani Muslims not converts): items of Islamic religious dimension, Islamic wellbeing, purpose of life, satisfaction with life, religious struggle and fundamentalism were added, plus new questions focused on belonging to different sects, cults, and denominations, and their attitudes towards their in-group and out-group.

The main purpose was to find out how Pakistani Muslims live their religion, a deeper understanding of Islamic religiousness, and how the migration experience affects them. The biggest difficulty was to convince them to fill in a questionnaire, considering the closeness of the community, their distrust for the purposes of the research, or the fact that many of them are illiterate and might find the questions too hard to answer. For that reason, we have relied more on the qualitative analysis of the discourses of the leaders and members of the different religious groups: among the Sunnis, Deobandis: Tablighi Jama’at; Barelvis: Minhaj ul-Quran, Dawat-ul Islam; Ahl-e Hadith; Jamaat-e Islami; Sufis; Ahmadiyya and Shias.