tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50005935188883852862024-02-07T19:20:26.877-05:00ICSA Salon - perspectivesThe International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) is a global network of people concerned about psychological manipulation and abuse in cultic groups, alternative movements, and other environments. ICSA is tax-exempt, supports civil liberties, and is not affiliated with any religious or commercial organizations. Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06051542715853942258noreply@blogger.comBlogger44125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-83034336661058952602014-02-13T06:30:00.003-05:002014-02-27T06:09:08.875-05:00Philadelphia: Mental Health Issues in Cult-Related Interventions - A Report Mental-Health Issues in Cult-Related Interventions<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sunday, October 13, 2013, Sheraton Philadelphia University City Hotel, PA</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Report by John Paul Lennon</span></div>
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<tr><td class="sites-layout-tile sites-tile-name-content-1" style="padding: 10px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">In this special event, cult-intervention specialists and mental-health professionals discussed their roles in helping families and former members—in particular, how those roles work together and how they differ. The event was intended to be useful to former members of high-control groups or relationships, families concerned about an affected loved one, and helping professionals whose assistance families and former members sometimes seek.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Among the questions examined were the following:</span><br />
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<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">What assessment criteria should professionals consider to determine the appropriateness and feasibility of cult-related interventions?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">What criteria should professionals consider to determine the appropriateness of mental-health consultation and/or treatment?</span></li>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Speakers included some of the leading exit counselors and mental-health professionals in this field:</span><br />
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<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">David Clark</span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Steve K. D. Eichel, PhD, ABPP</span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Lorna Goldberg, MSW, LCSW, PsyA</span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">William Goldberg, MSW, LCSW, PsyA</span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Steven Hassan, MEd, LMHC, NCC</span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Joseph Kelly</span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Arnold Markowitz, LCSW</span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Patrick Ryan</span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Daniel Shaw, LCSW</span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Joseph Szimhart</span></li>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Information about these speakers is available on the ICSA website, www.icsahome.com</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">As ICSA President Steve Eichel noted in his closing remarks, this was a landmark occasion: the first time that exit counselors and mental-health professionals had sat down together and discussed their different approaches to helping cultic group members, former members, and families.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The meeting room was filled with about forty participants when the program opened just after 10:00 AM. A panel of intervention specialists—David Clark, Steven Hassan, Joseph Kelly, Patrick Ryan, and Joseph Szimhart—briefly presented its distinctive approaches. Several times panelists reiterated their shared belief that, rather than generalizing, it most important for professionals to be oriented to the particular individuals involved. There was agreement that the term "exit counseling" is hardly accurate because the field has moved away from intrusive actions—e.g., deprogramming, to what is now called thought-reform consultation. Some light bantering occurred as participants sought a more apt term, but without a consensus decision. What was agreed is that any intervention requires much background study by the professional, who also must prep the family in detail. To gather information on the cult-involved individual’s previous experiences and dynamics, most professionals have the family fill out detailed questionnaires.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The moderator, Lorna Goldberg, followed the interventionists’ presentations, gently and firmly leading them in dialog and later opening up the floor to the audience, whose members were eagerly waiting to contribute. The exchanges were lively and varied as participants sought answers to their pressing needs (they were loath to see lunchtime cut the discussion short).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">After lunch, Steve Eichel, William Goldberg, Steven Hassan, Arnold Markowitz, and Daniel Shaw presented their mental-health perspectives. Of interest was the consensus among the various mental-health professionals regarding certain basic therapeutic goals: to open up and maintain communication between family members and the cult-involved person to strengthen those relationships; to be aware that cult involvement may exacerbate preexisting family tensions; that exited members should be assessed for personal safety and for postcult trauma, which requires specific therapeutic strategies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The third part of the program was even more fascinating, as both sets of professionals formed a roundtable, and a general discussion ensued that revealed and fleshed out the complementarity between interventionists and therapists. The goal of professionals is no longer to get the member out of the cult, but rather to facilitate communication between the family and the cult-involved person. Interventionists agreed that exiting members generally need psychotherapy to help them process their leaving experience, continue healing, and consolidate their progress. Psychotherapists, for their part, acknowledged their limits regarding helping persons exit controversial groups. Moreover, they did not want to perform cult-exiting interventions of any kind, so as to protect their therapeutic relationship with the exiting or exited cult member.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="_GoBack" style="color: #135355;"></a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The fourth stage of the program offered the audience an array of experts who were available to answer questions. Final remarks summarized the historic nature of this meeting and the satisfaction both sets of professionals felt with it. As the program drew to a close, members of the audience sought out experts for one-on-one help or more specific information. All seemed to benefit from the networking that such gatherings provide.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><i>ICSA Today</i> plans to publish presentations from this conference in a future issue.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b>John Paul Lennon, STL, MA, LPC,</b> Board member, Regain Network (Religious Groups Awareness International Network). Mr. Lennon was a Legionary of Christ brother from 1961 to 1969 and an LC priest from 1969 to 1984. He served as a Diocesan priest from 1985 to 1989 and received an MA in Counseling from the Catholic University of America in 1989. For the past 10 years he has worked as a Child and Family Therapist in Arlington, Virginia. In 2008 he published a memoir, <i>Our Father who art in bed, A Naive and Sentimental Dubliner in the Legion of Christ.</i></span></td></tr>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-7056004746429021552013-11-22T23:56:00.001-05:002013-11-22T23:56:21.910-05:00Who ya gonna call? Gurubusters!<h1 style="margin: 0pc 0pc 0.2pc; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 12.75pt;">The Age</span></h1>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">October 31, 2013<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Amrit Dhillon<o:p></o:p></span></span></h3>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In the endless fight against superstition and fakery in India, campaigners for rationalism have to use every trick in the book to beat so-called holy men at their own game.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Standing in front of the schoolchildren at Desu Madra Secondary School in Mohali, in the Indian state of Punjab, Satnam Singh Daun spreads his props out on the table: scarves and money that vanish, cards, powders that burst into flames, some rope, matches, vials, cotton wool. He looks like a magician about to start a show at a child's birthday party.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But the tricks are not for entertaining the children. Daun is using them to expose the godmen, gurus, astrologers, charlatans, soothsayers, palmists, charm sellers, quacks, and humbugs who are so popular in India.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The children, seated on the ground in the bright sunshine and humidity that follows a monsoon downpour, listen intently to Daun as he pours scorn on superstition. He performs the same tricks that are used by holy men to exploit the gullibility of Indians and project themselves as possessing supernatural powers - making money disappear or turning 100 rupee notes into 500 rupee notes, producing ash from nowhere, swallowing fire.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">''It's because they are too stupid to become teachers, doctors or scientists that godmen become astrologers to fool people,'' Daun says.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-size: 10pt; padding: 0pc;">Advertisement</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">''They want you to use amulets and trust in the stars instead of using your reason. These holy men are holy fools tricking you. Be rational, use your minds,'' says Daun, as a rooster in the school grounds crows on cue as if to say ''hear hear''.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Daun is one of three men in Mohali known as ''gurubusters''. He is talking to the schoolchildren, accompanied by his two colleagues, to teach them to spurn superstition and be rational instead.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Daun is short and stocky and works as an Amway agent. His co-gurubuster Harpreet Rora is a slight, fresh-faced young man who works as a journalist. The third is the founder of the Mohali branch of the Indian Rationalist Association, the burly and avuncular Jarnail Singh Kranti, a retired primary school teacher. From a tiny office, using their own funds and their spare time, the endearing threesome, loyally supported by their wives, launch blistering broadsides against India's influential godmen. This is the headquarters of a lonely mission: promoting the supremacy of rationalism.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Superstition is a multimillion-dollar industry in India. From the poorest to the richest, the predisposition to superstition is embedded in the neural pathway of most Indians. Choosing a spouse, fixing a wedding date, getting a job, trying for a baby boy, curing an alcoholic husband, reviving a failing business, curing an illness, ending a factory strike - all these problems require a visit to a holy man, who is paid a fortune for his services.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The propensity to believe that some mystic will solve your problems runs across the social spectrum. Former prime ministers have consulted bead-wearing astrologers on the most ''auspicious''' date for a general election. Bollywood stars offer tributes at the shrines of mystics to ensure a box office hit.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Given their preference for discretion, wealthy Indians prefer to have a guru dedicated to their family; sometimes he lives with them so that he can be available at all times.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">''I have total faith in my guru. He can cure cancer. I have seen it. I come away after an audience with him feeling light and blessed,'' says New Delhi garment exporter Rocky Verma, who has just asked his guru to suggest a date for his son's engagement.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Talk to the wives of tycoons and it becomes clear their faith in their family guru is blind. New Delhi art collector and gallery owner Renu Modi is married into the famous Modi business family and she is totally dependent on her guru, Swami Chandra. ''We do not make any major decision without first consulting him,'' she says.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">On Delhi's Prithviraj Road, home to many business moguls, Madhushree Birla, the wife of a scion of the Birla dynasty, sits in a living room full of priceless artefacts and talks of how she relies on Patrick, a Christian faith healer from Goa who she says can cure cancer.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">''My faith in him stems from the day my brother and sister-in law were involved in a horrific car crash near Nasik. My brother had broken ribs and my sister-in-law suffered serious internal bleeding.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">''Two minutes after they crashed, they were still lying there stunned but just beginning to realise what had happened when Patrick called them on the phone. He had seen everything that had happened and he knew what injuries they had suffered even though he was far away in Goa,'' she says.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is the kind of belief that Daun likes to pour his vitriol on. As the morning sun rises higher in the sky, he ignores the heat and starts getting into his stride, asking the schoolchildren, ''Has any holy man ever invented a medicine or an airplane? Can he stop any of you dying in a road accident? How can he help you do well in exams and get a good job when he himself is nothing but a failure?''<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Standing behind Daun is his wife Neeraj. She hands him something. Daun pops a burning ball of fire into his mouth, eliciting gasps from the schoolchildren. Then he shows them that it is only burning camphor, which cannot hurt his mouth. He dips his hand into burning oil, unscathed, showing them later that he had pre-soaked his hand in oil as insulation.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">At the end of the talk, the children troop out to join their classes, having promised Daun that they will never again succumb to superstition. When they have finished handing out leaflets, the energetic gurubusting triumvirate pack their props, mount their scooters and head off to another assignment at another school to educate children on the importance of being rational.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Indian Rationalist Association was founded in 1949, with the good wishes of British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Its first members belonged to the educated elite. It has rarely had more than 100,000 members - mainly teachers, students and professionals - but they have been vigorous in publishing pamphlets and deriding the Indian penchant for superstitious nonsense.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Over the decades, its branches have tried to inculcate Indians with a scientific temperament through debate, talks, ridicule, humour and challenges. Much of their time is spent performing the tricks that self-styled holy men love to perform to convince Indians of their special powers and to garner billions of rupees from their credulity.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">''Their press conferences are hilarious because they consume fire, levitate (a trick requiring a blanket and two hockey sticks), walk on coals (the skin doesn't burn if you walk fast enough) and make statues 'weep' (melting a layer of wax covering a small deposit of water),'' says Mumbai journalist Neeraj Gaitonde. ''It's the only way to destroy the blind belief in their special powers.''<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Some charlatans are more creative than others. One used to impress the crowds by ''creating'' fire by pouring ghee (clarified butter) onto ash and then ''staring'' at it until the mixture burst into flames. Rationalists-turned-detectives found that the ghee was glycerine and the ash was potassium permanganate and the two spontaneously combust a couple of minutes after they are combined.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">India's rationalists love to challenge quacks. When the well-known television guru Pandit Surinder Sharma boasted on television in 2008 that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, Sanal Edamaruku, president of the Indian Rationalist Association (who is currently in hiding in Finland, but more of that later) took up the challenge and invited the guru to kill him on prime-time television.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The guru agreed and appeared on television performing sundry rituals intended to kill Edamaruku. Millions tuned to the show. The hocus pocus went on for some time. The holy man ruffled the rationalist's hair, pressed his temples and mumbled incantations. Several hours later, Edamaruku was still alive, cheerfully taunting the frustrated killer.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Edamaruku, a former journalist, became a rationalist activist when he was 15 after seeing a local athlete with blood cancer die because her family refused medical treatment, preferring a faith healer. Now he lives in Finland, having fled India after the Catholic Church in Mumbai filed a complaint against him in April 2012 under the country's blasphemy law. If convicted he would face three years in jail.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The case concerned a crucifix dripping water at a Mumbai church. Edamaruku discovered the dripping was caused by a leaky cistern that was causing water to seep through the wall onto the crucifix. He reported his results on television and criticised the Catholic Church for being ''anti-science''. When the church filed a case against him, he fled.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Not so lucky was Dr Narendra Dabholkar, a prominent anti-black magic campaigner in Pune, near Mumbai, who was murdered on August 20. Known for his lifelong campaign against superstition, Dabholkar, 70, was gunned down during his morning walk.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Dabholkar estimated that several hundred women are killed every year after being branded ''witches'' by so-called godmen. He also pointed out many children also were killed as part of ''human sacrifices'' ordered by godmen to resolve their followers' problems.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Indians were shocked at the murder; some were equally surprised to discover that Dabholkar had been lobbying the provincial government of Maharashtra to approve the Superstition Eradication and Anti-Black Magic Bill to make superstitious practices illegal.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Despite receiving several death threats from right-wing Hindu groups, Dabholkar refused police protection. These groups believed he was targeting their religion and not condemning superstition in all religions.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">However, the evidence suggests Hindu charlatans predominate (Hinduism in the largest religion in India), partly because there is no organised structure to the religion nor an established hierarchy, making it easy for anyone to set himself up as a guru offering spiritual advice.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Invariably, the majority of the controversial godmen who end up in the news for amassing millions, owning fleets of Mercedes and Audis, for being involved in prostitution rackets or are charged with sexual abuse or rape, are Hindu.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Just last month, a leading godman called Asaram Bapu was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old. Yet, seeing their godman behind bars has done little to dent the faith of his supporters.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">''These godmen are like Jekyll and Hyde. They do a lot of social and community work initially to become popular before they start gratifying themselves,'' says Dr Indira Sharma, president of the Indian Psychiatric Society.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">''They help with marriages, school admissions, medical treatment. So when they are charged with an offence, their supporters are not affected because they want to continue getting that help and it's in their interest to protect the godman.''<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Mohali gurubusters, always cheerful and energetic, have so far not received any threats.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">''We won't stop, particularly when it comes to educating children,'' says Harpreet Rora. ''We want children to become ambassadors of change. They have to go home and tell their parents to stop their nonsense.''<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The cost of superstition in India is high. All over the country, hanging in shops, homes, workshops and vehicles, are small bunches of green chillies and lemons tied together to ward off the evil eye and bring good luck. Fresh bunches are hung every day.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">''Do you know that Indians spend 104 million rupees ($2.4 million) every year on buying chillies and lemons?'' says Jarnail Singh Kranti.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">''At our local hospital, they have an astrologer on hand to 'help' patients if the medical treatment fails. This must stop. We must start relying on science and logic to move into the modern world.''<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is in the interests of Indian politicians, he adds, to keep Indians mired in superstition so that the poor don't start asking, ''Why are we poor?''<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Before closing the shutters on the office, he points to a large poster hanging on the wall. It offers a reward of 2.3 million rupees ($39,000) to any godman who can perform any one of 23 acts, including standing on burning cinders for half a minute without blistering his feet; reading the thoughts of another person; making an amputated limb grow even one inch through prayer, spiritual powers, using holy ash, or giving blessings; walking on water; getting out of a locked room by divine power; or converting water into petrol.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As he reads out the list, Kranti chuckles. ''We don't have 2.3 million rupees. But we're not expecting anyone to win so we're pretty safe,'' he says.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><strong><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-size: 10pt; padding: 0pc;">Amrit Dhillon is a Delhi-based writer.</span></strong><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="border: 1pt none windowtext; font-size: 9pt; padding: 0pc;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><a href="http://www.theage.com.au/world/who-ya-gonna-call-gurubusters-20131030-2whap.html">http://www.theage.com.au/world/who-ya-gonna-call-gurubusters-20131030-2whap.html</a></span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-30762362708023970972013-11-22T23:30:00.001-05:002013-11-22T23:30:47.565-05:00The Fall of the House of Moon<div class="title">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">New Republic</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Mariah Blake</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sex rituals, foreign spies, Biden offspring, and the Unification Church's war-torn first family</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">November 12, 2013</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One Sunday morning in February 2010, Bob Exler, a fiftysomething engineer, arrived at the faded ranch house in northwest Houston where he regularly worshipped the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Most people know Moon for his mass weddings and his ultra-conservative newspaper, <i>The Washington Times</i>. But Exler, who joined Moon’s Unification Church in 1972, had been inspired by Moon’s mission to rebuild the traditional family. As he told me, “I didn’t want to be part of this McDonald’s Drive-Thru society, where you go from one partner to another.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For many years, the Sunday service had followed an unchanging routine. Exler and his wife, Susan—who were matched by Moon and married in a mass ceremony at Madison Square Garden—would join fellow disciples in pledging their loyalty to a portrait of Moon, or, as they called him, “True Father.” They would then sing hymns in Korean and English, and listen to sermons by a rotating cast of elders.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But on this particular Sunday, Exler and his fellow congregants arrived to find that the portrait of their leader, in his traditional Korean robe, had vanished. In its place was a wide-screen television with simulcast footage of the Reverend Moon’s 45-year-old daughter, In Jin, speaking from a podium at the Manhattan Center, the concert venue where “America’s Got Talent” was filmed. With her thick makeup and sculpted red hair, In Jin bore a striking resemblance to a game-show host. After welcoming the “one hunfdred six churches all across the country” that were tuning in, she pointed out the church’s new “Liberace piano,” a rhinestone-encrusted Baldwin grand. Her love of Liberace, she explained, dated back to a show she’d seen in Las Vegas as a child. “I must say that he was fabulous,” she recalled, in an affected British accent. “He used to fly through the air, hoisted on a cable. He wore glorious capes—some were rhinestone, some were velvet, and they had all different textures.” At first Exler was intrigued, but after months of watching In Jin’s broadcasts, which had replaced the church’s normal services, his fascination turned to dismay. “We just turned on the TV, sat there for ninety minutes, then everyone went home,” says Exler. “The sense of community was destroyed.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In Jin had assumed control of the U.S. church at a precarious moment for Moon’s religious empire. Her father had come to the United States from Korea nearly 40 years earlier, aiming to “subjugate” America as the first phase in a plan to establish a new world order. Moon had gone on to amass extraordinary political influence, building a vast network of powerful right-wing organizations and forging alliances with every Republican presidential administration since Ronald Reagan’s. In 2004, he and his wife even staged an elaborate coronation ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, which at least a dozen lawmakers attended.<span lang="FR"><a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/node/115512/print#footnote-1"><sup><span lang="EN-US">1</span></sup></a></span> Republican Roscoe Bartlett bowed down before the couple, and Democrat Danny Davis carried in one of two golden crowns that were placed on their heads. Moon then informed the audience that “kings and presidents” had declared him “humanity’s savior” and that Jesus, Buddha, Hitler, and Stalin had been “reborn as new persons” through his teachings.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But in recent years, Moon’s plans to remake America and salvage humanity had run into trouble. Followers had drifted away; his political influence had ebbed. With his ninetieth birthday approaching, he increasingly looked to his children to preserve his life’s work.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In Jin, Moon and his wife’s fourth child, seemed suited for the task. She had a modern American upbringing and a master’s degree from Harvard. In 2009, she took over the Unification Church of America and introduced a bold modernization program. Her aim, she said, was to transform the church into one that people—especially young people—were “dying to join.” She renamed the church Lovin’ Life Ministries, shelved the old hymn books, and launched a rock band, an offshoot of which played New York clubs under the moniker Sonic Cult. She also discarded the old Korean-inspired traditions: bows and chanting gave way to “Guitar Hero” parties, open mics, concerts, and ping-pong tournaments. What’s more, In Jin broke some long-standing taboos. Rather than adhering to the church line on arranged marriage, for example, she encouraged young people to play a role in choosing their own spouses.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Her reforms were met with heated resistance. Across the country, Moon’s disciples took to the Internet to denounce In Jin’s “bling-bling” style and her “ridiculous accent.” One online critic dubbed her ministry the “mushroom church,” because “all you do is sit passively in the dark and are fed bovine excrement.” Within two years, nationwide monthly attendance plunged from roughly 26,000 to less than 7,500, according to internal church documents.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Yet In Jin persisted, confident that, with time, she could win over the doubters and bring her father’s church into the modern era. In early 2012, she gave an upbeat sermon about music, motherhood, and true love. “This is an incredible year and I feel so many wonderful things are going to unfold,” she said. “This is about you and me. This is about America. This is about our future.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But after the service was over, In Jin disappeared from public view. She stopped delivering the weekly broadcasts, and even quit showing up at the church’s Manhattan headquarters. After several months passed with no sign of her, some parishioners began pressing for information on her whereabouts. They were blocked at every turn. Even the highest circles of church leadership couldn’t—or wouldn’t—say what had happened to In Jin Moon.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Before long, it became clear that the House of Moon was crumbling and In Jin had become caught up in its downfall. But her disappearance was only one part of a much more complicated saga—one that involved illegitimate children, secret sex rituals, foreign spy agencies, and the family of Vice President Joseph Biden. Even by Moon’s famously eccentric standards, the collapse of his American project would turn out to be spectacular and deeply strange.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Just before dawn on February 12, 1965, Sun Myung Moon shuffled off a plane at San Francisco International Airport, carrying a suitcase of Korean soil. His disciples later drove him to the hills overlooking the city. As a strong wind blew, the wiry 44-year-old buried a clump of the soil, and declared the spot holy ground—“a place where you can come to pray and not be bothered by Satan.” He spent the next month touring the continental United States in a blue Plymouth Fury station wagon. All told, he and his followers staked out 55 plots of holy ground, including one on the Ellipse in front of the White House.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This brief U.S. visit was a vital step toward realizing Moon’s messianic vision. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Born in 1920, he had grown up in a thatched straw hut in northwest Korea during the brutal Japanese occupation. When he was ten, his family converted to Christianity. Moon eventually joined a fringe Christian sect that engaged in sexual “purification” rituals. After Allied forces liberated Korea in 1945, he moved to Pyongyang, which was then under Soviet control, and started his own church. But other ministers complained about his teachings, and, in 1948, Moon was arrested and reportedly charged with “polygamy.” According to his memoir, he was beaten until he vomited blood and sentenced to five years in a communist prison camp.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When the Korean War broke out, Moon escaped across the border to the South Korean city of Pusan. From his one-room mud hut, he could look down into the harbor where the United States and United Nations unloaded troops and supplies. It was at this point that he began writing down his theological ideas—a mix of Christianity, Confucianism, shamanism, and anti-communist bile—sometimes on the walls and ceiling of his hovel.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The central pillar of Moon’s theology held that Eve had a dalliance with Satan in the Garden of Eden and then slept with Adam, which is how human beings were burdened with original sin. Moon also believed that people, movements, and even entire countries embodied these biblical figures. He himself was the “perfect Adam,” and his mission was to help humankind reclaim its original goodness by forging a new world order led by Korea, the “Adam nation.” America, the “archangel” nation, would play a key role in this mission by helping Korea to rout communism, after which it would bow down to the Korean-led regime, with Moon as its king and messiah.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The nationalist overtones of Moon’s teachings appealed to some influential Koreans, including several English-speaking South Korean Army officers. Among them was a savvy young colonel named Bo Hi Pak, whom Moon tapped as his deputy. In 1961, the military ousted South Korea’s democratic government, and several Moon acolytes were catapulted into key posts, including inside the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, or KCIA. Bo Hi Pak was dispatched to Washington, D.C., where he served as a liaison between the KCIA and U.S. intelligence agencies and built political inroads for Moon’s organization.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">While Moon’s theology had geopolitical ambitions, he saw his family as the means for realizing his vision. At the age of 40, he married his cook’s daughter, a delicate 17-year-old beauty named Hak Ja Han. Moon claimed that their union marked the beginning of the “completed testament” era, in which Moon would reverse the fall of man by making his wife pay penance for Eve’s sins. For three years, he stashed Hak Ja Han in a rented room, kept her in bitter poverty, and forbid her from seeing her family. The goal was to rid her of Eve-like defiance and cultivate “absolute obedience” so that she could bear children free of original sin. By the winter of 1960, the first of these perfect children had arrived.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Moon told his followers that they could join his sin-free bloodline by marrying a spouse of his choosing and engaging in a series of rituals. First, the newlyweds would beat each other with a bat, and then they would perform a three-day sex ceremony involving prescribed positions in front of Moon’s portrait. After the final sexual interlude—in missionary position—the bride would bow down to the groom, a confirmation that they had restored the “lost ideal of goodness.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Moon returned to the United States in 1971, and two years later brought over the key to humanity’s salvation—his rapidly growing family. By now, he and Hak Ja Han had seven children, including eleven-year-old Steve, eight-year-old In Jin (or Tatiana), four-year-old Preston, and three-year-old Justin. (All the Moon kids were given both Korean and American names.) Moon settled the family on a wooded 18-acre estate in the Hudson River Valley, which he christened East Garden.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He also began aggressively recruiting new followers, who were expected to live in monk-like purity. Alcohol and drugs were off-limits, and sex outside marriage was the worst possible sin, punishable by eternal hellfire. His religion appealed to young people who liked the communal ethos of the counterculture, but not the drugs and free love. His growing army of heavenly soldiers raised money by hawking flowers and candles in airports and on street corners. Funds also poured in from Japan (the “Eve nation”), where young devotees persuaded elderly Japanese widows to liberate their ancestors from hell by purchasing grossly overpriced trinkets. By 1974, the U.S. church was raking in $8 million a year.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Moon plowed this money into U.S. businesses, including a shipbuilding firm, a recording studio, a cable TV network, the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, and a 50-state seafood operation. He also began spending generously on political causes. At the height of the Watergate scandal, Moon and his followers organized “God Loves Richard Nixon” rallies on Capitol Hill and bought full-page pro-Nixon newspaper ads all over the country. Moon also assigned pretty young devotees to cozy up to lawmakers, with the goal of planting three in every senator’s office. The women managed to insinuate themselves into several offices—including then–Speaker of the House Carl Albert’s—where they lobbied and collected information.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">These heavy-handed tactics led many to view Moon as a dangerous cult leader. Writing in the <i>Daily Mail</i>, the father of one former devotee described Moon’s followers as “mindless” fund-raising “robots” who had no ideals except “the half-baked ravings of Moon, who lived in splendor while his followers lived in forced penury.” In 1976, Congress began looking into a massive covert KCIA operation designed to sway U.S. policy toward South Korea. The investigation found that the Moon organization was likely a “political tool” of the Korean spy agency and had “systematically violated U.S. tax, immigration, banking, currency and Foreign Agents Registration Act laws.” In retaliation, the church filed a $30 million lawsuit against Representative Donald M. Fraser, who chaired the subcommittee behind the investigation, and launched a brutal—and ultimately successful—campaign to scuttle Fraser’s 1978 Senate bid. But despite their efforts, Moon was charged with tax evasion. A late ’70s Gallup Poll found that Moon “elicited one of the most overwhelmingly negative responses ever reported by a major poll,” his only rivals being Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Meanwhile, an even greater threat to his American project was brewing, this time in his very own home.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Moon expected his followers to sacrifice everything, but this wasn’t true of his own family. His wife and children, who now numbered 13, had the run of East Garden and its lavish manors, one of which contained abowling alley, six pizza ovens, and a waterfall in the dining room. Moon raised his brood like the royal children he believed them to be. They attended private schools and had tutors imported from Japan, fast cars, purebred horses, and even hunting weapons. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Mrs. Moon was not deeply involved in their upbringing—according to former church members, she spent much of her time shopping. Tim Porter, an ex-member who grew up near the family compound, calls her the Korean “Imelda Marcos.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The task of caring for the messiah’s children fell to his followers, who didn’t dare discipline them. “The Moon kids were like gods—completely and utterly exempt from the rules,” says Donna Orme-Collins, a onetime Unificationist whose father directed the British church. Moon’s eldest son, Steve, a plain, slender boy, was particularly brazen. In the late ’70s, he wasexpelled from an elite middle school for shooting students with a BB gun. Moon sent him to live with Bo Hi Pak, but Steve’s behavior only deteriorated. He started doing drugs and picking fights, and Pak was unable to rein him in. At one point, according to members of the Moon and Pak families, Pak even resorted to spanking his own son—a sweet, studious boy who went by the American name James Park—when Steve got out of line.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Moon eventually shipped Steve off to South Korea. There, according to a speech Steve later gave, he joined a rock band and started chugging a bottle of whiskey a day. According to several sources close to the family, including Trenor Rapkins, a former church member who grew up near East Garden, when Steve returned home in the early ’80s, he was more volatile than ever. “He would start yelling, and mucus and spit would start flying out of his face,” Rapkins recalls. “Sometimes he would start throwing punches or waving his gun around.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Steve’s behavior made a deep impression on In Jin, who had a taste for American culture and chafed at the notion that women should be pure and deferential. According to sources close to the family, by the time she was 16, In Jin was accompanying Steve on all-night drinking jaunts. “She basically worshipped him,” says one member of her inner circle. “She was really into partying and rock and roll, because he played it.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Afraid that American culture was corrupting his children, Moon turned to his religion’s catch-all solution: marriage. In 1982, he arranged for Steve to wed a naïve 15-year-old Korean girl named Nansook Hong. Hong would later recall Mrs. Moon telling her that she had been brought to America to reform Steve and that, should she fail, she would be “failing God.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The following year, Moon’s 17-year-old son Heung Jin smashed his Jeep on an icy freeway and died. This created a theological quandary for Moon, since according to his teachings, only married couples could enter God’s kingdom. He solved his dilemma by arranging to have his dead son marry Bo Hi Pak’s second-eldest daughter, Julia. At the same time, In Jin, who was 18, was to wed Pak’s teenage son, James, who had taken the spanking for Steve.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In Jin was mortified, according to family members. She had no interest in James, who was nerdy and quiet, and she was taken instead with his rowdy, handsome younger brother, Sam. But Moon insisted, and his wife stood by him, despite everything she had endured in her own arranged marriage. She even agreed to co-officiate the macabre ceremony. First, In Jin and James traded vows, then Julia trudged down the aisle holding a photo of the dead Heung Jin, after which James gave a groveling speech. “In a million years, I would never deserve to become the husband of In Jin,” he said. “My mission is to work to deserve it for the rest of my life.” The whole ordeal left In Jin traumatized. “She felt like it was institutional rape,” says one member of her inner circle.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Yet whatever resentments In Jin harbored, she remained loyal to her father. Later that year, Moon was sentenced to 18 months in prison on the tax-evasion charges. The church launched a $30 million campaign to overturn his conviction, with In Jin as its public face. According to <i>The Washington Post</i>, in July 1984, thousands of evangelical pastors were invited on an expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C. Although billed as a pageant for religious freedom, the event quickly devolved into a pro-Moon rally, with hundreds of devotees waving placards that read, “REV. MOON INNOCENT VICTIM OF BIGOTRY." The emotional crescendo was a speech by In Jin, who wept as she recalled the “tears and sweat” her father had shed for America.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The campaign, which cast Moon as an innocent man who had been prosecuted for his unconventional faith, struck a nerve. A motley coalition, including the American Civil Liberties Union, then–Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, and religious conservative leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye, eventually rallied behind him. This helped transform Moon from a pariah to a martyr.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By the summer of 1985, when Moon was released from prison, the Reagan Revolution was in full swing and Moon was perfectly positioned to benefit. <i>The Washington Times</i>, which he had launched three years earlier, had become a must-read among conservatives—Reagan himself read it every morning. Moon also won points with the New Right by wading into anti-communist proxy wars in Latin America. In 1985, after Congress cut off aid to the Contras, the Washington Times Foundation launched a pro-Contra slush fund. According to <i>Bad Moon Rising</i>, an investigative history by John Gorenfeld, a Moon front group called CAUSA (Confederation of the Associations for the Unification of the Societies of the Americas) also distributed money and supplies to Contra rebels. In another case, Moon’s organization reportedly helped finance a coup—orchestrated by right-wing paramilitaries, cocaine cartels, and fugitive Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie—that toppled Bolivia’s democratically elected government. Bo Hi Pak later visited the mountainous Bolivian city, La Paz, and declared, “I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world’s highest city.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Moon’s think tanks and front groups also advanced his agenda on the home front. CAUSA spent millions of dollars hosting expenses-paid “Godism” workshops, which promoted Moon’s theology as an antidote to communism and were attended by a number of Senate staffers. Moon also launched the American Family Coalition, which soon surpassed the waning Moral Majority as one of America’s leading religious conservative organizations. And he worked with conservative Christian leaders on a grassroots campaign to push the Republican Party to the right. As his network expanded in Washington, Moon’s dream of remaking America seemed within reach.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By this point, In Jin and James had settled into something resembling Moon’s ideal of married life. James, who held a PhD in finance from Columbia and a law degree from Harvard, launched an investment firm, called Paradigm Global Partners, and began carving out a reputation as a hedge-fund guru. In Jin, who had studied philosophy and political science at Columbia, raised and home-schooled their children.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But Steve, who now ran a church-owned music venue, the Manhattan Center, couldn’t manage to put his wild youth behind him. Like other Moon ventures, the Manhattan Center was lavishly funded by Japanese “donations,” which Steve treated as his private ATM. According to people close to the family, he once marched into the office with $600,000 in a Bloomingdale’s bag and skimmed off $400,000. It was gone in less than a year.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The cash fed Steve’s drug addiction. According to sworn statements from Steve’s wife, Nansook Hong, and people close to the family, by the early ’90s, he was spending days holed up in his room gorging on cocaine. And he pressured others to join in, including James Park. Hong claimed that, when she was seven months pregnant with her fifth child, she found Steve doing cocaine at East Garden and tried to flush it down the toilet. Steve “smashed his fist into my face, bloodying my nose,” Hong later recalled. “He wiped my blood on his hand, then licked it off. ‘Tastes good,’ he said. ‘This is fun.’ ”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Early one morning in 1995, Hong hustled her five children into the back of a cargo van and fled East Garden. She later filed for divorce and published a devastating exposé of life inside the compound, <i>In the Shadow of the Moons</i>. In 1998, she and a Moon daughter, Un Jin—who claimed her husband had abused her, too—went on “60 Minutes” and unleashed a flurry of allegations about sex, drugs, and violence inside Moon’s ideal family. Moon was still reeling from this bombshell when, the following year, his second-youngest son, Phillip, who was also trapped in an unhappy arranged marriage, hurled himself from the seventeenth floor of a Harrah’s casino in Nevada and died.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The family turmoil made a mockery of Moon’s teachings. Moon had already lost some of his political leverage during the early ’90s, as communism crumbled and Democrats seized control of Congress and the White House. Now, many disillusioned followers began turning their backs on the church. Moon, who believed that America’s culture of “moral degradation” had caused his children’s downfall, grew bitter toward his adopted country, which he branded “Satan’s harvest.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But he didn’t give up on the United States entirely.Instead, he began courting new groups, such as socially conservative black churches and Democratic politicians. The church also launched the Women’s Federation for World Peace, which packaged his theology as a tool for the “liberation of women.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">(Liberation in this case meant reviving traditional families by being “unusually obedient.”) Mrs. Moon, whose role in the church had been mostly ceremonial up until this point, was named president. She began traveling the world proclaiming herself a co-messiah and urging women to devote themselves to their families. “We must spread, to the whole world, a model movement . . . in which we embrace our husbands and raise our children properly,” she told a crowd in Seoul. On several occasions, former President George H. W. Bush, a major beneficiary of Moon family donations, appeared alongside her, as did his wife, Barbara. In a major departure, Moon formally declared Mrs. Moon to be his equal and promised she would “inherit everything from Father.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Moon also tried to persuade world leaders and outside clergy to accept him as their king. In the spring of 2000, he invited 120 American ministers to South Korea, and gave them diamond-studded gold watches. Just after the 9/11 attacks, Moon convened a summit in New York City of religious and political leaders—including Falwell, Dan Quayle, Richard Holbrooke, and the Nation of Islam’s president, Louis Farrakhan, whose Million Family March Moon had underwritten the previous year. The goal was to find “solutions to global violence.” But the mood was fractious, especially after Farrakhan suggested that Osama bin Laden had been wrongly scapegoated. Instead of uniting behind Moon, as he had predicted, the post-cold-war world was only growing more divided.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">With every setback, Moon’s plans only grew more grandiose. Later that year, he made an announcement: By February 2013, all humanity would join hands under the banner of a global “nation of cosmic peace and unity,” called Cheon Il Guk. Moon and his followers began preparations in Korea—launching a police force, commissioning an anthem, and adopting a flag. They also built Moon an elaborate castle, shaped like the U.S. Capitol building. If Moon couldn’t actually conquer America, at least he would do so in symbolic form.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Around this time, In Jin was living in Boston and pursuing a doctorate in divinity at Harvard. Her father, who was splitting his time between New York and his kingdom in Korea, no longer kept close tabs on her. Over time, she shed her sense of familial obligation. She started writing and recording romantic pop songs. (“You see how I burn beneath your steady gaze / You see how I yearn to be a meadow where you graze.”) And around 2004, according to a half-dozen sources close to the family, she started an affair with a keyboard player and longtime Unificationist named Alistair Farrant. Soon, Farrant abandoned his wife and children and began camping out at In Jin’s place.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">James Park was crushed. “He felt really displaced,” says one member of his inner circle. “He felt like he had lost his family and everything that gave him meaning.” Park started binging on cocaine and Paradigm, his company, suffered. According to people with inside knowledge, one of Park’s business partners began angling for control of the company, and Park began hunting for a buyer friendly to his interests. As luck would have it, he found one in an unlikely quarter: then-Senator Joseph Biden’s family.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">At the time, Biden was mulling a 2008 presidential bid. According to sworn statements from people involved in the deal, he worried that his son Hunter’s lobbying career could hurt his campaign and asked his brother James to find Hunter a new line of work. (Hunter Biden disputed this account in an interview with The New Republic.) James Biden approached a business associate named Anthony Lotito, who connected him with James Park’s camp, and the three men began negotiating to buy Paradigm.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">On its face, the deal looked solid. Paradigm’s marketing materials boasted $1.5 billion under management and generous returns, and Lotito believed they could quickly expand into union pension funds, which tend to have close ties to democratic politicians. So Lotito and the Bidens pushed ahead. In the spring of 2006, they signed an agreement that gave them a controlling stake in the company, in return for $21 million in cash, to be paid in six months. Hunter Biden—who had no financial industry experience—was named CEO, with a salary of $1.2 million. But it was clear that they needed James Park’s hedge-fund expertise, which meant confronting him about his cocaine habit. According to three sources close to the negotiations, James Biden visited James Park and persuaded him to seek treatment at a center in Florida.<span lang="FR"><sup><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/node/115512/print#footnote-2">2</a></span></sup></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Bidens soon realized that Paradigm wasn’t as solid as they thought. Instead of $1.5 billion under management, it had just $200 to $300 million, and its holding companies were buried in debt. Worse, the Bidens’ main financier backed out.<span lang="FR"><a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/node/115512/print#footnote-3"><sup><span lang="EN-US">3</span></sup></a></span> But the Bidens found a way around the lack of capital. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That summer, according to court documents and people close to both sides of the negotiations, they approached Park, who was still in treatment, and cut a new deal: Instead of $21 million in cash, they would fork over an $8 million note. Hunter Biden and his lawyer, Marc LoPresti, maintain that the deal was fair, given the state of the company. But people close to Park say he was emotionally fragile and felt indebted to the Bidens, which put him in a vulnerable position.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Finally, in 2008, the economy collapsed, after which it emerged that Allen Stanford, whose firm was soliciting investors for one of Paradigm’s funds, was running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. While the fund itself was solid, investors were spooked. In 2010, Paradigm filed for voluntary liquidation. “It was a thicket,” Hunter Biden told me. “Every time you thought you saw a way out, there would be another road block.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">James Park was never able to collect on the $8 million note and found himself facing a mountain of debt. But James and In Jin were able to fall back on their Moon family ties. According to three sources close to the family, In Jin’s younger brother Preston—a Harvard graduate and former Olympic equestrian who controlled most of the family’s American enterprises—agreed to bail the couple out with several million dollars. It was a decision that Preston would come to regret.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By now, Moon was in his late eighties and contemplatinghis legacy. Despite his promises that Mrs. Moon would “inherit everything,” he had begun divvying up his global empire among his sons, including Preston, Steve, Justin, and Sean. But once again tragedy struck the family. In 2008, Steve died of a heart attack at 45. This left an opening for In Jin who maneuvered her way to the helm of the Manhattan Center—the only one of Moon’s daughters to assume a leadership role. She immediately gave her lover, Alistair Farrant, a top position and fired half the staff, many of them long-standing church members. She also began courting new talent, including a thirtysomething rock musician named Ben Lorentzen.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That summer, Reverend and Mrs. Moon were injured when a helicopter they were traveling on crashed into a South Korean mountainside. While they recovered, their children began squabbling over the only major piece of Moon’s empire that remained up for grabs: the Unification Church of America, which oversees the movement’s U.S. congregations, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. Preston saw himself as the natural heir. But In Jin also spotted an opportunity. Her family hadn’t fully recovered from the Paradigm debacle, and, according to people close to her, she was hungry for additional income. When Justin approached her about staging a takeover, she agreed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">While Preston was out of the country, Sean, who headed the international church, issued a memo saying that In Jin was to be “chairperson of the Unification Movement in America.” The American church then convened a board meeting, led by In Jin. Most of the existing board members were pressured to resign and were replaced with In Jin’s allies, after which In Jin was formally elected chair. A bitter family feud ensued. Preston later staged his own boardroom coup at Unification Church International, the holding company for the Moon family’s U.S. business, giving him unfettered control over billions of dollars in assets. He used the proceeds to fund an offshoot movement that drew on his father’s teachings without deifying the Moon clan.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In Jin, meanwhile, assumed the role of chief pastor of the American church and began using it as a vehicle for her own passions. She launched the band Sonic Cult, with Lorentzen as the lead singer. She also pushed back against the traditions that had confined her in an unhappy marriage—openly condoning divorce and encouraging younger members to marry for love.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In Jin had her own reasons for loosening the church’s mores, as Lorentzen’s on-again, off-again wife, Patricia, discovered. In late 2009, Patricia traveled to New York with their two young sons to visit Lorentzen for Christmas. While they were staying at the New Yorker Hotel, Patricia borrowed Ben’s laptop and found his e-mail box brimming with sexually explicit messages from In Jin. “I was so shocked,” Patricia told me. “I went back to my room and sat there trying to digest it.” She confronted In Jin over e-mail, after which she says Lorentzen and another man turned up at her room and delivered an ultimatum: She and the children had to be out of the hotel by the next morning, or they would be tossed out by security. (In Jin and Ben Lorentzen declined to be interviewed.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Patricia later tried to alertthe church’s liaison for family matters, Phillip Schanker, to the affair, but James Park assured Schanker there was no cause for concern. As Schanker explained in a letter to one parishioner, “In Jin’s husband came to me, thanking me for being honest and trying to protect True Family and our movement, assuring me that this was a misunderstanding, that he trusted his wife, and that the wives of the men she works with easily became jealous and created false rumors.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Meanwhile, the family feud erupted into open view, as the siblings sparred over billions of dollars in assets in court. And one of In Jin’s deputies traveled the country delivering a PowerPoint presentation that cast Preston as a “fallen” Adam who was “being controlled by Satan.” This was the state of play in early 2012, when In Jin disappeared.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">On September 2 of that year, the movement was dealt an even bigger blow, when Moon died of pneumonia at age 92. Two weeks later, some 15,000 people packed into a Moon-owned stadium outside Seoul for the memorial. Mrs. Moon vowed to continue her husband’s quest to build “a world where all people live as one great family under God.” After the service, she and her children knelt above his burial vault, clasped hands, and prayed. Through all of this, In Jin remained conspicuously absent.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It was around this time that a birth certificate for a four-month-old boy began circulating on the Internet. To the astonishment of Moon’s followers, the child’s parents were none other than In Jin Moon and Ben Lorentzen. The baby probably would have come to light sooner had James Park not worked to cover up his existence; according to people close to the family, James helped In Jin rent a house in Cape Cod where she and Ben could lay low during her pregnancy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now, on top of mourning their messiah, Moon’s American disciples had to digest the news that his supposedly sinless daughter was trampling his most sacred teachings. “The core of our faith is purity before marriage and fidelity between husband and wife,” longtime church member Mary Anglin told me. “We’ve devoted our lives to this vision. Then In Jin turned around and slapped us all in the face.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As it turns out, Moon didn’t always live up to his virtuous teachings, either. In April, I spoke by videophone with Annie Choi, a soft-spoken, 77-year-old Korean woman with ruddy cheeks and thick silver hair. Choi, who joined Moon’s church along with her mother and sister in the 1950s, alleges that she engaged in numerous sexual rituals—some involving as many as six women—beginning when she was 17 years old. Her story, which is consistent with the accounts of several early followers, supports the claim that Moon’s church started out as a sex cult, with Moon “purifying” female devotees through erotic rites.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">By 1960, when he married Hak Ja Han, Moon was touting marital fidelity as his religion’s foundational ideal. But Choi maintains she stayed on as Moon’s mistress until 1964, when she moved to the United States. The following year, Moon made his inaugural visit to America. By the time he left, Choi says, she was carrying his child.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">News like this could have sunk the fledgling American project. But Bo Hi Pak made sure that didn’t happen. According to Choi, who has never before spoken publicly about the experience, Pak’s wife stuffed her mid-section with cloth diapers and pretended that she was pregnant. When it came time to give birth, Choi says that Pak accompanied her to the hospital and passed her off as his wife. The following day, he dropped her off at her empty apartment and took the baby back to his home. Later, Mrs. Pak brought Choi some seaweed soup, but Choi told me that she couldn’t eat it. “I just sat there crying, with my tears falling in the pot.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Choi stayed in the United States to be near her son, Sam Park—the same young man In Jin had fallen for during her teenage years. (By all accounts, she was unaware that Sam was her half brother.) Then, at age 13, it dawned on Sam that the kindly “aunt” who visited periodically was actually his mother. “Suddenly my life made a lot more sense,” Sam told me in April, when we met in Phoenix, where he and Choi live.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Bo Hi Pak later approached Sam and his mother with a contract. As a sign of their “mutual love, affection and respect,” it read, Sam, Choi, and Pak would release one another—and the Moon family—from “any and all past, present or future actions,” including those arising from inheritance claims. In return, Sam and Choi would each receive $100.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Alleging that they were victims of “theology-based” racketeering, Sam and Choi are now suing the Paks and Moons for $20 million. Neither the Unification Church nor the lawyers for the Moon and Pak families responded to requests for comment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sam Park’s existence was an indignity that Mrs. Moon had to endure. But by the time In Jin’s love child came to light, Mrs. Moon’s husband and master was dead and she was free to handle the situation as she saw fit. She demanded that In Jin resign. In Jin later issued an apology to members of the church. “It was never our intention to hurt anyone,” she wrote. “All we wanted was to love and to be loved.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Next, Mrs. Moon moved to claim the inheritance her husband had promised. She wrested control of the international church from Sean and issued a memo saying, “[E]verything that is carried out in Korea from this day onward will be centered on True Mother.” She later ousted Justin, who controlled most of Moon’s Korean enterprises. After five decades spent in Moon’s shadow, the kingdom was in her hands.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And despite Moon’s views on wifely subservience, it soon became clear that Mrs. Moon did not share all of her husband’s opinions. She began speaking out in surprisingly critical terms about Moon’s preoccupation with America. During a trip to New York late last year, she complained that he had squandered 40 years in the United States for “such little” return. Many members suspect that she will soon turn her back on his beleaguered American project entirely. “Reverend Moon really cared about America,” says Richard Barlow, a former Unificationist missionary, who maintains contact with elements of the church leadership. “But his wife doesn’t feel that strong connection, and she’s ousted her children who do.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In late February, the matriarch celebrated the arrival of Cheon Il Guk—Moon’s global kingdom of peace and unity—before some 15,000 devotees who packed into the Moon-owned stadium in Korea, wearing identical wedding garb. The crowd sang the Cheon Il Guk national anthem, and then Mrs. Moon, the former cook’s daughter, swept into the stadium wearing a jeweled crown and a purple robe festooned with gold embroidery. She marched slowly up a long stairway to a giant replica of the Moon family palace and took a seat on a white throne. Next to her was an identical throne, reserved for her dead husband. An attendant handed her a “heavenly scepter,” and she climbed to her feet: “I proclaim the first year of Cheon Il Guk.” Trumpets blared, and the stadium filled with mist.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Afterward, several of Moon’s old friends gave congratulatory speeches, including former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who lauded the festivities as an “affirmation of marriage and family.” “We often take the family for granted,” Hastert said. “However, when the family system begins to break down, all manner of personal and social problems emerge.” It was a fitting epitaph to Moon’s American project and his diminished political empire. </span></div>
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<a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115512/unification-church-profile-fall-house-moon"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115512/unification-church-profile-fall-house-moon</span></a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-28916301697555351982013-09-30T14:45:00.000-04:002013-09-30T14:47:45.349-04:00Life At An Austin Ashram, A First-Person Account<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Outlook India</span><br />
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Karen Jonson<o:p></o:p></div>
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The author of Sex, Lies and Two Hindu Gurus shares her experiences<o:p></o:p></div>
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September 16, 2013<o:p></o:p></div>
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In 1991, American writer Karen Jonson wasn’t in love and was in a dead-end job when she joined an ashram, the Jagadguru Kripalu Parishat (JKP) in Austin, Texas, attracted by local guru Prakashanand Saraswati’s talks “about god and loving god”. The JKP proclaims the divinity of Kripaluji Maharaj. In the beginning, she was happy to be among a group of people who had the same feeling and purpose, picking green beans by the moonlight, cooking meals, acting in skits. After living in the ashram for 15 years, she quit in 2008, three years before Prakashanand was found guilty on 20 counts of child sex abuse. Jonson published a tell-all book, Sex, Lies and Two Hindu Gurus, which JKP followers dismiss as a ‘Christian conspiracy’. Here Jonson tells Debarshi Dasgupta how her spiritual quest went awry:<br />
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In hindsight, I always had some small doubts about both Kripalu and Prakash. But I had no proof of anything. I was also very religious and wanted to believe what they were telling us, about achieving God realisation and becoming a gopi in divine Vrindavan. All we had to do was ‘surrender’ to them, they said. So I tried really hard to do that, and whenever I stumbled, I believed it was because of my own lack of devotional qualities. So whenever I had doubts, I would push them back into the corners of my mind.</div>
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But the major onset of scepticism occurred when Kripalu was arrested in Trinidad for raping a young woman in May 2007. It was while he was on a ‘world tour’ that year for a few months. He had just spent about four weeks in the JKP ashram in Austin where I had lived full-time since April 1993. His plan was to go to Trinidad, then Canada, then come back to Austin.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Some uncomfortable events took place when he was in the Austin ashram, called Barsana Dham at the time (the name was changed to Radha Madhav Dham later, after Prakashanand fled to Mexico on his own cases becoming public). For the first time ever, I was invited to Kripalu’s bedroom to perform a secret ritual they called ‘charan seva’. I had never heard of it before. But I later learned that many of the women in JKP’s ashrams participated in this ritual, which took place several times every day at specific times.<o:p></o:p></div>
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During this ritual, 5-6 women are brought into the guru’s bedroom. He is lying on his back in the middle of his bed on several pillows with his arms and legs spread out. The women each climb up on his bed and kneel near one part of his body, the thigh, calf and feet. (At that time, one foot was not available for massaging due to an injury, which I later learned was tuberculosis that had gone into his bone.) We had been instructed to “press him very hard.” So we just pressed hard on whatever body part we had.<o:p></o:p></div>
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My first time was his left thigh. The room is very dark so it was hard to see what else was going on. Also, my attention was very focused on massaging him correctly, as instructed. While pressing him as hard as I could, his hand reached down to mine and tried to nudge my hand up to his groin. At the time, I naively thought he wanted me to massage him higher on his thigh, so I tried, but there was really nowhere else to go. He nudged me again. And again I went a tiny bit higher, but that was it. Then it was over and we were told to leave. “Jao!”<o:p></o:p></div>
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I had four more pressing sessions. In two, nothing that I know of happened. But then I wasn’t really expecting anything. But one time, when I was on the left thigh again, I saw movement on his groin from the opposite side. While focusing on my pressing, I also kept glancing over. It looked like another woman, who I knew, was massaging his penis. I really could not believe my eyes. I kept glancing, but was in shock. But I now knew that is exactly what was happening.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Another time I was on his left calf, and out of the corner of my eye I saw some movement. When I glanced up, I saw that Kripalu’s hand was up the woman’s blouse. I knew this woman too. Again I was in shock. Each of these three times, I tried not to think about the incidents. I still tried to believe that Kripalu was God and that I could not understand God’s actions. Plus, with him in residence there is way too much work to do and no one gets enough sleep, so we are sleep-deprived every day. I was constantly exhausted trying to keep up with the brutal satsang schedule from 4 am to 10 pm. Plus the work we had to do. My job was baking “birthday cakes”. They offered a thing called a “birthday seva”, where an interested person paid US $2,500 for the privilege of having Kripalu acknowledge their birthday—even if it wasn’t the person’s birthday. I baked over 50 cakes in four weeks for this!<o:p></o:p></div>
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About a week after his arrest in Trinidad, one of the preachers gathered us together one night to inform us. After spinning the story in Kripalu’s favour (she didn’t use the word rape), she told us: “Do not go on the internet and read about this.” I think that was the exact moment I got my mind back under my own control and snapped out of my cult delusion. Because I decided that is exactly what I was going to do: I went online, typed in ‘Kripalu’ and ‘Trinidad’, and started reading. I was in complete shock.<o:p></o:p></div>
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That’s when I learned the truth. So many people from around the world were commenting on the real JKP and Kripalu. I just knew they were telling the truth. Everything. The sex, the money collection, the abuse. That’s when I started putting together pieces of the puzzle—including my past doubts and recent experiences during “charan seva”.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It took me a little more time to accept that Prakash was as bad as Kripalu, because I knew Prakash first and had hardly known anything about Kripalu until the fall of 1999. Prakash had stopped talking about him after Kripalu’s first arrest for raping two underage girls in India in the early 1990s (I joined in 1991). That case has never been resolved. He ‘reintroduced’ us to him in late 1999, saying he was the fifth jagadguru, an incarnation of Radha-Krishna and Chaitanya, and a lot of other fairy tales.<o:p></o:p></div>
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One day, I realised that Prakash had to be as bad as Kripalu, because he served him and brought us to him. Within a couple of months, I heard from the young women who had been molested by Prakash as children while living in the ashram.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m not sure why certain people calling themselves “gurus” in India are so popular among Indians. I don’t fully understand the beliefs, culture and history surrounding this relationship. I’ve been told by some of my Indian friends living in the US that to worship so blindly is an aberration of the traditional guru-disciple relationship. In fact, an Indian man living in Austin wrote a chapter in my book on that subject. He stressed that there should always be an element of verification on the student’s part. In other words, be sure the person is a true guru. But it seems that some people have completely abandoned this step.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I believe that conmen gurus don’t leave any room for verification. In my case, Kripalu and his preachers went out of their way to teach that it’s a sin to doubt the guru, question him or second-guess him. The only option is 100% unquestioning belief. I now know that this is a red flag. Only a cult would not want a person to use their reasoning mind to make an informed decision.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If a person stays in such a situation, well then they are just sitting ducks. This unquestioning attitude gives the conmen complete control and allows them to shape the followers’ minds anyway they choose. The conman has effectively stolen the individual’s personal power and used it for their own purposes, much like a vampire sucks a person’s blood to stay alive.<o:p></o:p></div>
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At the same time, they claim a kind of shield. Just before his arrest in Trinidad, one day at the Austin JKP temple, Kripalu said: “The actions of a saint may seem more worldly than the most worldly person’s actions. But you cannot judge them, because you are worldly and a saint is divine.” That’s the kind of thinking that gives a person a licence to kill. Very scary.<o:p></o:p></div>
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http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?287715</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06051542715853942258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-23326404758647152682013-09-24T00:46:00.001-04:002013-09-24T00:46:52.366-04:00Paul Martin memorial documents<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Introduction to Special Collection: <nobr><a class="FAtxtL" href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_articles/langone_michael_introductiontorecoveryfromcultscollection_abs.htm#" id="FALINK_3_0_2">Recovery</a></nobr> From Cults: A Pastoral/Psychological Dialogue - Personal Accounts of Former Group Members</div>
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<span lang="FR"><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_profile/langone_michael.asp" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"> Michael D. Langone, Ph.D.</a></span></div>
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The following articles are edited transcriptions of talks given by four former group members who participated in a joint two-day conference of AFF and Denver Theological Seminary: Nancy Miquelon, Patrick Knapp, Carson Miles, and David Clark. The conference’s title was “Recovery from Cults: A Pastoral/Psychological Dialogue. In addition to the former member talks published here, the conference included talks by Dr. Ronald Enroth, Dr. Michael Langone, Dr. Paul Martin, and Gretchen Passantino. Dr. James Beck of <nobr><a class="FAtxtL" href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_articles/langone_michael_introductiontorecoveryfromcultscollection_abs.htm#" id="FALINK_2_0_1">Denver Seminary</a></nobr> moderated the conference. Herbert Rosedale, Esq., of AFF and Dr. Douglas Groothuis of Denver Seminary were discussants.<br />
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The talks of the former members were designed to illuminate the psychological and spiritual issues former group members frequently encounter and the similarities and differences of evangelical and secular approaches to recovery issues. Two of the former members (Clark and Miquelon) have been active in cult educational work with secular organizations and rely primarily on the thought reform model of cult conversion. Two (Knapp and Miles) initially sought help from evangelical cult educational organizations and have been associated with Denver Seminary. They also recognize the abusiveness of cultic environments, but rely on family systems and pastoral counseling models of cult conversion. All four contributors are currently practicing Christians.<br />
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AFF is grateful to Denver Theological Seminary for providing a facility for the conference and for collaborating in its design, promotion, and execution. We are grateful, in particular, to Dr. James Beck, director of the seminary’s <nobr><a class="FAtxtL" href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_articles/langone_michael_introductiontorecoveryfromcultscollection_abs.htm#" id="FALINK_1_0_0">counseling program</a></nobr>, and Dr. Douglas Groothuis, Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Ethics. A special debt of gratitude is owed Sharon Hamm, a writer from Fort Collins, Colorado. Ms. Hamm volunteered to prepare these talks for publication. Without her patient and skillful editing, these papers would have remained rough transcriptions.<br />
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AFF also wishes to thank the speakers, whose thoughtful contributions made the conference stimulating and memorable. The papers presented here will, I hope, help readers appreciate the complexity and subtlety of the cult experience and recognize that we need more nuanced theories of cult conversion than currently exist.<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">This article is an electronic version of an article originally published in Cultic Studies Journal, 1998, Volume 15, Number 2, pages 107-108. Please keep in mind that the pagination of this electronic reprint differs from that of the bound volume. This fact could affect how you enter bibliographic information in papers that you may write.</span></div>
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<editablefield name="Top"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></editablefield><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">References</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">
Two groups of former cultists were administered the MCMI and other psychological tests in order to assess the nature and magnitude of post-cult psychological problems. One group consisted of 13 former cultists who attended an educational conference on cults. The other group was made up of Ill former cultists who attended a <nobr><a class="FAtxtL" href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_articles/martin_paul_postcultsymptoms_abs.htm#" id="FALINK_1_0_0">residential treatment</a></nobr> center. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of this treatment, 66 members of the latter group participated in a six-month followup. Post-cult distress at initial testing was high and did not differ between groups. Pre-post evaluations of the treatment group indicated a strong treatment effect. Marked personality configuration shifts in the MCMI profile after treatment occurred. Results appear to <nobr><a class="FAtxtL" href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_articles/martin_paul_postcultsymptoms_abs.htm#" id="FALINK_3_0_2">support</a></nobr> the view that dissociative processes are central to the cult experience.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><table style="width: 512px;"><tbody>
<tr><td bgcolor="#f1f8ed"><a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/by_author.asp?Subject=AFF+News+Briefs+%2D+Vol%2E+01%2C+No%2E+04%2C+2002+%2D+print"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">AFF News Briefs - Vol. 01, No. 04, 2002 - print</span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td bgcolor="#f1f8ed"><a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/by_author.asp?Subject=Childhood+Verbal%2C+Physical%2C+Sexual+Victimization%2C+Symptomatology+and+Family+Environments+within+Coercive+Groups+and+Resultant+Treatment+Outcomes"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Childhood Verbal, Physical, Sexual Victimization, Symptomatology and Family Environments within Coercive Groups and Resultant Treatment Outcomes</span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td bgcolor="#f1f8ed"><a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/by_author.asp?Subject=INTERNATIONAL%3A+Sweden%2DAmerican+Cult+Experts+Consult+in+Sweden"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> INTERNATIONAL: Sweden-American Cult Experts Consult in Sweden</span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td bgcolor="#f1f8ed"><a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/by_author.asp?Subject=Overcoming+the+Bondage+of+Revictimization%3A+response+to+Passantino"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Overcoming the Bondage of Revictimization: response to Passantino</span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td bgcolor="#f1f8ed"><a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/by_author.asp?Subject=Paul+Martin"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Paul Martin</span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td bgcolor="#f1f8ed"><a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/by_author.asp?Subject=Pitfalls+To+Recovery+by+Dr%2E+Paul+Martin"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Pitfalls To Recovery by Dr. Paul Martin</span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td bgcolor="#f1f8ed"><a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/by_author.asp?Subject=Post%2DCult+Symptoms+As+Measured+by+the+MCMI+Before+and+After+Residential+Treatment"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Post-Cult Symptoms As Measured by the MCMI Before and After Residential Treatment</span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td bgcolor="#f1f8ed"><a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/by_author.asp?Subject=Professional+Profile%3A+Dr%2E+Paul+Martin"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Professional Profile: Dr. Paul Martin</span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td bgcolor="#f1f8ed"><a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/by_author.asp?Subject=Study+Indicates+Rehab%27s+Benefits"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Study Indicates Rehab's Benefits</span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td bgcolor="#f1f8ed"><a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/by_author.asp?Subject=The+Lifton+Scale"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The Lifton Scale</span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td bgcolor="#f1f8ed"><a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/by_author.asp?Subject=The+Wellspring+Treatment+Model+for+Victims+of+Cults+and+Cultic+Relationships"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The Wellspring Treatment Model for Victims of Cults and Cultic Relationships</span></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Paul R. Martin, Ph.D.</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">ICSA is sad to report that Dr. Paul R. Martin passed away after a long illness on Friday, August 14, 2009. Dr. Martin was one of the leading figures in the cultic studies field. He contributed immeasurably to the recovery of more than 1,000 former cult members, provided counsel to families, trained professionals, and was a pioneer of clinical research in this field. </span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You will find personal details in Dr. Martin's <a href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_profile/martin_paul_obit.asp" target="_blank"> obituary</a>. We wish his family and friends our deepest condolences.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">If you would like to share your reflections on Dr. Martin's contributions and your feelings about him, please contact Dr. Michael Langone (<span style="color: blue;"><a href="mailto:mail@icsamail.com">mail@icsamail.com</a></span>), who will consider adding them to our <a href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_profile/martin_paul_reflections.asp" target="_blank"> memorial page in honor of Dr. Martin</a>. </span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b><img align="left" border="0" height="254" src="http://www.icsahome.com/images/profile/paulmartin.jpg" width="190" />Paul R. Martin, Ph.D</b>., a former member of Great Commission International (currently called Great Commission Association of Churches), was a psychologist and Director of the Wellspring Retreat and Resource Center in Albany, Ohio, a residential rehabilitation center for ex-cult members that has treated over 1000 clients. Dr. Martin was author of <i>Cult-Proofing Your Kids</i>. He wrote numerous articles on cults, including several contributions to <i> Cultic Studies Journal</i>, such as, “Pseudo Identity and the Treatment of Personality Change in Victims of Captivity and Cults” (Vol. 13. No. 2). He was interviewed by many newspapers and radio and <nobr><a class="FAtxtL" href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_profile/martin_paul.asp#" id="FALINK_1_0_0">TV stations</a></nobr> concerning cults. He served as an expert witness in cult cases around the world, and was the lead expert witness for the Lee Boyd Malvo trial (the Virginia sniper case) and testified in the Zacarious Moussoui case, (the 20th hijacker) on the process of terrorist recruitment. He was the 2006 ICSA recipient of the Herbert L. Rosedale Award for leadership in preserving and protecting individual freedom. In 1993, he also received the John G. Clark Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Cultic Studies. </span></div>
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<b><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_profile/martin_paul_reflections.asp" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Return to Memorial Page in Honor of Dr. Martin</span></a></b></div>
<b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_profile/martin_paul_obit.asp" target="_blank"> Return to Dr. Martin's Obituary</a></span></b><br />
<span style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><b><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_profile/martin_paul_video.asp">Video's by Paul Martin</a></b></span><br />
<b><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_profile/martin_paul.asp#refocus"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Reflections from reFOCUS</span></a></b><br />
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<tr><td style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 2px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/logon/elibdocview.asp?Subject=INTERNATIONAL%3A+Sweden%2DAmerican+Cult+Experts+Consult+in+Sweden" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none;"> INTERNATIONAL: Sweden-American Cult Experts Consult in Sweden</a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 2px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/logon/elibdocview.asp?Subject=Overcoming+the+Bondage+of+Revictimization%3A+response+to+Passantino" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none;"> Overcoming the Bondage of Revictimization: response to Passantino</a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 2px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/logon/elibdocview.asp?Subject=Pitfalls+To+Recovery+by+Dr%2E+Paul+Martin" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none;"> Pitfalls To Recovery by Dr. Paul Martin</a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 2px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/logon/elibdocview.asp?Subject=Post%2DCult+Symptoms+As+Measured+by+the+MCMI+Before+and+After+Residential+Treatment" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none;"> Post-Cult Symptoms As Measured by the MCMI Before and After Residential Treatment</a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 2px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/logon/elibdocview.asp?Subject=Professional+Profile%3A+Dr%2E+Paul+Martin" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none;"> Professional Profile: Dr. Paul Martin</a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 2px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/logon/elibdocview.asp?Subject=Study+Indicates+Rehab%27s+Benefits" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none;"> Study Indicates Rehab's Benefits</a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 2px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/logon/elibdocview.asp?Subject=The+Wellspring+Treatment+Model+for+Victims+of+Cults+and+Cultic+Relationships" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none;"> The Wellspring Treatment Model for Victims of Cults and Cultic Relationships</a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 2px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/logon/elibdocview.asp?Subject=The+Lifton+Scale" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none;"> The Lifton Scale</a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 2px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/logon/elibdocview.asp?Subject=Childhood+Verbal%2C+Physical%2C+Sexual+Victimization%2C+Symptomatology+and+Family+Environments+within+Coercive+Groups+and+Resultant+Treatment+Outcomes" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none;"> Childhood Verbal, Physical, Sexual Victimization, Symptomatology and Family Environments within Coercive Groups and Resultant Treatment Outcomes</a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 125%; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 2px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 9pt;"><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/logon/elibdocview.asp?Subject=Paul+Martin" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none;"> Paul Martin</a></span></td></tr>
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<div class="title">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Study Indicates Rehab’s Benefits</span></div>
<div class="author">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_profile/martin_paul.asp" style="text-decoration: none;"> Paul R. Martin, Ph.D.</a> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Because cults can be oppressive environments, and because people who leave cults are frequently disillusioned and overwhelmed by the challenge of adjusting to mainstream society, former cult members experience a high level of distress. Research studies suggest that more than one-third and possibly more than one-half of those who have left cultic groups have been detrimentally affected by their cultic experience. One researcher has written: “Members may be harmed in that they lose their psychological autonomy and, frequently, their financial assets. Furthermore, the group’s partial-to-total disconnection from mainline society deprives members of the opportunity to learn from the varied experiences that a normal life provides. Members may lose irretrievable years in a state of ‘maturational arrest.’ In some cases they undergo psychiatric breakdowns and/or suffer from physical disease and injury.” A survey of 350 ex-cultists from 48 different groups found that former members suffered from residual effects of their cult experience lasting from 43.8 months to 139 months, with an average duration of 81.5 months. These effects included such things as depression, loneliness, guilt, anger, fear, humiliation, disorientation, “floating” in and out of altered states, nightmares, and an inability to break mental rhythms of chanting, meditation, or speaking in tongues. Deprogrammed subjects appeared to recover more quickly. Clinicians who have worked extensively with former cultists say that most require six months to two years to adjust adequately. Some require much more time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Ex-cultists often need so much time to readjust because so many areas of their lives are adversely affected simultaneously. Most cultists are implicitly, if not explicitly, encouraged to burn all interpersonal bridges to the mainstream world. When they leave the cult, they are usually shunned by their cult “friends” and met with puzzlement, hurt, and anger by the old friends and relatives they had ignored for so long. Because of their devotion to the cult’s “cause,” many cultists abandon <nobr><a class="FAtxtL" href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_articles/martin_paul_study_rehab_benefits.htm#" id="FALINK_3_0_2">school</a></nobr>, career plans, and even functioning careers in order to serve the group. Leaving a group that appeared to provide spiritual meaning will often leave ex-cultists feeling spiritually empty or spiritually raped. And, in part because they had been indoctrinated in the cult to believe that the group was always right, many former cultists consider themselves to be failures or seriously inadequate. Thus, former cultists often have interpersonal, vocational, spiritual, and intrapersonal conflicts and deficiencies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Although it can certainly be helpful, weekly psychotherapy may be insufficient for many former cultists. That is why many have attended special residential <nobr><a class="FAtxtL" href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_articles/martin_paul_study_rehab_benefits.htm#" id="FALINK_1_0_0">treatment programs</a></nobr>. The Wellspring Retreat and Resource Center, for example, offers a comprehensive program of in‑depth psychological assessment and treatment usually lasting two weeks. Clients receive a full psychological test battery and assessment interview. They participate in workshops that address common postcult problems, e.g., depression, grieving and loss, establishing career goals, spiritual issues. All clients receive extensive one-on-one therapy. And all clients receive an intensive education on psychological manipulation, thought reform programs, and the cult conversion process.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The term “rehabilitation” has been applied to this process because, like persons recovering from physical injuries, ex-cultists require an intensive program in order to bring them back at least to the level at which they once functioned. Also, as with the physically injured, most ex-cultists were relatively normal before they were seduced into a destructive group.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Wellspring has conducted the only formal outcome evaluation study with the ex-cult rehabilitation population. The results are encouraging. Wellspring clients are routinely administered the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI) at intake and, in most cases, at a six-month follow-up. The improvement in all clinical sub-scales, including <nobr><a class="FAtxtL" href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_articles/martin_paul_study_rehab_benefits.htm#" id="FALINK_2_0_1">dysthymia</a></nobr> and anxiety, was dramatic, with the exception of the psychotic delusion scale, which was normal at the time of admission. Treatment effectiveness was not enhanced, on the Millon inventory, if clients sought further psychiatric care once they left Wellspring. Wellspring research indicates, then, that additional psychotherapy following postcult rehabilitation does not appreciably reduce the ex-members’ symptomatology. The study, however, did not include consideration of psychotherapy gains through work with mental health professionals trained to recognize and deal with cult-related symptoms and dynamics. Such work may greatly aid the recovery process.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">To conclude, an intensive postcult rehabilitation program may be a cost-effective treatment for former cult members. By clarifying the cult-related issues troubling the client, it can lay the groundwork for a more productive psychotherapeutic relationship.</span></div>
<div class="references">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Langone, M.D., Destructive Cultism: Questions and Answers. Bonita Springs, FL: American Family Foundation, 1982, 7.</span></div>
<div class="references">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Conway, F. et al. Information Disease: Effects of Covert Induction and Deprogramming. <i>Update 10 </i> (3) 1986, 63-65 and Update, 10 (3). 45-57</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="notes">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This article is an electronic version of an article originally published in Cultic Studies Journal, 1992, Volume 9, Number 2, pages 219-250. Please keep in mind that the pagination of this electronic reprint differs from that of the bound volume. This fact could affect how you enter bibliographic information in papers that you may write.</span></div>
<div class="title">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Post-Cult <nobr><a class="FAtxtL" href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_articles/martin_paul_postcultsymptoms_abs.htm#" id="FALINK_2_0_1">Symptoms</a></nobr> As Measured by the MCMI Before and After Residential Treatment</span></div>
<div class="author">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_profile/martin_paul.asp" style="text-decoration: none;"> Paul R. Martin, Ph.D.</a> </span><br />
<a href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_profile/langone_michael.asp" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Michael D. Langone, Ph.D.</span></a><br />
<a href="http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_profile/dole_arthur.asp" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Arthur A. Dole, Ph.D.</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Jeffrey Wiltrout</span></div>
<div class="abstract">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Abstract</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-9695738587912083382013-09-16T11:21:00.001-04:002013-09-30T14:46:54.271-04:00Church hid abusive priest from victim<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 1.4;">news.com.au</span><br /><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-4582775459273246141" itemprop="articleBody" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 500px;">
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THE orders the Reverend Carlos Rodriguez got from his religious superiors after he confessed to molesting a 16-year-old boy just hours before were swift and decisive.<br /><br /><o:p></o:p></div>
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September 10, 2013<o:p></o:p></div>
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"Leave immediately. Check into a motel. Don't tell anyone where you are going. Wait for further instructions."<o:p></o:p></div>
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Rodriguez, then 31, picked up cash at a Catholic retreat centre and waited by the phone. The next day, the regional leader of his religious order called and told him to book a plane ticket out of California.<o:p></o:p></div>
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By the time the victim's family went to police, he had checked in at a residential treatment center for troubled priests in Maryland.<o:p></o:p></div>
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"I felt like a fugitive. But what else could I do under the circumstances. I had no other choice but to follow orders,'' he wrote years later in an essay that was included in his Vatican petition to be defrocked.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The essay was part of a 330-page confidential personnel file on the priest that was released yesterday along with files for five other priests who were also accused of molesting children while working for their Roman Catholic religious orders - the Vincentians, the Norbertines and the Augustinians - while assigned to parishes in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Rodriguez's file stands out among the dozens of priest files that have become public in recent months because it includes a candid and detailed autobiographical account of his actions and the steps his religious superiors took to shield him from the family and civil authorities.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The file also makes clear that officials with Rodriguez's religious order, the Vincentians, and the Los Angeles archdiocese worked together to intercede.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Both the order and the archdiocese knew of Rodriguez's confession, but no one spoke with police until the boy's family filed a police report a month later, according to the file.<o:p></o:p></div>
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"The thing that Carlos Rodriguez does is, he lays out the truth, the underbelly, and exposes that for all that it is,'' said Ray Boucher, a lead plaintiff attorney in the clergy litigation who secured the release of the files.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The religious order files are the second set to be released this summer and at least a half-dozen more releases are expected in the coming weeks as religious orders comply with the final terms of a 2007 settlement with hundreds of clergy abuse victims in Los Angeles.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The archdiocese itself released thousands of pages under court order this year for its own priests who were accused of sexual abuse, but the full picture of the problem has remained elusive without records from the religious orders, which routinely assigned priests to work in Los Angeles parishes and schools.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Without access to Rodriguez, the police case dried up and the priest was back at work within seven months, where he molested two brothers beginning that same year.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Rodriguez, who was defrocked in 1998, was convicted of that abuse 17 years later, in 2004, and sentenced to prison. He was released in 2008.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Now 57, he lives as a mostly unemployed registered sex offender in Huntington Park, a gritty, industrial city southeast of Los Angeles. He has been accused of abuse in at least five civil lawsuits.<o:p></o:p></div>
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"It still weighs heavy on me,'' Rodriguez, who wore a cross around his neck, said yesterday when reached at his apartment. "It's nothing proud to talk about. I still feel remorse and it still hurts.''<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Reverend Jerome Herff, the Vincentian regional provincial who told Rodriguez to flee after his 1987 confession and placed him back in ministry the following year, said he urged him to leave because the boy's family was irate and he feared for the priest's safety.<o:p></o:p></div>
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"I did what I thought was best and had to be done and what happened, happened,'' Herff said in a brief phone interview. "I've lived with this for years and I just don't want to go back there anymore.''<o:p></o:p></div>
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Rodriguez's abusive spree began in the summer of 1987, when he took two teenage boys on a trip to the Grand Canyon roughly a year after he was ordained.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The three checked into a Holiday Inn in Flagstaff, Arizona, and in his essay, Rodriguez wrote he began molesting one teen after he fell asleep on the floor.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The boy awoke and the novice priest, terrified at being discovered, drove nearly 800 kilometres through the night to deliver both teens to their families and immediately went back to his parish, where he took a shower and confessed.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Vincentians sent him to the residential treatment center, where he stayed for seven months.<o:p></o:p></div>
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While there, Rodriguez fretted in letters home about the "seriousness of the law in Arizona'' that could get him up to 15 years in prison and asked the Vincentians for help gathering character references that could help convince the Arizona prosecutor not to press charges.<o:p></o:p></div>
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When the family finally contacted the Los Angeles police a month later, Rodriguez's superior told the investigating detective that the "church was aware of the situation and the defendant was currently hospitalised,'' according to court papers from a criminal case filed years later.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The victim's former attorney, Drew Antablin, said his client, who could not be reached for comment, received a settlement in 2007 as part of an agreement with hundreds of plaintiffs in Southern California.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="url" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small; margin-left: 0pc; margin-right: 0pc;">
http://www.news.com.au/world-news/north-america/catholic-church-hid-abusive-priest-from-victims/story-fnh81jut-1226715722663</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-55426628042954203282013-08-26T14:59:00.001-04:002013-08-26T14:59:51.756-04:00The Birth of “Stockholm Syndrome,” 40 Years Ago<a href="http://www.intervention101.com/2013/08/the-birth-of-stockholm-syndrome-40.html?spref=bl">The Birth of “Stockholm Syndrome,” 40 Years Ago</a>: History Christopher Klein Forty years ago, a six-day hostage drama inside a Stockholm bank grabbed worldwide headlines, and the surpri...<br />
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-15347429125201821312013-08-24T08:41:00.001-04:002013-08-26T03:39:12.105-04:00Special Event: Mental Health Issues in Cult-Related Interventions<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">ICSA will conduct a special event in Philadelphia</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Sunday, October 13, 2013, 1</span><span style="color: #565555; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 19px;">0:00 AM to 4:30 PM</span><br />
<span style="color: #565555; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 19px;">Sheraton Philadelphia University City (36th and Chestnut St.).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">In this special event, cult intervention specialists and mental health professionals will discuss their roles in helping families and former members, in particular how they work together and how they differ. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Among the questions to be examined are:</span><br />
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<li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;"><span style="line-height: 1.5;">What assessment criteria should be considered to determine the</span></li>
<li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;"><span style="line-height: 1.5;">appropriateness and feasibility of cult-related interventions? </span></li>
<li style="margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: #565555; line-height: 1.5;">What criteria should be considered to determine the appropriateness of mental health consultation and/or treatment? </span></li>
</span></ol>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">This event should be useful to former members of high-control groups or relationships, families concerned about an affected loved one, and helping professionals whose assistance is sometimes sought by families and former members.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 1.5;"><br /></span></span><br />
<ul style="line-height: 1.4; margin: 0.5em 0px; padding: 0px 2.5em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;"><span style="line-height: 1.5;">David Clark</span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: #565555; line-height: 1.5;">Steve K. D. Eichel, PhD, ABPP </span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: #565555; line-height: 1.5;">Lorna Goldberg, MSW, LCSW, PsyA </span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: #565555; line-height: 1.5;">William Goldberg, MSW, LCSW, PsyA </span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: #565555; line-height: 1.5;">Steven Hassan, Med, LMHC, NCC </span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: #565555; line-height: 1.5;">Joseph Kelly</span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: #565555; line-height: 1.5;">Arnold Markowitz, LCSW</span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: #565555; line-height: 1.5;">Patrick Ryan</span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: #565555; line-height: 1.5;">Daniel Shaw, LCSW</span></li>
<li style="list-style-position: outside; list-style-type: circle; margin: 0px 0px 0.25em; padding: 0px;"><span style="color: #565555; line-height: 1.5;">Joseph Szimhart </span></li>
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<span style="color: #565555; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;">Speakers include some of the leading "exit counselors" and mental health professionals in this field-</span><span style="color: #565555; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 1.5;"><a href="http://icsahome.com/infoprofile.asp" style="color: #7c93a1; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><b>biographical</b></a>. </span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-52769201214482953502013-08-01T23:06:00.001-04:002013-08-01T23:08:49.276-04:00CALL FOR PAPERS: Inform Anniversary Conference "MINORITY RELIGIONS: CONTEMPLATING THE PAST AND ANTICIPATING THE FUTURE"<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">London School of Economics, London, UK <br />
</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Friday 31st January 2014 – Sunday 2nd February 2014</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Inform is celebrating over a quarter of a century of providing up-to-date and unbiased information about minority religions with an Anniversary Conference at the London School of Economics in London, UK. It will commence on the evening of Friday 31st January and continue over the weekend of February 1st and 2nd. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Submissions for papers (maximum 200 word abstract and 150 word CV) on topics relevant to the title of the conference are now being accepted, please send these to <a href="mailto:inform@lse.ac.uk">inform@lse.ac.uk</a>. The deadline for papers is 1st October 2013, with decisions by 1st November 2013. Unfortunately no subsidies can be offered to participants, who will be responsible for making their own arrangements for accommodation.<br />
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<br />
Registration will open on 1st November 2013. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-10890821250714797462013-08-01T14:27:00.001-04:002013-08-01T14:27:55.038-04:00High Demand Groups: Helping Former Members and Families -Santa FeHigh Demand Groups: Helping Former Members and Families -Santa Fe<br />
New Mexico November 2-3, 2013.<br />
<br />
This conference will focus on the helping needs of former group members and families concerned about a loved one in a high-demand or cultic group or relationship.<br />
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The conference will take place at La Fonda on the Plaza, one of Santa Fe's finest hotels, located in the heart of the old city.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-68033879921512282712013-07-16T02:31:00.000-04:002013-07-16T02:31:56.962-04:00The Macrobiotic Faithful Swans<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Michael Barker</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">May 6, 2013<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">How <a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="01">George</a> Ohsawa envisaged the global spread of his macrobiotic spiritualism is confusing to say the least. This is because in his frequent rants about education, he says that schools and professional education itself are "the makers of slaves," as their didactic methods are the "cause of all misery and unhappiness." As an alternative he suggests that solutions should emanate from within, not from teachers. But of course Ohsawa sows confusion among his intuitive disciples by dictating that they can only reap the benefits of macrobiotics "by complete and strict observance of its fundamental directions" for ten days (if not for the rest of their life). Consequently, many of Ohsawa's followers misunderstood him on whether they should think for themselves or follow their guru. In light of this confusion, the forth edition of <i>Zen Macrobiotics</i> (1995) actually includes a footnote which warns readers to develop their own "judgment in order to gain complete freedom from following any diet prescribed by others, including Ohsawa himself." The implication being that once one has memorised, or internalized Ohsawa's macrobiotic principles, your "judgment and understanding" will have been "deepened to the point" that you can eat whatever you like "without fear or ill effect." <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#1">(1)</a> In <a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="02">Ohsawa's</a> case this meant he was able to occasionally indulge in Coca-Cola, Scotch whiskey, cheesecakes and doughnuts, and daily treat himself to cigarettes. The latter being considered by Ohsawa as more of a treatment than treat, as in his book <i>Macrobiotics: The Way of Healing</i> he claimed that tobacco smoking could both prevent and cure cancer. <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#2">(2)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="03">Despite</a> such contradictory advice on the need to educate oneself about macrobiotics, on the closing page of <i>Zen Macrobiotics</i> Ohsawa calls for fellow self-taught enthusiasts to take up the cause of macrobiotic evangelism. For those who would prefer not to "educate" their friends about the "superiority of the macrobiotic way to health and happiness" he threatens that if they fail to do so they won't achieve the full benefits of macrobiotic therapy. Such a failure to teach others how to eat means, in Ohsawa's mind, that: "You are still exclusive, antisocial, egoistic, and arrogant; you will surely fall ill again." And woe and behold if you suffer from exclusivity as it "is both the most difficult disease in the world to cure and the origin of all unhappiness." <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#3">(3)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Education and schooling in macrobiotic ideas were, as it happens, key to the spread of Ohsawa's ideas. The formation of macrobiotic retail outlets and restaurants likewise played a central role in the dissemination of his faddish dietary regime. So, when against the macrobiotic ideal, Ohsawa somehow succumbed to heart disease in April 1966, his unexpected death only seemed to provide further fuel for his eager disciples, who in that same month formed a macrobiotic and natural food store in Boston, Massachusetts. Named Erewhon, this shop was founded by Michio and Aveline Kushi, but by August 1967 the management of the small but growing retail store was taken over by <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art18/barker120.html">Paul Hawken</a>. Hawken quickly expanded their business model, and in the process changed the stores name to Erewhon Trading Company.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="04">Prior</a> to joining Erewhon Hawken had been an active member of the San Francisco Calliope Company, a psychedelic theatrical group -- headed by Hawken's housemate Bill Tara (a man who would come to play an important role in the macrobiotic movement) -- which had worked producing shows for local rock acts like the <i>Grateful Dead.</i> <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#4">(4)</a> <a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="05">Hawken's</a> subsequent decision to leave the Calliope Company and work full-time at Erewhon was proceeded by a profound spiritual revelation while experimenting with Ohsawa's macrobiotics with his good friend Tara -- a transition that came to them fairly naturally given their obsession with Eastern philosophy and psychedelic drugs. One should add that this natural, not drug-induced, mystical moment of clarity was a byproduct of Hawken's five-week fast that was augmented only by brown rice and water; that is, the macrobiotic cereal diet. Hawken was trying this diet in a bid to cure his asthma, and as he recalled about his life-changing moment: "I could fully experience in that one moment the indivisibility of consciousness and body." <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#5">(5)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="06">With</a> Hawken now fully converted to the macrobiotic faith things went from strength-to-strength at Erewhon Trading Company. In June 1971 Hawken married Dora Coates, and succeeded in persuading her father to leave the motorcycle industry to help him set up a base for Erewhon in Los Angeles. The following year, financial backing for this extension, to the tune of $150,000, was provided by Hawken's close friend and macrobiotic fellow-traveler John Deming. As luck would have it, his friend was independently wealthy, living on a trust fund derived from his family's history as wealthy oil barons, with Deming having already used part of his inheritance to set up a commune in the Californian wild lands. Macrobiotic circles were tight indeed, and polygamy was not abnormal, <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#6">(6)</a> and so it is not surprising that Hawken had become close to Deming in part because prior to marrying Dora he had dated her sister, Judy Coates, who had gone on to marry Deming in 1972.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="07">Deming</a> and Hawken eventually left Erewhon in the early 1970s, and both were soon broadening their spiritual horizons in the organic realm. In this regard, Hawken was first off the mark and he set off for Britain on an epic pilgrimage to the biodynamic Findhorn Garden in Scotland, a transformative story that was later recounted in <i>The Magic of Findhorn</i> (Souvenir Press, 1975). After returning to America from his initial foray, Hawken spread the good word about Findhorn's <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art18/barker119.html">anthrosophical angels</a>. He then returned to Findhorn in November 1972 for just over a year, accompanied this time by his wife, her sister, and her husband. Deming's prior experience of working the land on his commune proved useful in his latest organic adventure, and for part of his stay in Scotland he served as Findhorn's head gardener. But while Hawken emphasized the other-worldly gardening that took place at Findhorn, Deming corrects the misconception that magic was involved. Instead Deming recalled: "We trenched down about 3 feet and put in this incredibly powerful, all natural compost of seaweed and manure. I don't think it was the elves and fairies that grew those huge vegetables. During the summer the sun is in the sky almost 24 hours a day for 2-3 weeks." <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#7">(7)</a> <a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="08">Here</a> it is interesting to note that another interesting person involved with Erewhon Trading Company during its early years, and with the Sams's brothers Seed Restaurant in the UK, was Eric Utne, who later founded <i>The Utne Reader</i>. Eric is now an influential anthroposophist, whose wife Nina will be introduced later. <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#8">(8)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="09">Around</a> the time that the Soil Association's Wholefood Baker Street shop was taking off in London, American macrobiotic diet enthusiasts Craig and Gregory Sams arrived on the scene, opening the Seed Restaurant in Paddington, London, in 1968. <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#9">(9)</a> <a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="010">Regular</a> customers at their restaurant included counterculture celebrities such as <i>The Beatles,</i> <i>The Rolling Stones,</i> Yoko Ono, and many others. A few years later the exceedingly driven macrobiotic brothers formed Ceres, the UK's first natural food shop, on the Portobello Road. This shop soon became the center for macrobiotic food supplies, and in 1970 the brothers followed this success by founding Harmony Foods (now known as Whole Earth Foods). These natural food outlets meshed well with the countercultures' oppositional dietary needs, and when the first Glastonbury Festival took place in 1971 the only food available at the festival was the macrobiotic fare of the Sams brothers. Consolidating their influence in Britain further still, in 1971, Gregory and Sam, with their father's support, launched <i>Seed,</i> a monthly magazine of the alternative and complementary health movement. <i>Seed</i> "contained many elements of what would come to be known as 'New Age' thinking, and was often distinctively pagan in tone." <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#10">(10)</a> <a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="011">Notably</a>, in 1972 Seed's secretary was Sue Coppard, which is significant because the year before, while working as the secretary at <i>Resurgence</i> magazine, she had founded Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms with help provided courtesy of John Davy's biodynamic farm (at Emerson College). <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#11">(11)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This now brings us back to Paul Hawken's friend, Bill Tara (whom we met earlier). Having gained a macrobiotic apprenticeship by working as a manager of Erewhon in the United States, Tara set off to Britain in the early 1970s with the intention of creating an Erewhon-style operation overseas. But when these initial plans fell through he did the next best thing and took over management of Ceres -- the Sams brothers' food shop. Spreading the macrobiotic word came naturally to Tara, and soon he teamed up with Peter Bradford -- who had just returned to England from a period of macrobiotic study in Boston -- to form Sunwheel Foods in 1974: a macrobiotic food company modeled after Erewhon, and set-up in competition with Harmony Foods. Another important person who helped found Sunwheel was Bob Harrop, and when their health food enterprise was sold on in 1983, Harrop continued working with Bradford running the Freshlands shop in the City of London. When this shop was sold to the Fresh & Wild chain in 1999 Harrop became the accounts/HR director of Fresh & Wild, which in turn was purchased by the American natural food empire <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Whole_Foods_Market">Whole Foods Market</a> in 2004. At the present time, however, Harrop is the finance director of the London-based macrobiotic food distribution company Clearspring Ltd. The owner of Clearspring being Chris Dawson, a man who after studying biodynamic farming at the Rudolf Steiner Emerson College, had founded the East West Natural Food shop (in Old Street, London) in 1977.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="012">In</a> 1975 the macrobiotic crew that had coalesced around the charismatic Tara organized a new venture known as the Self Health Center. Although initially established as a squat on the Caledonian Road, when they soon obtained permanent premises on Old Street (in London) this enterprise evolved into the Community Health Foundation -- formed with the express purpose to promote macrobiotics and other holistic and spiritually-oriented teachings. <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#12">(12)</a> Using <a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="013">his</a> stellar contacts in the United States, Tara then arranged for Michio Kushi to travel to England to speak in London, and keen to spread the good word Tara soon organized Kushi's first European tour. Fellow macrobiotic leader, Simon Brown, served as the CEO of the Community Health Foundation between 1986 and 1993, and Brown's work clarifies the strong connections between macrobiotics and Theosophy. In his book <i>Macrobiotics for Life: A Practical Guide to Healing for Body, Mind, and Heart</i> (North Atlantic Books, 2009), Brown highlighted the impact of both Western and Eastern thinkers on the evolution of macrobiotics history, naming nine individual European thinkers that he considered to have influenced macrobiotics over the past few thousand years: Brown suggested that the three most recently lived of these nine people were <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html">Theosophists</a> (these being Madame Blavatsky, <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker128.html#07">Alice Bailey</a>, and Annie Bessant). <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#13">(13)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As this article has demonstrated (so far), food fads that may at first glance sound healthy and wholesome are not necessarily so. Macrobiotics will never the source of world peace, any more than the ridiculous ideas of the Theosophists or Anthroposophists -- whose ideas are so intertwined with the macrobiotic community's -- will ever point the way forward toward a more healthy and equitable future for all. Global peace will not be associated with a flight from reason. Quite the opposite, social movements will need to be built that expressedly engage in rational and democratic debate, not irrational flights of fancy into the spiritual realm of the infinite consciousness. So it is that macrobiotic harmony seems able to only strengthen, and profit from, the very real health inequalities that are fueled by capitalism's relentless search for profits. Capitalism is presently in crisis, and we must now seize this moment to start planning for how all our planet's citizens' dietary needs can be met under alternative political arrangements. Romantic and sometimes reactionary food faddists stand directly in the way of the type of clear thinking that will be required to create this better future. Nevertheless in such times of crisis many people will still be drawn to irrational solutions to the world's ills. This makes it all the more important that we fully understand the history of their ideas so we can propose alternatives that are capable of nourishing a socialist alternative.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> <b>Notes<o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="1">1.</a> George Ohsawa, <i>Zen Macrobiotics: The Art of Rejuvenation and Longevity</i> (Oshawa Foundation, 1995 [1960]), p.10, p.49. p.52. <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#01">(back)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="2">2.</a> Jack Raso, <i>Mystical Diets: Paranormal, Spiritual, and Occult Nutrition Practices</i> (Prometheus Books, 1993), p.27. <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#02">(back)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="3">3.</a> Ohsawa, <i>Zen Macrobiotics,</i> p.168. <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#03">(back)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="4">4.</a> The person who turned Bill Tara and Paul Hawken on to macrobiotics was Roger Hillyard (who was also doing light shows in San Francisco). Hillyard later worked with Tara and Hawken at Erewhon and in 2011 retired from the natural foodstuff industry to live at the San Francisco Zen Center.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In 1965 Hawken and Tara had lived with the Calliope Company in a warehouse in San Francisco known as The Russian Embassy. Although Hawken had previously worked as a photographer for CORE in Mississippi, he soon adopted an altogether more New Age approach to social change. As Tom Wolfe notes in the <i>Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test</i> (Black Swan, 1989 [1971]) -- a book that is largely about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters -- Hawken, in 1965, now had "a withering attitude toward all those who are still struggling in the old activist political ways for civil rights, against Vietnam, against poverty, for the free peoples. He sees them as still trapped in the old 'political games,' unwittingly supporting the oppressors by playing their kind of game and using their kind of tactics, while he, with the help of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite regions of human consciousness..." (p.316) <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#04">(back)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="5">5.</a> Like so many nice-sounding mystical enterprises, the workers employed at Erewhon were often mistreated by their macrobiotic peace-loving bosses. For example, on 27 April 1979 the "workers in Erewhon's production, trucking, shipping, and kitchen departments voted 42-19 to form a union affiliated with Local 925, the Service Employees International Union... Erewhon employees cite as a major reason for the unionizing effort -- in addition to concerns about wages, working conditions, and medical benefits -- their feelings that behind Erewhon's New Age image lay the reality of an uncaring and unresponsive management willing to exploit them just as any 'straight' business might." As one might expect, "Management refused to deal with this group..." and Michio Kushi and his fellow macrobiotic managers "all worked to stop unionization -- but they failed." William Shurtleff & Akiko Aoyagi, <i><a href="http://www.soyinfocenter.com/pdf/142/Erewhon2.pdf">History of Erewhon -- Natural Foods Pioneer in the United Sates (1966-2011): Extensively Annotated Bibliography and Sourcebook</a> </i>(pdf) (Soy Information Center, 2011). p.130. <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#05">(back)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="6">6.</a> In June 1967 Bruce Macdonald "moved to Boston, and began to live in the University Road study house. After four quick affairs with lovely young women ('I was really yang'), Michio called him over to 216 Gardner Road and asked him to 'chill out' (calm down) with these girls, since Michio was 'involved' with the same young ladies. Michio and Aveline had initially gotten together in a marriage arranged by George Ohsawa, who sent Aveline to America to marry his best student. Michio and Aveline had an 'open marriage,' and both of them had affairs with younger people of the opposite sex the whole time that Bruce was in Boston. This was well known in the upper echelons of the still small macrobiotic community." Shurtleff & Aoyagi, <i>History of Erewhon,</i> p.194. <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#06">(back)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="7">7.</a> John and Judy returned to America after the summer solstice in 1974. Hawken had two children with Dora Coates before obtaining a divorce soon after returning to America: they are Iona Fairlight Hawken (a girl) and Palo Cheyenne Hawken (a boy). <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#07">(back)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="8">8.</a> The close links between biodynamic and organic farming become apparent when Hawken sourced rice for Erewhon from Carl Garrich of the Lone Pine Rice and Bean Farm, in Lone Pine, Arkansas, who proceeded to use a biodynamic compost to grow the first crop of rice. In addition, during the late 1960s it is notable that Alan Chadwick taught biodynamic gardening at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Chadwick would eventually leave the university in 1973 "to start new gardens in Marin County (at the Green Gulch Zen Center), Saratoga, and Covelo, California, and New Market, Virginia." One might add that Chadwick was famous for working the land using only a Bulldog spade and fork that Paul Hawken's later business, Smith & Hawken, "would one day make popular." Moreover, as Julie Guthman observed: "The decidedly counter-cultural milieu" of Chadwick's agricultural programme at University of California at Santa Cruz "set the idiomatic tone for organic farming for a long time to come, as many farmers were apprenticed in this programme." Shurtleff & Aoyagi, <i>History of Erewhon,</i> p.255; Julie Guthman, "<a href="http://www.unc.edu/~wwolford/Geography160/Guthmanyuppychow.pdf">Fast food/organic food: reflexive tastes and the making of 'yuppie chow,'</a> " (pdf) <i>Social & Cultural Geography,</i> 4(1), 2003, p.47.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Like Paul Hawken and John Deming's connection to the biodynamic community at Findhorn, Wendy Cook, author of <i>The Biodynamic Food and Cookbook: Real Nutrition That Doesn't Cost the Earth</i> (Clairview Books, 2006) recalls that Hawken had first turned her on to macrobiotics while both were resident at Findhorn; although she subsequently decided that Rudolf Steiner's biodyamic movement offered the best spiritual alternative. (p.15) Similarly, Kristina Turner, author of <i>The Self Healing Cookbook: A Macrobiotic Primer for Healing Body, Mind and Moods With Whole, Natural Foods</i> (Earthtones Press, 1996), first worked at Findhorn before going on to commit her life to macrobiotics. <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#08">(back)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="9">9.</a> Craig Sams recalls that when he first came to Britain in 1996 he "<a href="http://www.macrobiotics.co.uk/thecraigsamsstory.htm">imported the</a> books and pamphlets published by The Ohsawa Foundation in Los Angeles and sold them through the Indica Bookshop (part owned by Paul McCartney and also by Barry Miles, who wrote the definitive McCartney biography a few years ago)." Sams presently serves on the certification board of the Soil Association and is the chairman of Slow Foods UK.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Craig Sams notes: "<a href="http://www.macrobiotics.co.uk/thecraigsamsstory.htm">In 1990</a> my kids launched Gusto, the world's first energy drink, based on guarana, ginseng, Siberian ginseng and 'Free and Easy Wanderer', a Taoist herbal formula dating back to the 12th C. It was the spiritual descendant of the macrobiotic 'beer' that Ohsawa was working on for the 1966 Spiritual Olympics and which his wife Lima thought reactivated the filariasis he contracted at Albert Schweitzer's Lambarene institute and killed him. ... I am also working, with my son Karim (who produces Soma organic smoothies) on a new range of unique and yummy macrobiotic products..." Paul Hawken and Dora Coates son Palo Hawken (born 1972) has likewise adopted the New Age capitalist sensibilities of his parents and is known as the "beverage innovator" behind the anti-oxidant Bossa Nova Superfruit Juice and Zico Chocolate Coconut Water. <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#09">(back)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="10">10.</a> Philip Conford, <i>The Development of the Organic Network: Linking People and Themes, 1945-95</i> (Floris Book, 2011), p.232. "Seed's 'alternative' stance was thoroughly pragmatic, placing faith in the established channels of media power as a means of spreading its message." (p.235) <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#010">(back)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="11">11.</a> Sue Coppard recalled that while working at <i>Resurgence</i>: "<a href="http://www.wwoofinternational.org/history.php">A friend</a> suggested that Michael Allaby, editor of the Soil Association journal, might know of a suitable farm, and he put me in touch with [John Davy at] Emerson College in deepest leafy Sussex, the training college for the application of Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical philosophy -- including bio-dynamic agriculture on their 200-acre farm." In Autumn that year Coppard then founded WWOFF with her initial volunteers working at Emerson College, and to aid with the promotion of her new venture she spent the next year working as the secretary of <i>Seed</i>. (Notably, issue No.2 of Seed, published in 1972, led off with the eco-mystical story titled "<a href="http://craigsams.com/pages/seed/Seed-V1-N2-Feb1972.pdf">Diet and ESP,</a>" (pdf) which argued that it is possible that an organic diet might help you develop a sixth sense.) <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#011">(back)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="12">12.</a> Tara recalls that: "<a href="http://www.billtara.net/writing.html">An American</a> guy I had met was working for a group in London that was developing biofeedback technology" gave them the "lease to a building on Old Street in London..." He (the St. Lukes Trust) then leased them the space to set up the Community Health Foundation. <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#012">(back)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5000593518888385286" name="13">13.</a> Brown, <i>Macrobiotics for Life,</i> p.256. <a href="http://www.swans.com/library/art19/barker131.html#013">(back)</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-63159534503728696582013-07-07T03:24:00.000-04:002013-07-07T03:41:09.542-04:00Sex and Death on the Road to Nirvana<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;">by <span style="color: black; text-transform: uppercase;">NINA BURLEIGH</span></span><span style="float: left; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0px 0px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">T</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<a class="inStoryLink" href="http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-hugging-saint-20120816" style="color: #004277; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Hugging Saint</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><span style="float: left; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0px 0px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">T</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">he 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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Since Thorson's death, neither Roach nor McNally have spoken to the press. But both agreed to interviews with <em>Rolling Stone</em> – Roach on the condition that he would not answer questions about Thorson's demise, and McNally responding with a sprawling 44-page document.</span><span style="float: left; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0px 0px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">N</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As 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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><span style="float: left; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0px 0px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">n 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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.")</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.'"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"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."</span><span style="float: left; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0px 0px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">S</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">oon 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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><span style="float: left; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0px 0px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">n 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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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 <em>Psychology Today</em>. "It looked even like they could be the next great yoga couple." McNally and Thorson published a yoga book together called <em>Two as One</em> in 2010.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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 <em>New York Post</em>, 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.</span><span style="float: left; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0px 0px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">s 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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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?'"</span><span style="float: left; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0px 0px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">n 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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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 <em>his</em> 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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><span style="float: left; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0px 0px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">M</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">cNally'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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.'"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.'"</span><span style="float: left; line-height: 0.7; margin: 0.13em 0.1em 0px 0px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">year 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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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 – <em>The Karma of Love: 100 Answers for Your Relationship</em>. 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.</span><br />
<em><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This story is from the June 6th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.</span></em><br />
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<div class="date" style="color: #676767; letter-spacing: 0.1em; margin-bottom: 25px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">JUNE 06, 2013</span></div>
<div class="body">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">he 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. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">othing 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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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 <em>next</em> to him for 12 years without a single break."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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 <em>and</em> 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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Three days after the letter was delivered, Thorson was dead.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span id="internal-source-marker_0.8581533506512642"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/sex-and-death-on-the-road-to-nirvana-20130606 <span style="vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-52726097409539664662013-04-18T22:07:00.000-04:002013-04-18T22:07:04.047-04:00Research on TM and Other Forms of Meditation Stinks<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">John Horgan</span><br style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><br style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><div class="authorinfo" style="font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">March 8, 2013</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In response to my last post, which proposed that <a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/03/04/do-all-cults-like-all-psychotherapies-exploit-the-placebo-effect/" style="color: #7c93a1; text-decoration: none;">Transcendental Meditation and other cults might be exploiting the placebo effect</a>, some readers cited studies supposedly showing that TM has therapeutic benefits. Well, sure. There are lots of studies showing that lots of forms of meditation can yield lots of benefits. But the research is unimpressive, to say the least, and is corrupted by the “<a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2010/11/29/cybertherapy-placebos-and-the-dodo-effect-why-psychotherapies-never-get-better/" style="color: #7c93a1; text-decoration: none;">allegiance effect</a>,” the tendency of proponents of a treatment to find evidence that it works. (The term was coined by a Lester Luborsky, a prominent psychotherapy researcher.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For a critical overview of meditation research, see a 2000 article in the<i>Journal of Consciousness Studies</i>, “<a href="http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs_7_11-12.html" style="color: #7c93a1; text-decoration: none;">Meditation Meets Behavioral Medicine</a>,” which I discussed in my 2003 book <i>Rational Mysticism</i>. Author Jensine Andresen, now a religious scholar at Columbia, reviewed more than 500 papers and books on meditation published over the last half century. Andresen cautioned that there are thousands of techniques that could be categorized as meditation; it is virtually impossible to define the term in a way that does justice to this vast diversity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Not surprisingly, she said, attempts to measure meditation’s neurological effects with brain-wave monitors, positron emission tomography, and other techniques have yielded widely divergent findings. Meditation has been “prodded and poked by a variety of technological apparati, with inconclusive results,” Andresen commented. For every report of increased activity in the frontal cortex or decreased activity in the amygdala, there is a conflicting finding.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Investigations of meditation’s therapeutic benefits have been equally inconclusive. Meditation has been linked to a dizzying array of benefits, including the alleviation of stress, anxiety, high blood pressure, substance abuse, hostility, pain, depression, asthma, premenstrual syndrome, infertility, insomnia, substance abuse and the side effects of chemotherapy. But many of these studies have been poorly designed, Andresen remarked, carried out with inadequate controls or no controls at all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Andresen noted that meditation has been linked to adverse side effects, too, including suggestibility, neuroticism, depression, suicidal impulses, insomnia, nightmares, anxiety, psychosis and dysphoria. In an implicit reference to the cultish context within which meditation is often taught, Andresen added that meditators may become vulnerable to “manipulation and control by others,” including “unscrupulous or delusional teachers.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A similar picture emerges from the 2007 peer-reviewed report “<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17764203" style="color: #7c93a1; text-decoration: none;">Meditation practices for health: state of the research</a>,” by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The report analyzed 813 studies of meditation and concluded that most were of “poor quality.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The report stated: “Many uncertainties surround the practice of meditation. Scientific research on meditation practices does not appear to have a common theoretical perspective and is characterized by poor methodological quality. Firm conclusions on the effects of meditation practices in healthcare cannot be drawn based on the available evidence.” If your particular form of meditation makes you feel good, do it! But don’t kid yourself that its medical benefits have been scientifically proven.</span></div>
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<a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/03/08/research-has-not-shown-that-meditation-beats-a-placebo/" style="color: #7c93a1; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2013/03/08/research-has-not-shown-that-meditation-beats-a-placebo/</span></a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-19432995203155279672013-03-10T01:21:00.001-05:002013-03-10T01:21:54.960-05:00Atlanta megachurch pastor Bishop Eddie Long ‘preyed upon investors’ faith<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Religion News Service<br />
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Atlanta megachurch pastor Bishop Eddie Long is facing a suit from former parishioners who say they lost more than $1 million after he encouraged them to invest in a company that was operating an alleged Ponzi scheme.<br />
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A dozen former members of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga., contend Long’s assistant had been warned that businessman Ephren W. Taylor was running a $3 million capital deficit, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.</div>
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After Long introduced the businessman as his friend, the former New Birth members lost their money investing with the self-described social capitalist.<br />
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“If Bishop Eddie Long hadn’t endorsed this they wouldn’t have invested,” Jason Doss, attorney for the former members, told the Journal-Constitution.<br />
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Long’s church has urged Taylor to repay investors with interest.</div>
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The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Taylor in 2012 with running a Ponzi scheme, and a civil case against him is pending. SEC officials said he promised to use investments for charity and to help economically challenged areas but instead diverted the funds from members of churches to pay other investors and finance business and personal expenses.<br />
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“He preyed upon investors’ faith and their desire to help others, convincing them that they could earn healthy returns while also helping their communities,” said David Woodcock, director of the SEC’s Fort Worth Regional Office in Texas.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-20792440480577089582013-02-21T06:36:00.001-05:002013-03-10T01:22:20.517-05:00A measurement of Islamic religiousness among Pakistani migrants in Spain: analysis of their sectarian affiliations<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">Ana Ballesteros , Maria Jesus Martin Lopez, PhD; Jose Manuel Martinez Garcia, PhD</span><br />
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</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">ICSA Conference Talk Abstract</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Trieste, Italy, July 4–6, 2013 </span><br />
<a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/event_regproducts.asp" style="color: #7c93a1; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Register</span></a><br />
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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.</div>
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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.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-18765662948528175592013-01-14T19:20:00.001-05:002013-01-14T19:20:07.774-05:00End-of-Year Fund-raising Appeal<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/member_benefits.asp" style="font-size: small;">donate online</a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Dear Friend,</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">As the holiday season slows down our fast pace, we have the opportunity to reflect on what we value.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">ICSA is grateful for your support. We hope that you value ICSA and will send a year-end donation to help us continue to help others.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Except for a relatively small number of individuals, the large majority of ICSA’s financial supporters and volunteers have been personally affected by psychologically manipulative groups or relationships.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Thirty-two years of fund-raising in this field has taught me that the public at large, though sympathizing with those harmed by cultic groups, does not view this field as an area to which they will direct even a miniscule portion of their charitable giving.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">This is so, even though 65% of U.S. households give to charity and the average household annual charitable contribution is $2213, with a median of $870.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">That is why it is vital that those affected by psychologically manipulative groups make ICSA part of their ongoing charitable giving. In other words, if not you, who?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">With your financial support, our information service, workshops, conferences, special events, local meetings, periodicals, website, and resource network will continue to be available to those in need for many years to come.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Without your support, the resources ICSA offers may no longer be there when individuals emotionally battered by a cult experience apprehensively reach out for help.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Join us for the long haul by renewing your membership or increase your donation level. Please consider making a recurring donation so that your membership will be automatically renewed.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Mail your donation to:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">ICSA</span></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">PO Box 2265</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Bonita Springs, FL 34133 USA</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Or <a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/member_benefits.asp">donate online</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Thank you!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Michael D. Langone, Ph.D.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Executive Director</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Editor-in-Chief, ICSA Today</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">P.S. If you are undergoing a difficult financial period but want to remain part of ICSA, please let us know. We will work something out.</span><br />
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-5242937621253491312013-01-12T19:47:00.003-05:002013-01-12T19:51:32.990-05:00Special Program for Parents of SGAs (those who are born and raised in cultic groups)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;">The goal of the program will be to offer an environment in which parents can give one another mutual counsel and support.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;">Parents will have an opportunity to focus on the complex relationships resulting from multi-generational cult involvement.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;">Sunday afternoon, April 14, 2013 from 2 pm to 5 pm.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;">Englewood, NJ (directions to be sent to attendees)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"><b>Facilitators:</b></span></div>
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<a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/by_profile.asp?elibPubauth=pubauth_goldberg_william" style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;" target="_blank">Bill Goldberg</a></div>
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<a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/by_author.asp?elibPubauth=pubauth_goldberg_lorna&1=Submit" style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;" target="_blank">Lorna Goldberg</a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"><b>Fees:</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;">There is no cost for the program; however, participants will be expected to help ICSA help others by becoming a <a href="http://icsahome.com/infoserv_respond/member_benefits.asp">Web member</a> of ICSA. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"><b>Note:</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;">Space is very limited and attendance will be first come first served. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;"><b>Register:</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;">Contact ICSA: 1-</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">239-514-3081; </span></span><a href="mailto:mail@icsamila.com" style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;" target="_blank">mail@icsamail.com</a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 24px;">. </span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-47700581237782944522013-01-12T19:35:00.001-05:002013-01-12T19:35:11.851-05:00Christian group makes legal appeal for charity status<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.4;">Guardian</span><br /><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-1686598923521302134" itemprop="articleBody" style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.4; position: relative; width: 500px;">
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James Gray<o:p></o:p></div>
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A legal appeal will decide if the Charity Commission was right to deny charitable status to the Brethren movement – the case hinges on whether its doctrine and practices are compatible with public benefit<o:p></o:p></div>
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January 3, 2013<o:p></o:p></div>
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Last month saw the formal start of a charity tribunal appeal that could redefine the place of religion in the charity sector. The case – which has been the subject of increasingly acrimonious debate in parliament and the media – concerns the Charity Commission's decision not to grant charitable status to the Preston Down Trust, which runs a meeting hall for south Devon's Plymouth Brethren community.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Founded in the 19th century, the Brethren are a Christian movement whose lifestyle is characterised by daily bible study, an emphasis on traditional family roles and a rejection of radio, TV and cinema. Their doctrine of "separation" limits time spent with outsiders, but adherents say the popular perception that the community lives in isolation, severing all ties with those who choose to leave – hence the "Exclusive Brethren" epithet – is an outdated stereotype.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The case hinges on whether the doctrine and practices of the Brethren are compatible with the public benefit requirement of charity law. Until the Charities Act 2006 there was a presumption that "advancement of religion" was in itself a public benefit, but the act removed that presumption and required religious charities – just like those with other legally defined charitable purposes – to demonstrate explicitly how their activities made a positive contribution to the community.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In a recent letter to the Commons public administration select committee, which is conducting an inquiry into the regulation of the charity sector and the 2006 act, the commission was forced to <a href="http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/Governance/article/1165267/charity-commission-reasons-refusing-charitable-status-plymouth-brethren-included-doctrine-separation/" style="color: #7c93a1; text-decoration: initial;" title="">explain why the Druid Network had charitable status while the Brethren did not</a>. The commission said this was because the former did not support events or organisations that were "exclusive".<o:p></o:p></div>
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The commission has previously drawn on case law developed before 2006 to resolve such questions. <a href="http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/Library/about_us/Preston_down_070612.pdf" style="color: #7c93a1; text-decoration: initial;" title="">But in its letter to the trust</a>, the regulator said the act's introduction – and the tribunal's recent assessment of public benefit in relation to private schools – meant this aspect of charity law was now unclear. "The evidence is relation to any beneficial impact on the wider public is perhaps marginal and insufficient to satisfy us as to the benefit to the community," it said.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The letter outlined two specific concerns: first, that the trust may not provide "meaningful access to participate in public worship" and secondly, that the supposedly rigid disciplinary practices of the Brethren, and the "effects of the doctrine and practice of separation on family, social and working life", may negate potential public benefit. The letter stresses, however, that the latter is based on "public criticism" rather than solid evidence.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The commission considered referring the matter to the charity tribunal for clarification but decided not to. And as it deemed an internal decision review to be "inappropriate", the trust's only option – apart from accepting the decision – was to appeal to the tribunal and become a test case for other Brethren congregations, and potentially for other religious groups too.<o:p></o:p></div>
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When parliamentarians and parts of the media found out about its decision, they were quick to accuse the commission of "anti-Christian" bias. Brethren elders were invited to give evidence to the public administration select committee, during which <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmpubadm/uc574-iii/uc574iii.pdf" style="color: #7c93a1; text-decoration: initial;" title="">Charlie Elphicke MP claimed the regulator was "committed to the suppression of religion"</a>. The case also dominated last month's Westminster Hall debate on charity registration, with some MPs calling for a full parliamentary inquiry.<o:p></o:p></div>
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To the surprise of many, the Brethren have run a tight public relations campaign – not that they're relishing the attention. "It's a feeling of puzzlement and great sorrow to us that we're having to go through this battle," says Rod Buckley, a member of the Preston Down congregation. "I don't quite understand it. We do a lot in the community and people that know us, know that."<o:p></o:p></div>
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Buckley points to the Brethren's soup kitchens, food parcel collections and the help they gave to those affected by the recent floods as clear examples of their positive impact on the community. He adds that while holy communion – the "Lord's supper" in Brethren parlance – is accessible only to members, other events are open to all. No different, he says, to many mainstream religious groups.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The commission stresses that it does not have general concerns about religious charities, but those following the case have warned it could have wider ramifications. "It does potentially impact on other organisations, particularly where they restrict access to participation in religious services, meetings or activities, or where there's an emphasis on an enclosed community," says Stephanie Biden, a senior associate at charity solicitors Bates Wells & Braithwaite.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In an unprecedented move, the tribunal has allowed the commission to file anonymous witness statements and for witness protection measures to be put in place. The decision is in response to evidence received by the commission from former Brethren members, whose relationships with family members still in the group are particularly sensitive.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If these witnesses do testify at the full hearing in March 2013, the tribunal may have to answer a question that could have far-reaching consequences: when do allegations of harm against a particular religion or denomination outweigh potential public benefit? There is no shortage of controversial religious groups on the register, after all.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Despite the commission's protestations, the case is unlikely to be seen merely as a clarification of charity law. The regulator has found itself at the centre of a row about religious freedom – and with the Brethren vowing to take their case to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary, it's a row that's likely to get even more heated in the coming months.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>James Gray is an independent campaigns adviser and writer with a particular interest in education. His Twitter username is </i><a href="https://twitter.com/James_Gray_" style="color: #7c93a1; text-decoration: initial;" title=""><i>@james_gray_</i></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/voluntary-sector-network/community-action-blog/2013/jan/03/christian-brethren-legal-appeal-charity-commission-status?religionnewsblog.com" style="color: #7c93a1; text-decoration: initial;">http://www.guardian.co.uk/voluntary-sector-network/community-action-blog/2013/jan/03/christian-brethren-legal-appeal-charity-commission-status?religionnewsblog.com</a><o:p></o:p></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-8910248512000641642012-12-24T13:45:00.001-05:002012-12-24T13:45:33.178-05:00Understanding and Coping with Triggers<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 1px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;">Carol Giambalvo; Joseph Kelly</span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 13px;">Dissociation is a disturbance in the normally integrative functions of identity, memory, or consciousness. It is also known as a trance state. It is a very normal defense mechanism. You've all probably heard of how a child being abused—or persons in the midst of traumatic experiences—dissociate. Those are natural occurrences to an unnatural event.</span></span></div>
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What are some of the events in the life of a cult member that may bring on dissociation?</div>
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<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Stress of maintaining beliefs.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Stress of constant activities.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Diet/sleep deprivation.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Discordant noises—conflicts.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Never knowing what’s next.</span></li>
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There are many, many ways to produce a dissociative or trance state:</div>
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<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Drugs.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Alcohol.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Physical stress (long-distance running).</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Hyperventilation.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Rhythmic voice patterns or noises (drumming)</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Chanting.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Empty-minded meditation.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Speaking in tongues.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Long prayers.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Guided visualizations.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">“Imagine…”</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Confrontational sessions (hot seat, auditing, struggle sessions).</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">D</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">ecreeing.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Hypnotism or “processes.”</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Hyper arousal—usually into a negative state so the leaders can rescue you (ICC confessions).</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Ericksonian hypnosis (Milton Erickson) hypnotic trance without a formal trance induction.</span></li>
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Why are we so concerned about trance states?</div>
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<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Individuals don’t process information normally in trance state</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Critical thinking—the arguing self—is turned off.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Also turned off are reflection, independent judgment, and decision-making.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">In trance you are dealing with the subconscious mind, which has no way to tell the difference between something imagined or reality—it becomes a real experience which is interpreted for you by the group ideology.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Once in a trance, people have visions or may “hear” sounds that are later interpreted for you in the context of the cult mindset—the “magic”—while, in reality, they are</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"> </span><i style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">purposely manufactured physiological reactions to the trance state</i><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">While in trance you are more suggestible—not just during trance, but for a period of time up to two hours after.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">When a person dissociates, it becomes easier and easier to enter into a dissociative state—it can become a habit—and it can become uncontrollable.</span></li>
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You may have heard it said that not everyone can be hypnotized … that you need to be able to trust the hypnotist’s authority. While it’s true that there are degrees of hypnotizability, dissociative states may be induced indirectly. What if instead of telling you that “now we’re going to hypnotize you,” the leaders just say, “Let’s do a fun process—close your eyes and imagine …”? Are you told to trust your leaders? Do they have your best interest at heart? And what if they are using Ericksonian hypnosis, in which there is no formal trance induction?</div>
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What is Ericksonian Hypnosis? It’s an interchange between two people in which the hypnotist must</div>
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<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Symbol; font-size: 10pt; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 1px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 1px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 1px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;"> </span></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Deal with resistant behavior.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Symbol; font-size: 10pt; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 1px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 1px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;">·<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 1px; margin-left: 1px; margin-top: 1px; padding: 1px 3px 6px;"> </span></span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">Receive acknowledgement that something is happening.</span></li>
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Ericksonian hypnosis involves techniques of expectation, pacing and leading, positive transference, indirect suggestion, the use of “yes sets,” deliberate confusion, the embedding of messages, and suggestive metaphor.</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06051542715853942258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-76180685590893434202012-12-18T12:00:00.001-05:002012-12-18T12:00:51.923-05:00Rethinking the Classic 'Obedience' Studies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Stanley Milgram’s 1961 obedience experiments and the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment are legendary. But new research adds new wrinkles to our understanding of allegiance and evil.<o:p></o:p><br />
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November 25, 2012<o:p></o:p><br />
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They are among the most famous of all psychological studies, and together they paint a dark portrait of human nature. Widely disseminated in the media, they spread the belief that people are prone to blindly follow authority figures—and will quickly become cruel and abusive when placed in positions of power.<o:p></o:p><br />
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It’s hard to overstate the impact of <a href="http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/02/stanley-milgram-obedience-to-authority.php" target="_blank">Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments</a> of 1961, or the <a href="http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/09/our-dark-hearts-stanford-prison.php" target="_blank">Stanford Prison Experiment</a> of 1971. Yet in recent years, the conclusions derived from those studies have been, if not debunked, radically reinterpreted.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
A new perspective—one that views human nature in a more nuanced light—is offered by psychologists <a href="http://www.psy.uq.edu.au/directory/index.html?id=2129" target="_blank">Alex Haslam</a> of the University of Queensland, Australia, and<a href="https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/stephen-david-reicher(a0a908db-1bb8-4d5e-ab30-f47643e35169).html" target="_blank"> Stephen Reicher</a> of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
In <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001426" target="_blank">an essay</a> published in the open-access journal <i>PLoS Biology,</i> they argue that people will indeed comply with the questionable demands of authority figures—but only if they strongly identify with that person, and buy into the rightness of those beliefs.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
In other words, we’re not unthinking automatons. Nor are we monsters waiting for permission for our dark sides to be unleashed. However, we are more susceptible to psychological manipulation than we may realize.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
In Milgram’s study, members of the general public were placed in the role of “teacher” and told that a “learner” was in a nearby room. Each time the “learner” failed to correctly recall a word as part of a memory experiment, the “teacher” was told to administer an electrical shock.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
As the “learner” kept making mistakes, the “teacher” was ordered to give him stronger and stronger jolts of electricity. If a participant hesitated, the experimenter—an authority figure wearing a white coat—instructed him to continue.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
Somewhat amazingly, most people did so: 65 percent of participants continued to give stronger and stronger shocks until the experiment ended with the “learner” apparently unconscious. (The torture was entirely fictional; no actual shocks were administered.)<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
To a world still reeling from the question of why so many Germans obeyed orders and carried out Nazi atrocities, here was a clear answer: We are predisposed to obey authority figures.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
The Stanford Prisoner Experiment, conducted a few years later, was equally unnerving. Students were randomly assigned to assume the role of either prisoner or guard in a “prison” set up in the university’s psychology department. As Haslam and Reicher note, “such was the abuse meted out to the prisoners by the guards that the study had to be terminated after just six days.”<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
Lead author Philip Zimbardo, who assumed the role of “prison superintendent” with a level of zeal he later found frightening, concluded that brutality was “a natural consequence of being in the uniform of a guard and asserting the power inherent in that role.”<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
So is all this proof of the “banality of evil,” to use historian Hannah Arendt’s memorable phrase? Not really, argue Haslam and Reicher. They point to their own work on the <a href="http://www.bbcprisonstudy.org/index.php" target="_blank">BBC Prison Study</a>, which mimicked the seminal Stanford study.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
They found that participants “did not conform automatically to their assigned role” as prisoner or guard. Rather, there was a period of resistance, which ultimately gave way to a “draconian” new hierarchy. Before becoming brutal, the participants needed time to assume their new identities, and internalize their role in the system.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
Once they did so, “the hallmark of the tyrannical regime was not conformity, but creative leadership and engaged followership within a group of true believers,” they write. “This analysis mirrors recent conclusions about the Nazi tyranny.”<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
It also sounds familiar to anyone who has <a href="http://www.psmag.com/culture-society/the-mind-of-a-terrorist-8638/" target="_blank">studied the rise of semi-autonomous terror cells</a> in recent decades. Suicide bombers don’t give up their lives out of unthinking obedience to some religious or political figure; rather, they have gradually melded their identities with that of the group they’re in, and the cause it represents.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
Similarly, the researchers argue, a close look at Milgram’s study suggests it really isn’t about blind obedience at all. Transcripts of the sessions show the participants are often torn by the instruction to administer stronger shocks. Direct orders to do so were far less effective than entreaties that they need to continue for the sake of the study.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
These reluctant sadists kept “torturing” in response to appeals that they were doing important scientific work—work that would ultimately benefit mankind. Looked at in this way, it wasn’t some inherent evil or conformism that drove them forward, but rather a misplaced sense of idealism.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
This interpretation is still quite unsettling, of course. If a person has has fully bought into a certain world view and believes he or she is acting on the side of right, this conviction “makes them work energetically and creatively to ensure its success,” Haslam and Reicher write.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
So in the researchers’ view, the lesson of these two still-important studies isn’t about conformity or even cruelty per se. Rather, they reveal a dangerous two-step process, in which authority figures “advocate oppression of others,” and underlings, due in part to their own psychological makeup and personal histories, “identify with those authorities … who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
So we may not be inherently evil, but it appears many of us can be enticed into believing that a heinous act is, in fact, good and necessary. Perhaps the real lesson of these startling experiments is the importance of learning how to think critically.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
The most effective antidote to evil may be rigorous skepticism.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06051542715853942258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-6203398051116942072012-12-14T23:30:00.002-05:002012-12-14T23:30:28.176-05:00For us, it was a guru accident<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="title">
Age</div>
<div class="publication">
Christopher Jones</div>
<div class="publication">
<br /></div>
<div class="subtitle">
Described as the Leonardo da Vinci of mental manipulation,
"guru" Thierry Tilly duped a reclusive French family out of more than
$6 million, including their chateau.</div>
<div class="subtitle">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
December 15, 2012</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
October 4, 2012, the criminal court of Bordeaux: Thierry
Tilly, 48, appeared almost priest-like as he peered over the edge of the dock
and listened to the prosecution for nearly seven long hours. A slight man with
rimless glasses, he either stared at his shoes or gazed at the 41 boxes neatly
arranged under a monumental painting of Christ on the cross. In them were a decade's
worth of evidence revealing how Tilly, now known as the "guru of
Monflanquin", inveigled his way into the heart of one of France's oldest
aristocratic families, the Védrines, and brainwashed its 11 members into
handing over to him all their investments, jewels, furniture - even their
ancestral chateau near the 13th-century village of Monflanquin in south-west
France. It is a fortune estimated to be worth nearly €5 million (about $6.2
million).</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
At his trial, which began on September 24, Tilly faced charges
of emprise mentale (brainwashing), kidnapping and torture, including
"acts of barbarism". Although he had ferociously denied any
wrong-doing, he faced many years behind bars if convicted. As the prosecution
remarked, "The affair is extraordinary for its time span and for the
atypical form of the manipulation that was practised."</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
Tilly had been able to convince the family that they'd been
targeted for death by a secret Masonic order that coveted their wealth, and
that he alone was their saviour. But Tilly was no Scarlet Pimpernel. Instead,
as one of the lawyers representing the Védrines suggested, "Tilly is a
rare mix of Rasputin and Machiavelli." Presumably, Tilly was flattered by
Benoît Ducos-Ader's comments: he told a stupefied courtroom, "I gave a copy
of Machiavelli to the Libyan ambassador, who gave me a version of the Koran
that he dedicated to me." But it was just another tall tale, of the
variety Tilly specialised in. As he himself told an investigator,
"Everything I have told you is 80 per cent true; please forgive me for the
20 per cent that is fantasy."</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
But it is somewhere in this extraordinary 20 per cent that the
enigma surrounding Tilly and the Védrines family lies: how is it that one man
was able to convince 11 intelligent people that their lives were under threat
from an unseen conspiracy of Freemasons, Jews and paedophiles and that only he,
Tilly, a "secret agent" and descendant of the Hapsburgs, could
protect them?</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
"Tilly touched their subconscious and drove the entire
Védrines family to the threshold of insanity," explains lawyer Daniel
Picotin. "He is to mental manipulation what Leonardo da Vinci was to
painting. Like Leonardo, he constructed a huge painting and could cue in
different elements at his leisure."</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
Every member of the Védrines family was present at the trial:
the men in dark jackets, the women, all of them blonde, in light sweaters. They
looked as if they had mistaken the courthouse entrance for the doors to their
bridge club. There they were, the famous "recluses of Monflanquin",
and yet their presence was unsettling. This noble French family, with its
evident sophistication, cultivation and education, seemed so very at odds with
the collective lapse of judgment that had brought them here today.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
At the heart of the family is 66-year-old Ghislaine de
Védrines, who served as Thierry Tilly's Trojan horse. It was she who first
introduced the "guru" to the inhabitants of Chateau Martel in the
northern hemisphere summer of 2000. "He played us off one against another,"
Ghislaine said as the trial got underway. "Each one of us kept what Tilly
said to us to ourselves."</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
During the trial, Ghislaine's children, Guillemette, 35, and
François, 33, sat next to her. Her brothers, Charles-Henri, 64, a Bordeaux
gynaecologist and local politician, and Philippe, 74, a retired Shell Oil
executive, sat just behind with their wives, Christine and Brigitte. Behind
them were the children of Charles-Henri and Christine: Diane, 27, Amaury, 32,
and Guillaume, 35. There were 10 Védrines in all: the only one who was missing
was the matriarch, Guillemette d'Adhemar, who had died in 2010.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
According to one of France's leading
psychiatrists, Daniel Zagury, Tilly had followed to the letter the
unwritten guidebook of the master manipulator. He listed the different
"phases" for the prosecution: 1) Identify and prey on each family
member's particular weakness; 2) Cultivate a paranoiac siege mentality; 3) Have
an answer for everything; 4) Dismantle strong bonds so as to better enslave
your victims; 5) Cause each member of the family to doubt their personal lives
- for example, the fidelity of their spouse.</div>
<div class="article">
Present in the press gallery was Jean Marchand, a business
journalist who, until recently, had been Ghislaine's husband. His interest in
the case was personal.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
In 1999, Ghislaine was looking for someone to help her update
her Paris-based secretarial school's computer system. A lawyer friend had
recommended the services of Tilly to her; he said he was well-versed in such
matters. In fact, the friend had wanted Tilly to get the job because Tilly owed
him money.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
So one day, Tilly appeared at La Femme Secrétaire on the Rue
de Lille in Paris's Seventh Arrondissement. At first, Ghislaine was impressed
with the clean-cut, apparently competent Tilly, and made the mistake of
confiding in him: she told him her husband, Jean, was depressed and her son,
François, a failure. Other tensions were simmering in the family, to do with
the inheritance of the chateau following the death of Ghislaine's father in
1995. Tilly was all ears. Says Ghislaine: "If we'd been a unified family,
Tilly would never have gained a hold over us." Soon Marchand suspected his
wife and her "guru" of having an affair.</div>
<div class="article">
In mid-2000, Ghislaine invited Tilly to attend the Monflanquin
Music Festival, of which she was the chief organiser. Quite naturally, she
asked him to dine at the chateau and meet the family. It was during this visit
that he revealed that his job at La Femme Secrétaire was nothing more than a
cover. Now presenting himself as a "special agent in the service of
France", Tilly boasted to the Védrines of his NATO connections. They could
call upon his services whenever they needed him.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
The chateau, which was, behind its genteel exterior, a hotbed
of hidden rivalries and jealousies, was fertile ground for the plentiful and
imaginative lies that Tilly spun, and the Védrines gravitated towards his
energy. When the young Amaury was caught smoking marijuana in the city, Tilly
told him to retreat to the chateau for a few days where there would be no peer
pressure to indulge. When Christine started putting on weight, Tilly instructed
her to start exercising in the forest surrounding it. To the Védrines, it
seemed that their new friend could arrange anything.</div>
<div class="article">
Then he struck. One day, he explained the family were in
serious danger from sinister forces. He told them they were the lost
descendants of an ancient order, an offshoot of the Knights Templar, called
"L'Équilibre du Monde" (the "Balance of the World"), an
organisation only called into being when the world faces extreme evil.</div>
<div class="article">
All were taken in except one: Jean Marchand. When he tried to
warn his wife that Tilly, who had been working for her since 1999, was a
pervert and a charlatan, she divorced him on orders emailed to her by Tilly in
the autumn of 2001. Marchand was escorted to the edge of the family property,
whereupon Ghislaine threw down on the lawn a glove and a bouquet of dried
flowers, a sign that he had been recognised as an agent of "evil". By
the time Marchand had returned to his home at Fontenay, outside Paris,
Ghislaine had emptied their joint accounts. "From one day to the next I
became a non-person," he relates. (The pair eventually remarried in 2010,
after Tilly's arrest.) "Some couples have car accidents, others have
health problems," says Marchand today. "For us, it was a guru
accident."</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
Says Dr Zagury, "However improbable the fabrication, if
the guru or saviour says it, it must be true." So when Tilly told the
Védrines that they had to empty their accounts and sell off their belongings
and then put the proceeds for safe keeping in a mysterious-sounding
organisation called the Blue Light Foundation - the purpose of which, according
to Tilly and his "grand patron", 65-year-old retiree Jacques Gonzalez, was to
build hospitals in China - the transfers began without the slightest protest.
Over the course of a decade, the Védrines' fortune was systematically
dismantled by Tilly, the proceeds siphoned through various accounts in London
and used to furnish both him and his accomplice, Gonzalez, with lavish
lifestyles.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
At the height of the scam, Tilly maintained two flats, one in
London and the other in New York. Gonzalez began to collect rare and fine wines
and received a Rolex wristwatch as a gift from Tilly. When Gonzalez was
arrested in Paris, the police found €86,000 ($107,000) stuffed in a trunk.
Between them, the men purchased a BMW 645 and rented three other vehicles to
use from their bases in Paris (Gonzalez) and London (Tilly).</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
In the end, out of a family fortune of nearly €5 million
(about $6.2 million), only €220,000 ($274,000) has been recovered and much more
is suspected of being stowed in bank accounts in the Cayman Islands with,
according to Picotin, very little hope of it ever being recovered.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
But Tilly's real feat was organising the sequestration of the
entire Védrines family from his home in the UK, where he resided throughout the
affair. (Nobody in the village of Monflanquin remembers even seeing le
gourou.) By 2003, all 11 members of the Védrines family had left the chateau
and moved into Philippe's home at Talade, north of Monflanquin, where they
lived with the shutters closed between 2003 and 2008. Tilly forbade the use of
all timepieces and calendars, says Marchand, to further disorientate his
victims. "He wanted to cut them off from the world."</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
Throughout their seclusion, Tilly telephoned, faxed or emailed
the isolated family, on average, 40 times a day from across the Channel,
demanding updates on their activities. The presence of a few journalists
already alerted to the story by Marchand only reinforced Tilly's assertions that
the family were under close scrutiny by his conspiracy of malign forces.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
As the story of the "Reclus de Monflanquin" started
to gather momentum in the local press in 2008, Tilly decided to up the ante.
First the youngsters, and then the adults - including 96-year-old Guillemette -
were moved to a £300,000 ($460,000) rented house in Oxford, where Tilly kept a
pied-a-terre and had two children with a woman, Jessica Diner. In this way, he
planned to intensify the pressure under which he was making them live.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
"Psychosis is a glass that fills every day, drop by
drop," says Diane de Védrines today. "In the beginning, it was the
Freemasons; at the end, it was everybody who walked their dog. Tilly succeeded
in putting a psychological pistol to our heads." Yet, as she points out,
the door was never locked: "To leave meant to betray the family."</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
Tilly, suspecting Diane's brother Amaury of having
"paedophiliac tendencies", separated him from the rest of the family
and installed him in an empty office on Regent Street in London that was being
leased by the Blue Light Foundation. The special treatment meted out to him by
Tilly - this, despite Amaury's devotion to him - involved making him choose
between eating and washing. Amaury chose to eat and Diane supplied him with fruit
and bread until he was evicted for non-payment of rent. (Investigations would
reveal that Tilly had never actually paid rent anywhere. The owner of the
Oxford house where the Védrines were cloistered claims that he is owed about
$380,000.) Meanwhile, their parents, Charles-Henri and Christine, had
designated Tilly, on his instruction, as their children's tutor. In this way,
he was able to make Amaury believe that he'd been abandoned by them.
"Tilly was my friend, my confidante," says Amaury now, "and he
brainwashed me for 10 years."</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
The straw that finally broke Tilly's hold over the
Védrines - and added charges of torture and acts of barbarism to the
prosecution's case - was the Brussels episode. Once the family had assembled in
Oxford, Tilly told them that a marvellous treasure had been deposited in a bank
account there and that it was the task of Christine, whom he called "the
chosen one", to locate it. This treasure would lead them to a secret that
would save the world; the family had been selected for this mission by a
network of international VIPs, whose head, Gonzalez, was directly related to
the king of Spain, Juan Carlos. In Christine's absence, the rest of the family
would survive by taking on menial jobs: the gynaecologist, Charles-Henri, worked
as a gardener, the children as waitresses or shop assistants. Diane was sent to
wait on customers at Nando's and remembers scavenging outside supermarkets.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
Not surprisingly, since she had no idea what she was looking
for or even where to find it, Christine returned from Belgium empty-handed and
distraught. Why couldn't she remember the number of the bank account? Tilly,
looking to tighten his hold on the family even further, flew into a carefully
orchestrated rage in front of the assembled clan, accusing her of being
responsible for their penury. He decided that she would be subjected to a
particularly cruel and unusual punishment.</div>
<div class="article">
In her court testimony, Christine related how her husband,
Charles-Henri, and Ghislaine were ordered to take turns in preventing her
falling asleep by pinching her ear lobes as she sat on a stool, both hands
folded in front of her. "They gave me paper because it was absolutely
necessary that I write down the information [the number of the bank account]
they needed," she remembers. Only there never was any information for her
to convey.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
She stated in her deposition: "At the beginning, I drank
some tea and ate some biscuits. Then Tilly said that I no longer had the right
to go to the toilet and so I stopped drinking. Thierry Tilly reduced me to the
state of an animal. Above all, I was forced to urinate in front of my
sister-in-law and my husband. It was Amaury who cleaned it up. It was terrible.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
"Tilly came regularly into the room, shouting and [being]
very threatening. He said that I would never see my children again, that he
would fire a pistol near my ears and hand me over to a regiment of Senegalese.
One day he hit me very hard on my back."</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
According to Dr Zagury's analysis, the episode was a ploy
conceived by Tilly to reinforce his hold over the family by setting them
against one of their own. The Védrines were now his slaves. Christine would
later reveal on French television that when the torture session was over, she'd
forlornly asked Tilly, "Thierry, am I still one of the 11?"</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
Philippe, Christine's brother-in-law, was the first to abandon
the Oxford townhouse. He returned to France in July 2008, where he contacted
Jean Marchand, Ghislaine's ex-husband, and Daniel Picotin, a lawyer
specialising in cults. By March 2009, Christine, who'd been working in a cheese
shop, had also abandoned the Oxford house - leaving behind her husband and
children. "If it hadn't been for Philippe," she says now, "I
would have wound up in a common grave in Oxford."</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
With Philippe pressing charges, the French police were finally
prepared to act. (Jean Marchand's testimony hadn't been enough to spur them
into action because he was no longer married to Ghislaine.) Despite the early
recalcitrance of the UK authorities, the telephone at the Oxford address was tapped.
In this way, an unsuspecting Tilly revealed to French police that he'd soon be
making a trip to Switzerland. An international arrest warrant was signed and
Tilly was finally apprehended in Zurich on October 21, 2009.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
But Tilly's hold over the Védrines didn't end with his arrest.
In November and December 2009, Daniel Picotin had to lead two separate
"exit counselling" missions to try to break the spell under which the
remaining nine Védrines languished. Using "exit counselling" - the
technique pioneered by American cult expert Steven Hassan in 1978, after he
freed himself from the influence of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church -
Picotin attempted to provoke a psychological "disconnect" in each
family member. He discussed details of their lives prior to their
"enslavement". By evoking simple memories, the hope was that the web
of influence would disintegrate.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
During the first trip to the UK in November 2009, only
Guillaume could be approached. "One of the specialists entered the house
and succeeded in talking to him," relates Christine. The spell was broken.
Her husband, their two children and the rest of the clan were
"exfiltrated" one month later.</div>
<div class="article">
Daniel Picotin hopes that, in the future, a new law will be
written into the French penal code making "subjection to detrimental
brainwashing" a crime that can be denounced by a third party.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
"I think that it is far more dangerous to perform a
mental hold-up than the hold-up of the corner bank," he says. In this way,
treatment of the trauma can be quantified and compensation sought. As Picotin
points out, three years after they recovered their freedom, five members of the
Védrines are still receiving psychiatric treatment. And to add insult to
outrage, it's possible that Tilly will try to recoup some of the "lost"
money in the Cayman Islands once he is released.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
On November 13 this year, Tilly and his accomplice,
Jacques Gonzalez, were found guilty of "brainwashing" the Védrines
family between 2001 and 2009. The court also found the pair guilty of
kidnapping and torture with acts of barbarism. Judge Marie-Elisabeth Bancal
sentenced Tilly to eight years and Gonzalez to four years behind bars.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
"Tilly and Gonzalez were the authors of a Machiavellian
conspiracy," she told a packed courtroom. "Over nine years, [Tilly]
was able to exploit the fissures in a family by taking advantage of their
history and situation." In addition, the two men have been ordered to
reimburse more than €5 million (about $6.2 million) to the family. Included in
that sum is €505,000 (about $628,000) to be paid in damages to the Védrines.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
Tilly's lawyer, Alexandre Novion, launched an appeal on
November 21, saying, "The sentence was far too harsh and could be the
start of a freedom-killing jurisprudence. We cannot allow psychiatrists and
psychologists to sit in the seats of judges." As for Tilly, he remains
defiant and unrepentant; when the sentence was announced, he roared, "It
has only just begun. We will expose your responsibility in front of the
European Court of Human Rights."</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
Given Tilly's florid courtroom antics - far from the image of
a cool, calm arch-manipulator - many who followed the story were shocked that a
family such as the Védrines could have been collectively taken in by such a
person. Yet, when preliminary psychological tests were carried out, they
revealed Tilly to be extremely intelligent and gifted, with an astonishing
memory. Novion maintains that his client is the victim of a witch-hunt and
accuses Jacques Gonzalez of actually manipulating the manipulator. "It is
difficult for me to believe," says Dr Zagury, "that the puppeteer
could be a puppet for such a long time."</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
In jail for the past three years, Tilly receives few visits.
He has refused to see his father, who came to the trial to set the record
straight regarding a number of his son's key boasts. A retired army driver,
Tilly senior was never the "commando diver" that his son had said he
was, and his mother was a licensed midwife, not a skating champion.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
Sitting beside Ghislaine in their apartment in Fontenay-sous-Bois,
Jean Marchand said recently on French television, "This man whose
profession is mental manipulation will start again. We are hoping that his
sentence will put him out of action for a while. But the scars of this affair
will be with us for the rest of our lives."</div>
<div class="article">
The various members of the Védrines family see each other
rarely now. Guillaume still lives in Britain, where he works in a bank. Amaury
regularly consults his psychiatrist, who is helping him to find his feet again
in the real world. Charles-Henri has been reinstated as a gynaecologist.</div>
<div class="article">
<br /></div>
<div class="article">
<a href="http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/for-us-it-was-a-guru-accident-20121210-2b4am.html">http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/for-us-it-was-a-guru-accident-20121210-2b4am.html</a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06051542715853942258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-24071283225119262282012-11-12T10:09:00.000-05:002012-12-14T23:31:46.812-05:00Splinter groups of Aum Shinrikyo religious cult get security investigations<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Japan Daily Press, November 2, 2012</span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: x-small;">By Adam Westlake</span></div>
<br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">On
Thursday, officials from Japan’s Public Security Intelligence Agency began
investigations of 21 facilities owned by the group Aleph, a departure and
renaming of Japan’s infamous Aum Shinrikyo religious cult. Eight facilities of
another splinter group, <em><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif";">Hikari
no Wa</span></em> (Circle of Rainbow Light), which is led by former Aum
spokesperson Fumihiro Joyu, were also inspected. The Aum Shinrikyo cult is most
known for its sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995, for which
the group’s founder and leading members are still on death row.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">The
29 facilities are located in 15 of Japan’s prefectures, spread out across the
entire country. The Public Security Intelligence Agency operates under the
Ministry of Justice, and is responsible for collecting and analyzing
information on any potential threats to public safety or security. The last
collective inspection of facilities operated by former Aum groups was in August
2011. During the massive police raids of the main Aum Shinrikyo compound near
Tokyo after the subway attack, they discovered the cult had amassed a huge
collection of guns, explosives, and other weapons, in preparation for a
large-scale battle.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">This
year’s nation-wide inspections were triggered as a result of ending the 17
year-hunt for the final Aum fugitives. Naoko Kikuchi and Katsuya Takahashi were
both arrested, less than two weeks apart, this summer. Takahashi led police on
a final chase for about a week after they were tipped off about his location,
only several hours ahead of them the entire way. The government’s Public
Security Examination Commission stated in January of this year that the
Aum-related groups would remain close surveillance for the next two to three
years.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<i><span lang="ES" style="color: black; font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: ES;">[via Kyodo]<o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<br />
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<span lang="ES" style="color: black; mso-ansi-language: ES;"><a href="http://japandailypress.com/splinter-groups-of-aum-shinrikyo-religious-cult-get-security-investigations-0217753"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Verdana; font-size: x-small;">http://japandailypress.com/splinter-groups-of-aum-shinrikyo-religious-cult-get-security-investigations-0217753</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br /></div>
Carol Ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03605112349467352631noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-14288304618518235012012-11-08T13:28:00.004-05:002012-11-08T13:31:26.823-05:00ICSA on Facebook<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06051542715853942258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-82170470022729420432012-11-08T13:16:00.001-05:002012-11-08T13:32:21.631-05:00ICSA Youtube channel (icsacultinfo)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06051542715853942258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5000593518888385286.post-38684294851464872022012-10-24T21:22:00.002-04:002012-10-24T21:22:37.754-04:00Reverend Moon: Cult leader, CIA asset and Bush family friend<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="title">
<br /></div>
<div class="publication">
Scoop<br clear="all" />
Bob Fitrakis</div>
<div class="subtitle">
Reverend Moon: Cult leader, CIA asset, and Bush family friend
is dead</div>
<div class="article">
September 5, 2012</div>
<div class="article">
The death of Reverend Sun Myung Moon hopefully ends one of the
strangest chapters in U.S. security industrial complex history. The
self-proclaimed "Messiah" who owned dozens of businesses including
Kahr Arms, and who once claimed to have presided over Jesus' wedding
posthumously in order to get the Christian savior into heaven, was ultimately a
front in the United States for friends in the CIA like George Herbert Walker
Bush.</div>
<div class="article">
Moon founded the Washington Times newspaper in 1982 and the
Washington Post went out of its way to avoid any mention of the "the dark
side of the Moon" upon his death Monday, September 3, 2012 at age 92. When
George W. Bush faltered in New Hampshire in early 2000, it was Moon's shadowy
cultish right-wing network that came to its rescue in South Carolina. Moon's
forces helped turn a certain primary defeat into a double-digit victory by
spreading Moonies, his zombie-like followers, throughout the state. As the
Washington Post reported, "An array of conservative groups have come to
reinforce Bush's message with phone banks, radio ads, and mailings of their
own."</div>
<div class="article">
Meanwhile, Moon's Washington Times ran the headline "Bush
scoffs at assertion he moved too far right." The bizarre, almost
unbelievable political alliance between the Bush family and Rev. Moon is one of
the dirty little secrets of CIA involvement in U.S. domestic politics.</div>
<div class="article">
To understand the historical significance of Rev. Moon and his
Moonies, one must start with Ryoichi Sasakawa, identified in a 1992 Frontline
investigative report as the key money source behind Moon's far-flung world
religious/business empire. Sasakawa bragged to Time magazine that he was
"the world's richest fascist."</div>
<div class="article">
In the 1930s, Sasakawa was one of Japan's leading fascists. He
organized a private army of 1500 men equipped with 20 war planes. His followers
were Japan's version of Mussolini's Black Shirts. Sasakawa was a key figure in
leading Japan into World War II and was an "uncondemned Class-A war
criminal." Following WW II, he was captured and imprisoned for war crimes.
According to U.S. documents, Sasakawa was suddenly freed with another accused
war criminal, Yoshio Kodama, a prominent figure in Japan's organized crime
syndicate, the Yakuza. They were freed in 1948, one year after the National
Security Act established the CIA as the successor to the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS). In January 1995, Japan's KYODO News Service uncovered documents
establishing that Kodama's release coincided with an agreement he had made with
U.S. military intelligence two months earlier to serve as an informant.
Declassified documents link Kodama's release to the CIA.</div>
<div class="article">
During WW II, Kodama activities, according to the U.S. Army
counterintelligence records consisted of "systematically looting China of
its raw materials" and dealing in heroin, guns, tungsten, gold, industrial
diamonds and radium. Both Sasakawa's and Kodama's CIA ties are a reoccurring
theme in their relationship with Rev. Moon.</div>
<div class="article">
In 1997, Congressman Donald Fraser launched an investigation
into Moon's cult. The 444-page Congressional report alleged Moonie involvement
with bribery, bank fraud, illegal kickbacks, and arms sales. The report
revealed that Moon's 20,000-member Unification Church was a creation of the
Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). The Moonies were working with KCIA
Director Kim Chong Phil as a political instrument to influence U.S. foreign
policy. The U.S. CIA was the agency primarily responsible for founding the KCIA
after WW II. The Moon organization has denied any link with the U.S.
intelligence agencies or the Korean government.</div>
<div class="article">
Moon, who is Korean, and his two fascist Japanese buddies
Kodama and Sasakawa, worked together in the early 1960s to form the Asian
People's Anti-Communist League with the aid of KCIA agents. The League
allegedly used Japanese organized crime money and financial support from Chinese
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. The League concentrated its efforts on uniting
fascist and right-wing militarists into an anti-Communist force throughout
Asia.</div>
<div class="article">
In 1964, League funds established Moon's Freedom Center in the
United States. Kodama served as a chief advisor to the Moon's subsidiary Win
Over Communism, an organization that served as a conduit to protect Moon's
South Korean financial investments. Sasakawa acted as Win Over Communism's
Chair.</div>
<div class="article">
In 1966, the League merged with another fascist organization,
the Anti-Bolshevik Block of Nations. The merger begat the World Anti-Communist
League (WACL). Later, in the 1980s, the retired U.S. Major General John
Singlaub emerged from the shadows of the League to become caught up in the
Iran-Contra scandal. As Chairman of the WACL, Singlaub enlisted soldiers of
fortune and other paramilitary groups to support the Contra cause in Nicaragua
against the Sandinistas.</div>
<div class="article">
Moon's Freedom Center served as the headquarters for the
League in the U.S. During the Iran-Contra hearings, the League was described as
a "multi-national network of Nazi war criminals, Latin American death
squad leaders, North American racists, and anti-Semites and fascist politicians
from every continent."</div>
<div class="article">
Working with the KCIA, Moon made his first trip to the U.S. in
1965 and shockingly obtained an audience with former President Dwight D.
Eisenhower. Both "Ike" and former President Harry S. Truman lent
their names to letterhead of the Moon-created Korean Cultural Freedom
Foundation. In 1969, Moon and Sasakawa jointly formed the Freedom Leadership
Foundation, a pro-Vietnam War organization that lobbied the U.S. government.</div>
<div class="article">
In the 1970s, Moon earned notoriety in the so-called Koreagate
scandal. Female followers of the Unification Church were accused of entertaining
and horizontally lobbying U.S. Congressmen while keeping confidential files on
those they "lobbied" at a Washington Hilton Hotel suite rented by the
Moonies. The U.S. Senate held hearings concerning Moon's "programmatic
bribery of U.S. officials, journalists, and others as part of an operation by
the KCIA to influence the course of U.S. foreign policy." The Fraser
report documented that Moon was "paid by the KCIA to stage demonstrations
at the United Nations and run pro-South Korean propaganda campaigns." The
Congressional investigator for the Fraser report said, "We determine that
their (Moonies') primary interest, at least in the U.S. at that time, was not
religion at all but was political, it was an attempt to gain power, influence
and authority."</div>
<div class="article">
After Ronald Reagan's presidential victory in 1980, Moon's
political influence increased dramatically. Vice President George Bush, former
CIA director, invited Moon as his guest to the Reagan inauguration. Bush and
Moon shared unsavory links to South American underworld figures. In 1980,
according to the investigative magazine I.F., the Moon organization
collaborated with a right-wing military coup in Bolivia that established the
region's first narco-state.</div>
<div class="article">
Moon's credentials soared in conservative circles. In 1982,
with the inception of the propaganda tabloid the Washington Times. Vice
President Bush immediately saw the value of forging an alliance with the
politically powerful Moon organization, an alliance that Moon claims made Bush
president. One former-Moonie website claims that during the 1988 Bush-Dukakis
battle, Rev. Moon threatened his followers that they would be moved out of the
United States if the evil Dukakis won.</div>
<div class="article">
Moon himself lacked clean hands. Moon was convicted of income
tax evasion in 1982 and spent a year in a U.S. jail. Also in 1982, the Moon
organization based at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio helped elect John
Kasich, now Ohio's governor, to the U.S. Congress in 12th district. During the
Gulf War, the Moonie-sponsored American Freedom Coalition organized
"support the troops" rallies throughout the country.</div>
<div class="article">
The Frontline documentary identified the Washington Times as
the most costly piece in Moon's propaganda arsenal, with losses estimated as
high as $800 million. Still, the documentary asserts that his old friend
Sasakawa's virtual monopoly over the Japanese speedboat gambling industry
allowed money to continuously flow into U.S. coffers.</div>
<div class="article">
The Bush-Moonie connection caused considerable controversy in
September 1995 when the former President announced he would be spending nearly
a week in Japan on behalf of a Moonie front organization, the Women's
Federation for World Peace, founded and led by Moon's wife.</div>
<div class="article">
Bush downplayed accusations of Moonie brain-washing and
coercion. The New York Times noted that Bush's presence "is seen by some
as lending the group [Moonies] legitimacy."</div>
<div class="article">
Long-time Moonie member S.P. Simmonds wrote an editorial for
the Portland Press Herald noting that Bushes "didn't need the reported
million dollars paid by Moon and were well aware of the Church's history."
Other news sources placed the figure for the former President's presence at $10
million. Bush shared the podium with Moon's wife and addressed a crowd of
50,000 in the Tokyo dome. Bush told the faithful "Reverend and Mrs. Moon
are engaged in the most important activities in the world today."</div>
<div class="article">
The following year, Moon bankrolled a series of "family
values" conferences from Oakland to Washington D.C. The San Francisco
Chronicle reported, "In Washington, Moon opened his checkbook to such
Republican Party mainstays as former President Gerald Ford and George Bush, GOP
presidential candidate Jack Kemp, and Christian Coalition leader Ralph
Reed."</div>
<div class="article">
Purdue University Professor of Sociology Anson Shupe, a
long-time Moon-watcher, said, "The man accused of being the biggest
brainwasher in America has moved into mainstream Republican Americana."</div>
<div class="article">
Moon proclaimed at his family values conferences that he was
only one who knew "all the secrets of God." One of them, according to
the Chronicle was that "the husband is the owner of his wife's sex organs
and vice versa."</div>
<div class="article">
"President Ford, President Bush, who attended the
inaugural World Convention of the Family Federation for World Peace" and
all you distinguished guests are famous, but there's something that you do know
now," the Chronicle quoted Moon as saying. "Is there anyone here who
dislikes sexual organs? . . . Until now you may not have thought it virtuous to
value the sexual organs, but from now, you must value them."</div>
<div class="article">
In November 1996, Bush the Elder arrived in Buenos Aires,
Argentina, amid controversy over a newly-created Spanish language Moon weekly
newspaper called Tiempos del Mundo. Bush smoothed things over as the principle
speaker at the paper's inaugural dinner on November 23rd.</div>
<div class="article">
The former president then traveled with Moon to neighboring
Uruguay to help him open a Montevideo seminary to train 4200 young Japanese
women to spread the word of the Unification Church across Latin America. The young
Japanese seminarians were later accused of laundering $80 million through a
Uruguayan bank, according to the St. Petersburg Times. The Times also reported
that when Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University faced bankruptcy, Moon bailed
it out with millions of dollars of loans and grants.</div>
<div class="article">
In 1997 the New York Times wrote that Moon "has been
reaching out to conservative Christians in this country in the last few years
by emphasizing shared goals like support for sexual abstinence outside of
marriage and opposition to homosexuality." Moon also appealed to Second
Amendment advocates. In March 1999, the Washington Post reported that the cult
leader owned the lucrative Kahr Arms company through Saeilo Inc.</div>
<div class="article">
It's the shadowy network around the Moonies and the CIA that
helped propel both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush into the presidency.
Recently the "Messiah's" newspaper has spent most of its time
attacking President Obama.</div>
<div class="article">
Besides the Washington Times, the Unification Church had
business holdings including the United Press International (UPI). Moon was
often shown in the mainstream media presiding over mass marriages of his
followers. More importantly was his marriage of convenience to the CIA and the
Bush family. His corruption of American politics lives on.</div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06051542715853942258noreply@blogger.com0