I lost some friends to the John de Ruiter cult a few years ago - anyone have any information about goings on in the Edmonton Oasis?

thanks

"Rod Slack Edmonton-based follower of John de Ruiter suicided last week."

[www.facebook.com]

If this report is true, it would be the third suicide in the John de Ruiter group, the first two being Bryan Beard in 1999 and Anina Hundsdoerfer in 2014.

[raymondparkerphoto.com]

[www.theglobeandmail.com]

[www.spiritualteachers.org]

This exchange in the comments section following the article:

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Anna says:
February 26, 2017 at 8:45 pm
I have been attending johns seminars regularly for 2 years now am so grateful for the chance to be close to him and the group of people that follow his teaching – it is here I find meaning, learn, see and grow. I find his seminars infinitely helpful and very enlightening.

He speaks from a deeper place, and the level of truth he conveys both by spoken word and transmission is astounding. In countless occasions I have realized and known such love, as hat I have thought “I wish everyone could have the chance to experience this man”. I have seen countless people benefit on all levels by attending his seminars.

I am a mental health professional(What? - Corboy), (a psychologist) and can honestly say: this man is profoundly mentally healthy and pure in intention- I have seen him help
So many by inviting a shift in perspectve from a more ego- centered to a more heart-centered and mindful way of being in the world.

I see a man who is Actually contributing to the awakening of humanity. Instead of just indiscriminately posting your negative and judgemental responses on the internet, why not spend some time Really listening to what this man is Actually offering us.

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Barbara says:
March 14, 2017 at 1:26 am
..and you Anna, “why not spend some time Really listening to” what…John’s first wife, his second Benita and his third, Katrina have to say about his ‘purity’.

How about listening carefully to what his latest ‘sexual conquests’, Debbie or Randi S. have recently been attempting to share with the public. Only to be ‘silenced’ very quickly on the JDR sites like Birds of Being because…nobody wants to know what’s going on under all that ‘goodness and purity’.

(COrboy: this resembles how persons attempting to make harm reports about Mooji are getting trolled and their posts removed on various venues.

swissanalyst wrote about this here:

[forum.culteducation.com] )

Or, for that matter asking or wanting to know what actually ‘happened’ to his student dear Anina before she went into the forest and so very suddenly…committed suicide.

But…you might say, well that’s all ‘par for the course’ in life and…’shit happens’. It’s a little odd and ‘coincidental’ though I think, that all this and likely far more has gone on within a short period of fifteen years or less. Not to mention him being married again, for the forth time now.

“Profound mental health and pure intention” as you describe John having and being, doesn’t usually manifest in ‘unexplained deaths’, constant legal battles, multi divorces, over accumulation of wealth or having multiple extra marital sexual relationships or and worst yet…lying about much of it.

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j.R. (Name converted to initials for privacy - Corboy) says:
December 5, 2017 at 6:18 am
Book on de Ruiter, dark oasis: a self-made messiah unveiled, by jasun horsley, just came out

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Tano says:
December 5, 2017 at 7:39 pm
Jasun Horsley left a very detailed and sincere account of his personal involvement with JDR and has written a book on the perils of cult enmeshment and the loss of own critical thinking abilities in the process. It can be found here:

[auticulture.wordpress.com]

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/11/2018 09:28PM by corboy.

Dark Oasis Jasun Horsley's memoir of his time with John de Ruiter

Online articles

[auticulture.wordpress.com]

Dark Oasis - the book

[www.amazon.com]

Corboy note:

I consider Dark Oasis to be a masterpiece. Relegating it to the catagory of cult expose would do it an injustice.

Dark Oasis combines biography (John de Ruiter), top quality investigative journalism, and memoir (the author).

Neither de Ruiter nor Horsley's voice dominates this narrative. Horsley gives ample space for current and former de Ruiter disciples, They speak vividly from the pages of Dark Oasis.

Seven years in the writing, Dark Oasis is Jasun Horsley's sincere attempt to make sense of John de Ruiter's charisma, his development as a guru, his social background and his methods of testing, influencing and controlling his followers.

Jasun Horsley is a thoughtful and sensitive writer. He spent 7 years researching and writing Dark Oasis and he took care to interview as many persons as possible.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2018 09:46PM by corboy.

Alberta spiritual leader John de Ruiter charged with four counts of sexual assault

[www.theglobeandmail.com]

corboy Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Dark Oasis Jasun Horsley's memoir of his
> time with John de Ruiter

I have read Jasun Horsley's Dark Oasis. The material in it was written and rewritten over a seven-year period, so it's had a lot of thought put into it.

One of the most confusing things about John de Ruiter is reconciling his benevolent stage persona with his private vindictiveness and deceptiveness. Even his first wife, Joyce, cannot understand which is the real John. Jasun Horsley concludes, "John's shadow side is real," and he repeats the old adage, "The brighter the light, the darker the shadow."

This extreme split is something we've seen before among spiritual teachers. Ordinary people have a public self they present to the world and a hidden self that may be unknown even to themselves. In people who have gone deeply inside themselves, the split is for some reason exaggerated, often to Jekyll-and-Hyde proportions. The damage they can do is magnified when their stage presence becomes so charismatic that it verges on the hypnotic, and especially when they acquire unusual occult powers. A large part of John de Ruiter's appeal is his ability to induce an instant high in people he has one-on-ones with.

This ability to cause damage does not seem to be balanced by any corresponding benefit to the "students," who never seem to graduate out from under their "teacher." Your average guru is spectacularly unsuccessful at his or her stated purpose, consistently over-promising and under-delivering.

There's a first class book by Australian psychologist Len Oakes entitled Prophetic Charisma.

Oakes was able to interview a large number of self identified spiritual leaders/prophets and found most of them had some degree of narcissistic personality disorder -- a fragile precariously poised/easily disrupted inner core.

To compensate for this, these persons became "avid students of social manipulation" -- they learned the various skills that add up to what we call charisma.

[forum.culteducation.com]

Oakes noted that some of them retained the intuitive sensitivity that small pre verbal children have to non verbal cues.

They also create social settings organized around them and become adept at extracting intimate information from vulnerable people they later exploit.

These people also learn to select the type of person most responsive to them - and how to reject/discard/scare away those persons who dont respond to their tricks and charm.

The charisma exercised by these gurus can be as addictive as any drug - and it gives the illusion of healing - but like alcohol and dope, only erodes maturity and fosters increasing dependence.

[forum.culteducation.com]

The charismatic guru also becomes increasingly dependent on his or her minions and comes to resent them, just as the entrapped addict is increasingly dependent on the substance and hates it just as much as they need it. They no longer feel happy as guru, they need to remain gurus merely to keep their depression at bay - with less and less success as time passes.

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corboy
There's a first class book by Australian psychologist Len Oakes entitled Prophetic Charisma.

That is an excellent find. I was just thinking, we need a body of literature on the mechanics of how gurus' minds work. That looks like a valuable read.

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corboy
they learned the various skills that add up to what we call charisma.

Jasun Horsley mentions in his book several times that John de Ruiter discovered his bag of tricks by trial and error. He discovered that people would tithe just to hear a three-hour talk once a week. Then he discovered that they would continue to tithe even if the three-hour talk consisted of three hours of silence. Then he learned (from a New Ager) the possibilities offered by prolonged staring. It was all a matter of exploiting what he discovered.

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corboy

These people also learn to select the type of person most responsive to them - and how to reject/discard/scare away those persons who dont respond to their tricks and charm.

I've heard that stage hypnotists learn a similar skill. They learn how to select the easily persuaded from among a crowd.

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corboy
They no longer feel happy as guru

That's an interesting observation. I read somewhere that "Gurumayi Chidvilasananda" had mysteriously disappeared from her guru-ing activities.

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daniel46
A large part of John de Ruiter's appeal is his ability to induce an instant high in people he has one-on-ones with.

The eye-gazing high is exactly the phenomenon Oakes refers to in his introduction:

“the essence of charisma, what Max Weber called ‘pure’ charisma — an ecstatic experience when eyes meet, hearts stop, and minds merge, which lies at the heart of the leader-follower relationship”

And Len Oakes quotes a similar experience from Hugh Milne’s Bhagwan: The God That Failed:

“Many people have asked me how a sensible, independent person could be mesmerised by someone like Bhagwan. The answer, as many sanyasis would agree, is that once you had been affected by his energy and experienced the sensation of being touched by it, you knew there was nothing like it, no bliss to compare with it. Once you had experienced it, you had to go back for more, to try and regain that feeling of harmony and being at one with the universe. It is similar to a drug-induced high, except that there is no artificial chemical at work. Bhagwan’s touch could be just as addictive as the strongest drug.”



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/05/2025 05:13AM by daniel46.