You brought up some interesting points about “discreet groups.” I think that part of the reason I was sure that this was not a cult was because this woman did not use the aggressive recruitment techniques that I has always associated with cults. She held public speaking events only two or three times a year and most of the people in the group were introduced to her through other students. She does not advertise, she does not have a website. She does have a book out, but that’s it. I met her through a friend that I was trading massage therapy for coaching with. (There were a number of healers and therapists in the group.) This friend, the one who sent me the email mentioned in the last post, kept talking about this woman all of the time, and invited me to come to one of her public presentations.

If I had known more about thought reform techniques and trance induction, I would have caught on sooner. I just assumed it wasn’t a cult because, based on my limited knowledge of cults, I didn’t see the “typical” things going on—dietary restrictions, the same clothes, demands that we turn all of our money over to her. This is what I thought a cult involved, and she didn’t do any of those things. She was WAY too sopshisticated for that—she had to be, considering the level of education and intelligence of the people in the group. It did seem like it all happened very, very slowly….I just know that one day I had lost all confidence in my own judgement and had given myself over to her mind body and soul. I was really afraid that I was too deluded and egotistical to “make it on my own” spiritually.

The night of the big-blow out, I left my body for a few minutes and as I was out of body, I SAW her manipulating the group energy in a very powerful, skillful way. I do energy healing myself, and I just saw her working in this energetic dimension, moving energy into a fever pitch and then lowering it down it again…I also saw how much power she had over the people in the group, and that’s what really scared me. To actually “get” that on a very deep level….very spooky.

Fortunately, I did not make the group my life. To this woman’s chagrin, I always made sure that I had a good mumber of friends and support outside of the group. This saved my marriage in the long run.

I am working here and there with a counselor, which is going okay, but she doesn’t really have much experience in treating ex-cult members. Mostly I am educating myself as much as possible, praying, and going through all of the feelings I need to. It feels incredible to return to myself, to trust myself and hear my own voice again. I realize now that I am all I have. I MUST trust my own voice, my own knowing, no matter what. I feel great joy about that.

Brad Warner, author of Hardcore Zen, puts it something like this:

If you hand your power over to a real teacher, he or she gives your power right back to you. Only a fake teacher will allow you to surrender your inner voice/authority to her.

I am certain that your leader must have spent time with other groups and gurus, and learned her own bag of tricks.

Many of these charismatic types are brilliant at reading nonverbal cues and body language. This can make them seem psychic, even when they are not. Also, they may spy on you or encourage members to tattle on each other, giving them information that they can use against you, also making them seem all powerful.

Key thing to understand is that a group of this kind is a game of marked cards. It is structured to disempower you, and route all the power to the teacher. The teacher has no incentive to empower you. None. Its like playing cards in a casino where all the decks are marked. No matter how good a card player you are, you are set up to lose.

A bogus leader will never, ever validate your perceptions or say, 'You got it. You can graduate. I have nothing left to teach you.'

The only way you can graduate from a corrupt group and leader is to *write your own diploma*, ignore their jeers and nasty invalidating comments, put on your own self designed cap and gown, and proudly march out under your own power.

If your leader is keeping her past mysterious and has taken all that trouble to avoid leaving a paper trail or any traces in cyberspace, chances are she learned her MO from some shady people.

Some of these types start as mental health professionals who are interested in innovative methods, and who gradually get seduced into the guru role, losing professionalism in the process. If a leader of this type assembles a coterie of healers and psychotherapists, he or she is guaranteed a steady stream of new recruits, because it is so very common for a therapist or healer to recommend his or her spiritual teacher to a client.

This is common practice, but all too often can lead to boundary violations and the problem of dual relationship where loyalty goes to the guru at the expense of the client's best interests.

The smartest leaders of this kind bring in new recruits, and simultaneously identify those persons who are unconsciously betraying through their facial expressions and body language that they are getting bored or suspicious.

If the leader can detect and viciously eject members who are getting bored, before they are consciously aware of feeling bored, these rejected persons have no sense of empowerment in their departure from the group. Worse, they are haunted by some feeling that they have failed, have 'bad attitudes' and remain miserably obsessed with the leader and group--the ultimate revenge for the leader.

Meanwhile these purges keep the other members in line. It is a mini-totalitarian dictatorship.

My hunch is your former leader is a very needy person and that may have learned some tricks from various groups that abuse trance and energy.

If you read Len Oakes' book and see how similar these leaders are to one another, this may help demystify your former leader. Your therapist may also benefit from reading Dr. Oakes' book, too.

Back to your former leader. She may have learned some other tricks through time spent in either a genuine or a bogus 'Fourth Way' group. If you read the plethora of material on the thread concerning Gurdjieff/Fourth Way groups, you may see a tell tale similarities to your former group.

These Fourth Way groups (whether genuine or bogus) tend to be secretive, recruit very gradually, and play the game of 'this isnt a group'. People end up becoming 'inmates' of the group, all their social life confined to the group. When they get kicked out or leave, they are bereft.


Other problems come up when a needy person like your former guru learned to manipulate subtle energy (or at least the attention of a group). These articles may contain clues.

[www.google.com]


[www.google.com]

and this thread contains information from various members of the RR.com community about use and abuse of trance and energy

[forum.culteducation.com]

About her background: She went to study with Marharisha at the age of 19, and stayed with him for 6-7 years. Then, she studied with a Tibetan spiritual leader (I don't know how to spell the name--Duju Rimpoche, maybe?) for several years in her thirties. She claims to have had alien abduction experiences throughout her life from the time that she was a young child. Her final enlightenment experience happened, according her, during one of her encounters with these alien beings. She also claims to have ties with the Dali Llama.

She has quite the impressive educational background, if you believe what she says. She worked in early childhood education and psychology for many years.

The thing is, is that I stayed with her for so long because I did feel that her teachings were incredible. But, I also reconize that they did not belong to her exclusively--it's stuff I could find anywhere, really. She insisted that she was our "last chance." That we were lucky to be with an enlightened being an that we would never find enlightment or happiness without a teacher. She has everyone in the group convinced that she is god-like, that she is psychic--I thought so, too. I think that she is slowly weeding out the people who are not going to be of use to her in the long run--the last several people to be ejected out of the group before me were not in a position to support her finacially and did not want to move to Canada and live on this property she was talking about buying.

My freind got pregnant while she was in the group, and this woman convinced her that her baby was going to the second coming of Christ, practically--that he was a "powerful energy" and that he was going to be enlightened by the time he was 5, etc--so of course my freind ate that up. The leader was making decisions for her about where the child was going to go to school, how he was going to be raised, etc. When I asked my freind if she felt uncomfortable about this, she just shrugged and said, "I trust her."

The last night I was in group, she was screaming at me about "giving up my chance for enlightenment just to be with a man," and "being a victim." She was unhappy that my husband didn't want to be involved in the group, I think, although at first she cooed about how it was okay, that it "wasn't for everybody" and that she would "never force someone to be there."

What a bunch of manipulative crap.

:mad:

classic move is for characters of this kind to create lineages for themselves. And if someone claims time in India, we are apt to believe it--plus its hard to fact check what someone has done or where they've been while in India.

She may or may not have been involved with the Maharishi. But if she was, Maharishi was one of the earliest and most successful of the export gurus. He targeted Westerners, not Indians, because Westerners didnt know how to check a guru's lineage claims. Indians would've known how to fact check the guy--which is why Maharishi did NOT minister to emigre Hindus during his time in London.

Some gurus are so easygoing that they'll allow you to put their names on your 'spiritual resume', even if all you've done is sit in an audience at their ashrams. Ditto for many Tibetan lamas.

You can have all kinds of amazing experiences and 'awakenings' and still remain needy and greedy. A german spiritual teacher named Karlfried Durckheim put it in old fashioned language, but still quite accurately when he said, 'The Holy Ghost cannot always eradicate a father-complex.' Someone can be enlightened or know how to give folks bliss experiences and still be greedy and dishonest.

One very common trick these people do is as soon as you try to pin them down about real world specifics, they'll derail the discussion using 'spiritual' language--like someone on a losing baseball team suddenly saying 'we are not losing, we are winning because this is really a football game and you're too dense to have known that.'

In case your former leader played this kind of mindgame, you can read about it here.

[forum.culteducation.com]

As for the DL, he probably has his hands full coping with all the nutcases who claim to be his special friend.

Genuine, celebrated spiritual teachers are like newly rich widows--all kinds of hustlers constantly try to hang out with them. And, with rare exceptions, not all these spiritual teachers are worldly wise enough to protect themselves from these crooks.

This long but good article deals with another guru named Da Free John (DFJ) but the author brilliantly describes a process of 'mythologization' in which a person gradually learns to see the leader and his/her behavior from a myth-making standpoint. This may help you understand what you've been through and how you were indoctrinated in such a manner that the cult alarm bells did not warn you earlier.

[lightmind.com]

'You mentioned that you didn't understand how all the things I said about the group and DFJ could be true if intelligent people like your cousin and myself were involved.

'What happens is that you develop *a blind spot* when dealing with anything relating to DFJ, and to some extent in ancillary areas. With respect to most aspects of your life, you continue to be a largely "normal" and rational person.

'So it's not like you have to be a glassy-eyed automaton to be trapped in a cult. That's the popular picture of cult members, but I doubt it's true of very many people in ANY cult. There's a few people like this in DFJ's group, but most people are relatively ordinary, albeit with a blind spot that obscures their discrimination regarding DFJ.

'The community is *at root a society devoted to glorification and myth-making* in relation to DFJ (fill in your guru's name here?)

'I bought into the extraordinary claims made in DFJ's autobiography (The Knee of Listening) and appreciated his dharma (if you can really call the dharma "his") to the point where *I didn't see the obvious when I met him* - i.e. that DFJ was extremely irresponsible and was exploiting people to satisfy his whims and fantasies.

'By the time I met DFJ and saw things about him that would previously have caused me to reject him out of hand, I was already sufficiently indoctrinated to assume that anything he did was a form of teaching.'


'It can be difficult to see all of the ways in which habitual mythologization is operative and to understand the full range and scope of its influence. Waking up can take time. Many can't seem to develop much insight into their delusions and commitment to myth-making about DFJ, beyond identifying the crudest and most obviously "cultic" level of it. This is why some of the group's beliefs and assumptions are retained indefinitely by many people, even long after they leave.

The funny thing, though, is that this myth-making activity I´ve described really is an "esoteric" practice in some sense. It truly is "hidden", as it is largely unconscious and almost entirely uninspected in the community, despite DFJ's frequent criticism of cultism. He superficially criticizes some aspects of cultism, yet at the same time creates an entire culture devoted to it. It is remarkable that he is able to focus everyone´s attention on what he writes and says, rather than what he does and how he lives.

'DFJ also never gets to the core issue, which is the fact that he is an ordinary human being like everyone else and should not be afforded the unique luxury of being beyond accountability.

'If he really wanted to end the cultic game surrounding him he could easily make some very practical changes in the way he lived and the way he related to others. Of course, this is the last thing he actually wants.'

Now, I am going to be a good librarian, and give you the space to chow down on all this reading matter.

Welcome to RR.com

Welcome!

Yep, I'm plugging away at it, alright. A book I read that helped enormously was "The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power" by Joel Kramer and Diane Alstad. It's excellent. Also, all the fantastic information on this board. Slowly, peices are starting fall into place; all of these things that I had a difficult time with in the group, unanswered questions, certain incidents...I'm piecing it all together and coming to a better understanding of what was REALLY going on, not just my fanasy about what I wanted it to be.

I can't find anything about her anywhere on the web or through other venues. I know she had a brother, who they both claimed was enlightened, but then something happened and all of the sudden according to her he wasn't enlightened anymore but "corrupt."--weird things like that all of the time, going on.

I really appreciate all of the helpful information--this board is great resource. I'm glad to be "out."

--Leopardgirl