Hi,
I begun to write in an other topic about Ching Hai (
here) and I've been told that there were more people in this one.
I'd like to introduce my little experience (I hope it will not be too much boring for you guy) :
I'm French (male). I've been confronted with Ching Hai's cult since a year by a friend of mine (a vietnamese girl leaving in Paris) who is a follower. Before that I had never even heard about Ching Hai. At the begining I didn't notice anything wrong in my new friend. It seemed to me she was quite open minded, with a lot of ideas about life, environment, and she was interested in metaphysic questions... so different from any vietnamese girl I knew before. In a word, she was pretty interesting.
But very soon I reached the limits of her personality. In fact everything was ok while it was just about telling me what she knew or believed, but each time I disagreed something, I noticed that she was inefficient in producing any proper reasonning. Each days there were more and more incoherent ideas and naive representations. Any time I asked question like "how can you know that", or "where did you learnt that", she was answering beside my question, or changing subject, or just saying something like "because I know", or "that's so evident!". I just thought she was a little stupid, that's all.
However progressively she told me about her meditation practice, and tried to stimulate my interest for that. I also noticed kitsch pictures of that blonde woman in her purse, her agenda... even the background in her mobile phone. She told me that was her master, and how great she was. After that she showed me the SupremeMasterTV website, and I suddenly understood that absolutely ALL what she told me since the first time we met were in fact from that ridiculous TV chanel.
I was really shocked and didn't know how to react. It was unbelivable for me that an educated girl (the is a postgrad student!) could watch such a TV chanel more than 1 minute without thinking "what the hell am I doing here!". I really tried to watch more, in order to check if there was something good that I missed, but there is not. I understood that SupremeMasterTV was much more than an insult to human intelligence : a brainwashing machine. I didn't know much about sects at that time, but it was obvious to me that she was in a kind of sect. I naively tried to warn her, in vain. An endless denial. Each time she was repeating that Master was so good, that she never lies, impossible. The more I was trying to put her in an awkward position (for her to notice there was something wrong in her beliefs and her blind love for Ching Hai), the more she felt confident to tell me about Ching Hai's teaching. I know that there are still many things that she doesn't allow herself to tell me, but what I heard is already amazing.
Argument after argument, I was getting tired of her. Many times I threw in the sponge, but my friend was always calling me back. I understand that she needs me, which can mean that somewhere deep in herself, she realizes that she needs help. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's the little hope which made me hold on until now.
Since last month, I begun to research on the web and found many documents that confirmed point by point my own experience. I also bought some books about sects and mind control techniques, and I realised that I did to my friend the exact opposite of what I should have done to help her. I also took a lot of advices from the Rick Ross Institute. And I'm here to share experiences and discuss some points of view with any people who feel concerned about Ching Hai (ex followers, relatives of followers, even followers themselves).