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THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN MIND CONTROL |
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THREE: Anatomy of Mind Control People are suggestible. There is no question about it. In a world of mass media, we often hear of how political handlers position themselves to influence people by the power and cogency of their sixty-second sound bites. In his book, The Assault on Reason, [1] Al Gore -- no stranger to the use of media in political campaigns -- speaks about the "quasi-hypnotic state" created by television technology. This state is partially fostered by the continual barrage of negative images, which Gore says stimulates a trigger to set off an "orienting response" that awakens a viewer instinctively to pay attention. The constant, flickering demand on his or her attention, with the concomitant elevation of heart rate and blood pressure, creates a viewer partially traumatized by fear and very susceptible to suggestion. Political persuasion, utilizing this knowledge, therefore has an edge over the efforts of more rational people to argue by dialogue and reason. American politics are actually run by very sophisticated individuals trying to influence masses of people to cast their votes without going through the complex machinations of reasoning, or the agonizing process of examining their consciences or trying to carefully discern the consequences of their decisions. It is one thing to vote on a war policy by reason and conscience, following a serious debate within oneself and with others; it is another to make decisions on the basis of cliches and sound bites. For politicians to be tough on bad guys because it wins votes; to be charismatic and appealing when speaking, no matter what the message is; to go after easy applause by delivering multiple simplistic messages that match the audience's core beliefs and not because of important, real content, is not the way to serve a democratic people. It is not the best way to engage their hearts and minds. It does, however, get votes -- if money and power are the prime motivators. This kind of politics -- with its chanting, its slogans, its simplistic appeal to party affiliations with oversimplified ideologies, its rallying the emotions of its followers through empty promises that are guaranteed never to materialize -- comes dangerously close to cult mind control, something I have experienced firsthand. It is not surprising, therefore-since a great deal of the American political life is dictated by a leadership who happily use a combination of suggestion, false promises, simplistic party identifications, and the unique charisma of a powerful leader -- that Americans would be easy targets for cult mind control. It is hardly surprising that religious cults, who are sometimes even more callous in their objectives and more developed in their methods of mind control than politicians, can use these methods with great efficiency in America. Originally an outsider to the American way of life, I have seen the same forces involved in Haitian politics. But Haiti is a small, poor country compared to America, and it is not surprising that cults gravitate toward America. This country is a great place to grow a cult because Americans are wealthy, hopeful, and consumer-oriented. And although I came to this country rather poor, I wanted to be affluent, future-oriented, and enthusiastically consumer-oriented -and that is probably why I chose such a distinctly American cult. Although AMORC claims to be European and Middle Eastern in origins, it is distinctly American in certain ways. American groups like EST or Scientology often like to reduce their complexity to the least common denominator. Despite certain intricacies in their formulation, there is a simplistic, immediate appeal in the works of men like Werner Erhardt and L. Ron Hubbard. AMORC, like these organizations, has taken a very complex historical and metaphysical phenomenon, like Rosicrucianism, and boiled it down to bite-size consumable pieces in its signature monographs. AMORC is also distinctly American in that as it utilizes, at every opportunity, techniques needed to "close" and retain its membership. Its contents are readily consumable -- though probably not all that good for you -- and it is sold with the promise of unlimited power, wealth, and wisdom. AMORC embodies the simplicity of a Dale Carnegie, the cleverness of a Jennie Craig weight-loss infomercial, and the brandability of a can of Campbell's soup. Writing this now from my home in Minnesota, I am happy to say that much of my time in AMORC now seems like a bad dream. I came to this country so poor, so unhappy, and so blatantly out of touch with myself, that I have to blink my eyes and look around to see the burgeoning signs of prosperity and happiness that are my lot at present. Still, I have written this book as a cathartic work, to get rid of old ghosts and, to some extent, hoping that the story of my extrication from the deception and loss of liberty at the hands of a religious cult can be passed on to others. This is a case history of mind control through the methodology of what I have termed "remote indoctrination." It is my personal story -- how I got in and how I got out. It will be as personal and truthfully reported as I am capable of. Back in 1981,when I became a member of AMORC, I was a perfect candidate for a cult. Cults thrive on people's unhappiness and confusion. Recruiters for cults will target students who are changing courses, failing, or wanting to drop out of school; people who have lost someone through death or heartbreak; unemployed people or people stuck in unimaginative and soul-killing employment. They strive on discontent people that has left over at least slight residue of hope. If the cults can flame the discontent and awaken the hope, then everyone will be very happy. When I joined the order as a student in Haiti, I was looking for that magic key to help my family out of dire and life-destroying poverty. After acquainting myself with the order, my hope was that Rosicrucian techniques of visualization, affirmation, and prayer would help me find the resources I needed to extract myself and my family from a hopeless, depressing lifestyle, rooted in the cycle of Haitian poverty. This hope sustained me through a remarkable twenty-four years of ambivalent, emotionally wrenching, dream-crushing servitude to the demands of an organization offering me their infallible authority to help me find my dream. In actuality, AMORC's contribution to my life was built on providing me with an interminable correspondence course, somewhat sustained by my attending and/or holding offices in the Port-Au-Prince, Miami, and New York Rosicrucian lodges. In this study, you will find me constantly questioning how I could wind up a prisoner of this organization for so many long years. How many other people does this happen to? How is it possible that an organization that largely depends on its correspondence course can exercise a powerful and nefarious hold on its members? In this book, I will discuss many so-called secrets of the Rosicrucians, never before subject to public dialogue or scrutiny. I will also show that, although many of these "secrets" in themselves might be insightful and even important, they are buoyed up by false and dubious claims to authority. The techniques themselves are often variants of meditative and hypnotic techniques, functioning as mind control tools. Are these practices really "secrets"? I would say that the substance of almost everyone of them could be found elsewhere in a different but related context. When these "secrets," in their specific Rosicrucian form, are administered to the general population of a religious cult in a correspondence course or a meeting hall with these limitations, the results on members may be profoundly deleterious. Is this planned and intentional? Do the leaders of AMORC mean to use mind control tools deliberately? Instead of answering that question at this point, I am instead going to examine how, whether intentionally or not, these types of techniques can function as mind control tools and induce specific changes in the human personality. With respect to creating changes in the behavior of his subordinates, does it matter if a Boy Scout leader or a boot camp instructor in the U.S. Marines knows exactly why those changes might occur? Does he need to know, for instance, that his manner of exerting discipline encourages psychological transference relative to it happening? Or that he has made such serious threats to those subordinates that they are terrorized to comply? Or something else? Or both? In fact, the individual directly in charge might be communicating information that creates changes in his subordinates that he really believes in -- but which is absolutely wrong. Maybe the Boy Scout leader, for instance, has been told that merit badges will not be given out for anyone who is ever late. But that is false information provided by the Boy Scout leader he reports to. Maybe the boot camp instructor has been told that a badly kept barracks can be punished with a group dismissal from the corps. But that is just a way in which his ranking officer is intimidating him so he can get his job done, and there are no group dismissals of that sort in the corps. Assuming one believes in the power of transference, do parents know that when they exert this influence, they are thereby creating extra compliance with their wishes? Probably not, for the most part. Transference is a psychological doctrine and effect that is often not known by the general public. The fact is that mind control techniques can work regardless of whether anyone knows why -- and regardless of whether they were intended or not. A speaker may unconsciously use guided imagery and lull his audience into a trancelike state. A strong leader may induce transference by his demeanor when all he personally wants is people to think about things objectively. Mind control techniques can function independently of intention. They also can be passed on from one person to another and used on others without anyone really understanding their implications. Do all cult recruiters or speakers understand that they are using mind control techniques? Absolutely not. Many times, particularly in the lower hierarchy of a cult, it is precisely the beauty of these techniques (from the higher leadership's standpoint) that people can be manipulated to use these techniques on others once their core beliefs have been manipulated. With respect to the outcome of a mind control technique, what matters most is the efficacy of the technique itself or its use in combination with other techniques. The intention may often be irrelevant to the outcome. If it affects human personality and causes the requisite changes, then it works. Do the upper echelon leaders cynically use these techniques on their subordinates? I believe they often do. But there are also probably examples where the original leaders have died or moved on, and their lower-echelon followers have picked up the drum beat but have no knowledge of mind control whatsoever. And there are probably cases where mind control techniques are used unconsciously. A religious cult uses techniques that effectively create changes in its members that promote compliance with the cult's objectives, even if those changes are not consistent with members' consciences or ability to reason. They do this by causing profound changes in their members' personalities -- by manipulating and changing their core beliefs. In order to explore more exactly what happened to me with AMORC, I would like to dwell for a moment on the psychology and methodology of religious cults and how they develop an ironclad control over the minds and souls of their victims. So, for the moment, let's look at cults in general: what they are, why they come into existence, and how they operate and interact with their members. In the United States, we love our freedom. For this reason, we look askance at attempts to abridge religious and political expression or behavior. But there are limits to our patience when it comes to clear aberrations like Jonestown or Heaven's Gate, where death is the final proof of the mental imbalance and emotional instability of their leaders. But other organizations with peculiar records of interaction with society at large, and their members -- like the Unification Church and Scientology -- are allowed to prosper among us. Still, even these still-powerful organizations have been subjected to a variety of government scrutiny and prosecutorial activities. In regards to legal skirmishes, AMORC had been remarkably quiet for quite a few decades, until recently, when a lawsuit and scandal split the organization into several parts -- actions that, at the time, were largely shielded from their membership. Some members have claimed that this action was equivalent to a coup d'etat, where Gary Stewart, the imperator chosen by Ralph Lewis, was basically overthrown. Still, whether an organization succeeds in escaping government oversight and prosecution or not, the definition of a cult -- whether it is religious, political, or commercial -- is generally based on the way it gains, influences, and retains its members. We will define a cult here as an organization with a strong authoritarian leadership, which, having various political, religious, or commercial intentions, utilizes mind control and other psychologically invasive techniques to enhance and enforce its control over the behavior of its members. We will show, in my situation, that AMORC, although mostly out of the limelight for decades, has been slowly and insidiously utilizing mind control techniques, with great disadvantage to its members. Six Stages of Cult Activity There are six phases to cult activity. These phases, although roughly chronological in character, overlap considerably. Cults may vary as to how they interact with members and involve them in these various stages.
Recruitment The cult seeks out new members, utilizing a variety of tactics to entice and entrap them. I shall show how AMORC uses a variety of widespread, seductive advertising to net its thousands of members, while at the same time using its existing members to solicit membership from family and friends. Utilizing a center of influence like this is common in many types of cults, not unlike the practices that multilevel and networking organizations use to build an initial customer base. Indoctrination A cult uses mind control and other psychologically invasive techniques to create loyal, dedicated, and generally unquestioning members as instruments to reach its ultimate objectives. AMORC, as an organization whose revenues are largely based on monthly membership dues and whose activities are mainly based on a correspondence course and lodge activities, is heavily into indoctrination and entrapment techniques. AMORC doesn't depend on any kind of massive, conventional fund-raising activity or the selling of merchandise, like the Krishnas or the Unification Church, who have historically sold merchandise publicly at airports, on streets, or door-to-door. So, in the training and deployment phase, AMORC is considerably less active than other cults. Still, there is value in examining these other phases and seeing how AMORC fits in. Training Most cults have very specific ways of teaching their recruits to accomplish their goals. Their training is often meticulous, repetitive, and thorough. In AMORC, there is some training in the recruitment process and training in conducting various offices in the lodges. AMORC sells certain books, spiritual implements like candles and incense, and garments, etc., but proceeds are used to support the membership, and this is probably not a giant cash-flow machine in itself. I myself was responsible for certain sales at a lodge, but a good many things are sold over the Internet and sent by mail. Deployment Members, as they mature, are given recruitment, indoctrination, fund-raising, and other leadership tasks and will, themselves, take over the implementation or deployment of their leaders' objectives. All AMORC members are expected to speak with their family and friends and engage in relatively mild recruitment techniques. The fact is, AMORC projects an image of itself as a centuries-old secret organization that has been able to survive years of persecution from churches and governments by keeping a low profile. This low-key attitude has probably contributed to its longevity as a religious cult. Recovery When members leave, it can be disruptive to the entire cult organization. Sometimes a member may be forced to leave through the introduction of family and exiting counselors to the member's life, with or without the member's consent. In this case, the cult must make a powerful effort to recover a member who may not only know their "secrets" or be a key factor in their leadership, but who also may be privy to knowledge of possible unsavory or illegal activities. Recovery, in the traditional cult sense, has not been a visible activity of AMORC. Many of its members are exclusively attached to AMORC through its correspondence courses. Many members last a long time, but some drop out. The lodges do interact with a large number of members but tend to maintain an orderly and secret execution of rituals from year to year. I have no real evidence of any conspicuous outreach to recover lost members. The Purpose of Recruitment It would seem that cults go through a lot of trouble to recruit people, since in order to do this, they have to subject members to a substantial amount of carefully orchestrated changes to make them useful for the cult's purposes. It is important in looking at cults to realize that they are not all the same, particularly in their motivations. They resemble each other more in the ways they recruit, indoctrinate, and retain their members than in their individual philosophies and motivations. Some groups, including their leadership, appear to hold a common set of beliefs, whether it is to avoid the end times by meeting up with a UFO, converting the world to their religious dogma, or electing a member of a third party to the presidency of the United States. These groups, in whole or in part, have certain idealistic intentions, distorted as they might be. They are not wholly motivated by profit. Other groups, centered around so-called business opportunities or self-growth, appear to be more financially oriented, particularly in the areas of leadership. They use their membership to acquire wealth from outsiders and recruit a continuous crop of new members to serve as cheap labor. Still other groups, especially those that make the news because of their devastating treatment of their members, the public, or even components of their own leadership, seem often to be recruiting to fulfill the main leader's quest for personal power. Sometimes this quest for expansion could reflect the objectives of a charismatic leader who has managed to retain some degree of personal stability or rationality. His or her sense of power, although tainted with odd areas of focus, seems limited to control issues. He is not psychotic or totally sociopathic. Others -- like Jim Jones, infamous for Jonestown, and Marshall Applewhite of Heaven's Gate -- can be blatantly destructive of others and themselves. These cults suffer from having a mentally imbalanced or emotionally deranged leadership and are dangerous to themselves as well as others. But they often love to recruit, too. No cult fits into a totally neat little package, and there are hybrids and permutations of even the three main motives for recruitment that I have mentioned -- idealism, money and power. Still, the cults resemble each other in one critical way: how they attract, transform, and retain their following. In the chapters to come, we will discuss the leadership of AMORC somewhat. However, in AMORC's case, its leaders are very low-key, very nonpublic, and mostly anonymous -- except in regard to their connection with the membership at lodges, or in their selective and generally innocuous correspondence. Mostly the public projection of AMORC leadership centers around the imperator. Decades ago, at the beginning of its activities, AMORC was fairly conspicuous and strove for more public recognition. I will later discuss its then-widely-publicized alchemical experiment. H. Spencer Lewis and his son, Ralph, the first two imperators of the order, were authors, and their books can be found in public libraries. But they never reached out for any kind of personal, massive publicity, and little is known or published about their lives. Gary Steward, Ralph's successor, experienced a rash of publicity when he left the order, following some fairly well-publicized litigation activities. His successor, Christian Bernard, has been reasonably anonymous since he has taken over AMORC. Cult Personality One can look at a cult as a kind of factory, a factory that takes in recruits and reprocesses them for their personal use. The cult factory takes in raw material -- the personality of the recruit as they found him -- and then reconfigures the personality to suit their needs. The end products greatly resemble each other. Members of the same cult may dress alike, speak a special "loaded language" or cult doctrine, engage in a great many cult rituals and repetitive cult behavior, and fiercely support their leader no matter what. Still, these common characteristics will vary from cult to cult. Cults do not always use the same instrumentality for creating conformity to their objective. They do not all provide uniforms, cult rituals, distinctive language, and other bonding or hypnotic mechanisms in the same neat package. But one thing they do have in common: the product -- the transformed personalities of their recruits, who all basically think alike and follow the cult doctrines. We could join with many distinguished exit psychologists and cult experts in calling this product of recruit reprocessing a "cult personality."
There are several useful paradigms for looking at the creation of a cult personality. Eric Schein, a psychologist who has penetrated deeply into the shaping of this type of personality, sees three major stages. He calls the first stage "unfreezing." In this stage, the personality of the recruit must be broken down. The recruit must learn that the life he or she has been living is based on lies and half-truths. Recruits are taught that their pasts have been tainted by these lies and misconceptions and that continuing to live in their own lives is unthinkable, given what they now know. The second stage is called "changing" and, in this stage, the foundational elements of the new personality are introduced. This is where the cult indoctrination techniques begin to really make a dent in the member's personality. The new personality will often be more compliant, less questioning, and more willing to work toward a specific cult goal than the old, real personality. Better still for the bottom line of the cults, this new personality will be more capable of accepting impoverished living conditions, bad nutrition, and situations leading to extreme fatigue. The new personality will be extremely susceptible to peer pressure. Cults like to have members who will work hard for little reward and not complain very much -- or at all. In the third and final stage of Schein's protocol, there is a refreezing process. The member's original personality was created in a complex social-familial environment, combined with the cognitive, emotional, and physical freedom that is the result of growing up in a democratic society. The new personality has been released from many of these influences. Instead, the cult personality is now consolidated and refrozen with an entirely new set of values, designed to serve the cult leadership. In light of the fact that there are severe penalties for failure to comply with the parameters of the cult and lots of peer approval if one does comply, the new personality is formed rather quickly and solidly. At the end, the member begins to feel, act, and think differently. In 1984, the famous novel by George Orwell, Big Brother is the name of the dictator who rules his dominion through mind control processes. At the end of the novel, Orwell sums up the rebel Winston Smith's final capitulation to his brutal indoctrination in the riveting last sentence of the masterpiece. In regard to Winston Smith, Orwell writes, "He loved Big Brother." In my involvement with AMORC, unlike Winston Smith, after twenty-four years, the forces of freedom were still slightly alive in me. I began to do things, often quite unconsciously, that began to work against my subconscious programming. Robert Jay Lifton, who we refer from time to time here as an expert in brainwashing, published a book in 1993called The Protean Self, named after a conceptual construct of Lifton's own design. This construct described a generally healthy and appropriate form of selfhood for these turbulent and ever-shifting times. In discussing the emergence of this protean sense of selfhood in human development, Lifton said:
After twenty-four years of programming, I did not love AMORC. I did not love Big Brother. Was it that finally some powerful force inside of me, nurtured by the continual longing for freedom, began to fight for liberation from its awful imprisonment in my own mind? Was this my own protean self finally coming alive? But despite the difficulty of having to begin a protracted war against my own "cult personality," which had created substantial bifurcation in my own psyche, I finally made a conscious decision to begin my campaign. This book analyzes my experiences, based on my rather late discoveries about brainwashing and mind control. In this way, the reader can understand, to a degree, what was going on as I progressed in AMORC, and what I discovered about myself and about mind control that led to my escape. But in order for you to understand how I escaped, you must first understand how I became a prisoner in the first place. How could I, a resident of Haiti, living and working hundreds of miles away from AMORC's California headquarters, later living in Miami, New York, and other places in the United States, become so thoroughly imprisoned in a mind control cult? Yes, I must explain how I first became a prisoner of the Rosicrucians in San Jose. To do this, and so that you will understand what ultimately happened to me, I must begin by telling you something about my life.
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