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THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN MIND CONTROL |
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INTRODUCTION: My Twenty-Four-Year Captivity Twenty-four long years in captivity. Looking back, it seems almost impossible that I had given away my hopes and dreams -- indeed, my core identity -- to an organization whose vaunted promises led to poverty, degradation, and a life without real meaning. AMORC -- even the acronym still summons, in my mind, a world of exotic mystery, of unlimited personal power, of wealth and security grounded in a distinguished spiritual organization, an organization of unprecedented antiquity and authenticity. For many, many decades, the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC) has solicited members through ads promising membership in a secret society graced by distinguished historical figures such as Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and Benjamin Franklin. The secrets of the ages were offered to the masses in strange but alluring ads that spoke of invisible worlds, astral projection, attunement with Cosmic Consciousness, and gifts of illumination bestowed abundantly on its true initiates.
As a young man in Haiti, I was used to the ambiance of mystery and religiosity. Voodoo and the Catholic Church flourished bountifully in a society serving only the privileged few. Young men like me knew that our only hope of surmounting the deep poverty surrounding us was an education and a job. But this route wasn't always easy. There were great complexities in it -- immense competition, laden with various levels of bureaucratic and collegiate favoritism. Money was the best way to speed the journey to upward mobility, but who had it? Could an ancient mystical order and its secrets be the lubrication I was seeking? I certainly hoped so. And when I left Haiti, intending to jump-start my upward path in the United States, I took my hope in AMORC's promise with me. But instead of finding that promise fulfilled, I found myself in a strangely perplexing state of mind. It's hard for anyone caught in my predicament to neatly explain how one steps into an organization subtly promising wealth, power, gratifying relationships, and true vocation and then wakes up one day in an entirely different set of circumstances than the world one had imagined -- indeed, in the grips of a mind control religious cult. Few people, including me, who managed to be recruited, young and innocent, into such an organization, would have thought such an eventuality to be even remotely possible. I never even dreamed that I could one day be a victim of mind control, hypnosis, or brainwashing. It never crossed my mind until years after I was recruited by AMORC. Yes, I saw myself as a victim of society, of poverty, of a social class, of an unfeeling government for the hungry masses, but never of something as strange as mind control. Now I know that religious cults like AMORC feed on struggling, desperate, but somehow still hopeful souls like me. They prey on the confused, downtrodden, and vulnerable. Steven Hassan, in his book Combatting Cult Mind Control, explains:
The key to the success of a religious cult often lies in the close structural similarity between certain traditional spiritual practices, like prayer and meditation, and its own techniques of hypnosis and mind control. There is a difference between self-inducing a hypnotic trance state and entering voluntarily into a state of mindfulness, the door to the meditative experience. Both are routes to the subconscious. Hypnosis enters through the door of sleep or trance; meditation through the door of mindfulness or waking up, becoming more conscious.
In this book, I am not making any kind of religious claims about meditation or prayer. Rather, I am firmly trying to distinguish these types of techniques, used with awareness grounded in a spiritual view of the world, from the deceptive, manipulative, and self-serving hypnotic and coercive techniques of mind control cults. I shall show in the following pages, clearly but painfully, how I was drawn into joining AMORC, purportedly a Rosicrucian society with an ancient pedigree, and how my personality ultimately became shaped by its practices. These practices, in my opinion, were, in part, hypnotic and based on certain practices of cult mind control. When actuated, they fostered suggestibility and an unthinking conformity to the ideas and practices of the mother organization. As I more deeply studied these teachings, I became a kind of zombie, living a life that was directly contrary to my best interests, with only a small, desperate voice inside of me vaguely protesting the person I had become. Yet, finally, although still deep into the hypnotically induced stupor of AMORC, part of me rebelled. Although very much weakened by my long years of captivity and with the indirect aid of a few people and a few books, I began to realize who I was. I have drawn upon these books and a small portion of my Rosicrucian diary to help give the reader some idea of my plight and what it meant. In my diary entries, I have a comprehensive account of my entire twenty-four-year journey, but I have only presented and highlighted a few of the most relevant episodes, so that the reader can focus on the most significant part of my story. Although I have tried hard to make my case, I believe it will still be hard for an outsider to mind control methodologies to realize that there are constraints on someone whose mind has been conditioned. These constraints are difficult to recognize and more difficult to overcome. Conditioning by these organizations involves the creation of triggers in members' minds. When one begins to question the mind control cult, these "psychic" triggers, based on ingrained associations with a variety of thoughts, feelings, and situations, awaken the "cult personality" originally designed by the cult to overcome the members' original or real personality. The pull of the hypnotically shaped personality is incredibly strong. As you will see from the foregoing narrative, the contradictions aroused by the reawakening of this artificial personality caused me to behave erratically and sometimes dangerously. For instance, I would resolve to quit the organization, but a few days later I would be praising and thanking God for its existence. On several occasions, while driving alone in a car, I remember talking bitterly to myself about AMORC before I slipped into unconsciousness and woke up some time later, without any recollection how I managed to get from one place to another. Talk about dissociation! This was not the mysterious "missing time" of so-called UFO abduction cases but, in my opinion, more like the temporary amnesia experienced by multiple personalities while the individual passed from one personality to another. Such was the depth of self-division from my precult personality provided to me by my mind control captors. At some point in my growth as an individual, while still in the confines of this mind control prison, I discovered that, indeed, there were other people in religious cults like mine, and that a whole discipline of "exit psychology" had evolved in the last few decades. As I read books based on the psychology of cult behavior, deprogramming, and exit psychology, I began to develop a voracious appetite for freedom. Simultaneously, I became aware that since my mind and heart had been conditioned, only a careful and sometimes painfully slow process of deconditioning could restore me to normal. As an example of some of the insights I obtained from these books, here are Margaret Thaler Singer's six conditions [2] that create the proper "thought-reform atmosphere":
In my book, you will learn how each of these various factors and other parameters used to describe mind control functioned in my life to deprive me of my freedom, the very essence of my life. Once I had determined that I would become free, I had to learn to consciously trick my own mind to avoid being consumed by the mind traps of others planted disturbingly in the garden of my own personality. In this work, I will show you how I was recruited, indoctrinated, and retained by AMORC. I will show you how I broke many of the shackles of my conditioning and how I now see a happy, prosperous life emerging from the depths of homelessness and heartbreak. I think it is important to note that, unless I am discussing other Rosicrucian orders specifically, the term Rosicrucian generally is only referring to AMORC, the organization that I was a member of. So when I speak of "time," "space," "the Egregore," or other topics covered in the teachings of AMORC as Rosicrucian concepts, I am indicating solely the organization to which I belonged. There have been many other Rosicrucian orders, some long since passed into history and some alive today. They have or have had their own concepts, their own Rosicrucian method of looking at the world. The idea of a monolithic Rosicrucian order with its own unique concepts of illumination and knowledge is, in my mind, a myth. I am not entirely free of the struggle. I still have issues. I still have an inventory of exceedingly bad memories, disappointments, and psychological pain to contend with. There is still the backwash of decades of economic hardship that I believe were the result of myths of "manifestation" fostered by AMORC. Furthermore, it is still difficult to contend with the "triggers" that can still awaken vestiges of my divided self. No, my current life is not entirely pleasant, nor is it free of all the shackles of the past. But, still, the light of freedom grows brighter every day.
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