Snapping: Welcome to the Eighties

Five years ago, when we teamed up to explore the cult scene, we were like most Americans—we could hardly tell one cult from another. We had been approached on street corners by polite young Moonie flower vendors and solicited in airports by Krishna booksellers, but by and large, we viewed their comings and goings with little more than mild curiosity. As the phenomenon grew, our own journalistic and scholarly impulses were aroused; and from the most neutral starting point we could devise, we set out to investigate what seemed to us to be a growing phenomenon of young Americans who had undergone, for better or worse, a sudden change of personality. From the outset, however, we found ourselves hip-deep in some of the stickiest, most complex issues of our time: deprograming, the First Amendment, freedom of thought and the intolerable notion of mind control.

It took Guyana to put the issue in the public eye. Up to the moment of that holocaust, virtually all of Government and the media were reluctant to venture into the difficult areas of religious freedom on the one hand and rumors of bizarre cult practices on the other, not to mention intense lobbying pressure from the various cults themselves. Five days before the Guyana story broke, pummeled by hundreds of letters, telegrams, phone calls, threatened lawsuits and repeated acts of physical intimidation, NBC News halted an investigation it was conducting into the phenomenon of "destructive cultism." The Justice Department itself had turned away nearly 500 complaints from parents of cult members on the grounds that the First Amendment forbade it from becoming involved in any matters pertaining to religion.

Nor were we immune to the onslaught. Months before our findings came out, the Church of Scientology made an aggressive attempt to interfere with the publication of our book, Strapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change. It made repeated demands on us, our agent-lawyer and our publisher to see material in advance of our publication date. It contacted our editor at J. B. Lippincott, as well as the company's production staff, its corporate executives—right up to Joe Lippincott himself—and threatened "years of lengthy, expensive litigation" if we did not agree to meet with the church's representatives.

Then came Guyana, and overnight it was a whole new ball game. Suddenly, no one could get enough of the cults, all of them, any of them. NBC News aired some of the damning film it was holding and news-papers around the country offered surveys of the "ten worst cults."

Only, to many people, the news came as no surprise. Since the early Seventies, Ted Patrick had been predicting violence on a mass scale. So had the small cadre of parents around the country who, years before Guyana, had been working untiringly and, for the most part, in vain to bring cult activities to public attention. Numbering more than 4000, with a core group of only a few hundred—with the exception of a handful of professionals and a growing fraternity of ex–cult members—this anticult underground is manned almost solely by middle- and upper-middle-class parents. The men are doctors, businessmen, stockbrokers and school administrators who stand to lose their jobs, their reputations and their life savings if charged with criminal or civil wrongdoing. The women are suburban housewives, music teachers and social workers who have abandoned full-time jobs, bridge games, car pools and household chores to carry out their activities. They strive to connect anxious parents around the country with others who may be able to help them locate a missing child, and they help abduct target cult members off the street. And they take heat from the cults: threats, lawsuits, harassment, dirty tricks. One mother walked out of her house one morning to find a for Sale sign planted in her front lawn.

Ted Patrick founded and organized the anticult underground, but many people in it are no longer willing to be associated with him. They find his style too abrasive, his voice too pointed and his politics too dogmatic. And, in many ways, their assessment is correct. Patrick is a self-admitted loner and a cantankerous public figure. As we see in the Playboy Interview, he is prone to sweeping generalizations about the cults and he often makes damaging accusations that he is unable to document. Although many of the charges he let fly years ago have since been verified and, from what we have seen, his techniques have produced more lasting and complete "rescues" than anyone else's, his outspokenness continues to raise hackles among many anticult people.

And, to be frank, many seem to prefer the advice of respected psychiatrists, psychologists and attorneys to that of a black tenth-grade dropout, despite the fact that America's legal and mental-health communities have been reluctant to acknowledge the existence of the bizarre new state of mind Patrick confronts every day. The cult experience and its accompanying state of mind defies all legal precedents. It has also taken the mental-health profession by surprise: The conceptual models and diagnostic tools of psychiatry and psychology have proved inadequate to explain or treat the condition.

Last year, we introduced the term snapping to describe the altered mental state described by deprogramed cult members. It was the only term we heard used consistently by young people grappling with the sudden, drastic changes they had undergone in the course of some cult ritual or conversion experience. "Something snapped inside me," we heard time after time; or "I don't know what happened, I just snapped"—as if the mind were a piece of brittle plastic or a drawn-out rubber band. As we explored deeper, however, we began to suspect that the glassy-eyed trance states of so many cult members were not simply something they snapped into and then out of. Talking with deprogramed cult members, we learned that it may take months, sometimes years, for them to rebuild (continued on page 217) Snapping (continued from page 59) their capacities to think, feel and make choices for themselves. To us, that seemed to indicate that they had sustained some kind of physical damage to the brain and the nervous system.

A former Divine Light missionary told us that after he was deprogramed, it took months before he was able to think normally again. "After I finally broke the reflex of meditating," he said, "I found I was going through a stage where my thoughts were like a very weak telephone signal. Normally, when you're thinking, you're with your thoughts; they're right where you're talking from. In this case, however, my thoughts were, like, way off over there, way out yonder, very faint. I really had to pay attention to hear them at all."

A young woman from the Way International, a Christian cult, had similar trouble after almost two years of speaking in tongues. "When I got out of the group," she told us, "it was still going on in my mind. I couldn't go to sleep without saying it. When I tried to stop myself from speaking in tongues and couldn't, I knew I was in trouble. Finally, I developed my own way of breaking it. When I listened to someone talk, I formed his words in my mind. I'd make mental images and spell the words out to keep from straying. It took me a good six months before it was completely gone."

Before long, we were forced to confront the possibility that what we were looking at in the cults was a new form of mental illness. In our book, we term what we believe to be a new form of mental illness information disease, which we define as a mental and emotional disturbance caused not by drugs, germs or physical force but by information—in the scientific sense of the word. In our opinion, many cult members in America have become mentally ill from the suggestions and commands of their leaders, from extended hours of chanting in Sanskrit or meditating to the sound of their own breathing, or simply by spending an arduous weekend in the country, listening to incessant lectures in Korean.

It is not the words alone but the entire experience that carries cult members over the line that separates religious belief from information disease. For our research suggests that the intense physical, emotional and intellectual ordeals cult members undergo in the course of their recruitment and conversion have the power to alter and destroy fundamental information-processing pathways in the brain. This so-called wiring in the brain forms the structure of our individual personalities, and it is this wiring that the cults' mind-control techniques appear to manipulate. To accomplish this, most of the larger cults first isolate the individual from the everyday world his nervous system has grown accustomed to from birth. Then they change his diet, his daily regimen, his name, his appearance and every sight, sound and smell in his environment. Next they pour in new information, in the form of straight indoctrination, intense ritual experiences or both. In a very short time, this comprehensive assault may produce lasting changes in the way cult members perceive the world, in their level of awareness, their ability to think and feel and, most importantly, in their ability to make choices and take action on their own. It appears to us that many do become, for all practical purposes, the robots they are often called, for at that point, they may be so vulnerable to suggestion that, on command, they would kill others or themselves—as we have seen in Guyana.

It is in that sense that all Americans are now being forced to confront the threat of cult techniques. Cult leaders have at their disposal a new technology of mind control: Eastern rituals of chanting and meditation, methods of behavior modification and newly refined therapeutic techniques such as marathon encounter groups, psychodrama and guided fantasy. Virtually any combination of those techniques can be packaged and patented in the name of religion.

The hard part for most people is grasping the significance of what has taken place. The events in Guyana may precipitate a major cultural shift. We have seen the manner in which this new religious cultism can destroy families, and in the future, it may split political parties and test other traditional loyalties as well. In at least some outposts, religion in America has turned into terrorism. In others, it appears to be turning into a new form of mental illness. These are not pleasant thoughts, but they are prospects that may increasingly dominate the news and our daily lives.

What can we expect in the coming decade? In our opinion, the face of the Eighties may well be one of con men and megalomaniacs. Powerful techniques of persuasion, conversion and mind control may be broadly disseminated and subtly employed in every area of our daily activities: politics, education, business and industry and the practice of mental-health care. From every indication, we can expect more violence as well. The potential exists for the United States to change from a country that is predicated on an informed citizenry capable of self-rule through open, unfettered public debate and elections to one in which masses of zealots compete to "outautomate" one another.

Perhaps the best example of the complex problems that face us can be found in the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation organization, a group few of us are likely to have even thought of when discussing "the cult situation." Six million Americans have studied the TM technique, which has been acclaimed in best-selling books as a safe, instant, nonchemical tranquilizer for the relief of nervous tension. Our research confirms that while the product itself is little more than a Hindu meditation ritual mass-marketed in the language of Western relativity physics, the majority of casual TM practitioners do experience some short-term benefits with few negative side effects.

But we talked with a number of advanced meditators and TM instructors who, to our surprise, painted an entirely different picture of the technique, its long-term effects and the TM movement as a whole. A veteran TM teacher who declined to be identified told us a hair-raising tale of how, after meditation ten hours a day for several months in order to become a TM teacher, he became trapped in the state of mind the Maharishi calls cosmic consciousness. According to him, extended periods of meditation caused his entire personality to "dissolve," leaving him withdrawn and detached from the world around him and subject to hallucinations.

"I'd be driving a car and all of a sudden my arms would be holding on to the steering wheel and I'd be sitting back, watching it happen. My body seemed more like part of the car than part of me. I was sensing all kinds of telepathic things. I would see energy surrounding people, little thin auras of different pastel colors and bigger egg-shaped ones made out of huge spirals. It was weird, trying to associate in the ordinary world when you're seeing all these things happen around people."

Now we have learned that the Maharishi has established a World Government for the Age of Enlightenment at TM headquarters in South Fallsburg, New York. According to multiple reports, the Maharishi has sent out advanced TM teams to areas of social and political turmoil in 108 countries, to "resolve outbreaks of conflict and violence" and to "create a dramatic and soothing influence in the atmosphere." His most recent announcement is of a plan "to bring invincibility to Israel," a direct appeal to American Jews to travel to Israel for a special two-month TM course in levitation—at $2500 per person. The program is an intense meditation regimen that purports to give "mastery of the laws of nature." It claims already to have graduated 5000 Americans, many of whom have told us and others that they have gained the ability to rise off the ground and "fly."

It is that type of delusion and vulnerability to suggestion that we find alarming about groups such as these and the techniques they use, along with the possibility that large numbers of people in other countries may be laid open to mind control at the direction of self-appointed religious, social and political leaders. Yet almost no one talks about these vast international cult operations. They seem to have grown too big to confront and, when pressed, they are able to present in their defense some of the wealthiest individuals and families in America, some of the biggest celebrities in the public eye and some of the most powerful political leaders and government representatives in the country.

Where will it all end? It's hard to say. There may be no stopping it at this point. The sensitive issues these groups raise have come upon our society at a time when the rate of change has become so rapid that our basic decision-making systems and institutions have fallen behind the events and the crises. In our view, there is an urgent need for a broad and independent Governmental investigation of the major religious cults and mass therapies in this country. That investigation should be conducted in full public view, for in the current climate, such an inquiry could pose real dangers to groups and individuals who are legitimately exercising their freedom without endangering the rights of others. Now, more than ever, we must beware of witch-hunts and inquisitions, but we feel it is, indeed, possible to conduct a rational, responsible investigation. Potentially destructive cults can be distinguished from legitimate movements by examining their methods of recruitment and conversion and identifying those that use techniques that may impair, make captive or destroy an individual's freedom of thought. However, having observed the response of most Government agencies to almost any question that touches on religion, it does not seem likely to us that that approach to the issue of mind control will be pursued.

Barring that, in the Eighties, we may find ourselves surrounded in our daily lives by great masses of Americans under one form or another of mind control: people driving on the highways, people in public office, people in the upper echelons of business and industry making decisions about what we eat, what we buy and what we do in our spare time. To those of us familiar with the ways of the cults, it doesn't take much imagination to envision a world where you cannot get a job in certain professions unless you have first taken "the training," or where you cannot run for office unless you have accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior. In many arenas, that already appears to be happening.

Then what choice will the rest of us have when those runaway religions and mass therapies pop up at the helm of our society? In this decade, millions of Americans have already surrendered their minds, their wills and their human freedom in exchange for the revelations, the instant cures and the "happiness" the cults dispense. Already, the shift into the Eighties has begun, and the future may not promise happiness. We can only hope that the last choice each of us makes will not be to pick our poison.

"Cultism can destroy families. In some outposts, religion in America has turned into terrorism."