Cult leaders are pros when it comes to trick plays

I’ll never forget the comment made by my attorney when my civil suit papers were delivered to my cult leader.

“We’ll just see how damn psychic he really is. If he knew this was coming he would be on a plane to the Cayman Islands by now.”

Being just a few short months into my recovery, I was still terrified that he actually did know the papers were coming by way of some cosmic source, and I held my breath for a few days after signing on the dotted line.

How did I go from being a rational human being, skeptical for the most part about a lot of things, into a quivering, paranoid simpleton, believing that he could predict the future, read my past, and ultimately control my present?

It was not overnight, but it didn’t take long. When I learned about Robert Lifton and his criteria for thought reform, I was instantly fixated on one in particular: “mystical manipulation.” I knew I had been expertly manipulated into believing that my cult leader had all sorts of mystical powers, and sadly, that belief system proved to be my undoing.

The coin trick

A basic explanation of mystical manipulation is this: whatever happens, cult leaders can cunningly reinterpret it for their advantage over you.  It is the old sleight of hand, the shell game, or a coin trick. Speaking of coin tricks, here is a good one to illustrate what I mean.

Take four coins: a quarter, a dime, and two nickels. Secretly keep one of the nickels in your hand and place the other three coins on a table. Tell the victim you are going to predict what he will do. Ask him to give you a coin, choose a coin for himself, and leave the third coin on the table. You are going to appear to be psychic no matter what he chooses because of how you interpret his choices. Read on.

If he chooses the nickel for himself, you show the nickel in your hand and ask, “How did I know you were going to keep the nickel for yourself?”

If he leaves the nickel on the table, you show the nickel in your hand and say, “How did I know you were going to leave the nickel on the table?”

If he gives you the nickel, you show the nickel in your hand and ask, “How did I know you were going to give me the nickel?

Sounds simple because it is simple. Go ahead and try it, but only once per person as it gets easier to figure out upon repetition. I have seen this trick done dozens of times and only one time, at a lecture to a civic group, have I ever seen the victim immediately say, “But you will make your answer match whatever I do with the nickel.” I still suspect that

person already knew the trick!  Other reactions are from surprise to amazement to sheer terror because it triggered such intense feelings.

Psychic surgery or palmistry?

To be fair, anyone can fall victim to mystical manipulation, even my cult leader!

At one time there was a traveling group of psychic surgeons from the Philippines coming through town.  The premise for psychic surgery is that very spiritually evolved individuals, mostly from the back alleys of Manila  (that should have been my first clue) are so attuned to the astral planes that they can literally reach down into the body using just their bare hands, spreading molecules as they go, and pull out terrible gunk that is causing your physical ailments.

For someone with a serious physical ailment, like me at the time, this was stupendous! (Of course insurance does not cover psychic surgery…HMO’s and all that.) But my cult leader was even more enamored by it, not because he had terrible gunk that needed pulling out like the rest of us…he was, after all, purified enough to almost reach ascension. No, he knew a good money-maker when he saw it. If he could have this ability, people would come in droves to him for treatment. Cha ching!

So he set up meetings with the “surgeons,” observed some of the “surgeries,” and came back totally blown away. He made his poor wife undergo the knife, or hand as it were, to remove the “adhesions” in her uterus. (I think they were given a professional discount and it only cost around $1500 back in the late 1980s. Can you imagine what inflation has done to the price of a good psychic surgery today?)

It is a sad thing to me now as I look back on it. She was unable to conceive and  returned from the procedure really thinking she had undergone some sort of viable treatment. Of course she was not alone in putting her trust in a psychic surgeon; famous celebrities have sworn by it including the late Peter Sellers who, after undergoing psychic surgery, believed a chronic heart condition was cured, refused heart medication, and succumbed to a fatal heart attack. Andy Kaufman believed that a cancerous tumor had been removed and would not undergo conventional surgery. He later died after that tumor spread cancer cells throughout his lymph system.

Nothing ever came of my cult leader learning the psychic surgery techniques from the traveling surgeons. I have reason to believe they didn’t want to share the spoils with him and blew him off with something about his aura not being pretty.

After I left the cult, I learned the real story about psychic surgery from an Amazing Randy video: “surgeons” merely palm chicken innards and “pull” them out of the person’s body.  That is some pricey chicken guts, costing not only huge sums of money, but the lives of many people who were hoodwinked out of medical treatment.

Spy-aware

Sleight of hand aside, I think the mystical manipulation that affected me most was probably the easiest to do.  No coin tricks no chicken innards, just pure old-fashioned deception.

There was fierce competition in the group to be the favorite of the leader, and jockeying for position was a regular occurrence. Take a moment and think back to grade school and imagine the competition for teacher’s pet. It was similar to that, only more malicious.

(Donald Jackson had the teacher’s pet thing down to a fine art in fifth grade. I often reflect about the time he put my name on the board for talking when he was assigned room monitor during the teacher’s smoke break. Smarmy little tattle-tale.)

And that’s what I’m leading up to. Cult members tattle on each other, and cult leaders use the information for all sorts of nasty little tricks. Take for instance spying. Several members who were hoping to win favor with my leader took it upon themselves to let him know what I was doing if they saw me out and about. Later, when he wanted to impress me with his psychic abilities, he would plant a seed in the conversation about getting an impression regarding something I had just done unknowingly in front of another cult member

“Let’s see… it had something to do with earthquakes, no that is not right….yes, it is definitely earthquakes. Were you just reading a book or watching a tv show about earthquakes? “

“Oh my God. I was in the bookstore a few days ago and looking at a magazine that had a cover story about the big one happening in California one day!”

Not content to leave it at that, it would usually go a few steps further.

“You know, there was a reason you were drawn to that magazine. Your intuitive side is telling you about the earth changes and to get ready for them….”

And then I would be hooked a little deeper. These dreaded “earth changes” were bringing catastrophe and calamity upon all who were not purified and prepared for ascension. Obviously he must be right about these earth changes, too, if he can discern that I was reading a magazine about earthquakes.

Perfectly executed mystical manipulation, or plain old lies and deceit, depending on what you want to call it.

Eventually I started spying as well, but I really believe none of us knew how he was using the information on each of us. We all just thought he should know everything about everybody so he could protect us in his important meditative work to delay the earth changes while we worked on our purification. Spying was never called spying. It wasn’t called anything at all. We just did it.

Spooky or kooky?

It takes a while for an ex-cult member to get over the heebie-jeebies associated with mystical manipulation. I watched a lot of Amazing Randy as well as Penn and Teller videos. A woman who does exit counseling (Mary Alice Crappo) sent these materials to my husband and told him to sit down with me and watch them over and over.

I can remember the sigh of relief, more like a huge boulder being removed off my chest actually, when it finally went in my brain that he was a charlatan. He was a phony like the wizard behind the curtain in Oz. He was not psychic and therefore also not in tune with these channeled spirits/energies, or whatever he called them on any given day, that were predicting the earth changes. (That is not to say I am not concerned about global warming, which is backed up by something called SCIENCE!)

No longer did he hold that magical power to scare the bejeebers out of me with his predictions and psychic powers. I changed my perceptions about it: it was no longer spooky, but more on the lines of kooky. The task at hand for me, and anyone else coming out of a cult with a healthy dose of mystical manipulation, was not to go kooky, too.