“Scientific research has clearly demonstrated that when one per cent of the population of a city or town practices Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation Programme, the crime rate significantly decreases. Similarly, when groups of individuals practicing Maharishi’s TM-Sidhi programme with Yogic Flying equal at least the square root of one per cent of a population, there is a significant reduction of crime and accidents, as well as an increase in stock prices, decreased pollution, decreased unemployment, and decreased hostilities between nations.”

This crime-reducing by-product of TM™ is a phenomena known as “The Maharishi Effect”. During the Summer of 1993, 4,000 faithful, trained in the peaceful art of Transcendental Meditation™, gathered in crime-ridden Washington, D.C. with a mission: to scientifically prove the Maharishi Effect. And, if you ask those minds from the prestigious Maharishi University who were responsible for the study, the experiment was a great success… A success, that is, despite the fact that “during the weeks of the experiment Washington D.C.’s weekly murder count ‘hit the highest level ever recorded.’”

So where was the success? I childishly ask in my negativity-induced ignorance.

Ah… you see, though homicides peaked in this TM™-increased field of peace, crime was in fact reduced 18 percent from what it would have been had the meditators not been present!

No doubt about it. Maharishi University’s own physicist, Dr. John Hagelin worked out all of the variables. The Maharishi Effect is proven… But I have my doubts. When I published an article questioning the validity of TM™ science, a commentator and TM™ practitioner tried to set me straight:

“[...]You get the facts all wrong because you see it through a negative belief system. Lighten up. I’ve been doing TM for years. It’s given me more happiness & energy for success in my work, gotten rid of stress that I see dragging others down & making them sick. Friends whom I’ve gotten to do TM, I’ve watched meditation change their life. It’s ridiculous to try to reason or explain the facts to people enmeshed in an unhealthy, negative mindset. This article’s not even about the research. It’s not about TM. It’s about a world view threatened by the possibility that TM really has the effects claimed for it. It’s about a rigid belief system that needs to convince itself & others that the all-positive, life-changing effects of TM are not possible, because that would mean your beliefs & your defense mechanism would collapse. TM is a totally cool, edifying experience – a fact you cannot change.”

Worse than my failure to appreciate the science of the Maharishi Effect, is the fact that I’ve dismissed out-of-hand, as absurd, TM™’s Yogic Flying – the claim that TM™ meditators may achieve levitation. “Stage One is generally associated with what would best be described as ‘hopping like a frog.’ Stage Two is flying through the air for a short time. Stage Three is complete mastery of the sky.” The very idea proved altogether too much for the defense mechanisms I’d constructed in preservation of my negative world view, and when I learned that TM™, through the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, was attempting to insert itself into public schools, I went on the offensive, publishing the following article on Examiner.com… an article that the General Counsel for Maharishi University would deem “defamatory”:

Transcendental Meditation in schools, the David Lynch program

Expel from your mind the stereotyped image of the robed, bearded yogi. Forget the worn image of the unkempt, hash-headed, lotus-seated hippy listening to sitar music in an incense-filled room behind a beaded curtain. This is not the Transcendental Meditation [TM] we are talking about. This is Science!

“Hundreds of scientific studies have been conducted on the benefits of the Transcendental Meditation program at more than 200 independent universities and research institutions worldwide in the past 35 years,” explains the TM-promoting David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace website. Among the positive side-effects of the TM program, we find: increased focus, decreased hostility, reduced anxiety, even a reduction in cardiovascular disease among practitioners.

Surely, with this in mind, no reasonable person would argue against teaching the TM method in public schools.

And this is exactly what the David Lynch Foundation – founded by the cult film director of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive – proposes: implementation of a TM teaching program “in public and private schools and in after-school programs across the U.S. and around the world, with thousands of students enjoying its benefits.”

This past April, the foundation held a large benefit concert in New York – including performances by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Ben Harper, and Moby – which, according to USA Today, raised an estimated $3 million toward funding the TM-in-schools program.

But, despite the attributed benefits and celebrity endorsements, some worry that the teaching of a TM-based program in public schools constitutes another breach across the ever-eroding church-state dividing line. Americans United for the Separation of Church and State reports, “Slowly but steadily, TM seems to be gaining a foothold in public schools across the country. The trend has alarmed some advocates of church-state separation, who point out that the practice is based in Hinduism and that the federal courts removed it from New Jersey public schools on church-state grounds in 1979.”

In regards to funding being offered by the David Lynch Foundation in support of the TM program, “Americans United is urging school officials to turn down the money, reminding educators that TM in the schools can spark litigation. In 1976, Americans United and other groups joined with Roman Catholic and Protestant parents to bring a lawsuit against the use of TM in five New Jersey public schools.” […] “A federal court struck down the TM classes in October of 1977, a decision that was affirmed by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in February of 1979…Ruling in Malnak v. Yogi, the federal appeals court declared that TM is grounded in Hinduism. Students, the court pointed out, were assigned the name of a Hindu god to chant, and even went through a type of religious initiation ceremony called a puja.”

Indeed, though the David Lynch Foundation seems keen to express that TM is just a technique, with real estate holdings, schools, and clinics—even a town, Vedic City, in Iowa—“worth more than $3 billion in the late 1990s,” TM is clearly something more. Some go so far as describe TM as “a cult that ultimately seeks to strip individuals of their ability to think and choose freely.”

Therapist John Knapp, specializing in providing help to ex-cult members and people entangled in “cultic relationships” left TM after 23 years of involvement. “I married somebody who was not involved with the group, and part of my group experience was that I was asked to lie about a number of items. And living every day with someone and having to lie to them was extremely difficult… It caused what you could call a cognitive dissonance. It really caused a bifurcation in my mind. It was really difficult to live with. And I’d also gotten very far away from my family, which is not uncommon for people who are in these kinds of [cultic] relationships. As my mother was getting older I wanted to re-establish my ties with her and the family. These kinds of things led me to begin questioning my relationship [with TM].”

Upon deciding that he would leave TM, Knapp reports that he suffered a good deal of harassing behavior from the group. “It was difficult for me, because I had believed so strongly in this group [TM]. My spiritual and emotional life was really bound up completely with this group, so when they turned on me it was very confusing and very difficult for me…”

Worse, Knapp reports negative effects derived from the meditation technique itself, from addictive behavior to increased feelings of dissociation. He claims that many clients of his that come from TM have experienced the same.

TM was founded by a man known as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1956 in India, and the revered guru himself had once been accused of using “fear and intimidation” in order to work to prevent a disciple from leaving the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. The disillusioned student, Robert Kropinski, and six other people sued Maharishi’s University for $9 million on the grounds of “fraud, neglect, and intentionally inflicting emotional damage”. Kropinski stated that none of the promised TM benefits ever surfaced during his time as a student, and he was awarded $138,000 by a Washington D.C. jury. Maharishi did not appear in court, as he was never available to receive summons.

Admittedly, all of this sounds most unpleasant, but what of the scientific data supporting theindividual benefits of TM?

There are problems with TM’s data. While the David Lynch Foundation endlessly promotes the “unique” benefits of TM, there is a conspicuous shortage of comparative analytical studies that measure TM against other relaxation techniques. Surprisingly, studies measuring the effects of a simple mid-day nap report many of the same “unique” benefits touted by TM.

In fact, a study published in the journal Science in 1976 found in studying “five experienced practitioners of Transcendental Meditation”, that they “spent appreciable parts of meditation sessions” merely napping.

And, according to a June 2007 report, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that evaluated the quality of the meditation research along an array of standard scientific criteria such as the proper use of randomization and control group techniques, “Overall, the methodological quality of both intervention and observational analytic studies on meditation practices is poor.”

According to Dr. Barry Markovsky, professor of Sociology at the University of South Carolina, “Poor evidence, even in large quantities, falls short of establishing scientifically the benefits of TM.”

Worst of all, TM makes a series of staggering claims that can be charitably described as “unlikely”. Old advertisements for TM claim that practitioners of TM will develop “supernormal powers” including “supernormal sight and hearing”, invisibility, and levitation! The organization even circulated photos with pictures of lotus-seated students apparently hovering above the ground, but first-hand observations of the “levitations” left many unconvinced. The levitators never managed to levitate for very long; they never really “hovered”. In fact, they sprung up rather abruptly and dropped immediately to the ground again. Really, it was quite apparent that these transcendent hopefuls were merely hopping about from a seated position.

Nor has TM provided any legitimized demonstrations of any of its supernormal powers.

When asked about “advanced techniques” such as “yogic flight” during a press conference promoting his benefit concert, David Lynch replied with some rambling vagaries about a “field of unity”, “bliss”, and the “collective consciousness”.

The David Lynch Foundation has a stated of goal of teaching TM to one million children, which is reminiscent of another supernatural claim of TM: the Maharishi Effect, which states that a certain critical mass of TM meditators can affect change upon the material world.

While John Hagelin of the David Lynch Foundation claims that the Maharishi Effect is a scientifically proven phenomenon, there is no reliable evidence to support this. (Hagelin, it should be noted, is partially to blame for the simple-minded buffoonery of the best-selling book The Secret, which promotes a simpler version of the Maharishi Effect: The idea that one can obtain what one wants through mere wishful thinking.) Hagelin claims that in 1993 crime was reduced inWashington, DC during a two month period due to the collective effort of 4000 TM practitioners.

As Skeptico reports: “There were many problems with this experiment. One was that the murder rate rose during the period in question. Another was that Hagelin’s report stated violent crime had been reduced by 18% (in the film [What The Bleep Do We Know] he says 25%), but reduced compared with what? How did he know what the crime rate would have been without the TM? It was discovered later that all the members of the “independent scientific review board” that scrutinized the project were followers of the Maharishi. The study was pseudoscience: no double blinding, the reviewers were not independent, and the experiment has never been independently replicated. Hagelin deservedly won an Ig Nobel Prize in 1994 for this outstanding piece of work.”

James Randi, famed stage magician, author, founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation, and debunker of supernatural claims, explains that TM has “always maintained this… [the idea] that if a certain critical number of people take up TM, they will protect everybody, and the world will be perfectly safe from then on.”

Randi came to be aware of TM through his friend and fellow magician, Doug Henning. “I knew [Henning] very well as a kid, and later as a mature magician. We were always in touch…” Randi describes a deeply cultic relationship between Henning and Transcendental Meditation that would destroy Henning’s career and eventually take his life. Henning’s career as a television magician was compromised as he strove to hire only TM initiates to work on the set. According to Randi, this was not only problematic for the fact that it was difficult to find people within TM who were talented in television production, but “every so often they went in to meditation and work just stopped…” Eventually, TV executives grew weary of Henning’s professional antics.

Henning became even more deeply involved with TM following his diagnosis of liver cancer, eventually removing himself from contact with non-TM practitioners. “He gave up all medical care… the Maharishi had told him that he could recover from his liver cancer simply from meditating… he meditated himself to death.” Henning died in February of 2000.

“I’m so angry at the TM movement,” says Randi, “for having taken an innocent person.”

John Knapp feels that the drive to bring TM into more schools is destined to failure as any critical scrutiny of the organization will prove its undoing. According to him, “It’s just too damn strange…”

Relaxation – whether by crude napping, or practiced meditation – holds certain benefits that are not the monopoly of the TM brand. It is this author’s hope that schools will continue to seek techniques to aid the reduction of stress and conflict – while increasing health and focus – withoutreducing their curriculum to supernatural philosophies that cross the church-state line.

*********

Not long after posting the article above, I received an email from an Examiner editor informing me that she had received an email from William Goldstein of Maharishi University.

“I received [an] email [from William Goldstein] regarding your recent article regarding transcendental meditation and the David Lynch Foundation. As you should be aware, the Examiner.com Terms of Use and the click-through Examiners Independent Contractor Agreement and License (which you entered into with Examiner.com) prohibit the posting of content that is defamatory or factually inaccurate, as has been alleged here. Accordingly, we have temporarily removed the article from our site pending further investigation and/or modification of the article by you.”

She helpfully made my situation clear:

“Please be aware that because you are an independent contractor and your articles are selected, written, posted or controlled solely by you, you alone would be liable should either of the organizations listed below decide to bring a lawsuit for defamation or otherwise. Accordingly, we strongly encourage you to consider modifying the article[...]“

William Goldstein’s accusatory email followed:

Dear Examiner Editor in Chief

I write this letter as General Counsel for Maharishi University of Management and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace concerning the article in your online publication: http://www.examiner.com/x-20682-Boston-Underground-Examiner_y2009m10d5-Transcendental-Meditation-in-schools-the-David-Lynch-program

I will not comment on the inappropriate statements on the scientific research conducted on the TM program contained in Mr. Mesner’s article. Dr. Orme Johnson’s comments you have received reply more expertly than I could on that subject and I incorporate them [Orme Johnson posted his remarks in the public comments field following the article on Examiner.com]. But there are other false, defamatory and/or misleading statements which need to be identified as such and retracted. The failure to do so continues to damage the reputation of my client organizations which teach and promote these programs, and the individuals involved in those activities.

One court case, over thirty years ago, found a curriculum in the Science of Creative Intelligence which included the TM program to have religious overtones violative of the First Amendment. That “Malnak” case has been mischaracterized and its scope overstated by Mr. Mesner. No court at any time has ever ruled that teaching the TM program alone is impermissible, nor that the student is “assigned the name of a Hindu God to chant”.

What is even more relevant is the fact that, largely in light of the extensive research that has been done over the last thirty years on the Transcendental Meditation programs benefits in removing stress, several thousand at risk students in public schools across the United States have decided voluntarily to learn the TM program. Through sponsorships from the David Lynch Foundation, they have learned the technique in voluntary Quiet Time programs without any legal interference. The Supreme Court’s 1985 decision in Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 US 38 and its progeny have now made it clear that secular or non-secular meditation is permissible under the First Amendment in such circumstances.

Mr. Mesner then goes on to paste the horrific label of a “cult” on the TM program. Al Gore, Jerry Seinfeld and Paul McCartney would find it remarkable to be told they are members of a cult, but that does not mitigate the serious damages that such thoughtless labeling can have on the organizations which teach these programs to the public. And while Jerry may laugh at such a characterization, Al Gore may not have as well developed a sense of humor.

John Knapp, who claims to be a licensed counselor, is quoted by Mr. Mesner as saying he was lied to and harassed by the TM organization. But this is not factually supported. However, what is a fact is that Mr. Knapp has developed a niche in the field of counseling for victims of cults which he actively promotes on his websites. He has created a straw man, and now he is selling expensive medicine to him. Mr. Knapp’s professional ethical conflict of interest seems much more worthy of note than his unsupported claims of lies and harassment.

Further, Messrs.. Knapp and Mesner attempt to attribute the symptoms of mental illness to the practice of the TM program without scientific basis. This may be of great support to his cult counseling practice, but is not supported by the several hundred studies. No one claims that every person who practices the TM technique will be promptly freed of any mental distress. People who practice the TM program may indeed coincidentally suffer from such problems. What the research shows conclusively, however, is that they get noticeably and materially better through this practice — they do not get worse. If Mr. Knapp really and honestly feels otherwise, why has he not undertaken a controlled scientific study which has been published in a peer reviewed journal? In fact, all such studies of the TM program have shown that it only produces beneficial effects. Mr. Knapp’s self serving, conflict ridden unscientific anecdotes are not the evidence recognized as credible by science or his profession and claiming such is unethical and irresponsible. It is also damaging to those who teach and practice those programs and he should be held accountable for such damage. In any event, it should not be published and promoted by this publication or you are participating in this damaging process.

Mr. Mesner’s misrepresentations continue by his claim that Kropinski received a $138,000 jury verdict for claimed injuries from the TM program. What he omits to mention is that it was reversed on appeal. Kropinski v. WPEC, 853 F.2d 948 ( 1988) .

These falsehoods, defamations and omissions compel me to ask you to remove this article from your newspaper to put an end to the continuing damage its publication causes to my client.

Thank you very much for your anticipated co-operation.

William Goldstein
General Counsel,
Maharishi University of Management and
David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace

Telephone 641 472 1183
Fax 641 472 1141
email: bgoldstein@mum.edu

William Goldstein
General Counsel
Maharishi University of Management
Telephone 641 472 1183
Fax 641 472 1141
email: bgoldstein@mum.edu

*******************

And so, my article was pulled, and I was being given the opportunity to amend and correct all defamations. I re-read my work carefully….

No, no defamations there. As Examiner claimed no legal responsibility regarding the article, I decided to take the liberty of re-posting it in full, exactly as it was but with this preface:

This previously posted article has been updated with appended material following a letter received from the General Counsel for Maharishi University of Management and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace, William Goldstein, under the subject heading “Retraction of Defamatory Article”. Upon reviewing Goldstein’s criticisms, the author has decided that there are no grounds for labeling this article “defamatory”. An open reply to Goldstein’s letter follows the article below:

As promised, the updated post of the article was appended with my reply to the claim of “defamation” as follows:

On October 13 editors at Examiner received an email from William Goldstein, General Counsel for Maharishi University of Management and the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace. The email’s subject heading was “Retraction of Defamatory Article”, and it ended with strong words claiming that the “falsehoods, defamations and omissions [in the article above] compel me [Goldstein] to ask you to remove this article from your newspaper to put an end to the continuing damage its publication causes to my client.”

And what were these “falsehoods, defamations and omissions”? Goldstein opens: “I will not comment on the inappropriate statements on the scientific research conducted on the TM program contained in Mr. Mesner’s article. Dr. Orme Johnson’s comments you have received reply more expertly than I could on that subject and I incorporate them.”

I had read Dr. Orme Johnson’s criticisms and found them less than compelling, some of them nonsensical. For instance, this comment – “To Knapp’s statement that TM is “too strange” for America, one has to ask, strange for whom, the narrow minded and ethnocentric? I think our nation has gotten past a lot of that.” – left me to merely wonder what in the world ethnocentricism might have to do with any of this if TM is not to be viewed as an Eastern practice rooted in Eastern beliefs and traditions?

Dr. Orme Johnson made comments suggesting that James Randi was incorrect regarding Henning’s situation: “Maharishi’s advice was always to seek medical attention when one gets sick, not “just meditate” as Randi alleges. Studies of medical care utilization that I conducted on Blue Cross statistics found that 2,000 TM subjects over a five-year period had on average 50% less hospitalization and doctors visits than the norm or matched controls, with reductions in all categories of disease.”

This comment would be laughable if the ramifications were less grave. When the criticism is that TM discouraged a sick man from seeking medical attention, the statistic of 50% less hospitalization amongst TM practitioners hardly makes that claim seem less credible. But, just the same, if Randi’s comments are “falsehoods, defamations, or omissions”, that is problem that must be taken up with James Randi. He is accurately quoted in the article above.

Likewise, the claim that TM is a “cult” is attributed, and Goldstein must take any disagreement with that label up with those who use it to describe his… “client”. In my favorite part of his email, Goldstein writes: Mr. Mesner then goes on to paste the horrific label of a “cult” on the TM program. Al Gore, Jerry Seinfeld and Paul McCartney would find it remarkable to be told they are members of a cult, but that does not mitigate the serious damages that such thoughtless labeling can have on the organizations which teach these programs to the public. And while Jerry may laugh at such a characterization, Al Gore may not have as well developed a sense of humor.

This shameless name-dropping is pointless, as it can be worked both ways. “Jerry may laugh”, and Al Gore may be a humorless bore. Or Jerry may in fact cringe in disgust if presented with the idea that TM practitioners may learn to levitate, or that the Maharishi Effect is a proven phenomena. Al Gore may laugh at such nonsense. We really don’t know, do we? Were Jerry Seinfeld, Al Gore, or Paul McCartney asked to give an opinion of my article? Is it just too remarkable to imagine that such celebrities might be involved in a “cult” or cult-based practices? Do Tom Cruise and John Travolta find it remarkable that many accuse Scientology of being a cult? For that matter, isn’t Scientology’s Dianetics “auditing” practice nothing more than a therapeutic technique? As such, perhaps it too should be welcomed into school rooms.

Goldstein goes on to question the credibility of John Knapp: “Mr. Knapp has developed a niche in the field of counseling for victims of cults which he actively promotes on his websites. He has created a straw man, and now he is selling expensive medicine to him. ”

While I’m not exactly sure what is meant by this, it seems to imply that counseling ex-TM practitioners has proven lucrative for Knapp which would also imply a consistent client base of TM disaffected. But, again, if Goldstein takes issue with what is said by Knapp, he must take it up with him. Knapp is accurately quoted in the article above.

The one helpful item mentioned in Goldstein’s email was the fact that the Kropinski finding was over-turned on appeal – though this would better have been mentioned in the comments, not in a full letter claiming “defamation”.

Most other comments regarding this article, by Dr. Orme Johnson and others, take exception to the criticisms regarding the Maharishi Effect. I have no intention of being ambiguous about this: the Maharishi Effect is not a proven phenomena. I seriously doubt it can even be considered a valid hypothesis. It’s failed hippy mysticism, and it has no place whatever in public schools.

I said it.

Go ahead and sue me.

Speaking only for myself,

Douglas Mesner

www.process.org

*********

Anticipating summons, though believing the claim of “defamation” to be entirely unfounded, I contacted organisations and institutions I felt might be of assistance should TM™ in fact attempt to sue me.

So it was that sometime in early December, somebody with copies of the Goldstein-Examiner emails posted them on Wikileaks so as to demonstrate TM™’s descent into Scientology-like litigiousness. The public posting of Goldstein’s letter further agitated the TM™ apologists. The comments on the Wiki page questioned the purpose of posting such an item. One Commenter asked, Is Wikileaks serving a noble purpose here?:

“WikiLeaks needs to carefully discern documents such as this to determine if the material actually poses a threat to “A just and corrupt free world.” If the document is benign and the legal notice by the TM people was justified because the Examiner article actually is defamatory, then WikiLeaks is just letting themselves be used for destructive purposes by self-serving people with ill intentions.

After reading the letter, and being aware beforehand of the positive nature of TM, it appears to me that WikiLeaks, in this case, is itself acting in opposition to a fair and corrupt-free world. Just because someone claims to have a “secret document” revealing unfounded threats doesn’t mean that promoting that person’s accusations is noble and progressive.

But I think you’re actually doing TM a favor by publishing the letter and showing people the rational, fact-based response of the TM organization to Mesner’s attacks, whose article in the Examiner (for anyone who actually does research or knows the facts) was replete with false accusations and defamations.

I urge WikiLeaks to consider this: If TM is actually a good thing, and the organization is actually justified in their request that Mesner adjust his article, then are you really serving a just cause to allow yourself to be instrument of further defamation?

By reading through your files on TM, one gets the impression that your organization is not neutral, fair-minded or inclined to value scientific research and objectivity, but is predisposed to accept negativity and rancorous attacks against TM just for the sake of providing more so-called “leaked material,” regardless or whether or not the “leaker’s” context and explanations are justified.

Wiley, USA”

Odd though it was that the publication of Goldstein’s letter should provoke a defensive reaction from those who claim to feel his criticisms of my article were justified, it was a different comment entirely that infuriated me and demanded my correction:

[...] I think this is a complete non-issue. There was a basis for the claim (erroneous defamatory information being posted in the article). That was then corrected and the article was reposted with the correction and no further complaint. Totally legit (as would also be the case if it happened to wikileaks or anyone else – removing false statements)

This statement was posted anonymously. Of course, I had not “corrected” the article before I had reposted it. The claim that I had done so, supposedly conceding to having posted erroneous and defamatory information made me feel… defamed as a researcher and freelance writer.

I replied under the subject heading of “Maharishi Spin”:

Amid what appears to be an attempt by TM to re-spin this story, I want to make it abundantly clear that I did not, in any way revise the article on Examiner.com – except to add a brief introduction mentioning Goldstein’s letter, and an addendum replying to that letter – before reposting the article on that site. The claim that the article was “corrected” before being re-posted is a flat lie, and I would challenge anybody saying otherwise not to do so anonymously, and cite what exact corrections are imagined to have been made. In reality, what seems to have happened is, Goldstein attempted to intimidate both me and the editors at Examiner.com with the threat of legal action on the base-less claim of defamation in hopes that we would fold and remove the article. That did not work, the article remains as is, and Goldstein’s failure to sue me since is perhaps a tacit confession that there is, in fact, no case for defamation to be made.–Douglas Mesner 20:41, 15 December 2009 (GMT)

And that’s where we stand… for now….

David Lynch by Alethea Jones

-American Medical Association, Council on Scientific Affairs, Scientific Status of Refreshing Recollections by the Use of Hypnosis, 1985.

“The evolution of pseudomemories is clearly demonstrated in the case of Jeannette Bartha v Hicks Richard and Friends Hospital in Philadelphia. In September 1994, this former patient sued her treating psychiatrist and hospital for negligence and reckless treatment beginning in March 1986. For the six and one-half years she was under the care of the defendant psychiatrist, the plaintiff’s condition deteriorated, according to her complaint […] the defendant psychiatrist failed to monitor the course of treatment and used hypnosis and prescribed medications, increasing the plaintiff’s tendency toward suggestion, coercion and manipulation. Over time, this caused the plaintiff to experience and display symptoms of supposed multiple personality in conformity with the defendant’s expectations, when in fact no such illness existed.”

“As a direct result of the negligence of the defendant, the plaintiff alleged, her ability to rationally function was destroyed. Moreover, she became convinced that she had hundreds of alternate personalities as a result of extended and repeated sexual and other traumatic abuses as a child. These experiences – which, in fact, did not occur – included participation in ritual murders, cannibalism, Satan worship and torture by members of her family, among others. The plaintiff alleged that these memories were the product of
coercion and suggestion […] The complaints led to a settlement, the amount of which is undisclosed.”

- Harold I. Lief, M.D., Patients Versus Therapists: Legal Actions Over Recovered Memory Therapy, Psychiatric Times. Vol. 16 No. 11, November 1, 1999

In exact parallel to regressing people so they supposedly retrieve forgotten memories of “past lives”, [professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Chief of psychiatry at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Dr. Fred H. Frankel] notes that therapists can as readily progress people under hypnosis so they can “remember” their futures. This elicits the same emotive intensity as in regression or in [alien] abductee hypnosis. “These people are not out to deceive the therapist. They deceive themselves,” Frankel says. “They cannot distinguish their confabulations from their experiences.”

- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, 1996

So – to start at the beginning: you turned yourself in for psychiatric treatment?

Right. I had suffered from depression for years. It was voluntary admission.

Was this on the recommendation of anybody?

The therapist I was seeing at the time. She was getting to know this doctor in Philadelphia – whose pseudonym I use as “Stratford” – because I have to be clear that I have a gag order through the court that prohibits me from saying who did it and where.

Because ultimately you won a settlement, but that gag order was a condition of the settlement…

Correct. They wanted to keep me from writing or talking about it completely, but I waited and got the permission to do what we’re doing right now.

So you’ve written a book, but it’s told with pseudonyms?

Everyone but me. That’s also for the privacy of certain individuals. The book is supported by volumes of hospital records, doctors’ notes, nurses’ notes, my personal journal that I kept at the time, and legal documents through litigation, through the discovery process. I was able to obtain all that information.

You are able to say which hospital it was, right?

I can not say that, however it’s easily accessible through the internet… like everything else is…

When you turned yourself over [for treatment], you must have signed away a certain degree of your freedom. To what degree was that? To what degree were you an autonomous individual, and to what degree were you held by hospital rules?

I learned, I would say, within six hours of the severity of what I had done. I would bet within the first two hours I said, Wait. What am I doing? I don’t want to be here. I made that clear to nursing staff, and they told me that I was on a seventy-two hour hold, that I had to stay. What they failed to tell me is that I could have gone against medical advice. I thought I had to stay, and it snow-balled from there.

To the point in which you felt you were not allowed to leave?

Well, I believed that when I was told I had to stay that first day, while the reality was that I could have left against medical advice, but I did not have that information. So I thought, yes, I had to stay.

But beyond that point, what was your situation in whether you wanted to stay or go?

Once I met the doctor, I believed he was very benevolent, very kind. I very quickly thought, maybe he can help me get through this depression. I rather quickly allied myself with him and… treatment began.

How long did it take him to determine that you had Multiple Personality Disorder?

I think that he had already decided that before he had ever met me, quite frankly. He had what I would loosely call an agenda, in that he had his beliefs of why women become depressed. He believes it is because they are repressing memories of sexual abuse. He did not disclose any of that – his expertise, if you will – to me.

His expertise in Multiple Personality Disorder?

Right. He was considered an expert. He actually stated that in his deposition: that others considered him an expert before he himself did. He was not a garden variety psychiatrist. He was a colleague of Bennett Braun, Colin Ross, Cornelia Wilbur, who is deceased and was the psychiatrist for “Sybil”. He used to meet with them, and they devised a way to “help” women –

Based on a diagnostic criteria that consisted almost entirely of depression and its surrounding symptoms?

It was broader than that. They basically determined that a lot of symptoms women were having – largely women – [were indicative of MPD]: inability to hold a job, etc. I think looking into the history would be better than me trying to recall it off the top of my head.

How long was the process of history gathering and interviewing before Multiple Personality Disorder was concluded?

Not long at all. There was a history taken, and that was in the admission process. However, I believe, and I do know that there were things like having a history of depression in my family were disregarded. That should have been a red flag. He just pushed that aside and went in what direction he wanted to go in.

Well, genetic histories of depression seems to be an inconvenient fact for the entire [Ritual Abuse] movement. That’s probably part of the reason they’ve developed a story of multi-generational Satanic Ritual Abuse within family lines, illuminati bloodlines, etc. How far did that go with you? Did your doctor develop a detailed story of your background based on conspiracy theory? Or was it kind of a general idea that you were somehow abused –

You’re talking about Satanic Ritual Abuse? Well, we need to back up a bit. For me it started with MPD. That went on at least a year or so before any Satanic Ritual Abuse started to be focused on.

How many years were you in?

I had 100% insurance coverage, so I was in 2 years straight. Then, I was in and out on public funding, so I was in the hospital for a total of 1,040 days – which was over a 6 and ½ year period of time.

Okay. Sorry, go ahead and describe the evolution from MPD to Satanic Ritual Abuse…

That’s where it went: coerced “memories” of what happened. I think this doctor had an insatiable appetite for detail. For example, what happened during cult meetings? How did they abuse you? The more detail he got, the more he wanted.

I was reading some of your work today on the S.M.A.R.T. conference. Most people, in my experience, that claim to be satanically abused, they are pretty high up in the [cult] hierarchy. For example, they are priestesses, they were abused by high-level government officials. You don’t ordinarily find SRA people who are just, you know, average people who go to meetings and go home.

(Laughs) That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.

But had you noticed that? I don’t know how a group exists with that many high priestesses and that sort of thing.

I never got into Illuminati – I didn’t even know what that was at the time. I was sequestered a lot. I think once I got into Group Therapy and Art Therapy specifically with other women who were claiming to have multiple personalities and Satanic Ritual Abuse, things expanded quite quickly by hearing their stories [causing me to think], maybe these things happened to me.

I imagine that with the environment you were in, with the medical authorities around you, your own submission to their expertise, as well as your own acknowledgment that you were under mental distress and needed their help – I believe this would all make it easy for them to convince you that you were repressing memories from yourself…

Not only that, Doug, I think a large part of it was drugs — for example, getting me addicted to tranquilizers. It is indoctrination. If you look at any, say, religious cult – I read the work of Robert Jay Lifton and was appalled at the parallels [between Lifton's criteria for thought reform (indoctrination), and what was taking place in therapy]. For example, having a charismatic leader: that would be the psychiatrist. A controlled environment: I was told when to eat, when to sleep, when to shower. The heat was controlled in the room. It would get hot and cold, hot and cold, hot and cold. Information from the outside by TV, mail, magazines, newspapers hardly existed at all. If there were magazines, they were so outdated. If there was a TV show that seemed to relate to the subject, we were not allowed to view it. Sleep medication, sleeping pills, were given out freely, and I also experienced sleep deprivation. There were sedatives, sleepers, truth serum drugs. Physical restraints: four-point leather restraints, or more, to a bed for – could be – 2 hours to 15 hours at a time, at which point I would also be injected with more medication.

And there is what I would call coerced confessions of childhood sexual abuse, Satanic Ritual Abuse. Separation from family and friends… I can go on, but those are the largest things. I lost my job… I lost my apartment… I lost everything…

And they were utilizing sodium amytal during the interviews?

It was probably only a couple months into it, we were using sodium amytal interviews. Are you familiar with those?

Yes, I’m familiar with the experiments done in attempts to develop a Truth Serum during the early years of the Cold War which made it apparent by – when were you in, the late eighties?

’86 through ’92, yeah.

So it was well documented by then how unreliable so-called memories surfaced through a sodium amytal interview really were. It’s difficult for me in this case to determine how deep the actual belief of the doctors were in this program. To what level was it just incompetence, and to what level is it…

Well, you’re raising a good point. I think it’s what made doctors like mine dangerous, if you will. They did fully believe in what they were doing. That made them “incompetent” because they were not listening to their governing bodies – the APA, AMA, etc. – when [those governing bodies] started to, years later, question the techniques. [The doctors] chose to disregard not only those facts, but in my case they disregarded how I was physically and emotionally going down-hill [after treatment began].

I went to that S.M.A.R.T. conference just this past August. This is well past the prime of the Satanic Panic and the MPD movement. So it had a lot of people who got into this during the peak in the ‘80s to early ‘90s, and I think at that point they may have truly believed in it, but since then, they’ve had a lot of difficulty believing it, and they have to work to maintain this belief. This is where I lose sympathy for them. At their talks during the conference there were some very nearly candid confessions of how they feel it is a matter of choice as to whether they maintain this fiction or not. For example, there was a woman there – goes by the name of Dejoly LaBrier – she said that while she was going through therapy she “had to trust what other people were telling me, whether I believed it at the time or not.” There was a criminologist by the name of Hal Pepinsky – a very nice guy, but a purveyor of this rubbish – he seems to struggle with all this now, and he said: “You need at least another human being to affirm your reality and bring it to consciousness, but that’s your reality.”

It seemed to me, by what I was hearing, that these people were trying to work through this idea that reality is strictly a matter of personal choice. They seem to be so taken with this sense of identity [as SRA advocates and survivors] that nothing you tell them now can possibly change their minds about it.

I agree. And the important word in that to me is: identity. Their whole identity is wrapped around them being a survivor of Satanic Ritual Abuse, or that they’re “multiples”, even though MPD is now called DID [Dissociative Identity Disorder]. In my view, all they’ve done is changed from going through the front door to going through the back door. While they used to say, you have too many personalities, now they say, you have a failure to be one.

Right. I think the leading proponent of DID today is Richard Kluft, and when I look through his material, he takes this moderate tone, essentially saying that obviously some of these stories of Satanic Ritual Abuse are over-the-top and probably not true. But there is something there, he’s saying. He doesn’t indicate any way in which we can distinguish a true recovered memory from confabulation, and if you don’t have that, the technique isn’t good for anything, as far as I’m concerned. Especially when you still have people taking blame for abuse that may never have happened.

If you look into confabulation, it’s why you get – like why in my case – [Recovered Memory Therapy] was able to work. It’s how I was convinced and coerced into believing in abuse that never happened… wasn’t true.

The lies were sprinkled with truths. For example: I was abused by an uncle. Okay, the uncle exists, but I can produce records from the United States Armed Forces that put him in another country during the time at which I was saying he’d abused me. That’s the kind of thing that had happened repeatedly. [The partial truth] made it more difficult to say, this didn’t happen, this is so bizarre. If you sprinkle facts in the fiction… that’s the way it works.

Yes. Maybe I’m misinterpreting Kluft, but it seems to me that if it sounds plausible enough, it works for him.

It goes back to a couple of things. You can’t really determine whether anybody really was abused or not. I’ve had people say, tell me if I’ve been abused. I can’t! I can’t do that to anyone. I can’t tell you that – whether your memories are true or not – what I can tell you is what some red flags are, where you might want to ask some questions.

Remember, all these big [MPD/DID] theorists have been sued. So they’ve dampened down their opinions… in my view.

How deeply did you believe the memories they were creating in you at any given point?

I actually wrote in a journal [at the time] that I believed 99.99%. But I did hold out for that .01%, and that’s the small hair-line that pulled me out of it. I wanted to make sure that in my own mind and in reality that if any “abuse” occurred, I wanted no question in my mind, and I was not going to accuse anybody unless I could prove it emphatically. And that’s why I held out that small percentage. That’s the part that saved me, if you will.

So you began looking for corroborative evidence?

Oh yeah. The doctor and I even took a trip to Fort Dix, New Jersey. An Army base, I think it is, where he wanted me to show him where this abuse and prostitution had taken place. It was a town I really didn’t know, and I couldn’t come up with anything. The event was never spoken of again, and it was the only time corroboration was attempted.

You have to understand, Doug, too, that there were so many instances where I would say – particularly under sodium amytal – this is not true, this didn’t happen, I’m making this up. It’s sprinkled all throughout the medical records throughout those 6 and ½ years. I would say it to a therapist, I would say it to a nurse, and no one ever followed up on that. No one. The doctor disregarded it every time I said it.

There is one thing about this [recovered memory] “therapy”: there is nothing you say or question that they don’t have an answer for. If you say, I don’t believe this ever happened, they say, that’s because another personality has it, you don’t have access to it. There was always an out, which at the time I didn’t realize.

So did you feel that you were encouraged to develop new personalities to access memories that were repressed?

Oh yeah. There were times I would say something and he’d ask, who am I talking to? He wanted the name of a personality. If I said Jeanette, that wasn’t good enough. And then there were times when a personality might split off into another one, and then split off into another one. When I wouldn’t remember what personality I was supposed to be half the time – that’s because it split off. They had an answer for everything.

How many personalities did you end up with?

That’s something I couldn’t even tell you, really. It’s not something – it’s in records he kept, I could have cared less.

You sent me transcripts from a session wherein you were clearly saying, this is bullshit.

I have 15 audio tapes of sodium amytal interviews.

You acquired those during the legal process?

Right… I did.

How did you eventually disentangle yourself from all this?

I was an elite athlete when I was in college. I was a fencer, and a high level one at that. During treatment I had gained a lot of weight and couldn’t do anything. Quite literally. I would go to therapy and take prescribed drugs, and he went away for vacation, as all good psychiatrists do, in August. While he was gone I decided that while I didn’t have any control over my mind, I did have control over my body and what I eat. I made a promise to myself that I would exercise for half an hour every day. Doing that – and I did it – I remember that I would walk to the store thinking, okay that’s about half an hour, and I would decide I’d jog it for a bit, and that would be about 30 seconds. I’d have to walk the rest of the way. I used to able to fence for hours and hours and days on end during a major competition. So that’s how much I’d lost. The more I exercised, the more I didn’t need medication to calm down. I started losing weight, and my mind started to clear. Difficult as I remember that time being, forcing myself to go out in sub-zero weather, jog in the snow through the streets of Philadelphia, It was worth it. I kept doing it, and doing it. I told him, and he said it was just another personality that probably wouldn’t last long.

He was wrong.

And ultimately you decided to leave his care?

That didn’t happen till at least a year later. When I started exercising I gave myself a year. Having been so out-of-shape, and so drug-addicted, I figured it would take me at least a year to get my body where it needed to be, and it didn’t really take as long. I still remember – I think it was the Summer of ’91 or ’92 – I was an outpatient, and I was in his office, and I said, look, this uncle I told you had abused me wasn’t even in the United States at that time. That couldn’t have happened. To this day, Doug, he still has not responded. He totally ignored me. And I recalled thinking, Oh my God, he doesn’t believe what I can prove to be true! Why? Why is it that he can remember all these new memories, but something I am telling him absolutely is true, he doesn’t believe me? That’s when I think things turned for me, when I started thinking there was something real wrong here.

Do you have your own idea as to why he cannot accept that?

It didn’t fit in with his theory.

Did you ever recover any memories that were of any value at all?

No.

I mean, I even have – I’m so happy that I have all of these medical records, personal journals, so that I can reconstruct what really happened. It’s not just my recall. For example, when my family and I started to get back together, I would start visiting, I saw them during my father’s birthday, and we had fun. Then I came back to the hospital, told the nurses about it, and in his notes he would say, is amnesiac about father’s birthday.

And that is in my book. That’s how I present the story in the book, in narrative form, my recollections. I started writing this way back in the mid-nineties when I first got out of therapy, so things were still fresh in my mind. I use the excerpts [from my journals] to show, this is what was going in on my life, and this is what was being written about me [in the doctor’s records]. [The doctor] had no regard for reality. Even if one of the nurses would disagree with him, or say that there was no evidence of dissociation, he would assert just the opposite on the very same day.

When will we be able to buy a copy of your book?

When a publisher decides to publish it. I put it back on the market. I would say that for a good 10 years it was politically incorrect. I got some of the best rejection letters saying, good story, great writing, can’t publish it. I used them for inspiration.

Way back when I was trying to find [legal] representation [to bring a claim against the doctor], members of the feminist movement were saying, you’re trying to silence our voices, we’ve been abused. That was not what was happening at all, but it wasn’t understood at the time. I think now people in the general public are considerably more educated. And with the increase in the popularity in memoirs, now may be the time.

You had trouble finding legal representation?

That’s in the book as well: that whole struggle, and how I would go from law firm to law firm and it seemed like the more money they had, the more reluctant they were to get involved. It was still very controversial at that time. If they said, well, there may be evidence that you have this [MPD], I would stand up, demand my records back, and move on to the next person.

I ended up with Richard Shapiro in Philadelphia who was a one-man firm with moral values, who saw this as a horrific thing that happened to me, and was hell-bent on helping me right along.

You have written a few essays for the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, have you experienced any angry backlash from those who still maintain identities as survivors of Satanic Ritual Abuse?

None. Absolutely none. And that could be because they don’t have access to me personally. You’d have to ask the foundation if they’ve heard anything. If so, nothing was forwarded to me. I don’t know if it’s just because they haven’t been able to locate me. I find it a curious question.

Just wait until your book is published. For a group of so-called “victims”, they are a very mean-spirited and victimizing lot. [1]

Oh, I know. That’s another book I’m writing: there’s a whole underground society of people who believe that they have multiple personalities that has really dipped off the radar. I have done extensive research on these people and what they believe.

I think that the controversy is a good thing. Let’s get it out in the open. Let’s talk about it.

At this point, you have to understand that these women – and the vast majority of these [MPD cases] are women – they’ve been indoctrinated into this lifestyle, at this point, for a good 20 years. It’s their identity. That’s how they see themselves. I think that’s very difficult to give up. What do you have when you take that away?

I think that’s what I witnessed them trying to work through at that conference I went to.

I think you were. But say these women say, okay, my therapist is making me believe this, this didn’t really happen…? Well, what are they left with? They’re left with years of figuring out what the heck happened. They are going to lose their entire support system, which consists of other women who believe they have MPD. They are going to lose the attention of a devoted therapist.

It leaves a big hole in their lives. And then – like me – you have to figure out, now what do I do? How do I get my life back together? How do I get my life back?

Beyond that have you suffered any long-term effects from your psychiatric abuse?

Yeah. I still have PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome] from it. Sometimes it arises from the most innocuous thing. The one that hits me the most is my dog’s leather collar. If I smell that, I remember being strapped to a bed. I think there are health issues related to having been under a severe amount of stress. Unrelenting stress for over 6 ½ years while in therapy. Then I had to go underground in order to get away from him. So then there was that stress. I came out to Colorado and had to consider, okay, now what do I do? I had to get back on my feet. So after 6 ½ years of stress in therapy, there was an equal amount of stress 6 years later in trying to get my life back together.

Sounds like you’re doing well now, and I can’t wait for the book to come out.

Thank you. I’m anxious for it to come out, and to get the word out there. There are a lot of families, a lot of people, who have gone through this, and they have nothing to read – nothing to identify with – they have nothing to hold in their hand and say, see, this is what happened to my family. This is why, you know, my husband is in jail. This is why I’ve been saying there is something wrong with my sister. They have nothing.

Thank you very much for chatting with me…

• If you or somebody you are close to has had a similar experience to that of Jeanette Bartha regarding MPD, false memories, or psychiatric abuse, please contact Douglas Mesner at memory.abuse@gmail.com.

1. It seems that most everybody who has questioned the legitimacy of “recovered memories” has felt the wrath of the of those whose victim identities are threatened by the idea that hypnotically extracted scenarios might be confabulatory creations rather than inerrant recall. Susan Clancy was compelled to re-focus her own research, which had been exploring the creation of false memories in subjects claiming past sexual abuse, to alien abduction memories created in the same way, because of a frightful deluge of hate-mail and threats the former had brought upon her. Following the publication of my own S.M.A.R.T Conference report on Examiner.com, editors there were shaken by a number of apparently unbalanced and threatening phone calls. One Examiner editor went so far as to call me and suggest that I might be concerned for my own personal safety. Unfortunately, due to unrelenting phone calls, particularly from S.M.A.R.T. conference organizer, Neil Brick (who claims to be a former mind controlled Masonic/CIA assassin!), Examiner pulled the article entirely from their site, and even changed my beat from that of ‘Boston Skepticism Examiner’ to that of ‘Boston Underground Examiner’ in hopes that S.M.A.R.T. would lose track of me. No such luck. Within 24 hours of being re-assigned – and after nearly a month of inactivity – the first angry complaint against my even being on Examiner at all was registered, even though nothing posted had anything to do with Ritual Abuse. The ill-advised decision to pull my article did nothing to quell the uproar, and it only gave Neil Brick the opportunity to make the false claim that the article had been pulled for “defamation”.

As a “victorious survivor of incest, RA [Ritual Abuse], and Govt. MC [Mind Control]“, the aged and infirm “Julaine” understands how it is that They break into our minds.  “Moriah, Illuminati… whatever you want to call it”, this collective Satan “oversees information” through mass media, and it is a scientific certainty that while watching television “the cognitive part of the mind goes dead”.

Julaine addresses the conference from a seat behind a folding table at the front of the room.  Diabetic and suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, the 78 year old conference speaker is unwell both physically and mentally.  Both dysfunctional states, she believes, are attributable to a conspiracy of evil.  Rheumatoid arthritis and Satanic Ritual Abuse, Julaine posits, are “almost partners”.

“My sister thinks I’m bi-polar”, she admits.  “She won’t talk to me.”  This refusal of Julaine’s sister’s to recognise that their family is a multi-generational satanic cult is seen as mere denial.  “She is lost”, Julaine explains.

(As Juliane begins to describe her own history as a mind-controlled military sex-slave, a slight, fragile, middle-aged woman directly in front of me pulls her knees up to her chest, buries her face in her hands, and quietly begins to weep.  Her “support person” reaches out, gently touches her back, trying to comfort her.  Soon, the scarred emotions of the woman are soothed and she reciprocates the affectionate caresses of her guardian.  The woman turns in her seat and slips one bared foot under the man’s bottom while deftly rubbing his thigh with the other.  The man is flushed with arousal…)

Juliane expresses gratitude to former S.M.A.R.T. conference speaker Brice Taylor (after expressing disdain for “The Media”, and the requisite loathing of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation [FMSF]).  I can’t help but involuntarily raise my eyebrows as I look around the room to determine if the attendees are generally comfortable with the association.

Brice Taylor’s book “Thanks for The Memories” details her personal recovered memories of satanic sexual abuse within the highest levels of the United States government – from John F. Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, To Ronald Reagan.  Claiming to have been owned as a mind-controlled sex slave by late comedian Bob Hope – who later passed her off to Henry Kissinger – Taylor is a favourite in the mentally fractured fringe, her book a classic in the folk genre of delusional conspiracy theory literature.  A twistedly prurient work describing outrageous paedophilic orgies among the famous and affluent, Taylor’s work has been described as “porno for paranoids” – its claims so far-flung and unlikely that, as far as I know, nobody has seen the need to disprove it.  But then, this lack of a definitive debunking puts Taylor’s book in a class above several of the RA/Satanic Panic movement’s foundational texts.

First among the Satanic-Ritual-Abuse-concealed-by-Multiple-Personality-Disorder books was Michelle Remembers, published in 1980.  Though not much less apparently absurd on its face than Taylor’s “Thanks For The Memories” (Satan and Jesus themselves make guest appearances in the book, The Lord conveniently removing Michelle’s accumulation of physical scars), Michelle Remembers was an international best-seller, prompting the journalistic investigations that would ultimately debunk it in every major detail.

Satan’s Underground by Lauren Stratford similarly described the recovered memories of a victim of Satanic Ritual Abuse, in this case those of a “breeder” – a woman used to produce infants for use in sacrificial ceremonies.  An investigation by the Christian magazine, Cornerstone, debunked the story, finding that Lauren Stratford was, in reality, Laurel Rose Willson, a mentally disturbed woman with a history of making false abuse allegations. 

Willson would later abandon her claim to satanic victimization, but not her claim to victimhood, moving on to an identity as a jewish survivor of a nazi concentration camp under the alias of Laura Grabowski.

Even the foundational text for the Multi-Personality Disorder (MPD) craze, Sybil, turns out to have been a work of fiction.  Dr. Herb Spiegel, a psychiatrist specializing in hypnosis, was consulted during the treatment of the patient who would come to be known as Sybil.  Spiegel diagnosed Sybil as “a wonderful hysterical patient with role confusion, which is typical of high hysterics.”  According to Spiegel, MPD therapists were “taking highly malleable, suggestible persons and molding them into acting out a thesis that they are putting upon them.”  Nonetheless, Sybil’s therapist, under whose care Sybil had come to reveal sixteen identies, insisted upon MPD.  “If we don’t call [her] a multiple personality, we don’t have a book!  The publishers want it to be that, otherwise it won’t sell!”

But perhaps the greatest blow to the SRA/MPD movement was the investigation into the irresponsible quack antics of an MPD therapist from Rush University Medical Center by the name of Bennett Braun.  As the head of a “Dissociative Disorders” Unit, Braun took one Patty Burgus under his care treating her for severe and prolonged depression, the resistance to treatment of which was quite enough to convince Braun that a satanic cult was somehow involved.  Burgus would suffer continuous treatment at the hands of Braun and his troop of clowns for two years.  Hypnotized, sedated, and reminded that the only way to achieve healing was to recall the memories of satanic ritual abuse that were surely hidden in the compartmentalized recesses of her mind, Burgus would come to believe that she contained over three hundred personalities, had been involved in cannibalism, infanticide… all the standard satanic unpleasantness.

Eventually, Burgus herself began to doubt her own “recovered memories” and began seeking corroborative evidence for the cult activity that her therapists had lead her to believe existed.  As the drugs and hypnotherapy wore off, Burgus came to recognize that it was all a sham.  Seeking legal remediation for the malpractice she suffered, Burgus was eventually paid a settlement of $10.6 million, and Braun – perhaps the most widely recognized expert in MPD at the time – had his medical license suspended.

Soon, plainly false convictions that had been obtained on the evidence of recovered memories began to be over-turned, and retractor stories from patients who began to recognize their recovered memories as false memories began to accumulate.

A particularly disturbing tale of false conviction was that of daycare operator Gerald Amirault, a man convicted of twenty-six counts of child abuse which included, according to an article published by The Nation in 2002, following Amirault’s denial of parole, “accusations of extravagant and flamboyant sadistic behavior: children being anally raped with butcher knives (which left no wounds), tied to trees on the front lawn while other teachers watched, forced to drink urine, thrown about by robots, tortured in a magic room by an evil clown. One child claimed sixteen children had been killed at the center. Obvious questions went unasked: How come no kids who went to Fells Acre in previous years had these alarming experiences? Why was an expert witness permitted to testify about a child-pornography ring when no pornographic photos of the Fells Acre kids were ever found?”  The article ended with a damning comment against the politics of the state that, at the time, still incarcerated Amirault: “…Massachusett…is the only state in which people convicted in the 1980s wave of ritual child abuse cases are still in prison”, “…Will it take another 300 years for the state to acknowledge that Salem was not its last miscarriage of justice?”  Ultimately, Amirault wasted eighteen years of his life in prison.

Eighteen years.

I only find one mention of the Amirault case on the S.M.A.R.T. website.  From issue 79 of the S.M.A.R.T. newsletter dated March 2008: Commonwealth vs. Gerald Amirault. – October 9, 1996 – March 24, 1997 “All nine children testified in a broadly consistent way…The children testified to numerous instances of sexual abuse. Some of the children testified that they were photographed during this abuse, describing a big camera with wires, a red button, and pictures which came out of the camera. The children testified that the defendant threatened them and told them that their families would be harmed if they told anyone about the abuse….The Commonwealth also presented a pediatric gynecologist and pediatrician who examined five of the girls who testified…She made findings consistent with abuse in four of the girls.”

No mention from S.M.A.R.T. of any of the counter-evidence or actual details of the bizarre testimony given by the pediatric gynecologist.  As the Wall Street Journal reported, “Testifying with regard to a child who claimed that Gerald had penetrated her anally with a knife, Dr. Jean Emans offered a supporting statement–namely that an object could “touch the hymen on the way to trying to find the anus” without penetrating the vagina. The object in this instance was a butcher knife.”

But what’s eighteen years, or even a life-time, more-or-less when Neil Brick and his self-sympathizing followers have their victim identities, their sense of purpose, to defend?  As Brick wrote in an angry comment upon my first half of this article, “who are you to decide what people remember?”

Indeed, who am I?  As Lauren Stratford said of the decision to become a holocaust survivor without having actually suffered the holocaust, “I think only the individual can decide if he/she is a survivor.”  And as the co-author of Michelle Remembers, therapist Lawrence Pazder said of his patient’s (and later wife’s) unlikely “memories”: “For her it was very real. Every case I hear I have skepticism. You have to complete a long course of therapy before you can come to conclusions. We are all eager to prove or disprove what happened, but in the end it doesn’t matter“  [italics added].  By these standards, self professed victims are given a carte blanche to re-write their biographies at will.  Thus, Neil Brick may re-imagine – as he does – a past in which he was a top secret Cold War assassin, and sexually repressed housewives may place themselves in the midst of deviant orgies in which they had no choice but to participate. In this context, it is bad form, even pointless, to question the validity of the claims put forward by the conference speakers.

Julaine gives evidence anyway.  In a slide-show presentation we see pictures of her father in military uniform looking surly.  “There’s no love in his eyes.”  We are shown a picture of Julaine as a little girl holding a doll.  “I hated dolls,” she explains to us, “So I always got a doll.”  Julaine assures us that she could continue to present us with “evidence” for hours on end, but time constraints demand that she limit her presentation.

Evidence may not be necessary, but it is certainly appreciated.  For this reason, Anne Johnson Davis is the silently recognised headlining act.  Davis, it turns out, has one thing that none of the others have: corroboration… Signed confessions from her stepfather and mother.  Unfortunately for Davis, once one looks beyond just this bare-bones description, her story raises more questions than it answers.  Like the others, Davis recovered her memories during therapy, coming to accuse her parents of subjecting her to satanic abuse.  At first they denied everything.  Deeply religious, Davis’s parents went to their minister claiming that Anne was “hallucinating and possessed.”

The Church, it seems, preferred Anne’s story to that of her parents, sending three members of the clergy three separate times to Anne’s parent’s house in an attempt to extract confessions.  On the third attempt, Davis relates in astonishment, “they confessed everything!”  Recognizing that a confession from her parents made little sense on their part, innocent or guilty, Davis can only imagine that they did so because they were “stupid”.

Despite these confessions, Davis decided not to press charges.  Deciding that between Media slander and the FMSF, she’d “never get a fair judge and jury”, Davis opted “just to get on with my life” by doing talk tours promoting her book.  Davis relays some valuable lessons learned during her speaking arrangements to the conference attendees.  “If we assume that [people] are going to believe us, a lot of times they do!”, adding, “Sometimes I’m surprised at how many people believe me!”

The attendees at the conference, whether out of politeness or sheer credulity, seem prepared to believe anything.  Nobody shows a hint of doubt when a speaker by the name of “Royal”, at all of about forty years of age, stands before us to claim that she was a personal slave to nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Four practising mental health professionals give speeches during the course of this conference, each praising the “courage” of the “victims”, asserting the validity of recovered memories, and even sharing their own stories of encounters with the sinister Them.  Adah Sachs, Lowell Routley, Shamai Currim (or Shamai Currim PhD as she likes to refer to herself, apparently believing – judging by comments she submitted to me regarding my first half of this report – that her academic credentials, such as they are, allow her to create truth in the absence of facts), and Eileen Schrader.

And the litany of absurdity continues.

The lachrymose Schrader closes the conference with a turgid, drawn-own speech regarding “Programming and Relationships – The Mind Control of Shame”.  Wrapping up her talk, and choking back tears precisely on cue, Schrader reminds us all, “You… are worthy of being loved!”

The conference is so self-evidently full of bullshit that exposing it may seem no more productive than pulling the false beard from a shopping mall Santa Claus.  But, absurd as the premise of the S.M.A.R.T. conference is, and deranged as the speaker’s tales clearly are, there are practising, licensed therapists who, to this day, will defend the legitimacy of the “recovered memories” that have revealed the machinations of the Satanic Conspiracy discussed here.  These therapists will be the first to cry out that Multiple Personality Disorder, now re-branded as Dissociative Identity Disorder, is listed in the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), thus it must be entirely legitimate.  But as Johns Hopkins University professor of psychiatry, Dr. Paul McHugh notes, “symptoms alone are [the DSM's] diagnostic criteria”, so while symptoms of MPD may be categorically defined in the DSM, the condition itself “exists in relationship to the generative powers of the therapist that produced it. It exists just the same way as the Salem witches existed. It does not exist in nature.”

Indeed.  Multiple Personality Disorder and the Salem witches:  Where you find either, you’ll also find witch-hunters.  Let us hope, with the APA now planning to release a new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V) in 2012, that this mistake is soon corrected…

]]> http://www.process.org/discept/2009/08/31/report-from-the-s-m-a-r-t-ritual-abusemind-control-conference-2009-part-2/feed/ 1 http://www.process.org/discept/2009/08/25/report-from-the-s-m-a-r-t-ritual-abusemind-control-conference-2009/ http://www.process.org/discept/2009/08/25/report-from-the-s-m-a-r-t-ritual-abusemind-control-conference-2009/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:08:03 +0000 doug http://www.process.org/discept/?p=495 On the weekend of August 15-16, journalist Douglas Mesner (process.org) attended a conference for alleged victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse and Mind-Control in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. This is the first of his 2-part report:

The crude sales booth at the far end of the conference room marketing a more advanced species of tin-foil hat does nothing to allay the suspicion that this is to be a congregation of raving delusional paranoiacs.  The hats – an aged, slightly hunched, and shifty-eyed woman quietly explains – are made from a type of metallic fiber weave.  They are effective in blocking the transmissions that They use to get inside your mind.

…And the attendees of S.M.A.R.T’s (Stop Mind control And Ritual abuse Today) twelfth annual  Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control conference are all too aware of exactly who “They” are.  They may be your neighbors, minister, parents, or co-workers.  They might be known as Freemasons, the Illuminati, or Rosicrucians… but they are all Satanists.  They covertly trade slaves, organize secret sex rings, brainwash victims, and work insidiously toward a one-world Luciferian empire.

The S.M.A.R.T conferences are an opportunity for the victims of the satanic conspiracy to exchange their horrific tales, offer support to one another and, most importantly “just be believed”.   Victims are encouraged to bring an accompanying “support person”, as much of the material covered in the 2-day series of talks is considered to be “triggering” (that is to say, it may cause flashbacks in the similarly traumatized).

The organizer of the conference, Neil Brick, stands about 5′6″ with a greasy dark curly comb-over, large-thick glasses, and a voice that sounds exacly like Elmer Fudd (without the impediment of pronouncing his Rs as Ws).  He describes himself as a “survivor of alleged Masonic Ritual Abuse and MK-ULTRA [the CIA's covert mind-control and chemical interrogation project of 1950s - 60s]“.  The disclaimer of the word “alleged” in his own biographical description indicates a type of half-belief that was conveyed from most speakers at the conference, some of whose lectures were startlingly candid accounts of how and why they came to manufacture their paranoid fictions.

Most striking among these was a woman known as deJoly LaBrier, who claims to have learned – through recovered memory therapy – that she suffered childhood abuse at the hands of a cult of satanists in a “military sex ring”.  Remarkably, she also learned, after attending an Al-Anon meeting[an organization that offers "strength and hope for friends and families of problem drinkers"], that her father was an alcoholic, though she “never saw him take a drink”.  But her speech rather glossed over these amazing facts, concentrating instead on her “spiritual evolution”, and standing out within the lectures as among the more revealing of inadvertent confessions.

“We could all decide [Satanic Ritual Abuse] isn’t really true”, LaBrier announced, provoking no real discernible response from the crowd.  She admits that she could pass off her “recovered memories” as “hallucinations”.  But then, “the events [of the past] are not important to me anymore”.  Their only significance is in “what they mean to me in my evolution as a human being.”  Indeed, she will conform reality to her beliefs rather than the other way round.  As she recalls warning possible skeptics at a talk she delivered to an Indiana University class, “Don’t you ever question my reality!”

This rather postmodern perspective suggests a near total disregard for Objective Truth, and its conciliatory effect on LaBrier can’t be expected to offer any comfort to her family, who LaBrier has implicated in her accusations of heinous crimes committed in the name of Satan.  Whether Labrier’s parents are still alive or not is unknown to me, but the question of whether or not her parents actually sexually abused and prostituted her is one that ultimately has an absolute and objective answer.  When LaBrier declares during her speech, “I can talk about the memory of my truth, and it doesn’t matter if you believe it”, she suggests that she can have her own personal “truth”, regardless of what the reality is.

Almost all of the self-proclaimed victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse, like Labrier, have “recovered” their “memories” of these alleged early traumas while undergoing psychiatric therapy.  Though common sense and research both indicate that traumatic events are less easily forgotten than mundane or non-traumatic events, a certain school of psychotherapy still maintains that extreme trauma can lead subjects to so rigidly compartmentalize their memories that they develop multiple personalities.  These personalities (known as “alters”) operate independently of each other and fail to retain any knowledge of what the others are up to; thus the gaps in memory – repressed in buried personalities – that are necessary for a therapist to draw out by achieving contact with the various alters.  Following the popularity of the 1976 television movie, Sybil, a so-called true story about a woman with sixteen personalities created as a result of savage childhood abuse, Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) became a rather fashionable diagnosis.  The number of diagnosed MPD cases went from about 75 before Sybil to 40,000 after Sybil.

During the MPD craze, therapists are reported to have often diagnosed patients with symptoms no more outrageous than depression or anxiety with repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse.  They would then set about seeking the alters they knew to be present in the subject.  Patients who refused to play the role of a “multiple” were accused of being difficult, or resisting treatment.  Eventually, many patients would begin to subscribe to the belief that they had been abused, and work to recall the memories of these events that they had been convinced must have happened.  The patients learned to become multiple under the coercion of therapists who would continually ask to speak to the personality that maintained the memory of the trauma.  Thus, as Psychologist Nicholas P. Spanos explained, “patients learn to construe themselves as possessing multiple selves, learn to present themselves in terms of this construal, and learn to reorganize and elaborate on their personal biography so as to make it congruent with their understanding of what it means to be a multiple.”

Recovered memories of abuse and torture, cannibalism, necrophilia, and infanticide at the hands of satanic cults grew to such a level during the 1980s to early ’90s, that it sparked a minor modern witch-hunt, referred to by some sociologists today as the Satanic Panic.  Irresponsible hack reporters like Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jesse Raphael fueled the phenomena with sensationalist “exposes”, tittilating to the midwest masses for their implicit appeal to the righteousness of true bible-believing Christians, and for the salaciousness of the God-less, savage acts they described.  The whole thing began to come undone when serious investigations concluded that their was no evidence to support the claims of massive satanic cult activity.  More and more, the reliability of recovered memories was shown to be nil, and it came to be recognized that some innocent parents had been imprisoned for crimes only imagined.  Instrumental in demonstrating the role of fantasy in recovered memory was the work of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), an organization comprised of “families and professionals affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the Johns Hopkins Medical Institution in Baltimore” that was founded “in 1992 because they saw a need for an organization that could document and study the problem of families that were being shattered when adult children suddenly claimed to have recovered repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse.”  ( http://www.fmsfonline.org/about.html)

To Neil Brick, the the FMSF is nothing more than a group of “pedophile sympathizers”, the executive director of which – Pamela Freyd – serves as the oft-cited arch-villian of the conference.  There is Satan, and there is Pamela Freyd.  Without them, the world would be okay, and no children would ever get hurt…

This is the first of a 2-part report.  Read part 2 here…

Friday 3 April, 2009: David Lynch’s press conference is poorly managed and uninformative but well-planned enough – it seems – to achieve its intended effect. The attending Press are either convinced, or confused and cowed – by the PowerPoint presentation of statistical graphs and PhD presented data.

Nobody seems capable of a sensible question by the end. For a full hour, a presentation designed to publicize Lynch’s plan to bring Transcendental Meditation [TM] to “one million children” in public schools across America failed to approach the question of how this ambitious plan would be executed, and nobody thought to ask.

The David Lynch Foundation website is a bit more helpful: “[The Foundation] provides funding for schools that offer children in grades 6 through 12 the opportunity to learn the Transcendental Meditation (TM) program as part of a whole school, twice-daily, morning and afternoon, Quiet Time session.” Further, “The David Lynch Foundation bears all TM instruction costs, TM instructor cost, and the cost of the follow-up program, which includes faculty and staff training in the proper supervision of the Quiet Time period.” But who are these instructors, and why Transcendental Meditation?

Yes – to the lady with her hand raised: “What got you into Transcendental Meditation, Mr. Lynch?”

The only question suggesting some background knowledge comes from a man in a black fedora with a thick German accent… He wants to know what role Advanced Techniques such as “Yogic Flight” will play in this schoolhouse transcendentalism. Lynch seems coached enough to avoid overtly supernatural claims, but not bright enough to conceal his TM mysticism. He launches into some unclear rhetoric about TM’s ability to “bring bliss to the atmosphere” and “peace to the Collective Consciousness”. Not only that, but in areas where TM is practiced, Lynch tells us, crime rates, and even car accident rates, have lowered!

But what about Yogic Flight? We know that TM had once claimed that its practitioners could develop the ability to levitate… they even marketed the school of TM with pictures of lotus-seated students apparently hovering above the ground. But first-hand observations of the “levitations” left many unconvinced. The levitators never managed to levitate for very long; they never really “hovered”. In fact, they sprung up rather abruptly and dropped immediately to the ground again. Really, it looked quite a lot as one might expect if credulous transcendent hopefuls were merely hopping about on their asses.

But levitation isn’t all! An old advertisement boldly states: “Regular practice of the TM technique develops SUPERNORMAL POWERS such as:

• Levitating the body at will
• Supernormal sight and hearing
• Invisibility

(While pictures of “levitating” TM students may have been falsified, I’ve have not heard the same said of any such pictures of those who were practicing invisibility.)

TM was founded by a man known as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1956 in India, and has since grown worldwide. Its popularization was largely spurred by the endorsement of members of the Beatles. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are the first speakers at the press conference, stammering their way through a speech that they need not have mentioned was unprepared. TM is wonderful, is the gist of it. Oh, yes, and Ringo saw lepers in India when visiting Maharishi. Paul McCartney is just one of the performers scheduled to play at the next evening’s David Lynch Foundation benefit concert, raising money for the purpose of in-school Transcendentalism. Nothing is really said of the TM meditation technique. According to the Skeptic’s Dictionary online: “TM is said to bring the practitioner to a special state of consciousness often characterized as “enlightenment” or “bliss.” The method involves entertaining a mantra. Trainees pay hundreds of dollars for their mantras. Novices may be led to believe that their mantra is unique, though many practitioners will share the same mantra. As of April, 2007, the cost for TM training is $2,500. This is a one-time fee and financing is available.” (http://skepdic.com/tm.html) Though Lynch and his people are careful to stress that Transcendental Meditation is only a technique, it is quite clear that TM is an organization “which includes real estate holdings, schools, and clinics, […] worth more than $3 billion in the late 1990s.” (Brittanica: http://www.answers.com/topic/maharishi-mahesh-yogi).

Lynch’s goal of “one million children” seems reminiscent of another supernatural claim of TM, the Maharishi Effect: that a certain critical mass of TM meditators can affect change upon the material world.

“They’ve always maintained this,” James Randi (famed stage magician and arch-skeptic) explained to me later, “that if a certain critical number of people take up TM, they will protect everybody, and the world will be perfectly safe from then on.”

Randi came to be aware of TM through his friend and fellow magician, Doug Henning. “I knew [Henning] very well as a kid, and later as a mature magician. We were always in touch…” Randi describes a deeply cultic relationship between Henning and Transcendental Meditation that would destroy Henning’s career and eventually take his life. Henning’s career as a television magician was compromised as he strove to hire only TM initiates to work on the set. According to Randi, this was not only problematic for the fact that it was difficult to find people within TM who were talented in television production, but “every so often they went in to meditation and work just stopped…” Eventually, TV executives grew weary of Henning’s professional antics.

Henning became even more deeply involved with TM following his diagnosis of liver cancer, eventually removing himself from contact with non-TM practitioners. “He gave up all medical care… the Maharishi had told him that he could recover from his liver cancer simply from meditating… he meditated himself to death.” Henning died in February of 2000.

Therapist John Knapp, specializing in the treatment of individuals disentangling themselves from cult-type relationships, claims that he, too, had a cult-like experience with TM. After many years with TM, Knapp found himself far removed from friends and family outside of the organization. He began to harbour doubts about his relationship with TM, which caused for harassing behaviour from some its adherents. “I found that just raising various questions about the group caused me to be the recipient of extraordinarily painful language, and so forth…” Maharishi himself had once been accused of using “fear and intimidation” in order to work to prevent a disciple from leaving the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. The disillusioned student, Robert Kropinski, and six other people sued Maharishi’s University for $9 million on the grounds of “fraud, neglect, and intentionally inflicting emotional damage”. Kropinski stated that none of the promised TM benefits ever surfaced during his time as a student, and he was awarded $138,000 by a Washington D.C. jury. Maharishi did not appear in court, as he was never available to receive summons.

It was John Knapp who, in response to the David Lynch Foundation’s proposition to introduce TM into public schools, organized a web seminar to draw attention the possible violation of the separation of Church and State such a program suggests. “They try to tell you there is nothing religious about it,” James Randi, who was scheduled to speak during the seminar, explains, “but that is absolute nonsense. Doug [Henning] told me the mantras and such are prayers to Hindu deities. That’s all there is to it.”

I received an email from Knapp inviting me to RSVP to the event, after which I tried to help him generate publicity. But the event was never to be. The night before the seminar, William Goldstein, General Counsel for The David Lynch Foundation, sent Knapp an email strongly advising caution: “we intend to review the global web presentation for any false, defamatory, tortious, breachful, malicious or otherwise unlawful statements or materials made or published by you or the presenters.” Goldstein then went on to dissect sentences lifted from the Knapp Family Counseling website that he seemed to feel fit the criteria above, though he never answered the thrust of the charge: that teaching TM in schools is a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The next morning, Knapp cancelled the panel discussion. In an email to all registered attendants he explained: “Upon reflection, I could not in good conscience expose my co-panelists to possible legal entanglements. With regret, I have canceled this Web Event. The fight to overcome what I believe is a clear Church/State violation — teaching the religiously based Transcendental Meditation program in public schools — goes on.” I, too, believe the Church/State issue is a serious concern, and I feel that TM’s meditation practices planned introduction into schools is no different from a proposition that one-on-one therapy sessions be introduced in the form of Dianetics auditing as practiced within the cult of Scientology.

James Randi’s case against TM is far more personal, “I’m so angry at the TM movement for having taken an innocent person.”

Knapp’s opinion, as he explained to me the day after the seminar was to take place, is that any critical scrutiny of TM will prove its undoing. “…It’s just too damn strange.”

(Following is the email from Bill Goldstein, General Counsel for the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace, sent to John Knapp the night before the web seminar was to take place.  The email is posted here in its original formatting)

From: bill goldstein <bgoldstein108@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 10:34 PM
Subject: Web Event
To: “Mr. John Knapp” <jmknapp53@gmail.com>

Dear Mr. Knapp:

I am General Counsel for the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace. I have been forwarded the url which publicizes a web event which it appears you are hosting on April 2^nd entitled: Tell TM hands off our schools, http://knappfamilycounseling.com/tmconcert.html .

Your website is a fount of false, misleading, biased and entirely negative information on the TM program and the organizations and individuals which teach or have conducted research on that program[1]. The listed presenters at your event appear all to have a similar negative mission. Therefore, I wished to give you the courtesy of an advisal that we intend to review the global web presentation of the event carefully for any false, defamatory, tortious, breachful, malicious or otherwise unlawful statements or materials made or published by you or the presenters.

I would caution you and your presenters, therefore, to be most prudent concerning the truthfulness and propriety of any statements made by any of them at your web event or thereafter. As you have intentionally scheduled this event two days prior to the Foundation’s benefit concert at Radio City Music Hall it is clear you have planned it to have a negative impact on that event. Please know that you and your presenters will be held responsible for injury to any individuals or organizations, or their reputations, that may result from any unlawful behavior under US, UK and/or foreign law.

You will also be held responsible for the continuing publication of falsehoods on your websites and otherwise.

I trust you will act appropriately now after having been so clearly advised.

Very truly,

William Goldstein

General Counsel

David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace

[1]- For example, by way of illustration and in no way attempting to be exhaustive, you state: I think there is evidence that [the TM program] is either not effective, not enjoyable, or downright dangerous for a certain percentage of the population, on the order of 10% to 20%.” http://knappfamilycounseling.com/mostly.html. And as evidence you link to another website of yours http://trancenet.net/research/index.shtml with extensive false and misleading statements and citations. You start by including therein a characterization of  “ the German High Court’s 1989 ruling that TM is a destructive cult — overruling all lower court findings. The current law of the land in Germany.” The facts of the case are 180 degrees removed from that statement, as you should well know, and are laid out in http://www.truthabouttm.org/truth/LegalIssues/GermanCourtCases/index.cfm.

You go on to state that according to one of your presenters, Barry Markovsky, “TM researchers” research is not designed to be sensitive to, and contains no indicators for, negative effects. In fact, all the 600 studies on the TM technique could potentially show negative effects (e.g., they could measure an increased anxiety instead of decreased or no change in anxiety; an increase in war-related variables instead of decreased or no change in war).

The next false statement is “Negative effects are not detected in TM research because they are infrequent, and therefore will wash out in a statistical analysis”. The fact is that all the major clinical studies had in place mechanisms for reporting adverse effects. No adverse effects have been reported from these studies, even though the data were collected in universities not connected with any TM affiliated university or organization, and the data collection personnel and attending medical personnel  were blind to the group assignment.  Moreover, case histories on individuals at risk or with pre-existing conditions, such as mental health patients, do not support that the TM program has adverse effects. This allegation is baseless. For details responding in detail to all the claimed “studies” to the contrary you can see, as you already certainly have: http://www.truthabouttm.org/truth/IndividualEffects/DoesTMDoAnyHarm/index.cfm#Harmful.

And then you go on to misrepresent that “Most of the research has been paid for and conducted by individuals committed to TM” .The fact is that the research on the TM technique has been conducted at over 200 independent universities and research institutions around the world. The National Institutes of Health have funded 0ver $20 million for clinical research on the TM technique, which has been conducted at independent universities.

Some of the Universities Conducting NIH-funded research on Transcendental Meditation

University of Pennsylvania
Effectiveness of Transcendental Meditation on Functional Capacity and Quality of Life of African Americans with Congestive Heart Failure
Published in Ethnicity and Disease, Winter 2007 Full Article

Cedars-Sinai Hospital , Los Angeles
The effects of Transcendental Meditation on cardiovascular disease in coronary heart disease patients with metabolic syndrome
Published in the American Medical Association’s Archives of Internal Medicine, July 2006 Full Article

University of California , Irvine
The effects of Transcendental Meditation on brain functioning, stress, and pain as shown by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
Published in NeuroReport, August 2006 Full Article

Howard University School of Medicine, Washington , D.C.
Morehouse School of Medicine , Atlanta
The effects of Transcendental Meditation in older African American women at risk for heart disease
Findings presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, March 2006

University of Iowa
The effects of the multimodality approach of the TM technique and Ayurvedic herbal preparations on coronary disease
Findings presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, March 2006

The Medical College of Wisconsin , Milwaukee
(1) A study on the effects of Transcendental Meditation on the prevention of hypertension in African Americans; and
(2) A study on the effects of Transcendental Meditation on morbidity and mortality in African Americans with heart disease.

Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, Los Angeles
(1) A study on the mechanisms of atherosclerosis—the effects of Transcendental Meditation on the sympathetic nervous system and the functioning of the arterial endothelium in African Americans; and
(2) The effects of Transcendental Meditation on carotid atherosclerosis.
Published in the American Heart Association’s Stroke, March 2000 Full Article

Doug: A friend of mine forwarded me your website and I’m generally very skeptical of cult experts, but I was struck by the fact that you don’t seem to be promoting the idea, popular in the 80s and early 90s, that there is a Satanic New Age Underground working to overthrow American Judeo-Christian values.

John Knapp: No, I don’t. And I’m actually not that aware of that tendency in the eighties and nineties, though I came pretty late to the scene, so it’s possible that it was around. I have seen people who call themselves Christian counselors make somewhat similar kinds of assertions. But I’m not a Christian counselor, and I don’t feel that way.

So you don’t have much to say about the whole “Satanic Panic” scene?

No (laughs). Not really. I certainly don’t put any stock in it.

I imagine though, that there is some overlap with the conspiracy-mongers?

Conspiracy-mongers? What do you mean?

Such as the “Occult Expert” church groups—

No, actually, I make it very clear that I’m not a Christian, I don’t follow any kind of Christian beliefs. With the clients that I work with, I’m not concerned with what they believe. Everybody’s got their set of beliefs, and if they make them happy, that’s great. What [the client and I] do tend to focus on, when we get together, is any type of behavior they experienced that was abusive, or anything of that nature. And I try to be as objective about that as possible. It’s really not possible to define for another person what is “abusive”, but if a client is to come to me and say that they experienced abuse and trauma and there are things in their life that are not working for them right now, then I just accept them at face value and work with them.

But I got off track. Anyway, I don’t really hear from conspiracy people or Christian counselors.

You take people at their word that they are experiencing “abuse”, but “cult” is often an ambiguous and abused term. Have you set a clear definition of what a cult really is?

I think that’s really difficult. This is what I’m working with right now, and I’m not sure if it would stand up to the scrutiny of a really rigid, rational viewpoint, but it’s working for me so far and I always hope to change it if it doesn’t. This is the idea: I don’t focus on cults. I don’t have any lists of cults, I don’t say this one is, that one isn’t.  What I do focus on is cultic relationships, and those are fairly easy to define, I think. If you’re working with a high-demand group, and you end up seriously dysfunctional in any of the main core areas of life – such as finances, or friends, or intimacy, or things of that nature, and you’re experiencing dysfunction in your life, you probably had a cultic relationship. Now a lot of people – and we could talk about Scientology, Transcendental Meditation, whatever – in any group some people would have had a cultic relationship while others hadn’t. I work with the person on what they experienced and what their feelings are.

I actually think – and here I differ from some cult counselors – that spending too much time on dwelling or blaming the group that one was involved with is counter-productive, and tends to lead to a kind of victimization. And it’s very difficult to go from making yourself a victim to making changes in your life… So, what I say is, blame is largely about the past – who did what to whom, when, where, how many times – and what I focus on is responsibility, which is about the future: Who’s going to take responsibility for changing your life if you’re pain? And the answer always is, the client needs to take responsibility, and nobody can do it for them.

That’s what I’m trying to work with and, as I say, I think it’s an evolving work-in-progress.

Sure. But do you have any “normals” for what is a “cultic” relationship?

I gave it the best I could: If a person is working with a high-demand group, a group that’s asking a lot of their time or resources, or emotions, and they’re experiencing significant dysfunction in one of their core-areas of life – it seems to me that it’s a cultic relationship.

Okay. What I’m getting at is: What are the methods by which a group initiates a cultic-type relationship with people?

There are a lot of things that are talked about in the literature. To be honest, I listen to them, but I tend to take them more as metaphor than as something you could actually measure. There’s a discussion about the criteria for thought reform that Robert Jay Lifton came up with a couple of years ago. Largely what he talks about is different ways of controlling information that the person receives, their contact with the environment – there’s eight of them, but I’ll just give you a basic idea – as well as their beliefs about themselves and about the world. So, taken all together, these things tend to create a closed loop for people. They come into black-and-white thinking, they have difficulty relating to people outside their group. These things in turn, usually end up as some kind of dysfunction, some form of pain they’re feeling.

This would have been Lifton’s book on Chinese Communism?

Yeah. That’s one of the reasons I take it as metaphor. It’s just not accurate. It was actually his book on the people who came back from North Korea where they were supposedly “brain-washed”, and so forth. That’s not what happened to most of us in cults – I suppose there may be some people for whom that happened to. What actually happens is we go in with kind of a more intimate relationship in mind – we’re looking for something, whether its spirituality, whatever… [we say]You appear to be an expert. Not only am I going to invite you into my mind, but I’m going to make it a very comfortable place for you to be, because I believe you’ve got something to offer me.  That’s very different from what happened in North Korea.  There, they knew who the enemy was, and they resisted.  We didn’t resist.  Quite the opposite.

But would you still consider it “brainwashing”?

Brainwashing? Again, it’s just not a term I relate to. I can think of it in terms of a metaphor, that something takes place… what I will say is that people create in their minds some form of closed loop where all the answers are resident with the group leader or the group tradition. Almost always it’s a case where they associate, fairly close to exclusively only with other members of the group. They look for their information only from the group – this kind of thing, so it’s a closed system. Whether it’s “brainwashing” or forcing from the outside, I’m much hazier on to be perfectly honest. And for my work it’s not that important

And you experienced this yourself with Transcendental Meditation?

Yeah, I had a cultic relationship with TM, no question about it…

And how did that work? How did you come to recognize it as a cult, how did you come to leave –?

How did I come to leave? Well, I was in for 23 years, and it’s kind of interesting. On the one hand, the longer [you are involved with a group] the more rigid your belief could become, but for many people the initial enthusiasm and so forth that you have that really leads to that kind of high-intensity relationship, you know, just wanes. That’s part of human nature. So, in many cases, people who had been in for a long, long time, just generally tend to have a more relaxed relationship with the group – so that happened with me. But there was another aspect: I married somebody who was not involved with the group, and part of my group experience was that I was asked to lie about a number of items. And living every day with someone and having to lie to them was extremely difficult. You know, it caused what you could call a cognitive dissonance. It really caused a bifurcation in my mind. It was really difficult to live with. And I’d also gotten very far away from my family, which is not uncommon for people who are in these kinds of relationships. As my mother was getting older I wanted to re-establish my ties with her and the family. These kinds of things led me to begin questioning my relationship. I didn’t think of my group as a cult at that time, but what I did do is start searching on the internet – this was back in ’95, so this was after the Mosaic revolution, and there were websites to look at – I became fairly radicalized by that, reading what other people’s experiences were, and thoughts, and so forth. I was also involved in internet groups, news groups, and at that time they were just huge flame wars, and I found that just raising various questions about the group caused me to be the recipient of extraordinary painful language, and so-forth. So that kind of hastened my leaving. Other people have very different stories, but that’s mine…

So you were harassed by them?

Oh, yeah.

Have you ever been harassed by other cults for providing therapy to one of their former members?

Well, it depends on how you describe “harass”. I was harassed in the sense that people wrote nasty notes to me. Nobody ever threatened my life. Nobody threatened to sue me, or anything of that nature.

It was difficult for me, because I had believed so strongly in this group [TM]. My spiritual and emotional life was really bound up completely with this group, so when they turned on me it was very confusing and very difficult for me…

Now, as to other groups… I’m trying to think. I was once paid a visit by a Scientology private investigator. But he didn’t harass. I felt kind of intimidated just by the nature of who he was, I suppose –

Because he came to your house, right?

He came to my house, knocked on my door, told me who he was, invited me down to meet with some of the Scientology elders. So I was pretty shaken up, but I wouldn’t call it harassment. I’ve been very lucky in that regard.

You were in Transcendental Meditation, and I saw on your website that you consider trance & meditation addictive and possibly dangerous –

For some people. I’m very careful to say that. I think that for the vast majority of people they have a great experience with their meditation, but for some people, they do experience problems, and almost always it’s people who are deeply involved in meditating hours and hours a day. So I think it’s not so much the meditation that is dangerous, I think it’s the overindulgence of it that is.

Is it the meditation or meditation as a group activity?

Well, that’s kind of difficult to pull apart to be perfectly honest.

To me it’s a new idea, meditation being addictive or dangerous. I think of meditation as a very private experience. I can’t imagine a group of people getting together and meditating, or using it to drive home dogmatic ideas.

Right, right. That’s certainly part of it. But you should know that in the West, we’re fairly new to meditation. You know, it was first introduced here around the turn of the 19^th Century. A little over a hundred years it’s been here in any kind of form. In India, they have somewhat different views: meditation can be dangerous… Talk about various things, like the Kundalini experience that can be confusing, can be hurtful, can be physically damaging. It’s taught so very differently there for the most part. The Guru-Disciple relationship is very close, the Guru has regular contact with you, and he typically has a relatively small number of followers, so he can keep up with what’s going on with them. So if something happens, like dissociation, or some of the other things, he can kind of adjust your practice. Here, that’s not happening. People like the Maharishi are mass-movement leaders, and they really produce a mass-produced product. It just so happens, as with so many things, that different people respond differently. The other thing is, just keep in mind, a little bit of salt adds flavour to your food, and is in fact necessary for life… a whole lot of salt can kill you. And that’s kind of what’s going on with the meditation, I think. A little bit of it is good, it’s relaxing, and there may be spiritual benefits to it, but that I can’t attest to. But doing it for hours and hours every day probably isn’t so great for a lot of people.

You’ve had patients yourself who have had problems with this?

Clients. Yes. Lots of them… Lots of them. I did what I would call “lay counseling” for a number of years. I left [TM] in ’95, I began being a cult activist almost right away. I probably talked with 1500 or so people during that time. In 2000 I went back to school for my social work degree, my degree in therapy. I didn’t get the degree until 2005. So I didn’t turn pro until 2005, so when we’re talking about clients, we’re talking about some hundreds of clients, but not thousands. I would say that among those, probably two-thirds are TM people, because that’s where I’m known. Of those, my best estimate is that 10 to 20 percent of them have had those kinds of effects that appear to be from the meditation.

I was interested, on your website you mention “multi-level marketing cults”, and I was wondering if they differ significantly in method from the religious cults?

They emphasize different things. Certainly, the teachings are very different. But they use a lot of the same techniques. Almost every group that I’m aware of has some type of method for inducing dissociation, but dissociation can be induced by so many things. Obviously, meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, these types of things, these trance-like activities can cause that. You don’t typically see that in any multi-level marketing cult, but you do frequently see group criticism, shaming, that kind of thing. That can also cause dissociation. Basically, dissociation is a response by the mind to anything that’s overwhelming. So, a young child being raped, or anything of that nature, they respond with dissociation at the time. Frequently it will become part of their mental make up because they want to repress those memories, they are so painful. Any overwhelming stress can cause dissociation. In that respect, all these groups seem to have that in common: some form of dissociation-inducing technique. There are other things they have in common, too. Something Lifton called Doctrine Over Person, which is basically, if the method isn’t working for you, there is something wrong with you, there’s nothing wrong with the method – which is kind of an obvious logical fallacy. I’d have to run down all the various techniques. In the end, they have more in common than not, if looked at from a significantly abstract level.

So the clients you run into have pretty much the same symptoms when they come from a multi-level marketing cult?

Yes. But I don’t want you to think that all groups are the same, or that all level of damage is the same. Every group’s different, every individual’s different. I would say the groups exist on a spectrum from fairly benign to really destructive. For instance, my group, TM, I would say that on a scale of 1 to 10 it was a 5 or a 6. Scientology, 7 or 8. The really, really destructive ones you typically don’t hear about. They’re very small groups. They don’t show up on anybody’s radar, they’re not in the media. There are a lot of small Christian communities that might have 50 to 100 members, or less, where really, really terrible things happen, but you don’t hear about it. Those are the ones I put at the far end of the scale.

The ones that can better isolate themselves.

Yeah, absolutely. You hear about rape – when I say terrible stuff, I mean really terrible stuff – beatings, things like that. Things that anybody would recognize as being abusive.

Do you find that the psychological trauma due to cult involvement is different for those reared in a cult as children?

Oh, yeah. Very different for those who were reared. You may have seen it on the website, and if I’m repeating myself just stop me, but the basic idea is that when I’m working with someone who, like me, joined at 18, or later on in adult life, the main task is to try to reconnect them with their pre-cult self. So you work on trying to connect them to things they used to like to do, people they used know, hobbies, concerns, interests, passions, whatever. That tends to make it possible for them to reconstruct a personality that’s functional in the world. You can’t do that for somebody that was brought up in a cult. There is no pre-cult self. It’s much more challenging for them, and obviously much more challenging for me.

But do they generally have the same symptoms?

Yes and no. A lot of the young people I work with, or people who were young when they were in the cult, had the general kind of teenage rebellion against the group that you might imagine that anybody might have, so there was some kind of protection against a lot of the group practices. I’m working with a guy now who’s out of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and he feels he had a cultic relationship – I’m not here to judge the group, but he feels he did – and he left at 18. The problems he had were less of dissociation because he hadn’t been doing the group practices for a very long time. His problems are more of social skills, knowing how to relate with people who have very different beliefs, trusting people, intimacy issues, sexual dysfunction, those kinds of things. So it is somewhat different. Some of them do experience dissociation as well, but if I had to generalize, I’d say it’s less.

Is there a general way in which you can describe the therapy you give – you already touched on it, you try to reconnect them with their pre-cult selves – is there a basic…

Yeah, I can give you an outline of what I do. This changes from individual to individual and group to group, but this is the basic idea. What I do is focus on brief therapy. I don’t believe the therapeutic relationship should be a long-term one. What I do is in, say, the first four or five sessions, we kind of go over the characteristics of a cult, and I don’t directly attack their group. I might use another group as an example. There’s a book I use called Take Back Your Life that has a lot of discussion of this kind of stuff, and we look at the kinds of things that happen in other groups, and let them decide for themselves whether it happened in their group or not. So we go through that period. After that, we spend four or five sessions with very, very specific what they call cognitive or cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. These are things like what to do when you dissociate, how can you get control of dissociation, learning how to mingle with other people. You know, very basic things. I work a lot with what are called cognitive distortions in cognitive therapy. And these are kind of dysfunctional ways of looking at the world. People [from cults] tend to have very black/white thinking, they tend to do what they call “mindreading”. In other words, assuming to know the motivations or thoughts of another individual without actually asking them. That kind of thing. There are lots of cognitive distortions, but I work with a basic list of ten. What I do with them in cognitive therapy is look at thoughts or situations that are causing distress and we try to understand if part of the distress is caused by the way they’re thinking about it. Looking at the situation negatively, or if they’re using one of these cognitive distortions, we challenge that. Not that I try to replace their thinking, but what I hope will happen in doing this process is that they’ll get kind of a balanced way of looking at things. They hold in their mind multiple thoughts at once. You know, that something is evil, or not good, but at the same time there are parts of it that are good. So the goal here is to kind of integrate their thinking. Anyway, I do that for about four or five sessions. For a lot of people that’s all they need. For some people, they need less. For some people who are experiencing serious dysfunction, and possibly personality disorders, or other things, we might have a longer term relationship. But, always what I try to do, even from the very beginning is – and I outline what we call “termination” – and from the beginning our goal is to end the relationship… I’m kind of rambling, I hope some of this is good…

It’s great. Just one more question. I’m wondering what an outsider can do for friends who they feel are in a cultic relationship, or if they should do anything at all when somebody’s in an organization of their own free will?

Yeah, right. It’s really, really, really difficult. A lot of the things that people might think to do are terribly counter-productive. This is a place where I do disagree with a lot of cult counselors and what they call cult interventionists or exit counselors. There’s a kind of industry of working with people with families and holding what they call an “intervention”, which is a day or series of days in which you sit down with a cult member and challenge directly their beliefs, and try to teach them negative things about their group, and all that kind of stuff. Basically, what I’ve seen happen is that this works for a short period of time, but it just doesn’t seem to stick. It didn’t for me. I was in and out of my group three times before I finally left. The intervention had short-term effects, but it didn’t have long-term effects. So anyway, that kind of direct approach just seems to engage somebody’s defenses. A loved one going to them and just saying, “Look! What are you doing –?” You know, isn’t going to do anything. So what I recommend people to do is certainly if they’re adults, is just let the person know you love them, you’ll always love them, that you are concerned about the group they’re in, and that you’ll always be there to talk to them about it, if they’d like to talk. And after that, back off. And, really, only say it once. Because just the act of saying “I love you” over, and over, and over again, can engage defenses. You let people know this, and then you back off. You let them know perhaps that there are people that they could talk to, but in my experience, the people who successfully leave groups have already begun the process themselves. You know, there’s that really old chestnut, it’s a joke about psychotherapy: How many psychotherapists does it take to change a lightbulb? You ever hear this one?

No.

Just one. But the lightbulb’s really got to want to change… And it’s the same thing here.

Thank you very much for chatting with me…

“Hey!” I said. “Where are you at?” I was fishing for clues. This confused her.

“I’m really sorry to be calling so late…” she apologised. She explained that she works for a production company¹ that I had contacted by email several weeks earlier in regards to an upcoming film. The film, “Expelled” – a documentary that claims to “[blow] the horn on suppression” and give voice to “the silenced majority” of American creationists – promises to be controversial, and I had designed to write an advance feature article for a major daily exploring the issues it will present.

According to the film’s website, “Big Science has expelled smart new ideas from the classroom. What they forgot is that every generation has its Rebel…” Of course, the “smart new ideas” are merely archaic, counter-reality creationist concepts re-labeled as “Intelligent Design”, and this generation’s “Rebel” – it turns out – is the aged, crusty, monotoned Ben Stein, a former speech writer for Richard Nixon, mostly unknown for his bit roles in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and the television show The Wonder Years.

This call represented a break-through. After having been treated with high suspicion by the media company for weeks, the girl on the phone was prepared to set a specific time and date whereupon I could finally interview the producers responsible for the film. Happily, I made arrangements for the following week. Ultimately, the interviews would never take place. After several cancellations, re-schedulings, and further erratically timed phone calls (all on the producers’ ends), Expelled’s people finally stopped responding to my inquiries altogether, for reasons not entirely clear.²

This wasn’t the first call I’d received from Expelled, though it was the least formal up to that point. Since I had sent my initial query, the apparently suspicious production company had called and emailed me numerous times with dozens of mostly redundant questions contrived to measure my “angle”, and, I presume, my level of sympathy toward Intelligent Design.

The first call had come during regular business hours from a chatty clone who initially sounded professionally scripted, with the air of a salon-tanned prick perfectly willing to take business calls on his Blue-Tooth while out to dinner with his wife. He was “excited” about the film. He spoke rapidly, and at length, regarding the film and its predicted impact, with little or no prompting from me. “It’s the best documentary I’ve ever seen,” he declared confidently. Abruptly, his tone changed, reflecting sudden insecurity. He admitted that it was the only documentary he had seen. I said as little as possible. I didn’t want his making a fool of himself to leave him with a negative impression regarding my intentions. Fumbling for a recovery, he added, “It’s just a great film. It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian or not, it has nothing to do with that. This is for anybody; anybody concerned with Free Speech and science.”

Of course, I’d not mentioned religion at all.

Had I known that this inane conversation would be the closest I’d come to an actual interview with a representative for the film, I may have taken better notes. He babbled on in what seemed complete confidence that I was “all right”. He promised me an advanced screening and a meeting with a traveling Expelled propaganda crew. At the time, I merely waited for an opportune break in his wild oratory to ask if and when I could schedule an interview with the producers. “I’m not sure,” he told me, leaving me utterly confused as to why he had called me at all, “I’ll check and get back to you.”

He called back later that day sounding far more sober and subdued. He began a subtle interrogation cheaply disguised as passing small talk. What are you in school for…? Oh, good for you… Who do you write for…? Oh, that’s great… What kind of research do you do…? Interesting…! So, who do you write for…? Ah! That’s right… What’s your area of study…? Eventually, he promised to send me an email scheduling an interview. Later that day, I received an email that reminded me that I would get an email scheduling an interview, but in the meantime, could I send an email reminding him who it was that I was writing for? Also, could I assure them, in writing, that it was actually me who was writing the article and conducting the interview? Strictly a formality, you understand.

I found this level of screening ironic, being that the filmmakers themselves have been accused – by those who participated in it as interviewees – of misrepresenting their motives in order to gain the confidence of some of the top minds in academia; it’s a charge that the film’s spokespeople seem to dismiss as sour grapes from the “Big Science establishment.”

In a New York Times article about the film, physical anthropologist and head the National Center for Science Education, Eugenie C. Scott – who was interviewed for Expelled – is quoted as saying, “I have certainly been taped by people and appeared in productions where people’s views are different than mine, and that’s fine. I just expect people to be honest with me, and they weren’t.”

I, on the other hand, was quite honest with the people representing Expelled about the type if article I intended to write – though I certainly never revealed my personal opinions on the topic to them. Mine was to be an “objective” treatment of the subject, which may seem laughable given my anything-but-neutral position in the evolution-creation debate. Of course I “believe” in evolution. Evolution is an established fact. My feelings toward the creationists oscillate between indignant disgust, and detached sociological interest… but not equally. More often than not, I feel indignant disgust at their willful ignorance, and strive to reclaim the detached sociological interest. I would argue that this doesn’t preclude me from writing objectively on the topic, as I see no reason for which “objectivity” requires me to suspend disbelief in the patently absurd. “Objectivity” need not imply a willingness on my part to indulge in the crude fantasies of the defiantly ignorant – rather, “objectivity” in this case would require that I suspend judgment, making no assumptions regarding the motives, intelligence, or sanity of the fabulists in question… At least in writing.

My model for this type of objectivity is Pulitzer Prize winning author Professor Edward J. Larson of the University of Georgia, whose social history of evolutionary theory and acclaimed account of the original Scope’s “Monkey Trial”³ have established him as the authoritative historian of the evolution-creation debate. In an email exchange, he agreed to speak with me about Expelled: “Sure, I’d be happy to help… I’ve been following this movie. Interesting stuff. For once, a new twist in the creationism wars…”

In a phone conversation, I had Professor Larson delineate the difference between Evolution by natural selection, and the political theory of Social Darwinism. Expelled intentionally treats the two interchangeably, viewing genocidal holocausts as a natural result of society’s general acceptance of Evolution. According to The New York Times: “If it were up to him, [Stein] said, the film would be called ‘From Darwin to Hitler.’”

Interestingly, Professor Larson had been approached by Expelled, and he was asked to be interviewed for the film. “They were very unclear as to what the film was actually about, and I couldn’t see any reason why I’d want to be involved,” Larson told me. This surprised me, as I see the good professor as a neutral historian. Presumably, the creationists do not.

Another main argument that Expelled promises to present is the idea that the banishment of the Intelligent Design hypothesis from public schools is a violation of the First Amendment, which guarantees Free Speech⁴ . For the counter-point here I spoke with Daniel Mach, the Director of Litigation in the Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief for the ACLU, who described the invocation of the First Amendment as a tactic “related to the Teach-the-Controversy spin.”

“I don’t see this as a Free Speech issue at all,” he explained, “teachers shouldn’t be given a carte blanche to ignore curricular requirements or to convey educationally unsound information to public school students…” Further, to call upon the First Amendment “…misinterprets Free Speech while ignoring the Establishment Clause.”

Indeed, where would it end if teachers were allowed to teach whatever they wished in the name of Free Speech?

Playing the role of Jehovah’s Advocate while speaking with Mr. Mach and Professor Larson was difficult. Expelled’s arguments are easily flayed by the learned and rational. Unfortunately, a good number of the film’s viewers are sure to be neither, nor will rational arguments distract them from their cause. This dogged devotion to supernaturalism can be seen in the propagation of all of the so-called scientific criticisms against Evolution. These erroneous criticisms are debunked again and again, only to be presented by creationists to credulous Christians again and again, with no acknowledgment of their refutation.

Just as my feelings toward the creationists oscillate between disgust and sociological interest, so too do my feelings regarding their uprisings oscillate between fear and scornful amusement. It’s easy to feel that there is nothing to fear from the creationists, because their arguments are so clearly flawed and religiously motivated that one finds it difficult to imagine that they should ever win a significant court battle in their struggle to strangle science from public schools one school district at a time. On the other hand, there is reason to fear for the future, as supernaturalism seems to spread ever more malignantly, threatening a new Dark Age of unreason.

The impact of the film remains to be seen…

1. The same production company responsible for the Narnia fiasco, as well as Mel Gibson’s disturbing sado-masochistic blood-porn The Passion of The Christ. Motive Marketing, they are called. I think that the motive here is quite obvious.
2. Lest one adjudge me a fool, and see fit to point out that a mere Google search will probably reveal “Doug Mesner” as an enemy of Intelligent Design, allow me to confess that I don’t hold strictly to this name, and indeed I did not in this case.
3. Both books are highly, highly recommended to anybody at all interested in the topic
4. Even this argument – though it may seem somewhat original in the modern creationism war – is as old as the Scopes trial. Though William Jennings Bryan may not have invoked First Amendment privileges for religious concepts in schools (probably having a better grasp of the Establishment Clause than that), he did espouse a “majoritarianism” that maintained that in a democratic society, the majority rules, right or wrong: mobocracy.

Dr. Hammond stressed his own bravery in “coming forward” with his information – “Myself, as well as a few others that I’ve shared [this information] with, were hedging out of concern and out of personal threats and out of death threats. I finally decided to hell with them. If [the Satanists are] going to kill me, they’re going to kill me. It’s time to share more information with therapists.” [Applause]. He described a savage, blood-thirsty cult operating at the highest levels of society and in the United States Government. It is a cult that has converted millions into brain-washed sex slaves.

But why?

“My best guess is that the purpose of it [the satanists] is that they want an army of Manchurian candidates — tens of thousands of mental robots who will do prostitution, do child pornography, smuggle drugs, engage in international arms smuggling, do snuff films, all sorts of lucrative things and do their bidding. And eventually, the megalomaniacs at the top believe, [they will] create a satanic order that will rule the world.”

The details are eerily specific, and a good number of Conspiracy Theory’s usual suspects play a role. It’s like this: A secret U.S. military operation initiated immediately after World War II secretly recruited Nazi doctors (who were all, apparently, Satanists) to continue their sinister experiments in mind control. Today, Hammond explains, the head of the whole operation is a Jewish man who “is known to patients throughout the country.” His name is withheld, oddly, to protect the guilty.

The methods by which these Satanists achieve total subjugation of their slaves are also detailed. Prolonged torture, Demerol, and confusion techniques make a victim susceptible to re-programming: “[The victim] will hear weird, disorienting sounds in [one] ear while they see photic stimulation to drive the brain into a brainwave pattern with a pulsing light at a certain frequency not unlike the goggles that are now available through Sharper Image and some of those kinds of stores. Then, after a suitable period, when they’re in a certain brainwave state, they will begin programming, programming oriented to self-destruction and debasement of the person.”

This method of mind control sounds strangely similar to a hypnosis technique utilized by therapists versed in a communication protocol known as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). In NLP texts, a hypnosis technique is elaborated in which two therapists – one speaking mostly at random in one ear, while the other gives specific instructions into the other ear – confuse a subject’s conscious mind into “shutting down”, thus bringing the unconscious mind to the fore in a state of trance.¹

With Hammond’s background in clinical hypnosis and, particularly, the subtle coercive communication techniques of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, an obvious question arises: Did Dr. Hammond simply make up the material in the Greenbaum Speech based on his own conception of plausible “brain-washing”² techniques?

“That guy’s a legitimate nut-job…” a Floridian lawyer (who prefers to remain unnamed) drawled out in response to the question in a phone interview I conducted. He had taken a deposition from Dr. Hammond in the early 90s when engaging in a discovery process for charges of fraud leveled by one of Hammond’s former patients. “He wouldn’t face the camera during the deposition because he was afraid that the tape would fall into the hands of Satanists. So he sat in the corner facing the wall. He saw evidence of Satanism everywhere. Somebody was wearing a tie that made him suspicious that the guy was a Satanist.”

Dr. Hammond claims to have based his “findings” on information he had compiled from various patients in his care who had “recovered” memories of the abuse that Hammond had “come forward” to describe.

A common criticism that skeptics have put forward against cases of “recovered memories” of trauma is that the therapist often seems to be unwittingly “leading” the patient toward a preconceived notion. For instance, the question, “What color t-shirt was the man wearing?” presupposes a t-shirt over a button-up, sweater, or whatever else. If the person being asked isn’t attentive, he or she may then picture a t-shirt in a freshly created “false memory” without realizing that the idea was planted. Once believed, a False Memory becomes “fact” to whoever was implanted with it. Often, it is difficult to convince the person that their “memory” is indeed false.³

In the Greenbaum Speech, Hammond seems to be aware of the risks of leading. Addressing therapists, he specifically implores, “Do not lead [the patient].”

Eventually, many of the claims put forward by Dr. Hammond and his coterie of Repressed Memory Therapists were investigated by a Utah Task Force. 250,000 dollars later, the task force found nothing, and questions regarding Hammond’s credibility suddenly became quite pertinent.

While some of Hammond’s peers in the Repressed Memory movement appear to have mis-treated their patients with a far more damaging level of irresponsibility than Hammond ever achieved⁴ , Dr. Hammond is of peculiar interest to me specifically because of the Greenbaum Speech, and the fact that in the speech he implicated The Process Church:

“Remember the Process Church? Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, was killed by the Manson Family who were associated with the Process Church? A lot of prominent people in Hollywood were associated and then they went underground, the books say, in about seventy-eight and vanished? Well, they’re alive and well in southern Utah.”

Dr. Hammond mentions a “thick file in the Utah Department of Public Safety” that documents The Process’s activities within Utah as witnessed by covert law enforcement. The State of Utah knows of no such file⁵ . The interesting thing, of course, is that – in this instance – Dr. Hammond was right. By the time he had delivered the Greenbaum Speech, a collection of Processean luminaries had established an animal shelter in Utah. How did he know?

In an email exchange Dr. Hammond and I had in 2004, he replied to the question:

“A law enforcement officer in the state of Utah told me in about 1990 about them [the Process] having a complex in southern Utah and showed me aerial photographs that had been made of the complex. I’ve never heard anything since and really don’t know anything about them. I haven’t been associated with anything associated with cults in the past 12 years.”

Perhaps conveniently, Hammond could not remember the name of the law enforcement officer in question.

The good doctor’s new distance from the topic of Satanic Ritual Abuse follows a long series of litigation and accusations. Several Ritual Abuse therapists lost their licenses to practice after ruining the lives of their clients and their client’s families by instilling them with the belief that their own friends and relatives were part of a conspiracy to control their minds. Following these revelations of therapist quackery, I find myself wondering, Were some of the Ritual Abuse therapists willfully leading their patients? Were they, in effect, engaging in some form of the very coercion they decried? Was the Satanic Conspiracy a type of projection of their own cruel practices? Understandably, Dr. Hammond is reticent to comment on this episode of his career.

“I never really did cult research,” Hammond wrote to me, “but simply worked with some patients and consulted with other therapists who were working with them. By the latter part of 1992 I could see that it was becoming controversial and possibly an area of liability. It was exhausting, difficult work. Since it had never been more than a small part of my practice, I decided, why am I working this hard for the money when there are several other areas of specialty that I have where the work is much less gut-wrenching and the problems have a much more favorable prognosis than persons with extensive abuse histories?”

Despite Dr. Hammond’s dismissal of his Greenbaum stand-up comedy, many elements of the lecture still surface today among occult crime conspiracy theorists, and a popular conspiracy book, Mass Control, by author Jim Keith, cites Hammond’s Greenbaum material as a presumably accurate source for information.

“Occult crime investigators”, still certain that there is an international satanic conspiracy, have assimilated Hammond’s cult research into their ever-growing mythology, thus making the Greenbaum Speech something of an underground, deeply-rooted, cultural false memory.

1. The link describing Confusion Techniques above fails to mention induction by means of separate simultaneous auditory messages. A good book that details this technique, for practice by more than one therapist, is Handbook of Hypnotic Inductions by George Gafner and Sonja Benson
2. some my wish to quibble here about what hypnosis is or is not capable of, or, indeed, if there is such a thing as hypnosis at all. I am aware of the criticisms and varied definitions of hypnosis. Note that I do not credit the technique Hammond outlines as an effective method of brain-washing. I merely state that this would appear to be his conception of a plausible brain-washing technique
3. This exact example quite possibly originates from some other source I have read in the past, but my memory has currently repressed its full recall
4. Most notably Dr. Bennett Braun. I highly recommend the linked article to anybody interested in False Memory Syndrome
5. I called and asked

Then one day, out of the blue, I received an email from someone claiming to be a real Processean from an existing chapter in the state of New York. That email was the only the start of a watershed of communication. I began to hear from several splinter groups of the original Process Church who, as it turns out, were both still active and keeping an eye on us. This was more than a surprise as I had, to this point, naively believed that the original Process Church was entirely defunct.
It was during this time that we lost Dwayne Goettle. One of the most beautiful creative souls I’ve been privileged to know. Also during this time Adam Rostoker was gunned down in his home. His murder is still a mystery to this day.

Anecdotes from this era:

I received a cease and desist email from the Portland airport regarding our use of the Process logo. I replied and let them know that the four P symbol was not only an ancient swastika probably of Buddhist origins, but that its trademark was owned by a psychotherapy cult know as “The Process, The Church Of The Final Judgment”. I believe I cited William Sims Bainbridge’s book “Satan’s Power” with the page number reference that contained a picture of the logo. I never heard back from their legal dept…..;-)
I once received an email from a gentlemen who claimed to be the first child born into the Process, as well as a Skinny Puppy fan. He warned me that associating with the Process moniker was tantamount to welcoming the FBI into your living room.
I received an email from a man in prison who claimed to be a cell mate of David Berkowitz. He told me that he had read a lot of Process literature and just wanted me to know that Mr. Berkowitz’s claims regarding the Process were indeed bunk.

Eventually after the list had waned and traffic had dropped away we gave process.org over to a chapter of Processean’s based in NY. The site was active for a year or so and then appeared to go dormant. Eventually having no contact from the chapter I took it over once more to use it for a Vancouver based art collective called “Process Media Lab”. Not to be confused with Adam Parfreys publishing label “Process Media”.
It was around this time that I was contacted by the Toronto chapter of The Process. I arranged to meet with the head of the chapter while visiting the city. We met on a corner of College street. He looked at me and said “you don’t look like a member of Skinny Puppy” Well, he didn’t show up wearing a black cape with the goat of mendes emblazoned on the front either! It was an excellent meeting and I think informative for both of us. I learned about the Process street missions. The members of the Toronto chapter had anonymously been running a resource management operation for the different charity organizations in the area but now felt it was time to resume direct action helping people on the streets.
Since that time the web site has been in limbo with a little sentence proclaiming “rebuilding…be back soon”. I like to think that the flow of time is simply how you perceive it. So for me it’s just been a blink of the eye . This thing that started as a social art experiment turned into a journey that has now spanned over a decade. Since we evoked it, it has always shadowed us. It’s taught me a few things over the years. Perhaps the biggest lesson is that you have to take responsibility for the things that you create. Once they are born they will always have some sort of attachment to you no matter where they go and how they develop outside of you. Einstein’s theory of relativity may very well relate to ideas as well as objects. An idea that is put in motion tends to remain in motion, and if ideas are faster than light, they must collect mass on route. I also learned that the concept of “open source” doesn’t just apply to software. It applies to ideas and actions. Here’s an example of what one man is doing to help a lot of people with an open source concept…

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/54

So now we re-launch the web site. The aim of this blog is to create a virtual speak easy with a library of resources for learning. You’ll find most of our links on the side bar are geared towards getting the old neurons humming. If you look at the main link Darknet, you’ll find tools to protect your privacy. Believe me, if you don’t take steps to do it, no one will do it for you.
We are musicians, artists, programmers and media hackers waving a dark flag proudly displaying the four-P logo. It’s my hope that we can inspire each other not only to think and speak. But also to act.