- Martha Ann Tyo v. Colin A. Ross, MD, et al…

Dr. Colin Ross, demonstrating his supernatural eye beams

According to one expert witness, it was the worst case of medical malpractice he had ever seen.  The patient, Ms. Roma E. Hart, had been grossly over-medicated into a prolonged state of deranged confusion, during which time the offending psychiatrist, Dr. Colin A. Ross, had instilled her with exotic and perverse delusions:  To wit, the rather implausible belief that her family was involved in an occult crime-ring dedicated to a supernatural evil, and that Hart herself had been forcibly impregnated by extraterrestrials, birthing a hybrid infant (presumably in the course of a routine alien abduction).  The magnitude of Ms. Hart’s mistreatment during her submission to psychiatric “care” brought her to the precipice of death on several occasions.

During her treatment Ms. Hart gave custody of her 10 year old daughter over to Child & Family Services so as to preserve the girl from clutches of her Satanic cult family. Thus Ms. Hart lost her entire family in one egregiously misguided moment; her parents unable to forgive her for the accusations of sexual Satanic Ritual Abuse, her daughter heart-broken by abandonment.

As you will read in the interview with Ms. Hart below, these are but a few of the annoyances she suffered as result of Ross’s “therapy”.This bizarre malpractice by the hand of Dr. Colin Ross was designed to treat his unfortunate patient of the condition of Multiple Personality Disorder [MPD], a condition Ms. Hart now feels she never had, and many doctors argue doesn’t exist.  It is a condition that Dr. Ross himself has largely helped define and set the diagnostic and treatment protocols of.  The theory of MPD, unsupported by science, is that an individual undergoing trauma “dissociates”, recompartmentalizing the hurtful memories into separate “personalities”, personalities that are unaware of one another.

Dr. Colin Ross’s delusions are hardly concealed.  He is a known conspiracy theorist who helped construct the Satanic cult hysteria of the eighties to mid-nineties.  He has written and lectured regarding nefarious mind-control projects within the CIA, and even – in an interesting case of possible projection – speculation regarding the “iatrogenic [clinically produced] creation of Multiple Personality Disorder” by CIA psychiatrists.  Following Dr. Ross’s own vernacular, it might be appropriate to suggest that Ross has “dissociated” his own crimes of medical mistreatment, projecting them upon a “personality” he refers to as “CIA”.

But Ross can not be dismissed as a marginal fool.  He is a well-respected and dangerous fool.  Indeed, Dr. Colin Ross is an “internationally renowned clinician, researcher, author and lecturer in the field of dissociation and trauma-related disorders”.  He is founder and President of the Colin A. Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma, which “specializes in the management of psychiatric treatment programs and is currently contracted to provide management and treatment services to Timberlawn Mental Health System, in Dallas, Texas, Forest View Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Del Amo Hospital, in Torrance, California.”  Ross is “the author of over 130 professional papers and past President of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation”, and acts as expert consultant for the Showtime television series The United States of Tara.  Dr. Ross has acted as therapist for celebrity Rosanne Barr (who now also believes she recovered memories of childhood abuse), and Cameron West, author of the New York Times bestselling First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple.

Like all conspiracy theorists, Ross seems to feel he has an understanding of the true cause of all Evil.  Likewise, MPD feeds Ross’s paranoid fiction as, not only a by-product of a sinister CIA plot, but as a medical condition that serves to explain and negate all others.  Roma Hart gives an example of this over-valuation of the MPD diagnosis by Ross in a personal email to the author:

[...]I was regularly in seclusion [whilst an in-patient of Colin Ross], a lovely concrete walled and floored hole where I was locked in for days at a time.  Sometimes [I would be] thrown in, and I’d have the huge bruises to show for it.  [The seclusion room] was often used for “behaviour modification”, I suppose.  You see, when I had seizures from the drugs [Ross had over-medicated],  Ross told the nurses that I was just switching personalities to one called “Blue” that had seizures, so they should throw me in seclusion whenever that happened. One evening when [the seizures were] really bad, Ross had the nurses take me down to the ward below and strip me before they dropped me onto the floor.  That [particular] seclusion room had a bad fluorescent light that flickered really badly.  I laid there until the next day when they put me in a wheelchair to take me back up to my other seclusion room.  Those nurses, as I told you before, followed Ross around like panting puppies and did anything he said. I remember when I had my blood pressure taken my nurse asked me if I knew why my blood pressure was so unstable. I was going to answer “the drugs?”, but before I could say anything she said, “it’s because each of your personalities has its own blood pressure.” And, of course, [there was] the time that I was nearly killed from an overdose on the ward and I barely made it to the nurse’s station, gasping for breath, (respiratory arrest) [trying to] get their attention. The nurses became angry at me and demanded that I go back to my room. I fell to the floor and crawled back to my room still struggling with every ounce of my strength for every breath.  This was extrememly frightening and I was so close to dying. I made it to my bed and the nurse took my blood pressure. She wrote it on my bed sheet as a matter of fact: 190/180. The following day after I regained consciousness another nurse came in and took my blood pressure: 60/50.  Well, she remarked, you MPD patients are fascinating. You see, Doug, Ross had told the staff that night that I had “pulled myself in” and that it was an “MPD coma”, not a real coma.

On the face of it, Roma Hart’s accusations appear absurd.  For this reason, the hyperlinks embedded in this article, showing corroborative sworn testimony and affidavits, are important.  Thus, Ms. Hart’s claim that Dr. Ross actually encouraged her toward suicide seems quite plausible when taken together with the sworn affidavit of Winnipeg resident George Bergen, who testifies that Ross’s therapy drove his sister-in-law and at least four others to suicide, and the statement of Martha Ann Tyo (who also sued Ross for malpractice) indicating an eerily blase attitude, on Ross’s part, toward the possibility of his client’s suicide (see quote from Tyo v. Ross above).  The fact that Martha Ann Tyo, a patient in Texas (Hart was treated in Manitoba), tells also of being implanted with a conviction of Satanic Ritual Abuse and alien abduction does much to affirm that these beliefs were a product of Ross’s mind rather than those of Tyo or Hart. So, though the documents cataloging Dr. Ross’s criminal incompetence are linked throughout, I shall – in the spirit of Ross’s own book, Bluebird, which seeks full-disclosure of CIA malpractice – list an index of some of the more important ones here:

1. Affidavit of Roma E. Hart regarding Ross’s malpractice
   
2. Sworn affidavit of George Bergen regarding suicide deaths in Dr. Ross’s care
3. Martha Ann Tyo v. Ross, et al.
4. Testimony of Thomas Brown regarding Ross’s implantation of false memories in his wife.
5. Sworn affidavit of Robert Alexander Cowan attesting that Ross was fired from a Winnipeg Hospital.
6. Dr. Harold Merskey’s assessment of Dr. Colin Ross’s malpractice upon Roma Hart
7. Petition of the British False Memory Society seeking indictment of Dr. Colin Ross for violations of the Nuremburg Code
8. Dr. Alexander Bodkin’s assessment of Dr. Colin Ross’s malpractice upon Roma Hart
9. Selected quotes of Dr. Colin A. Ross, suggesting a mind disturbed
10. A list of Statutory Declarations attributing ruined lives to Dr. Ross’s clinical techniques

Interview with Ms. Roma E. Hart
by Douglas Mesner (Process.org)

How did you come to be in the care of the genius Dr. Ross?

Before I started seeing him, I was working constantly.  I was a single mom, I had two jobs, I was going to University full-time, and I had hurt my foot really, really badly.  So I got unemployment insurance, which only lasted a few weeks.  One of my friends said, Hey, you know what?  you can get it extended if you apply for stress.  I thought, cool, why don’t I do that?  Extra money, get my unemployment extended. So I was at University, went the the University Student Psych Centre, figured I could get them to fill out the form for unemployment insurance.  I saw one of the master’s students there, who was a student of Colin Ross’s.  She said, what do you do when you get under stress? I said, Well, I just switch to autopilot and just keep on going – I’m a single mom, after all. And she goes, Autopilot??  Do you have a name for this “autopilot”? Her eyes went so big, and she said, My professor Colin Ross is an expert in Multiple Personality Disorder [MPD] and I would just love to work with him.  I’ll bring you to him and he will fill out the form for you. So she put me in the car, drove me down to see Colin Ross, and it was just about 15 minutes before he shook my hand and welcomed me to MPD therapy.  Then I handed him the unemployment insurance form and said, fill this out for me please. And that was it.  I was doomed since.  That was it.

And how in that 15 minutes did he determine that you had MPD?

He had talked to that student councilor at the University of Manitoba – his student.  She had told him that I said that I switch to autopilot when I’m under stress.  He determined that she was absolutely correct, that [autopilot] was another personality.

Aha…

But you and I know that ["running on autopilot" is] just something people have been saying for years.  It just means you just keep on going because you have to.  You just do without even thinking about it.  I had no idea that anybody would ever interpret that as another personality.  But I thought to myself, Well, what the heck – he’s going to fill out the form – what possible harm could come? I had no idea my life would be ruined after that.

To kind of work backward so people have an idea right from the get-go what we’re dealing with:  What are the permanent side-effects you deal with now from having been a victim – or patient – of Dr. Ross?

One of the the biggest problems I have is a permanent record in my medical file that lists me as ‘Multiple Personality Disorder’.  That comes to my face any time I go for any test, any time I have to go to the hospital for X-rays… you name it.  It’s right there.  I’m never taken seriously for anything at all.  It’s on a permanent record for Child & Family Services because Colin Ross decided that my child was interfering with my therapy, so she was put into foster care.  She was put into foster care and hidden from me and from my whole family from the time she was 10 years old to the time she was 18 years old.  She has completely lost her family.  I lost the most darling child.  I was a single mother.  She and I were so close.  It was like we breathed at the same time.  I lost my whole family.  My parents were teachers.  Because when you’re diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, Colin Ross believes that 100% of the time, you have been sexually molested by your parents.  He told that to Child & Family Services.  My parents had to take early retirement from their teaching jobs.  My family hates me.  My parents were almost thrown in jail… And then, of course, there’s always [the fact that] I had to drop out of University.  My career was ended.  I lost my home.  I lost my friends.  I lost every cent I had… Then, of course, there’s the drug experiments that he did.  He did massive and illegal drug experiments on me in the hospital.  And I nearly died several times.  I was in comas, I was in wheelchairs.  I got down to like 55 pounds at 5 foot 5.  I was so, so sick.

Which Drugs?

The main one was Halcion, although he combined a whole bunch on top of each other just very recklessly. No regard for human safety whatsoever.  But Halcion: He had me up to 52 milligrams per day¹
Four hundred times the maximum dosage. He explains that – he justifies that – in one of the court transcripts I sent you – it’s really quite appalling – he justifies that amount by saying that I was a drug-user.  He has told the hospital – Saint Boniface Hospital, where he treated me – that I was a heroin addict.  And of course, that is why he had to use so many massive amounts of drugs.  Now, I most certainly wasn’t [a drug-user].  Just a few weeks before I saw him, I got up at six o’clock in the morning and I spent all morning, until 12:30 at the University, because I was a full-time student.  Then I worked all afternoon until 6 o’clock at a daycare.  Then I went home and took care of my child.  On the weekends, I worked as a maid at Holiday Inn.  I had two jobs, was a full-time University student, and I had a child to take care of.  I had no time to be a heroin addict!  I was a Pentecostal Christian fundamentalist.  I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t allow it in my home.  My brother and his wife were living with me.  They weren’t allowed to drink or smoke in the home.  And yet, Colin Ross says, I gave her all these drugs because she’s a heroin addict. What a crock!  But there it is, on my medical record.  And he keeps on saying that.

So you didn’t feel particularly mentally disturbed when you first went to see Colin Ross, but felt a definite worsening of your condition after therapy began?

The only thing that bothered me was my foot.  I just needed an extension of my unemployment insurance because my foot still hurt real badly, but the unemployment insurance had run out.  I thought, well this is really easy.  I’ll get it extended based on stress.  So when I saw Colin Ross, the only actual problem I had was a very sore foot that had been injured.  There was nothing wrong with me mentally.  I was definitely stressed, but that’s because I was still working a part-time job.  I was still going to University full-time, and I was still a single mother, and I had almost no money to live on.  So, that was why I was stressed.

So clearly you were an out-patient.  How often did you see [Dr. Colin Ross], and what was the “therapy” at that point?

I saw him twice a week for an hour to two hours.  It was hypnotherapy.  He made some tapes for me to listen to all day.  He had me do ‘dream-imaging’, where at the end of each session he’d ask me to think about whether certain things had happened to me.  My homework was to go home and dream about these things.  I’d come back the next session and say, I dreamed about those things, and this was what I was dreaming. And he would always say, Those dreams you had are actually flash-backs of real events in your life. So it proceeded very quickly into insanity.  So about two months after I started seeing him, I was committed into the hospital’s Psych Ward.

So then you were an in-patient at that point.

I was committed, I was forcefully given injections of drugs, yes.

And for how long were you an in-patient?

I was an in-patient for two weeks, and then I went back in-and-out, in-and-out for several years.

What was your drugs regimen at that point?

I was given antidepressants, I was given tranquilizers of various kinds.  At the end it was almost exclusively Halcion.  The last year I saw him, he switched me off of Halcion onto 320 milligrams of Valium per day²

And all the while he was telling you to recall your dreams as memories?

He would give me something to think about.  I had homework to do.  He would plant the thought in my head that this is what I was supposed to try to see if I could remember.  Of course I would dream about it, because what else are you going to do when you’re deep in therapy?  When somebody tells you to think about this, you’ll go home and you’ll dream about it, you come back and you say, I had this terrible nightmare about what you said.

Ah, well, that’s a flash-back.  It really did happen.

And I would say to him, I don’t remember that happening. The first time I saw him – the first visit, I told him – he asked, were you ever abused as a child? I was raised in the sixties by military parents, because my father was an aerial cartographer.  They were very strict.  I said, what do you mean by abuse?  I mean, they were strict, but they never abused me. I made it very clear to him that my parents never, at any time, ever sexually abused me, or anybody.  But he said it was normal to deny it.

So eventually you were made to come to agree that you had been sexually abused?

I was told by Colin Ross that I fit the description of somebody who was sexually abused… Even though I swore it never happened.  He said, you fit the description.  All people with MPD have been sexually abused [according to Colin Ross].

I know about Colin Ross.  He has written [several conspiracy theory books].  How specific was his story for you?  Did he develop a specific narrative for you that fit his conspiracy theory [and explained your supposed MPD]?

Oh, absolutely.  As I said, my father was in the military.  This was when I was a tiny little girl, he was in the Air Force.  And for Colin Ross, for anybody who’s ever been in the military, he just makes the immediate leap into CIA, for crying out loud.  He asked me if the words – what was it? – ‘beta’… ‘gamma’… and, um… ‘omega’, I think it was [meant anything to me].  Those three.  He said that children were put in to CIA experiments where they used goggles on [the children's] eyes and hypnotized [them].  [The CIA programmed personalities] were either one of those: beta, omega, alpha, one of those.  One [of these designations programmed the child so that they] would commit suicide, one would be given the job to dispense disinformation, the other was [...] an assassin.  I just thought ‘gamma’ sounds too stupid, ‘alpha’ sounds like alphabet soup, for crying out loud, I think I chose Omega, or something like that.  I chose the one that sounded the least stupid to me, because I was just trying to cooperate with him.  There was just no way you could argue with him.  He’d always just twist things around.  You couldn’t possibly argue with him.  He’d always just say that you fit the description, absolutely fit the description.  It has to be this.

So in his mind, you had to be Omega, or Gamma, etc.  You couldn’t be None of The Above?

No.  Not at all.  No.  He was very much involved in [the idea of] CIA mind-control nonsense.  And then he would give you jobs to do, homework to do at home.  You were supposed to close your eyes and you were supposed to visualize different parts of the city so that you could leave your body and travel around the city.  Then you’d come back for your next appointment and he’d say, So did you go anywhere?  Did you see anything for these out-of-body experiments he was putting you into?  I would say, I don’t think I did.  I don’t know. I tried the best I could.  You’d just try to please him so much because he just had this charisma, and you’d want to please this guy.  He was very affectionate with all of his patients.  He would give hugs, he’d rub your back and rub your legs.  In those days he was just so charismatic.  He was such a good-looking young psychiatrist.  All the nurses would just pander to him like puppies… So here we were: young women as MPD patients trying to please this handsome, young, charismatic guy who was giving [us] all of his affection.

So did he ever give any indication of where he was getting his ideas of government mind-control projects that were bringing patients in to him?

He never told me where he was getting that from.

But he seemed to have a pretty specific idea of what [he felt] was going on?

He told me that he was the only MPD expert in Canada.  That he knew more than anybody else.  That they didn’t understand him.

And eventually he denied having ever given you drugs at all?

Yes, he did!  One of the last times I saw him, I asked, Why did you give me all those drugs?  And he looked at me, and he said with a straight face, I never gave you any drugs.  I lived about a mile away from the hospital where I walked all the way home thinking, I must be so crazy, so completely delusional.  Why would I think this if he never did [it]? I got to the drug store, and I went up to the pharmacist and I said, I know this is going to sound weird, but could you tell me if I’ve ever been given any drugs? He looked at me, because he recognized me, of course, and he said, I’ll print off some pages for you. He printed off reams and reams of pages for me.  Oh my goodness.

Why did he deny it?

I think he’d have to because it was – when I talked to a police officer a year later [he told me] – what [Colin Ross] did was criminal.  The amount of drugs Ross gave me was criminal.  [The officer] said if they could bring him into court they would charge him with administering noxious substances and endangering my life.  I never could get him into court though.

And you have long-term effects from the addiction?

I did have – I talked to Peter Breggin about that – I suffered with Halcion withdrawal, really seriously bad Halcion withdrawal for 10 years.  My family doctor, the neurologist, they’d all say, That’s impossible.  You can’t be suffering from withdrawal for that long.  It only lasts two weeks.  And then Peter Breggin gave me a copy of his Prolonged Benzodiazepine Withdrawal Syndrome paper that he sent to the AMA.  It’s not as bad now as it was before.  This has been like 20 years.  Most of it is gone.  There is some side-effects: Loss of memory, loss of concentration, and if I get really tired I’ll start having seizures again.  And I do have fibromyalgia as a result of an accident: falling on the ice when I went to pick up my daily prescriptions.  The Pharmacist wouldn’t let me have more than 320 milligrams of Valium per day.  He wouldn’t do that.  I had to go all the way to the pharmacy, walk over there to pick up one day’s prescription at a time.  It was very icy.  Up here in Winnipeg, it’s very icy.  I started having a seizure, and I fell on the ice, and I injured myself very badly.  I had to have several operations and I have fibromyalgia – constant pain for that.  One of the problems I have is I have a morbid fear of drugs now.  Just a horrible, morbid fear of drugs, so while the pain clinics and my family doctor want to give all sorts of pain medication, I won’t take it.  I’m just too afraid.  So I’m just going to be living in terrible constant pain for the rest of my life.

I was looking at the affidavit you submitted to The Queen’s Bench – as it’s called in Canada – and it mentioned a…  sexual assault… in the hospital…

Yes.  Isn’t that disgusting?  I think I already mentioned that he did illegal medical experiments on me.  He likes to do experiments, this guy.  He likes to do research.  Well, he knew.  He knew darn well that he was admitting into the hospital a dangerous sexual offender.  He knew who that man was because he came to me and told me, after I had been sexually assaulted… It was Christmas, and, um, I’d gone to a funeral.  I came back from the funeral, and I was terribly upset because my child’s father had died.  I couldn’t go to sleep, so I just sorted magazines just to calm myself down.  Everyone on the ward was a woman.  That ward was totally women, except for that evening, while I was at the funeral, Colin Ross admitted this sexual predator – offender – onto the ward.  He didn’t tell the nurses.  Didn’t tell the Hospital.  Didn’t tell me, that’s for sure.  I came in from the funeral   and I was sexually assaulted on the ward.  The next morning, Colin Ross says, Oh, I’m so sorry. Yes, I have 5 video tapes of this guy, and all the information about his sexual offenses. He said, But I never thought he’d do that in the hospital.  I didn’t think he would.  [note: Following the interview Ms. Hart would amend this statement to say that Ross, in fact, did not apologize - rather, he told her that he believed her when she reported she had been assaulted]

…Well, I just – I’m claiming.  This is just my claim [speculation].  I’m claiming that this was an experiment. Let’s just put this sexual offender on a ward of totally female [inhabitants], not tell them anything, and see what happens.  Well, I’ll tell you what happens: He sexually assaulted me!

And I went to the press after that, when Colin Ross left my room.  I phoned the police and I phoned the newspaper, and then they contacted the hospital.  Later – it was a couple days later – there was a front page news article about it.  President of the hospital confirmed that Yes, the man was prone to sexual assault, yes he was a dangerous offender.  Yes, that was all true. And Colin Ross came in [my room].  He was furious.  He was absolutely livid.  He was just beat red.  He came into my room and he yelled at me and said, Get the Hell out of here! But, you see, I was on such high levels of Halcion that if he had thrown me out that day, I would have died.  So, he had to take me off just enough so that I could get down to 320 milligrams of Valium instead.  And then I was kicked out of the hospital.  On my own… Just to see if I’d live or die…

With no referral to go elsewhere?

Oh, no.  Not at all.

And as I recall, it took you a while to find a psychiatric assessment after that.

After he [Colin Ross] left Winnipeg, I tried, and no one would take me on as a patient because – apparently… I did go into the hospital to have a cardiac test done.  When I was in the room with the cardiologist, he took my medical files on his desk – like a foot high – turned them around to face me so that I caould see them.  Then he left the room for about 10 minutes.  So I thought, Well, okay – just out of curiosity. I looked at the top paper, just at the top of the pile, and it was a letter from Colin Ross warning everyone not to treat me.  I have copies of all my medical records, but I don’t have that paper.  When I had all my medical records copied from the hospital, I paid about $700 dollars for all the papers, all the transcripts.  They wouldn’t copy that one.  I know it exists, because a cardiologist turned around so I could see it.   So, no, I couldn’t get anybody to help me.  And then after [Colin Ross] left, down to Dallas, and I filed a lawsuit against him, no one would see me at all.  So I went to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, talked to Pope, the guy in charge there.  He said he couldn’t force anybody to see me.  So I went to my family doctor who contacted the Minister of Health, Chomiak.  Now Chomiak arranged for me to go to London Ontario, because there was a psychiatrist out there who had formally debated Colin Ross – Known all about him.  And he had agreed to do a psychiatric assessment for me.  So I did have to get politicians involved, and there were arguments, during question period, on the floor to get me this kind of psychiatric assessment.  That’s how difficult it was to have done.

And it was Harold Merskey who did see you after that, right?

Dr. Harold Merskey.  That’s right.

You decided to file suit against Colin Ross after he left for Texas?

That’s right.

So what compelled him to leave for Texas?  I was looking at some of his [court] transcripts and I had fallen under the impression that it was a malpractice suit that had compelled him to leave for Texas when he did.

I sent you a copy of a Winnipeg Free Press article.  In that Winnipeg Free Press article – this was 1991.  It says that there was quite a lot of hostility against Colin Ross.  The doctors in this city hated Colin Ross.  There’s this one time when I came out of one of my comas in the Victoria hospital.  Colin Ross worked at the St. Boniface hospital.  He wasn’t allowed to work at the Victoria hospital.  I was up in the ward and Colin Ross stopped by to visit me.  The doctor who was taking care of me came in and that was the first time in my life I ever heard two doctors yelling at each other out in the hall.  He just wanted Colin Ross to leave, and drop off the face of the Earth.  He was so angry.  There’s a lot of doctors who just can’t stand him up here.  They’re embarassed to say they even know who he is.

And that’s what compelled him to leave for Texas?

Yes.  Because he couldn’t get any funding.  Now, the Grey Nuns owned the St. Boniface Hospital.  Sister Jean Ell is a Psychologist, and she’d done a psychological assessment of Dr. Colin Ross – there were an awful lot of complaints – and she told the board at St. Boniface Hospital that it was her opinion that he should be let go, but that they told her – the board at the Hospital – that he was bringing in a lot of research money.  So, in spite of everything – they agreed he was crazy – he was bringing in so much money.  It was only after the research grants dried up and he couldn’t get any more money, that’s when they told him to get out.  And that’s when he left.

And he still seems a bit crazy… to say the least.  In a personal correspondence with James Randi, Randi tells me about Colin Ross’s eye beams, and how they were set to experiment this to either prove or disprove [Colin Ross's assertion that he can project energy from his eyes].  Colin Ross backed out [of the experiment], said he’d get back to Randi, but never did.  So maybe he has sense enough to back out of such an experiment, but to have made the claim [that he could produce eye beams] at all – you really have to wonder -

He has such a big ego though.  He doesn’t say that he’s wrong.  He just says that he needs to adjust his test for whatever the problem is.  He doesn’t admit he’s wrong.

Dr. Colin Ross, heating a burrito with his eye beams - by Alethea Jones

Right… Right.  And he would never retract his MPD diagnosis of you.

Never!  Never!  He won’t retract it.  The Hospital – St. Boniface Hospital… The president, Dr. [Michel] Tetreault, wrote me a letter last year explaining that the hospital no longer endorses that, that diagnosis.  So nobody would be diagnosed with that [MPD] today.  But because Colin Ross won’t retract that diagnosis, they won’t take it off [my records].

I Don’t understand why it would have to be Colin Ross who would do so.

Because it has to be the doctor that was treating you at the time that you were diagnosed.

That seems like a bit of an insane policy itself…

Well, Dr. Harold Merskey, who certainly believes that I’ve never had MPD, ever – he certainly explains that in his psychiatric assessment [of me] – what he wrote [in my psychiatric assessment] is that my [request] to have Multiple Personality Disorder removed should be granted.  And that was the best he could do, because that’s just the way hospitals work.  It has to be the doctor who treated you, the doctor who diagnosed you, that’s the one who has to take the diagnosis off.

There was a point also where you went into Emergency in the same hospital you were receiving psychiatric care in, and they remanded you back to psychiatric.  How did that happen?

This is when I was just a few days away from dying.  I was so terribly sick.  My blood pressure was down to 50 over 40, and there’s a walk-in clinic just across the parking lot from the psychiatric center that is at the St. Boniface Hospital.  Dr. Colin Ross wouldn’t allow me to see any doctors – the residents, the students that would come to the ward.  He wouldn’t let anybody see me, and he told the nurses to ignore me.  But I had passes.  I was allowed to leave.  So I almost crawled.  Part of the way, I did.  I crawled to the walk-in clinic and I saw a doctor there who told me, You need to go to emergency right away. I told him, I’m already in the hospital.  So he contacted the nurses on the floor, he sent me back, and half-way across the parking lot, a doctor stopped his car, put me in his car, and drove me up to the ward.  Colin Ross still refused to let the nurses treat me.  So I called the walk-in clinic doctor and I said, You know, you called over here, and the nurses won’t help me.  So he had to call Dr. Colin Ross himself.  Otherwise I would have died.

Did Colin Ross encourage you to take action against your parents under the assumption that they sexually abused you?

Yes.  When I was at my most insane, under the most drugs, he encouraged me to get a rifle and go up and shoot them. He also encouraged me to kill myself constantly, saying it would be quite understandable.  He would phone me late at night – and he did that to other patients too, because there was an MPD support group, and we’d all talk to each other and visit each other – he’d send us home with lethal amounts of drugs, phone us up at night, and encourage us to kill ourselves.  One of the reasons I figure he did that was because he had this interest in the ‘white-light’ Near Death Experience.  So after we’d come out of comas, or what-not, from drug over-doses, the first thing he’d ask us was, Well, did you see the light? That’s all he was interested in.  Some of the other women died though.  But he really didn’t care about that.  He just said it was fate.

Some of the patients did die?

Yes.  12 of them.

12 of them?!

12 of them died in Dallas, too.

I did not know that.

Yes. Laura Pasley used to work for the police department, she also sued him down there… no, she sued one of his colleagues.  But she was in the police department, and she said, yes, it was the same number that died down there too.

Well, beside encouraging you to shoot [your parents], did [Colin Ross] encourage you to take legal action?

Absolutely.  Oh. yes.  He also wanted me to sue one of my old family doctors from when I was a child who was the Governor General of Manitoba at the time… George Johnson³ , the Governor General who was a friend of my parents, because Colin Ross told me that he had other patients who claimed that the Governor General had sexually assaulted them when they were children.  And [Colin Ross] said, You really ought to sue.  I’ll help you.  And I said, I will if somebody else will.  Nobody else would, so George Johnson fortunately got away with not having to be dragged through the court system, the poor guy.

Did [Colin Ross] just have a grudge against George Johnson?

Yes.  Governor General.  I guess [George Johnson] just wasn’t helpful with the research grants.

Well… I guess you have that latitude [to falsely accuse your enemies] when you’re the Witch-Hunter General.

Sure.  You don’t want to make Colin Ross mad at you.

I think that’s inevitable for me pretty soon.

(Laughs) Okay.

So – your malpractice proceedings: You didn’t end up even getting a settlement, did you?

No.  Because I am on welfare disability, the only money I could raise for lawyers was just through begging people that I was given contact numbers for.  [I would be told] This lawyer hates [Colin Ross], this doctor hates him.  And this other man – his daughter died under Colin Ross’s care, and he helped me with some money too.  So I did manage to drag it through the system for 11 years with 4 different lawyers.  But, because my second to last lawyer did such an atrociously bad job – and he admitted to his negligence to the Law Society – it was dismissed due to delay.  And then Colin Ross’s lawyer managed to have the costs awarded against me.  So I owed Colin Ross something like 100 to 200 thousand dollars – something astronomical.  So I had to appeal that.  So I had to raise another 5 thousand dollars to appeal that, and then the Law Society threw in another 20 to 30 thousand dollars to pay the lawyer to help me appeal that, so I would have the costs removed.  And that was Judge Sinclair’s order that I sent down to you.  It says that, reason for dismissal due to delay, fault of my counsel.  And the costs were taken off.  I didn’t have to pay the costs.

I didn’t get too good of a chance to look over the [courtroom] transcripts [of a different suit brought against Dr. Colin Ross] you sent me today, but [from what I see, during the trial] somebody from an outside jurisdiction was saying that these charges brought against Colin Ross would certainly have his medical license removed.  I wasn’t sure what case that was.  There were several pages missing.

That was Elizabeth Carlson.  She sued.  It was a 12 week trial in Minnesota.  She was the first to sue in any type of case like this.  And that was Christopher Barden.  Christopher Barden has his doctorate in Psychology, and he has a Law degree from Harvard.  He was the one who said that.  He read all of my hospital records.  The doctor who was an expert witness, Bodkin,sent the affidavit that said that it was grossly inappropriate the amount of drugs that Colin Ross had given me.  It’s just amazing.  It’s just amazing that he wasn’t charged.  It was very odd the way the police said it.  They said they wouldn’t charge him criminally until after the civil suit.  I don’t understand that at all.  I would just think that if someone would do a crime like that, they would just charge them.  But they said they wouldn’t do it until after the civil suit.

I saw somewhere – I believe it was online, and not one of the documents that you sent me – that you were at a proceeding saying that your case [against Colin Ross] had carried on 8 years as you were trying to extend the Statute of Limitations in your case due to your [previous] lawyer’s incompetence.

I went 4 months over the Statute of Limitations.

Is there still hope for you getting any satisfaction out of this.

None.  No.  All I can do is spend the rest of my natural life hounding him as much as I can, so I can expose him for the fraud that he is, and hopefully save the lives of as many people as I can.

I was going to ask you about that.  How do you feel about those documents [relating to your malpractice proceedings against Dr. Colin Ross] being posted publicly?

I’d put them on a billboard.  I don’t care.  I don’t want him to think that I’m ashamed of what happened, because I wasn’t responsible.  I was under an immense amount of hypnosis and drugs.  He is responsible.  I have no shame.  It seems so silly to say.  I am not going to be blackmailed into being quiet, or anything.  This is what he did, and he should be held accountable.  And he is just such a lying dog, I can’t stand it.  So, I make sure everybody knows what happened.  My lawsuit was never completed, unfortunately, but my hospital records still exist, and they’ve been used in other lawsuits for other people to have successful outcomes.

I’ve talked to a few other recovered memory detractors who seemed to feel a sense of loss from leaving their support group [of MPD patients or Ritual Abuse survivors].  It sounds like you dealt mostly with Colin Ross, or did you have anything like a support group that talked about experiences with Satanic Ritual Abuse, or whatever conspiracy theory was being held onto?

He set us all up in an MPD support group called the MPDers, and he tried to get us registered as a charity so we could go and raise money for him.

That’s inventive!

We were supposed to approach businesses, and he told us which ones – nice big ones – and we were supposed to approach businesses to raise money for his research.  And he was going to have us registered as a charity.  So that’s what his MPD patients were doing for him.

And what exactly did he say his research was?

Multiple Personality Disorder and [that research into alleged] mind control experiments with the CIA – and Satanic Ritual Abuse, for crying out loud!  He explained this to me the first month I started seeing him.  There was a sign above the planetarium, and I saw it on my way to see him.  It was the silliest thing.  It was going toward Christmas and they were talking about the star of [Bethlehem], and that made [Colin Ross] start commenting about aliens.  The star [of Bethlehem, according to Colin Ross] wasn’t really the star of Jesus – it was an alien ship that they were really seeing.  So then he explained that lots of people had been abducted by aliens, and that women had been abducted by aliens and impregnated by aliens, and they have these alien babies.  Now, I think I already said to you that at that time when I started seeing him I was a Pentecostal Christian Fundamentalist.  I belonged to Church, was a Sunday School teacher.  All I could think was, How horrible!  How could God let that happen?  And what about the baby?  Would it have a soul? So, in my mind, I was horrified.  Completely horrified.  I wouldn’t even talk about it.  I couldn’t even talk about it.  I just didn’t want to talk with anyone.  But then, a few years later – I think it was 1990, somewhere around then – he came up from a conference in Chicago.  He’d seen [infamous MPD therapist] Bennett Braun and the International Association of Dissociation and MPD, and that.  He came in the hospital to see me and he said, Oh, I have great news for you! He was so excited, so happy and bubbly.  I looked at him and thought, Good.  Great news.  What is it? And he said, You know that baby that you had?  The half alien baby?  It didn’t die! Thinking that it had died was [according to Colin Ross] the only way that I could resolve it in my mind, so that I wouldn’t have to worry about the soul.  So he thought for me, telling me that it didn’t die was going to be some good news.  I looked at him absolutely horrified.  I said, What are you talking about? At the conference he’d just been to, it had explained why all of the Satanic Ritual Abuse cases that they’d always talk about, where women give birth to these babies and they kill the babies – but nobody can ever find the bodies of these babies – [the conference Colin Ross attended explained that] the reason they can’t find the bodies of these babies is because the bodies of these babies are beamed up into spaceships, and they’re raised in the spaceships until they’re 18 years old.  Then they’re beamed back down to earth and given jobs with the CIA.  This is all to form a New World, and all that.  So it’s really the aliens who are impregnating the women, while they’re CIA mind-controlled, and then they give birth at Satanic rituals.  It’s a big circular thing.  It’s the craziest circular thing I ever heard in my life.  But I was horrified.  I burst into tears.  I couldn’t believe he just told me that my alien baby was alive.  But he was so confused.  He didn’t know why I wasn’t happy.

I’m horrified now! I went to a conference of self-proclaimed – or therapeutically proclaimed – victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse and Mind-Control, and I wrote a report about that, I don’t know whether you read it or not – oh, no, you did.  You quoted from it [on James Randi's website].  That’s right.  When I argued with [the attendees and organizer of the conference] that recovered memories bring about tales of alien abduction, despite the crazy shit these people were [otherwise] saying, they were mortified by that comparison.  But Dr. Colin Ross goes the limit.  He believes it all.

In the transcripts from the Minnesota trial – there’s only a couple pages that I sent you today – Dr. Humenansky, she gives sworn testimony that Colin Ross told her that there’s a connection between the CIA and Satanists and Satanic Ritual Abuse.

Well, he kind of denies it, doesn’t he?  There’s pages missing after they bring up the issue, but it sounded like he was going to backtrack on that in the court of law.

He’ll deny everything to his dying breath if he thinks there’s a court reporter around.

But he has put out books and done conferences where he’s pretty open about [his delusions].  It’s amazing to me that he’s still taken seriously.  I’m sure you realize that he’s written the foundational papers, really.  Him and Richard Kluft, and a few others, really defined Multiple Personality Disorder, and its treatment.  And, In fact, it was Richard Kluft and Colin Ross who were the two doctors consulted as experts for the formation of the storyline for [the Showtime series] The United States of Tara.  The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation had them on a panel to discuss The United States of Tara just last year [at their annual conference].  So the whole movement [of therapists who hold to the myth of multiple personalities] still rallies around this fool.

Absolutely.  And they think he’s so special.  In his book Bluebird, he gets all these CIA documents and he puts them in the back.  He thinks he’s so special that he can get those documents.  You know, anybody could get those documents [through the Freedom of Information Act].  Anybody could.  There’s nothing special about him.  He’s just a shameless self-promoter, really.

It’s easily pointed out that just because there are secrets in the case of International Security, or whatever, it doesn’t give Colin Ross a carte blanch to decide what those secrets are or exactly how they work.

This is what Dr. Richard Ofshe from Berkley told me back in 1994: If – and it’s not true of course, but if – everything Colin said [regarding his conspiracy theories] was true, it would still not excuse anything that he did to me.  What he did to me was the worst case of medical malpractice that he had seen.  Really, he can’t excuse what he did by saying, Well look over here, look what they did in the CIA.  Well, what they did in the CIA is the same thing [Colin Ross] does.  All the experiments, all the drugs, all the hypnosis, mind-control.  All the things that he says look at what the CIA did [about], they’re the very same things he did!

I do find it funny that he actually wrote an article about the iatrogenic creation of Multiple Personality Disorder within the CIA, and I also see articles by people like Corydon Hammond, who was trained in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, talking about how not to lead people to believe things that are not true.  They seem to be doing just the opposite, or exactly what they describe or proscribe to other people doing.

The tapes he had me listen to – he made me hypnosis tapes – I’m walking around the University listening to these hypnosis tapes, and I’m taking these drugs, and of course I couldn’t complete my courses, I had to drop out.  And it just made me completely crazy, all this mind-control, all day long, all night long, this constant mind-control.  The constant visits to his office.  It was just ridiculous. That is mind-control.

…And the drugs, and the hypnotherapy.

I don’t know how he got away with the amount of the drugs he used.  He claimed it was okay, because I had questioned him about that.  I said, Are you sure this is safe?  I wasn’t completely stupid, I wanted to be sure it was safe.  He said, Oh, yes, yes, it’s perfectly safe.  Now, I’ve learned since then that he’s said the same thing to other patients: Oh, yeah, sure, it’s all safe, I checked it out.  Very same words to them.  But then I find out later, no, it was never checked out, no one ever approved it, no one ever did this before.  It was never safe.  He was just lying.  So any consent he ever got from anybody for any drugs he gave them was never informed consent.  So he’s violated the Nuremburg Code.  He’s violated the Nuremburg Code automatically by not getting informed consent, by doing illegal medical experiments on people with no informed consent.

So I’m still having trouble understanding what was it he believed was the therapeutic part of this?  You had your drugs, and you had your ‘homework’ to remember things, but what then?  What, after remembering it?  Where was the effort to try and bring you back into unity with your ‘core self’, or your ‘real personality’, or whatever is they call it in the vernacular [of Multiple Personality Disorder]?

There was no desire to help anybody.  There was only a desire to see how far you could get away with doing whatever you wanted to do.  It was treating us like white rats.  Some of the patients died.  With me, I got so completely insane, because of him.  So he had tried to have me locked up in a permanent psychiatric ward outside the city limits.  And that’s where you go when you’re like criminally insane.  He had tried to do that, but they wouldn’t take me.

How did you come to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation [FMSF]?

I was listening to the radio, and I heard that there were a couple of support group members on the radio, and they were talking about False Memory Syndrome.  It just sounded so much like what I had.  This was about a year after Colin Ross left, so… 1992.  Two years after he had left.  FMS wasn’t even formed as an idea of a syndrome until 1992, there were no support groups until 1993.  So it was ‘93 when I heard the radio program.  By the time that I’d found lawyers and doctors who could explain it to me, it was four months after the statute of limitations had expired.  So it took that long for me to understand that this was what was wrong, that this was what happened to me.

It sounds like you had a falling-out with Colin Ross before you had a chance to revise your thinking about what had actually happened to you.  What was the process there?  How did you come back to reality?  What were you thinking?

I had lost my child to Child & Family Service issues – put in foster care and hidden away from me.  Hidden away from her whole family, because Colin Ross had told them our whole family was involved in satanic ritual cults, killing children.  And my parents were supposedly high priests of this murderous satanic cult.  So CFS was hiding her from the whole family.  I was desperately trying to get her back.  I was doing everything I possibly could.  I went back to University, I tried to ween myself back off of drugs.  I told Colin Ross that other doctors had told me that I was addicted to the drug he was giving me, Halcion.  He said, No.  It’s impossible.  Can’t be addicted to Halcion. I tried to get off Halcion, tried to get off Valium, best I could, all by myself without any help.  And I had a court case coming up, and I didn’t want to be under care.  I just wanted to go to court looking as fit as I possibly could.  So I told Colin Ross that I couldn’t continue with the MPD therapy because I was fighting a custody battle, and the MPD therapy was making me too sick to fight my custody battle.  And he agreed with me!  That’s basically how it came to an end:  He agreed the therapy was making me too sick to fight for my child.  He was fed up with me as a patient anyway.  I was causing him nothing but trouble.((Note: After Ross’s infuriated reply to Roma Hart’s making public her sexual assault in St. Boniface Hospital while in his care, Hart was discharged from the hospital, but continued to see Ross on an out-patient basis. It was later that Ms. Hart sought to end her MPD therapy, and Ross, leaving Manitoba, failed to refer her elsewhere for psychiatric evaluation. This should clear up confusion that might be caused by what might otherwise sound like more than one permanent break made from Ross by Roma Hart.))

So you didn’t come to a sudden realization that all this about Satanism and alien abduction was crap?  You kind of always had that feeling in the background to begin with?

Well, I had read a magazine article where a woman said she thought she was MPD but really wasn’t, it wasn’t true.  I thought, Hmm, I wonder.  I read it and threw it away.  It wasn’t something I was using as evidence.  You know, I don’t still have it.  I read it and threw it away.  So there was that little thought in my mind.  But I was still worried my parents were going to kill me.  I was still quite certain that they belonged to a satanic cult, and they were going to murder me.  So I wasn’t out of the grip of this nonsense still.  I was still very fearful.  When I was sitting in my living room, in the apartment I had downtown, if lights flashed from the traffic, and they would flash on the windows, my heart would jump because I would think it was an alien spaceship or something.  I was still completely, totally crazy.  But there was still that one ‘maybe’.  So I would go back and forth thinking, Am I?  Am I not?  Am I crazy?  Am I delusional? I was very confused.  So desperately confused.

But you eventually grew more skeptical of those claims.  Was it a slow process, or a realization?

In 1993 when I heard that radio program with the FMS support group – I contacted them, and they gave me a bunch of stuff to read.  I put it on top of my microwave.  I probably had a foot-high pile of stuff on my microwave.  I never read it.  I just put it in a pile, and I would never read it, because I was not quite sure that they weren’t a part of the satanic cult or not.  I didn’t know what was true and what was not true.  I was open-minded, but I was scared.  I was very scared.  Scared of my own shadow.

Now you work with [the FMSF], don’t you?

I do.  I do.  One of the few retractors that they have there.  Think they’ve got, maybe, a few hundred retractors.  So I’m open to anybody who’s been falsely accused, or wants to retract, or is interested at all.  I’m open to talk to anybody who wants to talk about it.

1. “The recommended dose for most adults is 0.25 milligrams (mg). In some patients, a lower dose may be prescribed and the maximum daily dose should not exceed 0.5 mg.” – From the Physician’s Desk Reference [PDR] online (http://www.pdrhealth.com/drugs/rx/rx-mono.aspx?contentFileName=Hal1192.html&contentName=Halcion&contentId=265
2. “The usual dose, depending upon severity of symptoms, is 2 milligrams to 10 milligrams 2 to 4 times daily.” -http://www.drugs.com/pdr/valium.html .
3. Correction: Dr. George Johnson wasLieutenant Governor of Manitoba, not Governor General

“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…

The following book review, originally published in Skeptic Magazine volume 14, no. 2, gives my rather unflattering overview of the assertions made in The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary. The book distresses me in that I see in it an early Creationist assault on the Cognitive Sciences, and the formation of the false scientific arguments that may be brought to the stem cell debate in years to come. After the review was published, I found myself wondering what the authors of the book must have thought of my review – if they had read it at all. I wondered if they would be able to rebut my dissection of their work. It was my feeling that the questions I had posed would have to be confronted if anybody was to take their “evidence” seriously at all. With that in mind, I contacted co-author Denyse O’Leary by email and asked that she review my review and, if she would be so kind, explain to me where I might have gone wrong. She agreed to do so once the review was posted online. Her reply follows my review below…

The Ghost In The Machine

The Spiritual Brain by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary reviewed by Doug Mesner

Even before we reach the Table of Contents, the book has run afoul of reason, casting serious doubts upon the intellectual honesty of its authors. The first sentence on the inside flap of the dust-jacket synopsis asks “Do religious experiences come from God, or are they merely the random firing of neurons in the brain?” Of course, confined strictly between the two options, one may even feel compelled to choose the former – but clearly the cards have been stacked. That neurons must fire in patterns seems intuitive. But to present this as necessarily the product of God’s divine will demands quite a bit of justification. The question is also eerily similar to the equally misrepresentative question often posed by Intelligent Design advocates, “Was life designed, or is it the product of mere random chance?” Available biographical information about the authors reveals this similarity as no coincidence…

The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul was co-authored by neuroscientist Mario Beauregard – whose Templeton Foundation-funded research provides what very little original content the book has to offer – and journalist Denyse O’Leary, author of an Intelligent Design pseudoscience book titled By Design or By Chance? The Growing Controversy on the Origins of Life in the Universe. Indeed, The Spiritual Brain proves to be little more than a remanufacturing of Creationist arguments applied to the Cognitive Sciences.

One might reasonably expect that a book that claims to give evidence for the existence of the “soul” would at least give the reader the benefit of defining “soul” at the very outset. Why – it has been asked – if there is some angelic vapor that drives a living being, provides character, morality, and consciousness, would God have equipped us with burdensome, fragile, and expensive (in biological terms) organs such as brains? Where does the brain end and the soul begin? If the brain provides robotic function, and the soul provides “consciousness”, what are we to make of cases of extreme character change due to neurological disorder or brain injury?

The book begins with no such definition, nor with any overview of its evidence, nor a clear interpretation of the authors’ findings. It begins instead with a vitriolic attack on what the authors refer to as “materialist science”; being quite simply a euphemism for that damnable brand of elitist science that insists upon testable, empirical data.

According to the authors, an unwillingness to accept causes outside the physical world has crippled progress in the field of neuroscience. The reader is belabored with full-paragraph quotations from the leading minds in the Cognitive Sciences meant to demonstrate the magnitude of this bias. Current theories are misrepresented, ridiculously simplified and mocked. But, while the authors effectively prove that great minds have shown a near unanimous unwillingness to accept supernatural theories, they entirely fail to demonstrate how this has hindered progress. Quite the contrary. After pressing through bloated pages of rambling anti-materialist drivel, the reader will likely become solidly convinced that the practice of “nonmaterialist science” as advocated by the authors could itself only serve to end scientific progress. According to the authors, this magical science “is not compelled to reject, deny, explain away, or treat as problems all evidence that defies materialism.” It is quite plain that, instead of seeking explanations for the unexpected or unknown, the nonmaterialist scientist would be perfectly at liberty to “explain” anomalous data as the mysterious workings of God.

Those readers who are convinced by the arguments exposing the follies of evidence-based science may find the presentation of evidence for the soul now entirely needless. However, the “evidence” is sparse enough that converts may immediately practice their newfound powers of credulity.

The primary data put forward as evidence for the soul regards mystical experiences and the profound life-changing effects such experiences have. The authors seem to feel that mystical experiences are indicative of entirely real spiritual contact with God Almighty Himself, and scoff at the idea that these perceptions are derived merely from an altered state of mind. “[T]he fact that mystical experiences and states may have identifiable neural correlates [...] has typically been interpreted by journalists as suggesting that the experiences are somehow a delusion. In itself, that is a confused idea, equivalent to assuming that if hitting a home run has identifiable neural correlates, the home run is a delusion.”

Author Mario Beauregard ran a study on Carmelite nuns, who “live a life of silent prayer”. These nuns report that they enter a “mystical state” that they find difficult to describe. “[T]hey felt the presence of God, his unconditional and infinite love [...]”

But this is precisely what any scientist might expect of a Christian sect of meditators attempting communion with God. Meditators of another religion would surely interpret their experience in their own spiritual frame-work. The authors mention Buddhist meditators, but fail to give an account of their interpretation of the Religious Experience: “The scope of the present book does not permit a wide-ranging assessment of all types of contemplative states, so we will consider only the study of the Franciscan nuns.”

In fact, cognitive scientists don’t shy away from the study of mystical experiences, nor would most deny that these experiences do have the ability to change lives. But the fact that these experiences occur provides no evidence for the existence of the soul or an outer “spiritual reality”. Because the Franciscan nuns interpret this as a communion with God doesn’t mean that we should accept this uncritically.

There is a rare neurological disorder (Capgras’ syndrome) in which the afflicted are capable of recognizing the faces of loved ones, but feel that these people have been replaced with an imposter. Would Beauregard have us believe that this is because exact human replica imposters delight in annoying perceptive victims of particular types of brain lesions, or would he see these unique conditions of the brain as having manufactured this perception? The former would be just as scientifically valid as his assertion that spiritual experiences are provoked by a spiritual world.

Curiously absent from this book is any mention of mystical experiences achieved by means of psychedelic drug usage. A recent study (performed at Johns Hopkins University under neuroscientist Roland Griffiths) involving the inducement of mystical experiences by means of psilocybin (the psychoactive component in “magic” mushrooms) produced a report titled Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. The report concludes, “When administered under supportive conditions, psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences.” If mystical experiences induced by heathen drugs are somehow to be distinguished from mystical experiences induced “naturally” by prayer or contemplation, Beauregard has failed to demonstrate this.

The authors, to their credit, actually do admit that there is no proof of a spirit world to be gleaned from the mystical experience: “Do our findings prove that mystics contact a power outside themselves? No, because there is no way to prove or disprove that from one side only.”

Research of the mystical experience as experienced by the Carmelite nuns was the only original data provided in this book, and it admittedly proves nothing.

For reasons unclear, the book references the well-known placebo effect as some type of evidence for the soul. The ultimate message in this bizarre placebo digression seems to be, “faith matters”, as belief itself has yielded tangible benefits. Equally perplexing is the handling of the question of Free Will, wherein the authors seem to mistake consciousness and self-control for Free Will. The most cursory perusal of available literature on the topic could have served to correct them.

In citing Near Death (NDE) and Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE) as evidence for the soul, the authors again fail to make mention of certain data that seem to contradict their conclusions. One relevant experiment involved subjects whose brains were electrically stimulated in the right temporal region, thus causing them to experience full blown Out-of-Body perception. If Out-of-Body experiences can be electrically induced, where does this leave the idea that such experiences are caused by supernatural spiritual forces?

Near Death Experiences are handled no better. Here again the authors are remiss in their research. Omitted is any mention of NDEs induced by the drug ketamine, or by rapid acceleration, in subjects who are not in fact dead, or in serious risk of dying. Instead, the unscientific supporting “evidence” is anecdotal.

Rarely, a “science” book that attempts to justify supernaturalism holds a certain entertainment value in its far-flung contortions of logic as it attempts to explain away contradictory evidence. As The Spiritual Brain merely ignored data that troubled its thesis, we’re generally denied any such entertainment here. Searching for some redeeming quality, we might be amused at the book’s tone as it oscillates from indignant confidence to near-resignation, confessing that the soul’s existence can not be proven. It’s the similar to the perverse entertainment one might find in witnessing a lunatic street-preacher who, while engaged in solo argument… finds that he is losing.

Denyse O’Leary replies:

Doug Mesner writes asking me to respond to a review of The Spiritual Brain which he published in Skeptic Magazine, and he has now helpfully made the review available on line.

Read Ms. O’Leary’s full reply here:

http://mindfulhack.blogspot.com/2009/04/skeptics-review-of-spiritual-brain.html

Not to waste anybody’s valuable time with a reply to a rebuttal that was meant to end a long unhelpful dialogue, but I feel I must justify my reference to the stem cell debate that so puzzled poor Ms. O’Leary (a reference that I must point out was not made in the review at all, but rather in the introduction to the review on this site).

As stem cells clearly lack a nervous system, the idea of their personhood or “dignity” (as some theologians are fond of calling it) seems reliant upon the idea of a “soul” having been assigned to the life-to-be in advance of their development from the embryonic.  That this would elude Ms. O’Leary of all people seems hardly credible to me.  This possible anti-stem cell research consequence of a belief in the immortal soul is worth mentioning to show why this issue is worth arguing at all.  There is more at stake here than Ms. O’Leary’s faith.  If there weren’t, I should hardly feel good about attacking that which gives some well-meaning people solace.

Also incredible to me is the idea that she doesn’t find my skeptical materialism worth arguing, as it is “dead in the water”.  A perusal of her blog will show you that she has written attack after attack against skeptical materialism – in fact, such arguments are the very themes of her numerous blogs.  To imagine that theological supernaturalism has long since replaced materialism in the realm of scientific inquiry (whatever that would really mean) is delusional at best.  I feel that I have done my best to expose the flaws of The Spiritual Brain, and the author’s refusal to address my charges lead me to believe that she simply can’t. I suspect her decision to bow out of the debate is nothing more than a concession of defeat…

The banana, Ray Comfort famously declared, is “the atheist’s nightmare”. Observe, if you will, the compelling evidence for God’s Creative Hand at work. A banana:

1. Is shaped for the human hand
2. Has a non-slip surface
3. Has outward indicators of inward content: Green — not ripe enough; Yellow — just right for eating; Black — too ripe
4. Has a tab for easy removal of its wrapper
5. Is perforated on the wrapper for easy peeling
6. Has a biodegradable wrapper
7. Is shaped for the human mouth
8. Is pleasing to the taste buds
9. Is curved towards the face to make the eating process easy

The public then craned their necks to observe this brilliant satirist of the Creationist position, only to find an earnest, adamant, evangelical. (With this in mind, I must say it is to my credit that I made none of the obvious jokes when interviewing him following his comment that his wife is “made for Comfort”.)

Ray Comfort by Alethea Jones

Comfort, it turns out, is no lone, babbling, innocuous street-preacher. He is a best-selling author of vitriolic anti-atheist screeds that declare non-believers to be unintelligent, lacking in the sixth sense – Common Sense, the “sense” that apparently puts intuition and gut-feeling above reason and science. With actor Kurt Cameron, Comfort runs a ministry, Way of the Master, which sports its own Evangelism Training Academy and television programme. He is president, founder, and CEO of Living Waters Publications with a stated mission to “inspire in every Christian a God-glorifying passion to fulfill The Great Commission”.

Comfort agreed to speak to me for half an hour by phone and, in his defense, we were past the half hour mark when he asked that we “wrap this up”.

******

Doug: Now what provoked you to write You Can Lead An Atheist to Evidence But You Can’t Make Him Think?

Ray: Well, God’s given us six senses, and the sixth sense is Common Sense. That’s the sense that atheists lack. I just want them to think a little. All you have to do is look around you to see the genius of God’s creative hand. That’s what the book brings out. Any atheist who thinks a little will change his world view very quickly.

That brings us to the question of how can you convince an atheist that God exists?

Well, if you’re in a building, look around and say to yourself, how do I know there was a builder? It is axiomatic that a building can not create itself. It can not build itself. Nor can a painting paint itself. A painting is absolute proof that there is a painter. A building is absolute, 100% scientific proof that there is a builder. There is no better evidence that there is a builder than to have a building. The same applies to the existence of God. Creation is 100% scientific evidence that there is a Creator. You can not have a Creation without a Creator. My agenda really isn’t to convince an atheist that God exists. He already knows he exists. The Book of Romans tells us this: that “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even as eternal power and godhead, so they are without excuse.” My aim is to convince the atheist that he needs God’s forgiveness, and to convince the person sitting on the fence that atheism isn’t intellectual, as some people think it is. It’s not scientific, as some people think it is. It’s more than foolish. In fact, the bible says that the atheist (and this is what we see today ) is not only a fool (Psalm 14 verse 1), but he’s a man who professes himself wise for becoming a fool. And that’s exactly what atheists and evolutionists do. They say, we don’t believe in God, and anybody who does is a knuckle-dragger who denies that science tells us the very opposite is the case.

Psalms 14:1 says, “Fools say in their hearts there is no God. Their deeds are loathsome and corrupt and not one does what is right.” There’s another one in Deuteronomy: “If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter or the wife of your bosom, or the friend who is not of your soul entices you secretly saying, ‘let us go and serve other Gods’, you should not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him. But you shall kill him. Your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hands of all the people. You shall stone him to death with stones.” – Deuteronomy 13:6.

…What do you make of that?

Well, Israel had 613 precepts in the law. The law is broken up into three governments. There is the Civil Law, the Ceremonial Law… Civil, Ceremonial. There’s another… I can’t remember. Oh, the Moral Law. The Moral Law is the Ten Commandments which tells us right from wrong. Civil Law was instructions to Israel to carry out court cases. If somebody violated the law, they would be punished, and the laws were very, very harsh. Especially against idolatry. If Israel strayed into idolatry, God gave the death sentence. Ceremonial Law is the one evolutionists often grab and say, ‘look, the bible is so stupid. It says you shouldn’t eat lobster. It says you shouldn’t mix wool with cotton.’ Well, we now know that wool mixed with cotton produces sweat within the human body and God said he didn’t want priests sweating when they came in to the temple. We know that the lobster eats off the bottom of the floor of the sea and it eats filthy stuff, and its meat isn’t exactly good. So, Ceremonial Law was just for the health of Israel. Civil Law was the court system that was put in place – and the Moral Law is the law that will judge humanity on the Day of Judgment. When you understand that, the bible begins to make a lot of sense.

So we’re not talking about actually killing atheists?

Of course not. We want to see them come alive. They’re dead in their trespasses and sins and we want them to come alive. I love atheists. I’ve had meals with them. A lot of atheists are my friends. So, no, I don’t want to kill atheists, I don’t want to kill homosexuals, I don’t want to kill people that disobey their parents. I want them to come to Christ.

This seems like a bit of interpretational hocus-pocus. The Vatican has done essentially the same thing with evolution. They have said that The Creation doesn’t need to be interpreted exactly as such, that Darwinian theory can fit in. But you don’t see it like that. You spoke out vehemently against the Catholic dictates of Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s Pontifical Counsel for Culture.

Yeah. Because there is no way you can reconcile the Bible with evolution. What you have to do is create your own God. Because the God who revealed himself to Israel said that he made male and female, made man in his own image – and God is not a primate. And the scriptures also say that there is one kind of flesh of beast and one kind of flesh of man. There is no way you can reconcile the two. What you have to do is create a God in your own image and say, ‘Yep, the God that I believe in’ – and this is what the Vatican says – says that they’re both reconcilable, that God created man as a primate that evolved into a human homo sapien. There is no way that the scriptures say that at all.

Humans are in the category of primate.

No. I don’t think so. I think man is made in the image of God, and that he’s completely excepted from animals in that he’s got moral accountability. He has a conscience. He sets up court systems. No way do you get dogs, horses, cats, cattle, or primates setting up court systems that mete out justice on those that transgress the laws that I’ve stated. Only man does that, because man is unique in the creation of God, and I believe that that’s because he is made in the image of God. I don’t believe we’re apes as many people do. Some of my friends act like apes, but I don’t believe they are.

…Yeah… Sorry – how do we distinguish the different types of laws in the Books?

That’s what the Jews do. If you’ve studied Jewish history, and studied Jewish scriptures, you’ll see that they break up the 613 precepts into 3 parts: Moral, Ceremonial, and Civil…

So you have the atheist, and you show him “Creation” and you say that it is created. That’s dependent on using the word Creation which presupposes a creator. Now to take it from the reverse, how do you show an atheist something that wasn’t created to compare against?

Can you name something that wasn’t created?

Well, if everything was created, that doesn’t give us a standard to set anything by.

I’m not sure what the question is, to be honest.

If one claims God created everything, then points at something itself as evidence that God created it doesn’t really stand up syllogistically as an argument.

It does if you’ve got Common Sense! That’s all you need! Okay… If God didn’t create everything, who created it?

When the question is “who”, that presupposes that somebody has planned it.

If evolution created everything, is evolution intelligent?

No. Evolution is -

Never mind creating a frog. Let me see. How would you start if you had to create a frog from nothing?? You’re saying evolution created everything from nothing, I’m saying God created everything from nothing. God is eternal, he’s without the dimension of time and he created all things from nothing.

So naturally the question is, where then did God come from?

And that’s a good question. He had no beginning, he has no end, because he doesn’t dwell within the dimension of time. God created Time and subjected man to it, and because we dwell in the dimension of time, logic demands a beginning and an end. God’s eternal. If you don’t believe that, take the time to study Bible prophecy. Look at Matthew 24, or Luke 21 and see how God can flick through history as you or I can flick through the pages of a history book. So, because God is eternal, because He dwells without the dimension of time, he fits the bill of creating the universe.

Well, but then, if something was eternal, why not the material world?

Because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics called entropy. If you leave an apple on the table for two weeks, it rots. If you leave a rock for a billion years, it turns to dust. If the universe was eternal, it would have turned to dust. Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says there’s no way the universe could be eternal, and that’s an accepted scientific fact.

Matter disperses in its concentrations, but -

Everything is subject to entropy. It rots.

- Which means our present form may dissolve, but not that the matter from which it came will disappear.

Then everything around us would be dust if it were eternal. But we don’t see that. We see flowers, birds, and trees, and fruits. And we see the genius of God’s creative hand. Look, let’s say I believed in evolution just for a moment. Let’s say there was a Big Bang. We won’t ask where the material came from for the Big Bang, but we’ll just believe that it happened. From there, after a billion years evolved the first dog. We see it evolved. Fully evolved. It’s got four legs, a wagging tail. It’s got a heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, and it’s got eyes. Over a billion years it couldn’t see, but now its eyes are fully evolved to a point in which it can see, and it needs to see, because it needs to find a female. It needs to find a female that evolved at the right place at the right time and the right reproductive organs with which it can mate. Because if he can’t find a female, he’s a dead dog. Then you’ve got to translate that same scenario over the giraffes, zebras, elephants, horses, cats, goats, fish, and birds. In fact there’s 1.4 million species, and every one of them had to have a female evolve at the right place at the right time with the right reproductive organs and a desire to mate, or they couldn’t keep the species going.

Which came first, the blood, the heart, or the blood vessels? If the heart came first, why did it evolve when there was no blood? If the blood came first, why did it evolve, and how did it get around without blood vessels? And if blood vessels came first, why did they evolve when there was no blood? The only way to reconcile this intellectually is to say to yourself, you know, man must have been created fully formed with fully functioning eyes, brain, lungs, heart, kidneys, blood, skin to hold it all in, alongside a female with the ability to reproduce after their own kind. There must have been dogs there with females, horses with females, to keep it all going.

When you think about evolution, it makes no sense at all. There’s no way it can be reconciled. I think it’s intellectually dishonest when we can’t create a grain of sand from nothing, to say this whole Creation just happened without an intelligent designer. I think it’s intellectually dishonest to say that.

Simulations have been run – particularly at MSU [Michigan State University] that allow basic components to follow Darwinian patterns, and what they show is that this can cause for very complex “creations”, and cellular biology covers this – but I must say, I don’t understand your female argument. If you look at biology, and study cellular biology, back to the level of mitosis and meiosis, males and females aren’t said to develop separately -

Then how did they get here? Why is it that every one of the 1.4 million species has a male and female, except for a few worms and things like that? Every single one of them! Giraffes, elephants, horses, male human beings have females. How did that happen? And how did they reproduce before there was male and female?

Male/Female reproduction serves a survival benefit [genetic diversity], but this really isn’t a good forum to go into the deep biology of it -

Do you know why?? Because evolution doesn’t have an answer…

It doesn’t need an answer on where the first male/female common ancestor first split under what circumstances. We can see that -

I do! I need an answer! I want to find answers!

Just because you need an answer doesn’t mean we have an answer, or that your answer is correct!

No. But as -

So is that good enough??

No. Being a skeptic, I want solid evidence. Faith is not enough. I’m not going to sit back and say I believe that Michigan State University did this, or that I believe million years ago, this. Evolution is based on a blind faith, and a pseudo science. I want facts. I used to believe evolution till I asked for facts, and I couldn’t find any.

You’re kidding me.

No I’m not kidding you.

Go to a bookstore. There are bookshelves full of books on evolution that answer exactly the things you’re talking about.

I’ve been to museums where I’ve been told there are millions of fossils. I went to the Grand Evolution Museum in Paris with a camera crew. I spent an hour with my crew looking for the evolution display and evidence. We had to ask somebody, and they took us to a stuffed monkey with ‘Lucy’ written on it and Origin of Species in a glass case. That’s all they had, and that’s all they’ve got. They say that there are millions of fossils in the fossil record, and millions of bones, and there are! But they speak of Intelligent Design. They don’t speak of evolution. There’s no species to species transitional forms in the fossil record. There is none! And the Missing Link is still missing, despite what people may say.

There’s always missing links. As somebody said, once you fill in one spot with a missing link, you’ve opened two more gaps on either side of it. How do you explain Lucy? Is Lucy not a “missing link”?

No! Of course not. It’s just like the other things. Paleontologists have a huge incentive to just exaggerate a little. Just move this – just call… If you can find a bone with a lump on it, and come up with a theory, and call it a big name, and say that it’s 73 million years old, you could get your face on National Geographic magazine. You could get a book deal. You could be set for life speaking about the discovery you made. I’m a skeptic. I want proof. I’m not just going to say, I believe. I want proof when it comes to something as important as evolution, because your eternity’s at stake. If you say there is no God, that evolution created everything, that everything came from nothing – well, then you’re going to live your life accordingly. You’re going to ignore the claims of the Gospel, you’re not going to repent of your sins and trust the saviour – so it’s a huge issue for Christians.

It is for Christians. That’s Pascal’s Wager. My problem with that is, it’s not between one and the other. It’s not between believing in God and having your proper eternity, or not believing in God. It’s between a whole slew of Gods… or no Gods.

Remember the First Commandment? “Thou Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me”. Of course there are other gods. They are images that man makes up. They are other gods that he feels comfortable with. I did it before I was a Christian. I didn’t shape a God with my hands, but I shaped a God with my mind, a God I felt comfortable with, a God I could snuggle up to, it was a non-existent God that was a figment of my imagination. You know, the atheists believe that everything came from nothing. And he’ll deny that through gritted teeth because it’s intellectually embarrassing. If you say, I have no belief that my Ford truck had a maker… that means you think it just happened.

But if you have a God that came from nothing, you really haven’t resolved anything…

No, no, no, no! NO! NO! God is eternal. He didn’t come from nothing.

That’s just magic-ing the question away.

No, no. It’s not if it’s the truth. He has no beginning and no end. You know, space has no beginning and no end. If you say -

Then why isn’t Space the Grand Creator? “Space: The First Cause”?

Because God’s the Creator of Space. The Creator of the Universe. Space can’t create itself. A painting can not paint itself. There’s got to be a painter, there’s got to be a builder.

And there’s that language game of calling it “Creation”. What if we call everything we can observe, feel, “The Natural World”? So it necessarily follows the laws of Physics, the -

Well, there’s a natural world, there’s a supernatural creator…

[pause]

…See. You see order wherever you look, from the atom to the Universe, there’s order. If you look down the beach and you saw that someone had written in the sand, “Tommy, be home at 2 o’clock for dinner”, you’ve got to say an intelligent mind created it. DNA is a language! It tells us that there’s a designer! The more man’s knowledge grows, the more he should be in awe of what God’s done with his Creation. Look at the flowers, the birds, the trees. The seasons come round every year. Grab a peach, or an orange, or an apple. All these things tell us there’s an intelligent mind. Everything we eat comes from the soil. I mean, what kind of miracle is that?? Everything we eat comes from the soil! It yields, just like the Bible says, “food for man”.

Do you think you’re a good person???

…Hmm. More or less…

Let me ask you something. This will convince you more than anything else of what I’m trying to say.

How many lies have you told in your life?

That’s hard to quantify…

50? 100? 200? Lost count?

Hmmmm…

It’s a hard question. So – what do you call somebody who tells lies?

It depends. They could be a survivalist depending on the situation, or they could -

I’m talking about people who tell lies. It rhymes with fire, begins with L.

Okay. “Liar”.

Have you ever stolen anything in your life, even if small?

Yup.

What do you call somebody who steals things?

Thief.

Have you ever taken the Lord’s name in vain?

Yeah.

That’s called blasphemy, using God’s name is a cuss word. And Jesus said that if you look at a woman and lust for her, you’ve already committed adultery in your heart.

Then why not have sex with her too?

Well, you do what you might. So here’s a summation of your moral state, by your own admission: you’re a lying thief, a blasphemer and an adulterer at heart. And that’s only four of the 10 commandments!

Oh, come on! Are you going to tell me you’re not too?

I’ve broken all those commandments, probably more than you. That’s why I need a saviour. That’s why I need somebody to wash away my sins. So I can stand before holy God on the Day of Judgment and not be condemned to Hell. That’s why Christ died. So your sins could be washed away. Mine were washed away 36 years ago. That doesn’t mean I can live like a hypocrite, but it means that I’ve got ever-lasting life, and that’s what I want to share with other people. So the issue really isn’t an intellectual issue, it’s a moral issue. Christianity throws a wet, heavy blanket on a sinful lifestyle. And to change that whole world-view in an instant, somebody can dismiss the whole moral issue by saying, I don’t believe in God, I believe in evolution, I’m not morally responsible to God. I am an animal. These sexual prowlings I have are just me trying to keep my species going – and that’s really the issue.

I don’t think that non-believers are generally so to give themselves moral license.

You can’t say that, because there may be some that are.

There may be some that are, but I don’t think that’s the grand underlying reason for atheism. If our morals come from God, and this is something we feel instinctively, we’re programmed from God’s Word to feel, then how could there be conflicting moral codes?

How do you mean?

How is it that I’d have a different set of morals from anybody else? We’re all getting it from the same source.

We all have our free choice as human beings. We’re not robots. And if I want to steal, I can steal. If I want to rape, I can rape. If I want to lust, I can lust. You can consider stealing to be okay. You can say, my boss is rich, it’s not really stealing. We tend to do this as human beings, but that doesn’t make any difference. God is a moral absolute, and stealing’s wrong, and we have a conscience to tell us it’s wrong.

This is still talking about giving yourself license to do something that’s “wrong”. I’m talking about having a set of morals that isn’t biblical, nor self-serving. For example, I saw on your website that you had attributed the drought and wild-fires in California to homosexual marriage -

No! That’s not my website. I wouldn’t say that! ¹

Atheist Central?

No. That would be a homo– an atheist saying I’d said that. I’d never say that.

Is Atheist Central yours???

Oh, yeah, but it’s not me saying it. You probably read a comment from an atheist saying, ‘you say that…’ No, I’d never say that.

So you wouldn’t say that God would lay wrath upon us for homosexual marriage?

I would say that when we have a nation that has tornados and hurricanes, droughts, fires, and cancer that’s just consuming the nation – these are not a sign of God’s blessings. The Bible says, righteousness exalts nations. If we’re a country that does right and does good, God says he’ll give us good weather, and good crops, and bless the fruit of the womb. So what we’re seeing in the United States at the moment is not God’s Hand of Blessing, but I never said that God’s wrath will come upon the nation for homosexuality. But I’m not saying homosexuality’s right, obviously.

But, if I understand correctly, you’d also be entirely opposed to gay marriage -

- And bestiality, and adultery, and rape. Oh, absolutely.

See. That’s just a point we disagree on. But I’m not giving myself license to do anything here, and yet I feel that homosexuals should have the same rights as anybody else -

What about paedophiles?

I don’t see how that’s similar.

No. But I’m asking you a question… Why not paedophiles? Why can’t they have the same rights as anybody else?

We’re talking consensual. We’re talking about adults, and when we say adults -

A consensual kid, a 10 year old who wants to have sex and play around with a man who’s, you know, 43? What’s wrong with that??

We don’t consider them old enough to make that decision yet.

Well, let’s say it’s consensual, and the kid says, I’m old enough, I know what I’m doing?

What you’re saying -

What you’ve got is – if you start making up your own moral code, what are you basing it on? You know – child pornography. Is that okay? The kid doesn’t know about it. You know, they film the kids when they’re naked, and there’s a hidden camera. They sell the photos. What’s wrong with that?

I still don’t understand how this relates – ?

What I’m saying is that if you start saying that something is right by what I feel, society says it’s okay, where’s it going to stop?

But if what I feel comes from God to begin with, and I’m not giving myself license through my own moral code, where does that come from, if not from “God”. Clearly there’s a separate moral source.

It comes from your feelings, and you can’t trust your feelings. That’s why God gave us the Bible. The Bible puts in black & white God’s will. And you can read his will. It’s the New Testament. It’s the will of God. It’s what God wants, and he says thieves, adulterers, fornicators, homosexuals, etc. will not inherit the Kingdom of God, so what I feel doesn’t matter.

Okay. So we don’t feel the morals that “God” instilled in us? It’s all just text.

No! You’ve got a conscience, and if you listen to your conscience -

Exactly! That’s what I mean. How can my conscience contradict “God”?

The bible says, sear your conscience. Have you ever taken a steak and thrown it on a hot plate, and you actually kill the outside of the steak and make it hard, but on the inside it is tender. That’s called “searing” a steak. You can sear your conscience. You can actually harden it. So, the first time you look at pornography, you think, oh I feel guilty. Second time, not so guilty. Fifteenth time, your conscience doesn’t even speak to you. What you’ve done is sear your conscience. So a conscience isn’t reliable. That’s why you need the bible. It tells you in black & white what God says is right and what God says is wrong. That make sense???

If you didn’t have the Bible, would you act immorally?

Yeah. We all act immorally, whether with the Bible or not.

But you wouldn’t rape or murder or whatever else if you didn’t have the Bible to tell you not to.

Well, why were there 200,000 people murdered in the United States between the years of 1990 and the year 2000? In a 10 year period, 200,000 Americans – murdered! People still murder. We do wrong, because we have a propensity to do evil. We lie and steal and lust and commit adultery and fornicate, because we love to sin – and when you become a Christian, God changes your heart, so you love that which is right and hate that which is wrong.

What of Christians who commit murder?

That’s called hypocrisy. Christians that commit adultery and murder, and lie and steal – that’s hypocrisy. Hypocrite means “pretender”. If you’re not fooled by a hypocrite, how much less is God? So, don’t worry about hypocrites, they’ll answer to God on Judgment Day.

Well… okay. I just have to get back to the female question…

(Laughs) Don’t all men feel like that?

This idea that… (sighs)… I just hope you can elaborate this more. The idea that females kind of developed — I’m actually not sure how you picture this. I’m really not sure what your concept is on the biology of male/female division.

Well, everywhere I see, I see male and female: giraffes, elephants, horses, cattle, sheep, goats, fish, birds. Everywhere! You ask the evolutionists how this happened. They’ve got no answer…

But they do.

Well, then tell me simply, what happened? Where did the female come from and how did it happen to 1.4 million species without an intelligent mind?

Okay. This goes to Cellular Biology, and they have a common ancestor, all males and females, and they’re not left in separate locations at separate times to find one another! We’re talking about a method of reproduction -

How could they reproduce without a female? They can’t just split in two.

Cells can -

When did the dog start doing the female thing? When did she come along? And the elephant, and the giraffe, and the horse, and male and female homo sapiens? It becomes a huge nightmare when you start thinking about it.

No. You see, we have a common ancestor at the cellular level and beyond. And this does take a good deal of explanation, but my challenge to you then is if I can show you clippings from five textbooks that explain this process -

From billions of years ago. And then I have to believe this, because the professor tells me.

You don’t have to believe this, but you have to admit that you’re misrepresenting Biology.

No I’m not. Not scientific Biology. There’s a pseudoscience. A lot of these scientists should have got jobs as Disney imagineers, because their beliefs are based on imaginations of men. That’s my opinion. And I’m allowed my opinion because this is America. I don’t have to be shaped in a mould and believe the theory of evolution. And I don’t believe Evolution, even though I did once. So what we’re going to have to do is agree to differ, but that’s healthy, isn’t it?

It is healthy. But I do have a problem in that you associate yourself with people like Pat Robertson -

No I don’t.

You do his programme!

I’m doing an interview with you!! It doesn’t mean I’m married to you! Wouldn’t say I’m associated with you.

Yes, but Robertson’s more low-brow.

More what?

Low-brow.

Yeah, well, that’s your opinion. I think he’s a nice guy.

Here’s a guy who, with Falwell – who was a plainly odious character – claimed that 9/11 was some kind of vengeance for -

Well, I would never say that.

I’m glad to know that.

It’s an awful thing. Think of the relatives hearing that.

Exactly. I agree. And my problem with people’s beliefs imposing on public policy is-

Well, remember, it’s people’s opinions, and this is America, and that’s allowed. It’s not people’s beliefs being imposed upon people. I’m not imposing my opinion on you. I’ve got my belief, you’ve got yours, and that’s fine.

What of these “bad atheists” [you write about] who are trying to “take away the rights of Christians”? I don’t see that…

No, it’s the rights of Americans. We have a Freedom of Religion in this country like no other nation. We can be a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, Christian, Jew, Gentile. That’s been purchased by the blood of our soldiers. We’ve got a wonderful freedom in this country. What certain atheists have got an agenda to do is – not to push their beliefs or opinions – they legally are taking away these rights of freedom of worship in this country, and I’m going to fight it.

How are they doing this?

Suing the Gideons for giving bibles out in schools.

That’s just Separation of Church and State. They can distribute propaganda anywhere else.

They can give bibles out in schools. This is America. Come on! The Bible’s a wonderful History book.

Not at a State-sponsored school.

It’s Freedom of Literature. Why not give a bible out in schools? It’s the world’s greatest seller. Let them become educated. Let them make up their own minds. Let’s teach Evolution and Creationism. What’s wrong with that? Why censor Intelligent Design?

Because it has no basis in Science.

It is Science.

How is it Science?

It’s The TRUTH! And you’re censoring Science.

I would have to direct you to the judge’s ruling in the Dover trial and tell you that it [Intelligent Design] is not Science. Evolution has a vast body of research supporting it. Somebody like Richard Dawkins, or PZ Meyers – even though I know he adjudged you a moron – to call them “unintelligent” -

Yes, they’re both very silly men. Dawkins thinks that we came from aliens, and that aliens created everything. And PZ Meyers is in that same category, so I don’t see these as being intelligent, as you do. I see them as having great, great faith – blind faith amidst the genius of God’s Creation.

And you know what? I have a beautiful wife who’s just come home. I leave for Florida tonight on a plane. I just got back from New Zealand three days ago after being seven days here, so I really want to have dinner with her, so can we wrap this up?

Sure.

She’s a beautiful wife. Made for Comfort.

Okay. Very good. Thank you very much for talking to me…

It’s been really good talking to you, Doug…

1. You be the judge.  On his site, Ray received this comment: “There’ve been several hundred gay marriages enacted in California in the past few days. Maybe a couple of thousand by now, I haven’t checked the numbers. And in the non-gay-marrying Midwest, they’re fighting floods, while in California it’s fair and dry. How is The Golden State managing to escape the wrath of your imaginary friend, I wonder?” It was attributed to the name of “Weemaryanne”.  Ray’s response was as follows: “Maryanne. At present there are 840 wild-fires that are burning at once in California, destroying many homes. The fires were started by lightning strikes. Guess who’s in charge of the electrical department? These are from thunder storms that have no rain. Guess who gives the rain? You said “while in California it’s fair and dry.” We are having the worst drought in our recorded history. Last year 1,155 homes were destroyed. You live in an imaginary world. I suggest you get out more.” http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/2008/06/atheist-worldview.html

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

Already well aware that the film is Creationist propaganda, and previously informed as to the arguments that were to be presented therein, I didn’t particularly expect a rational, thought-provoking piece, but I actually did expect a well-produced, emotionally driven piece that might have served to give its arguments at least the appearance of credibility… Instead what I found was a muddled collage of unconvincing half-arguments poorly paced amidst constipated footage of Stein often doing nothing more than walking or reflecting. In one such prolonged scene, Stein visits a museum of Natural History, wherein he stares into the face of a statue representation of his nemesis, Charles Darwin. Stein’s face is shiftless and rigid, betraying no emotion whatsoever, and one is almost convinced that it is Stein who will ultimately win the staring contest. What this is meant to convey is uncertain, but it does reveal that, outside of his typical undemanding dead-pan roles, Stein is worthless as an actor.

In attempting to establish a link between Darwin’s theory and Nazi eugenics, Stein visits Hadamar, a former Nazi doctor testing facility (now converted into a memorial museum) wherein human subjects – “life unworthy of life” – were cold-heartedly utilized. In a scene more droll and monotonous than Stein’s narrative voice, the viewer is taken through the facility one mostly-empty room at a time as a tour guide wearily explains the significance of each in fractured English. The apparent refusal to employ editing leads to the only real suspense of the film: one begins to dread the possibility that the doddering old Stein will soil his Depends, and the viewer will be forced to watch him use the lavatory (though such a scene would arguably have been the most tasteful in the film). Worse, the point is unclear. The film promotes a concept of Intelligent Design that concedes variation within a species (”microevolution”), but denies that one species might ever evolve into another (”macroevolution”). But does this concession to heredity not allow for an ID-acceptable eugenics? The Nazis were not trying to breed a new species, but an “improved” population of humans, for which only an acceptance of heredity is necessary. Further, is not the relegation of blame upon believers in Evolutionary Theory for the crimes of Nazi Germany rather the same as blaming the grievous destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the believers in Atomic Theory?

The concession to heredity adds another element of confusion to the film: one of Stein’s Creationists claims (and I paraphrase for a lack of an actual recording), there are no clear answers in Evolution. ‘They’ can not even tell you where a line is drawn between one species and the next. And yet, without this distinction, how is it that the ID superstition distinguishes between micro and macro-evolution?

The premise of the film, that there exists a conspiracy within academia that acts to shut-out and discredit scientists who have found evidence for design, is very apparently feeble, and seriously under-represented as a core argument. Some professors didn’t have their contracts renewed and suspect discrimination against their public ID convictions. I actually believe that this could be the case – and maybe even should be the case when professors allow their religious convictions to trump reason – but the film didn’t convince me that this was actually happening.

In an attempt to spice-up their bland footage, the film-makers interjected various clips of public domain stock footage, mostly of prison camps and soldiers in combat meant to illustrate the idea of a raging war between science and religion. Unfortunately, this too comes off as excessively contrived – much like an amateur lap-top filmmaker YouTube debut pieced together from archive.org downloads – and quickly grows tiresome with over-use. Just the same, the film does have a few moments of inadvertent humour. Particularly, there is a scene in which an ID advocate is making the case that there has been a coup within academia, carried out by militant atheists. This state-of-affairs, he claims, this atheism within academia is a recent development. He informs us that all of the great scientists of the past were religious. He cites Newton… perhaps Kepler, and – with no apparent sense of irony (or even History) – Galileo!

For its climax, the film commits what I believe to be a cinematic faux pas of the highest order. It’s like this: Stein arranges an interview with Richard Dawkins, who is portrayed as something of a kingpin within The Establishment’s dogmatically atheist Science junta. It is impossible to feel any bit of the suspense during the lead-up to this confrontation – a suspense that the film tries so desperately to build – because throughout the film the viewer has already been inundated with brief clips from that very interview! It is the very definition of “anti-climax”.

And the Dawkins interview is ridiculously handled. The suspense is meant to mount as footage oscillates between Stein being driven to meet Dawkins, and Dawkins waiting in a darkened room for his arrival. We observe Dawkins having his face powdered in preparation of appearing on film. This is probably meant to convey that Dawkins puts on a false front… a mask… has something to hide. It is a cheap trick, of course. Clearly, the powder girl was Stein’s own, and I’d bet heavily that it was Stein’s people who recommended the facial prepping.

Stein pulls up… Dawkins is tapping his fingers on the table. Nervous perhaps? No. The tactless Stein gives the whole game away when he walks in. Richard Dawkins, he greets him, sorry to have kept you waiting. Obviously, this wait was annoying contrivance, an insult not only to the satanic Dawkins, but to the viewer as well.

The Dawkins interview, though, does provide some of the best moments of inadvertent hilarity. The first came when Stein asked (again, I paraphrase), “If God didn’t create the universe, who did?”

What does such a question even mean? How could Stein really not understand that to Dawkins any “who” would qualify as a god? Did Stein honestly need it explained to him that, to Dawkins, the question is not one of who, but what? Perhaps it wasn’t an old guy named God who created the universe, but rather an omnipotent entity named, say, Bob?

Another display of gross ignorance shortly follows. Stein asks Dawkins, “If you were to die and meet ‘god’ today, and he said to you, ‘Richard, why did you despise me so, after everything I’ve done for you? I gave you a good life, a multi-million dollar book deal…’ What would you say?” And so, it seems, in Stein’s delusional mind, it was God who commissioned The God Delusion! Dawkins’s patience in the face of such inanities is nothing short of saintly.

These are only a few criticisms of what I rank among one of the worst films of all time. But I grow weary now, and have decided to retire my observations here. I left the theater with a vague feeling of shame² and disgust, but also with a mild flicker of hope. It’s just possible that this film, rather than achieving its intended goal of advancing Intelligent Design, will help to drive some nails into its stubborn coffin. It’s hard to believe that an ID believer could watch this bomb and not be stricken when faced with how unreasoned and crude their arguments truly are.

1. Most notably, the reviews of Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, and PZ Meyers
2. I feel I must point out that I agreed to attend the film with a friend of mine on the condition that we purchase tickets for a more tasteful film, Prom Night, instead

Magicians guard an empty safe. There are few secrets that they possess which are beyond a gradeschool science class, little technology more complex than a rubber band, a square of black fabric or a length of thread.

Indeed, most spectators are disappointed to learn the techniques of the theater magician. Knowing that they are being deceived, the audience is always looking for the gimmick, the misdirection, a give-away. Their minds are trying to puzzle out an idea of “how”, and are only impressed when they are capable of none. Theater magic is a difficult and demanding profession, substantially lucrative only to a select established minority. A skilled magician, deft in sleight-of-hand, practiced in illusion, and well-spoken in scripted monologues, most likely works a “day job” while performing his art for extra money on-the-side. On the other hand, a bullshit artist employing but one routine – even (and most usually) very poorly – outside of the context of stage magic, can usually coax large sums from credulous rubes. Thus, a cheap mountebank, having learned the relatively unimpressive carnival routine known as The Blockhead, can declare himself John of God, a “Faith Healer”, so as to bamboozle the sick, superstitious and simple. An unscrupulous charlatan like Uri Geller can build a career from his – at times – clumsily executed spoon-bending routine. Cheap mentalists utilising common magic shop gimmicks convince lay-people of their powers of telepathy with disturbing regularity. Perhaps most perplexing of all, though, is the enormous success of the “psychic” who often displays no skills of illusion, or even the appearance of an increased perception. Using a basic technique of Cold-Reading that utilises vague statements, subtle questioning, and platitudinous advice, these relatively unskilled cons can often extract an indecent fee from their only-too-happy-to-be-fooled clientele.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to observe some cold reading practitioners in action when I stayed in the home of Salem “witch” Shawn Poirier (who has since died… R.I.P.)

* * *

It’s late October 2005 and I’m having difficulty sleeping in the house of Salem’s lead witch. Not for fear of falling victim to some bizarre black magic death ritual – Shawn Poirier is a cordial host – but for reason of more common discomforts; the room smells of cat shit, the temperature seems to remain steady at some level only slightly above freezing.

Shawn crawls out of bed around 8:00 am. It’s an unusually mundane hour for those of ungodly loyalties. The night had been passed in a dreamless unconsciousness following a fit of vomiting. Something about the pain-killers he coerced out of a doctor in the ER didn’t sit well with the liquor. But this is no time to sleep in, or, for that matter, sleep it off. This is the end of October – a particularly busy season for the Witches of Salem, and Shawn is the King of the Salem Witches. It’s a day in The Festival of The Dead, an annual event organized by Shawn and his partner, a fellow “Elder of Salem Witchcraft”, Christian Day that spans the entire month of October. There is a Psychic Fair to oversee, rituals to perform, and tours to guide.

I happen to be there with a notorious promoter, organizer, publisher, internet radio host, and hyper-active Free Speech advocate, Shane Bugbee. Shane and I are to present a True Crime lecture later in the evening as an added attraction to the Festival of the Dead.

Luckily, Shawn has but to don a black, pointed, costume shop witch’s hat over his uncombed mess of long, black hair, throw on a black velvet cloak over his snuggly flannel pajamas, and he’s ready to leave the house to conduct business. Towering – when vertical – at around 6′5″, and weighing in at around 300 lbs, Shawn projects an imposing air. He’s exactly what one would expect a male witch or vagabond Hell’s Angel to look like. The fearsome image is maintained only until he speaks. Shawn communicates in a comically incongruous effeminate lisp.

Shawn’s market consists of tourists who converge on Salem each October for the city’s peculiar Halloween-specific appeal. Since the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692, the name “Salem” has become synonymous with witchcraft, superstition, and persecution. During that embarrassing episode of American Religious History, 19 people were hanged and one was flattened under the weight of heavy stones – convicted on the accusations of jealous or vindictive neighbors – for imaginary crimes against Christian decency, performed in the name of Satan. During 2004, Salem mayor Stanley Usovicz considered the possibility of pardoning those executed in the early puritan witch-hunt….sometime in 2007.

Today, in less archaic, bleak, superstitious times, Salem is where tourists travel to speak with self-proclaimed witches and pay them large sums to give vague statements concerning – primarily – their love-lives, careers, money, and health. While this may all seem no less superstitious than the Salem of 1692, it is undoubtedly less violent, though, perhaps, not entirely benign.

In fact, Shawn and his witches are symptomatic of a world-wide outbreak of unreason. Poll after poll shows a majority of the lay-person masses to be skeptical of science, yet susceptible to easily disproved notions of supernatural phenomena including abduction by small, orifice-invading aliens, and worthless witch doctor cures from homeopathy to crystals.

Shawn himself is highly amused. Sitting in the Living Room of his modest middle-class suburban Salem home (a home that, according to him, was entirely purchased “by the Dark Arts”), he has just enough time to slip an old VHS tape into his VCR before tending to the Festival. It’s his favorite television appearance: a BBC documentary about witchcraft and the occult in Salem. Throughout the video, Shawn can be seen performing rituals and speaking of Salem history. His own editorial of the film, delivered while smoking marijuana on his couch, is surprisingly honest. To his credit, Shawn has accurately “intuited” that Shane and I are no strangers to mystical rhetoric and aren’t to be taken for rubes.

“I made all of that up.” Shawn says of an “ancient” ritual he performed on camera. Set to highly dramatic music and slick professional camera work, Shawn gives the apparently terror-stricken, intrepid film crew a tour of one of Salem’s most famous landmarks; the ominous, black Witch House, an architectural relic that used to be home to a judge, Jonathan Corwin, during the Witch Trials. Shawn’s on-camera tour of the house, given at mid-night for maximum effect, includes a harrowing tale of an accused witch who, according to Shawn, was tortured while strapped to a chair that still sits eerily against a wall. So as to validate the tale, the BBC brought a professional psychic into the house who, remarkably, felt terrifying vibrations emanating from that very chair. “I made up that whole thing about the chair, too.” Shawn remarks, admitting that he knew very little about the actual history of the Witch House, but felt compelled to produce a “little known” fact for the benefit of the camera.

Shawn loves publicity and attention. He’s appeared on The Discovery Channel, The Travel Channel, MTV, The BBC, Playgirl magazine (though, thankfully, not in the nude) and numerous spots on NPR. Probably Shawn’s least favorite appearance was a spot on Showtime’s “Bullshit”, hosted by Las Vegas stage magicians Penn & Teller. “Bullshit” is a show dedicated to de-bunking quackery, new-age hocus pocus, pseudo-science, and un-truths in general. Shawn was an easy target. Recalling his appearance on “Bullshit”, Shawn claims that he didn’t mind the skeptical, inglorious presentation of his occult practices, but he didn’t appreciate the dishonesty with which the “Bullshit” film crew approached him. Ironic.

Though it is generally agreed that the accused witches of 1692 Salem weren’t actually practicing any occult rituals, and it is almost universally agreed that they never actually fornicated with the devil during unholy Sabbath rituals, enough people seem willing to suspend their disbelief, or exercise their gullibility, to participate in Shawn’s occult antics. Walking with Shawn through the streets of Salem is similar to walking with a rock-star in any other American city. Tourists want their pictures taken with him, people stop and point. In most cities, Shawn would be taken for just another gaudy gothic clubber. In Salem, he’s a celebrity.

Upon arrival at the psychic fair, Shawn’s witches try desperately to impress Shane and I with their psychic talents.

“Who died?” One hapless witch asks Shane who, like me, after the long travel and uneasy sleep, is in no mood to play along. “Where do want me to begin?” He asks her.

Undaunted, she moves to her next victim… me. “Why aren’t you down south?”

More confusion.

“Why would I be?” I dryly respond. Failure.

What was just witnessed was a rather lame attempt at what is known as “cold-reading”, the process by which stage-psychics fish for clues from their chosen marks so as to impress them later with what they have “psychically” divined.

Later, while arranging items ranging from original letters written by John Wayne Gacy, to a hatchet used by psychotic serial killer Ed Gein, Shane and I are perplexed by a wandering psychic who claims to feel the evil “vibrations” from the objects that also, aside from vibrating, seem to burn the skin of the sensitive psychic who touches them.

Unconvinced, Shane produces some standard silverware and holds them out to the psychic while concocting a story about their history of use as brutal weapons in crime. Oddly, the psychic neither detects the deception, nor do the vibrations and burning sensations lessen with the introduction of objects undefiled.

That evening, against the wishes of Salem’s mayor who, despite having no idea what the actual content of our presentation was to be decided that Shane and I would “contribute nothing positive” to the Halloween festivities, we gave our lecture on True Crime to an unresponsive and generally hostile audience. Neither glorifying crime nor preaching morality, I delivered a speech in defense of full factual disclosure. Ignoring the brutal details of crime may serve to sanitize and glorify the act more than if one were to face all the facts head-on.

After a day of psychic readings, divination, and Black Magic, I couldn’t help but feel that Shane and I would have done better had we alluded to an International Satanic Conspiracy and “true” cases of “vampirism”.

We parted politely, yet uneasily from the Salem witches. I had a distinct feeling that both parties felt that they had been bullshitted.

* * *

The Dubious Art of Cold-Reading: An Interview With Michael Shermer

Why is it that ambiguous statements – sometimes no more insightful than those in a poorly hacked county newspaper horoscope – have the power to impress people as evidence of psychic ability? Why is it that with literacy and communication constantly improving, the belief in mystical oracles seems no more diminished?

Dr. Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society and the author of such books as, Why People Believe Weird Things, and, How We Believe, explains:

MS: It’s prevalent because we are by nature superstitious. We tend to want to believe certain things and, according to the Confirmation Bias, find evidence that supports what we want to believe is true, and then just ignore all the contradictory evidence. The Confirmation Bias is what drives and fuels conspiracy theories or things like the Da Vinci Code… anything. So if you want to believe that the dead are on the “other side” and that people can talk to them, you’ll go to a psychic and remember the hits and ignore all the misses – the hundreds of misses that they make – and remember the half dozen hits, and think that there’s something to it. So, as a psychological process, it’s not at all a surprise that it operates so well because we’re not designed by evolution to think scientifically, we think anecdotally. We hear anecdotes about this kind of thing and think that there must be something to it.

Q: So you don’t think that superstition is actually increasing or spreading, but rather, it’s a human constant?

MS: I think if anything, in the long-run, it’s getting better. If you compare our age to the Middle Ages, I think that things are much better than they were in terms of percentages of the population that believes in a lot of destructive superstition.

I think there will always be a sizable number of people that believes weird things. The Weird Things themselves, however, change. I mean, this whole business of talking to the dead – it cycles in and out of popularity. It’s popular now, but it wasn’t popular for a while. It was hugely popular back in the 1920s when Houdini was de-bunking it. These things kind of come and go.

Q: Is there actually no evidence of psychic ability in man or animal?

MS: None at all. No. And they’ve been testing this for a hundred years now – good, rigorous, controlled experiments, and they still really have nothing to speak of.

Q: Well, the sham psychic readings seem to have the feel of an ad hoc psychotherapy session, so one might argue that there is some good that comes of indulging in such things.

MS: Well, right – but that’s sort of like saying, what’s the harm in alcohol? It leads to other things that are destructive in life. Bad ideas are just as poisonous as alcohol. In many ways, worse. People go to war over bad ideas. They kill people. They blow up abortion clinics and fly planes into buildings, purely on bad ideas. It can be very dangerous.

Q: Could you briefly describe how cold-readings are done?

MS: Well, the readings are done – it’s actually cold-reading, warm-reading, and hot-reading – cold-reading is when you literally read someone cold whom you’ve never met, and there you throw out lots and lots of comments, ask a lot of questions, and look for feed-back, and start honing in on things that you’re getting feed-back on.

With the warm-reading technique, you say things that are true for everybody – enough that you are bound to get quite a few hits. So, if it’s a talking-to-the-dead sort of thing – if it’s a guy whose father or grandfather passed over, you talk about his watch. “There’s something about the watch… what does that mean, please?” Most guys keep their Dad’s or Grandfather’s watch when they pass over. If it’s a woman who’s lost a mother, grandmother – women usually keep a piece of jewelry; a necklace, a bracelet, something like that. Everybody keeps a keepsake – photographs, articles of clothing, whatever, of their lost loved ones. You throw those kinds of things out, you’re bound to get hits. Those are warm-readings, they’re true for most people.

Now, in hot-reading, you actually just cheat. You actually get information on people. I don’t think most psychics do that because you don’t really need to do it. The first two cold and warm-readings will get you the information you need – enough to convince people that you’re for real. Again, you don’t have to be very accurate at all. You only need to have about a five to ten percent hit-rate. If you ask a hundred questions or make a hundred comments – if you only get five or ten of them right – that’s good enough. People will come out shocked at how good you are. They’ll cry. They’ll boast about your incredible psychic powers. They’ll ask, “How do you explain that he got the name of my uncle Bob?” Well, how do explain that he rattled off 27 other names that meant nothing to you? See, people remember the meaningful names and forget the non-meaningful ones.

Q: Do think that some of these people actually believe that they’re psychic?

MS: Yes, I do. I think that some of them are just scam artists that know they’re faking. But, I think others have come to believe they can do it by their own positive feedback that they get from their clients. I think that they themselves improve at it – it is a skill, it’s like acting – you get better with practice. I think it’s a skill they develop and as they get better, they get more positive feedback, which gives them more confidence. Exuding confidence makes them more effective as “psychics” and it’s a positive feedback loop that gets set up there.

Q: Why can’t science conclusively dis-prove psychic ability?

MS: Well, the burden of proof is on them to show us that it does exist, not us to prove it doesn’t – and they have yet to do that. However, we can attempt to test whether people can read the minds of other people and when the tests fail, we can conclude there is no effect.

Michael Shermer has performed successful cold-readings that convinced his clients that he is a gifted psychic. He writes about his cold-reading experiments in his book, Science Friction.