Here was the phenomenon we call snapping in its most extreme physical form.
"I walked out of est," she continued, "and I walked about a mile home and just went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, I was disoriented and scared to death. I didn't want any part of est. I called the city's mental health service and they sent out a crew. They stayed with me for about an hour. They seemed to understand what I was going through. One of them asked me if I had blown my mind and I said, 'Yes, I don't know what that means, but it sounds like what's happened.' I was afraid. I felt very shaky. My son was coming in that night and I didn't think I could drive out to meet him. After the first weekend of the training, I had sent him this incredible note: 'Get your ass over here! I have to clean up my shit!' He'd never heard any of this language. It was est jargon and I was full of it."
Later that day, she told us, she did decide to make contact with est.
"I called their office. I never talked to the trainer, but the manager told me this had happened because I hadn't gone to the very end of the training. Something was unfinished. So I agreed to do the second weekend over again in the next training, which was a month away."
During the intervening month, she experienced "the most marvelous body feelings I had ever known," she told us. "I had never felt so good. Something was going on that I didn't want to interrupt. I was just high all the time."
Then finally, overtaken by the urge to share her feelings, she went to the est office.
"I walked in and shouted, IF YOU DON'T GET IT, THEN YOU AIN'T GOT IT! The secretary looked at me as if to say, What's going on with you? I walked into the manager's office and he hugged me."
When the month's wait was over, Jean Turner completed her est training without further incident. Afterward, her physical high continued and spilled over into other realms.
"After seven more days of experiencing these body things, I began fantasizing," she recalled. "It was beautiful. I was out of touch with reality; it was as though I could see on a different dimension. I experienced an intense joy the whole time."
Then her state of mind took an even more startling upturn.
"I reached a point where the fantasies became real," she said. "It was poetical. I was speaking in biblical languages. At times I couldn't open my mouth, but when I did it came out in verse. I was alone in my apartment for a week, and I felt like I was getting a whole new body, a renewal. I was extremely active. I couldn't stop dancing. I didn't want to stop, it was too good. My body just felt so powerful."
Then her high topped out and veered sharply downward.
"I can't explain it except that I became afraid," she told us. "Somewhere I knew this behavior wasn't right and I started feeling fear. So I called the est office and the manager asked me where I was and I told him. He said, 'We can't help you, but we can assist you.' He told me to come to a seminar that night, but I needed help right then."
In panic, she called a friend -- the man who later put us in touch with her who arranged for her to go into a psychiatric hospital. She spent two weeks there and then was released at her own request without further medication or professional care. Not long afterward, however, her delusions returned and she was readmitted to the hospital. The second time she was released on thorazine, a powerful tranquilizer. For the next ten months she underwent weekly psychiatric care and was put on antidepressant drugs.
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Est is, without a doubt, the most controversial of America's mass therapies. It has been the subject of countless magazine articles, several best-selling books, and endless hours of talk-show discussion. Celebrities who are among est's roughly 100,000 graduates include Valerie Harper, Cher, Cloris Leachman, John Denver, Buzz Aldrin, Marion Javits, and John Dean.
The est package was put together in 1971 by Werner Erhard, a man whose personal background has assumed mythic proportions. Born Jack Rosenberg in Philadelphia, Werner Erhard started his career as a used-car salesman. In 1960 he left his job, his wife, and four children and headed west to California. On his way out, as legend has it, he read an article in Esquire, "The Men Who Made the New Germany," and pieced together a new identity for himself from biographical threads of Werner Heisenberg, the formulator of the Uncertainty Principle of modern physics, and Ludwig Erhard, who served as West Germany's economics minister. As Erhard, he arrived in California, where he spent some time training encyclopedia salesmen and began experimenting with the various techniques emerging from the explosion of human awareness there. Eventually, he began working for Mind Dynamics, one of the first consumer products to package the discoveries being made in the still-experimental stages of the human potential movement. Then, in 1971, Erhard fused all his newly acquired knowledge into est, a conglomeration of techniques and principles from such scattered sources as encounter, psychodrama, Gestalt therapy, Scientology, Zen Buddhism, Dale Carnegie -- and marine boot camp.
The actual title of est is reputed to come from a science-fiction novel, "est: The Steersman Handbook," by a now untraceable author named L. Clark Stevens. Stevens's est stood for "electronic social transformation." His book foretold the rise of the "est people," a generation of postliterate men who would bring about the transformation of society. Not long after he formulated est, Erhard is said to have had his own great catalytic experience while driving in his Mustang. Somewhere along the highway, he "got it" -- est's term for its own brand of enlightenment in a moment of insight that informed him that "What is, is," and "What isn't, isn't." This experience led Erhard to further revelations. He has said, "What I recognized is that you can't put it together. It's already together, and what you have to do is experience it being together."
For the most part, the est training consists of endless hours of lectures on the nature of reality, perception, and belief systems. The lectures are intertwined with a series of est "processes," mental exercises aimed at erasing the trainee's "tapes" (est jargon for patterns of thought and feeling that, est says, prevent one from fully experiencing life). The course of the training is laced with direct verbal assaults in which trainees are dubbed "turkeys" and "assholes" and drawn into "personal encounters" with the est trainer. During the course of the weekend, many trainees cry, faint, vomit, or lose sphincter control. At the end of the training, for his $350 (currently; the price has doubled since est began), each trainee is supposed to "get it" in a moment of sudden realization that he alone is responsible for creating everything that happens to him.
Like many graduates, Jean Turner failed to "get it" in the est fashion. The pain in her legs disappeared as a result of the intense physical outpouring she had experienced, and for this she could be grateful. For a brief time, too, she had had a taste of est's often-stated goal: "To transform your ability to experience living so that the situations you have been putting up with clear up in the process of life itself." But the fulfillment she sought in est never came about. When we met her, almost two years after the training, Jean seemed confused and vulnerable.
Jean's story naturally raises two important questions: Might she have been unusually vulnerable or, as some might claim, predisposed to a severe episode in the aftermath of the est training? Was her painful experience a rare exception among est graduates? We cannot say with certainty that Jean's est training was solely responsible for what happened to her. Inevitably, in today's world, questions of vulnerability arise. To date, there are no statistics available on either the immediate or later lives of est graduates. There is, however, documented evidence which shows that Jean Turner is not the only est trainee to have undergone an emotional disturbance extreme enough to require psychiatric treatment.
Not long after our conversation with her, we read an article in the March, 1977, issue of American Journal of Psychiatry titled "Psychiatric Disturbances Associated with Erhard Seminars Training: I. A Report of Cases," the first such report in the professional literature. Here three psychiatrists describe five cases that "represent a segment of est trainees who came to our attention in a variety of emergency ps
ychiatric settings." Each of these experienced reactions very similar to, or even more extreme than, Jean Turner's in connection with their est training; four of the five cases had no record of previous psychiatric disorder.
At the end of our interview, Jean Turner admitted that she was still anxious -- and still searching.
"Lately I've been experiencing some discomfort and tension in my body," she said, "and I've been waking up with feelings of anger. But I don't want to go back on the drugs they gave me at the hospital. I want to deal with it.
"I went to see this doctor who does acupuncture," she said as we escorted her to her car. "He gave me a book and I'm reading it now. It sounds like something I will pursue."
3 The Fall
Theseus and his comrade Pirithous in their descent to Hades to bring
back the goddess of the underworld . . . sat down to rest for a while,
only to find that they had grown to the rocks and could not rise.
-- Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
The children of the seventies have set out on a different kind of search. The great cultural upheaval has subsided, and in lieu of self-realization their goal is spiritual fulfillment, a headier destination and one with even deeper pitfalls along the road.
Several years ago, as the smoke from the sixties, Vietnam, and Watergate began to clear, those pitfalls became apparent with the emergence of a new group of Americans. These were the early cult members, young people who had left home and school in pursuit of those rare moments of insight and revelation sought by us all. What they found were organizations such as the Unification Church, the Children of God, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Divine Light Mission, the Forever Family, the Church of Scientology, the Love Family, the Assembly, the Body, the Way, the Farm, and the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation. In the beginning, the cults gave little cause for concern. Their disciples were few in number, and whether they went barefoot, shaved their heads, and chanted or wore dark suits and ties and passed out leaflets, they were all simply variations on a familiar American theme: law-abiding citizens exercising their constitutional right to freedom of religion. If those citizens seemed a little strange, at least they didn't get in anyone's way. At worst, the early cult members were mere loose threads in America's colorful social fabric.
As they became more numerous, however, their various faiths and practices began to blur in the public eye. The question of whether someone was a follower of the Swami, the Reverend, the Perfect Master, the Guru, the Yogi, His Holiness, Krishna, or even Jesus became much less important to those the disciple approached than the flowers, incense, books, peanut brittle, cookies -- and in some cases vacuum cleaners -- that he or she was selling. For in addition to their earnest looks and tireless proselytizing, many of America's young cult members had taken up fund raising in a big way. They had learned to solicit door-to-door in residential neighborhoods, set up folding tables outside suburban shopping malls, and make intensely personal approaches in bus and train stations and airport terminals coast to coast.
Yet this industrious and charitable public image born no relation whatsoever to the bizarre stories being told reporters, judges, doctors, and anyone else who would lend an ear to a distraught parent or jilted lover. These stories told of people who had changed completely, almost overnight. While they claimed to have found true happiness and fulfillment, many seemed to have lost their spontaneity and humor, their free will, or their individuality in the process. They had become estranged, presenting themselves in odd postures ranging from stiff to animated, ecstatic to withdrawn. There was something eerie about them, but it was nothing you could put your finger on.
None dared call it crazy, not in any clinical sense. In some ways, cult members functioned even better after their conversions. Most could not be accused of even the most familiar frailties or conceivable vices. They had stopped smoking and drinking; often they had given up drugs and sex as well.
Nevertheless, alarmed by the changes they were witnessing, desperate parents began to take extreme measures to rescue their children. They sought help from "deprogrammers" who would kidnap cult members and attempt to free them from the groups' effects. Then the legal battles began, as young people sought to prosecute those who had tried to prevent them from practicing the professed rdigion of their choice.
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A young married couple whom we will call Lawrence and Cathy Gordon made the front page of their hometown paper when their parents managed to recover them from Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. The article described the organization's wealth, tax status, and political affiliations and gave a detailed history of Lawrence and Cathy's involvement. But the newspaper account didn't reveal what it was like to go through it all. Despite extensive media coverage of the cults, little attention has been given to the personal impact of the cult experience. Early in our research, it became clear to us that America's growing fraternity of ex-cult members hold the key to the phenomenon of snapping. They alone have gone through the most bizarre forms of sudden personality change and come back to tell the story. With the goal of unraveling this mysterious experience, we traveled to the small midwestern town where Lawrence and Cathy Gordon now live and work.
Like the Displaced Homemaker who ventured into TM, encounter groups, and est, the Gordons are everyday people -- good, decent, healthy. They are also typical cult members. They are college-educated and come from upper-middle-class homes. Lawrence is a strapping, fair-haired, all-American type. Cathy is diminutive and vivacious, an outdoorswoman with long strawberry-blond hair and a cheery smile.
Cathy began. She took us back to her first close encounter with the energetic recruiting forces of Moon's church.
"I was standing outside the public library when this guy who was about six feet tall came up to me," she said. "He seemed to be very happy, like he had a lot of answers to things. He said they had a group called the New Age Fellowship, just a group of people who would come together and sit around and talk about different things."
For Cathy, who had earned her degree in sociology, the idea of an evening of intellectual stimulation was appealing. She explained that she and Lawrence had spent some time traveling around the country after his thwarted attempt to get into medical school, and they had only recently returned to town and were just starting to become socially established after their long absence. In this casual and friendly context, the "Moonie's" invitation was attractive. To Cathy, it sounded like a way for Lawrence and her to meet people like themselves.
Something odd about this Moonie struck her immediately, however.
"He seemed to be in a different place than most people," she told us. "There was an aura about him. At the time, he seemed kind of spiritual. He asked me to this dinner they had, and I felt strange. I had to lean against the wall. He seemed to be a very powerful person."
Lawrence, who arrived on the scene later, was unmoved by that initial meeting.
"When I drove up," he said, "this guy was talking to her, and I shouted, 'Come on, Cathy!' Finally she broke away from him, and he came running up to my car in the middle of the street. He said, 'Hey, I just invited your wife to this dinner where we sit around and talk philosophy and sing songs.' I said, 'Sure, sure, thanks a lot.' I just wanted to get home. But a couple of days later, when we were talking about it, we said, 'What the heck, let's go check it out and see what it's all about.'"
First encounters with the cults are rarely anything extraordinary. People may sense something strange about cult members, but the decision to check out the cult is usually a casual one. When Lawrence and Cathy attended their first Unification Church gathering, however, the Moonies' impact on them was much less subtle than before. This time Lawrence felt it more than Cathy. He leaned forward in his chair as he described it.
"We went to the dinner, and there was a funny feeling in the room," he recalled. "I couldn't pinpoint it, but the people seemed to be putting on an act. It wasn't something I wanted to think abou
t. They kept the ball rolling; then this speaker came up. He was a very, very dynamic person; he just radiated when he talked. He started off normal and calm; then he got more into it and his eyes just glowed. It was amazing how much power his eyes had. We sat there glued to him as he communicated this urgent message to us about saving the world. As he talked, he walked around. Every muscle was involved; he was talking to us with his whole body. Because of him we decided to take up the invitation to the weekend workshop in the country, to find out what made him so enthusiastic."
Cathy put in, "My initial reaction to these people was, 'I don't know what they have, but want it.' They all seemed serene, ecstatic, or very, very loving."
"That Friday, all the way up to the workshop we were singing," Lawrence remembered. "Like we were going to summer camp or something. They woke us up at six o'dock the next morning and made us hurry to the lectures. We did exercises -- stretching, shouting, singing, running through the trees -- then had breakfast and toured the camp. There was a lecturer who introduced himself and then began talking about something called the Principles of Creation. You couldn't deny the first lecture. It was about God's love for man -- it was perfectly in line with Catholicism in every way. Lecture Two was the Fall of Man, which was a very heavy lecture. It made you feel guilty for the way you were living and the general attitudes of society. It had a lot to do with sexuality."
Snapping Page 3
