After each lecture, the Gordons and about twenty or thirty other new recruits were assigned to small groups where church members answered their questions.
"I kept asking about Masters and Johnson," Lawrence told us, with a boyish grin, "but they said you should totally deny all your sexual feelings and your feelings for other people. I didn't believe it right away, and they said, 'Didn't you feel that way when you were young? Didn't you feel guilty and want to cover yourself up?' I said, 'No, I didn't,' and the Moonies all said, yes, they did."
Cathy had been more affected by the exhortations of the second lecture.
"When they were talking about the Fall of Man," she recalled, "they said that we all had Satan's blood spiritually in us. I felt really dirty, and I had this sense of shame that made me feel even worse."
The final lectures were a mixture of traditional religious references and themes from history, philosophy, and American politics.
"They went through Hellenism and the Reformation," said Lawrence. "Then they arrived at this twenty-one-year period of history -- which was supposed to be what Jacob went through -- when Communism would be at its peak because Vietnam was a failure and the American people hadn't rallied behind Nixon, which was an indemnity thing because MacArthur didn't save Southeast Asia from the Communists because of President Truman."
Cathy picked up the original thread. "At the end of the weekend workshop," she said, "they left us with the idea that Christ could be coming very soon; in fact, he could already be here. You say to yourself, Wow, could this be true? Could it be? But they still hadn't even mentioned Reverend Moon."
Then, according to Lawrence, just before that weekend of much talk and little sleep came to an end, the church leaders made their first direct attempt to bring the two of them into the fold.
"They spent two straight hours trying to talk us into staying," he said. "They told us that when we went back down into the regular world, Satan would invade us. I'd never believed in Satan before, but somehow they got to me. When we left and were driving down, I felt really weird, and it kept up the whole next day while we were getting our business done so we could go back up."
Even though at this early stage the Gordons could feel the "weird" effects of Moon's conversion technique, they were unable to focus their impressions. As Lawrence described it, he and Cathy returned to an everyday world that had grown alien and sinister.
"When we came back down, we thought we were still in control of ourselves," he explained, "but when I look back on it now I can see how heavy their influence was. As soon as we walked into the house, my mom and dad looked at us and said, 'What's wrong with you? What's wrong with your eyes?' But we had been told to anticipate this, that the rest of the world would see us as different because we knew the truth. I just thought, 'Aha! Maybe I'm getting spiritual or something!'"
Cathy explained the resolution of that first confrontation with Lawrence's family.
"We had been told that a lot of times people will get sucked back into the real world and Satan through their families, and you had to cut that emotional tie and look at your parents objectively. Lawrence's mother got frantic when she realized we were going back; she ran out to the car crying, but we remained very cool and untouched by her. As we drove away, I said, 'It must be hard for you to see your mother like that.' And Lawrence said, 'That's not my mother. That woman who is crying and carrying on is not my real mother.' And I was proud of him then, for seeing things the way they were."
Lawrence and Cathy drove back to the Moon camp, confident that they were at last seeing the world in its proper perspective. Once formally in the cult and swayed further by repeated fervid lectures, they became totally engulfed.
"I remember looking in the mirror one time," said Cathy. "We were told not to look in the mirror, because it was such a vain thing, but I just glanced at it as I was walking by and I saw my eyes and I thought, 'Oh, boy, my eyes are on fire. I'm really high, spiritually high!'"
Then they described the same kind of high that led to Jean Turner's emotional breakdown in est, which grew for them into a sustained alteration of awareness.
"By the end of the next week, I remember feeling objective about the world, really detached from it," said Lawrence. "The first day of that seven-day workshop, the lecturer had said to us, 'By the end of the week, you're all going to be just like me. You're all going to be walking around smiling.' And we were."
Along with the other new converts, the Gordons experienced not just one but frequent peak moments when they felt as if they were receiving a revelation.
"Two other people and I were asked to pray for all the new members," Cathy recalled, "so we prayed out loud for three hours. At the end of the prayer, the leader came in and said, 'You've been praying long enough. Why don't you break it up in a few minutes.' I realized that I had one more minute to make this prayer really count, so I prayed even harder and just then I felt like everything I was saying was being sucked into a vacuum. When I stood up, I felt like thin air; I had to brace myself. I felt this energy, it was kind of an ecstasy. It just flowed through me like a sensation of tingling. It sent shocks through me, and I equated it with divine love."
Here again was the moment of snapping in its most intense physical form. Lawrence reported having a similar experience, "when I felt my spirit opening up."
"One day I started to have doubts, so I said to myself, 'I have to go out and pray about this,' because that's what you're supposed to do when you're weak. So I went out and prayed just like Cathy did, and after -- I don't know how long, I have no recollection of time -- I started to get strong again. I felt a tingling in my back like raindrops, and I thought, 'Wow, this is a sign!' It felt cool; it lasted about ten seconds, like God was about twenty feet above me with a little sprinkler."
Soon after they moved into the church, Lawrence and Cathy were separated. Cathy's participation remained largely subservient, the woman's fate in many cults, while Lawrence was sent halfway across the country to begin fund-raising activities. Securely anchored in his altered state of awareness, he returned to the everyday world, dressing up in the Moonie's familiar dark suit and tie to begin solicitations that would often keep up twenty hours a day. Now, on the streets, the same power Cathy had noticed when she met her first Moonie had become an unmistakable feature of her husband's own demeanor.
"I felt a rush when we were out campaigning, a real high," Lawrence told us. "I was bursting with joy. People would open the door in a humdrum mood, and as I talked they would get high with me."
According to Cathy, the effect was contagious.
"When we came back from a weekend workshop," she said, "Lawrence talked to his sister for a couple of hours. She was affected for days. People where she worked noticed it all week."
The high that communicated itself so effectively, however, was frequently marred by the Gordons' discomfort and personal misgivings.
"Every day of fund raising people would make comments to me," Lawrence told us. "I was getting all the negativity that the church predicted, but it was supposed to be Satan attacking me. We were told to be humble toward people and say, 'I'm sorry you feel that way.' But many times doubts came up in my mind when I was fund raising. I'd think, 'Do I really want to go into this plush restaurant and bother these people who are having a nice dinner with their family? Do I want to do that and make a fool of myself?' But the church said, 'Try always,' and I'd find myself at banquets, going from table to table asking people for money." (He accomplished his goal. The first year he was in the Unification Church, he raised $50,000.)
Exhaustion was a far more pervasive problem in the Gordons' life in the Unification Church. According to church doctrines, it is considered a sin to be sleepy.
Another former Moonie we interviewed later told us more about this problem.
"I'd be out fund raising in a parking lot somewhere, feeling very heavy, having trouble keeping my eyes open, and I'd go back somewhere and lie down," he said. "One time some people
called the police. They thought I was dead. I saw other members fall asleep while they were talking, just leaning in a car window, right in the middle of a sentence.
"Anyone who can't stay awake is said to have sleep-spirit problems," he went on. "Sleep spirits were supposed to be the spirits of people who had died. They were very low -- they came from Satan's world -- and if church leaders found someone with sleep-spirit problems, they would treat him very badly. One time at their training center in Barrytown, New York, a Japanese member slugged me very hard. When we would get tired, they'd tell us to go take a cold shower. Sometimes they would use squirt guns to keep people awake."
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The Unification Church holds a special place among the cults. With a membership that has been estimated as high as 60,000 to 80,000, it is one of the largest and richest actively recruiting cults in America today. Despite numerous questions raised by private citizens and government investigators regarding its business practices and tax-exempt status, the church has survived virtually unscathed every claim made against it. Despite many legal battles over the kidnapping and deprogramming of its members, it continues to operate without restraint in nearly every major city and on most college campuses in America.
The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, is a wealthy Korean industrialist turned evangelist. While church members state publicly that Reverend Moon makes no claim to be the Messiah, former Moonies we interviewed told us that within the church he is openly referred to as the Messiah and that he himself claims to be a divine being sent to earth to finish the work of Jesus Christ, which he sees as the breeding of the "ideal race."
Since it was founded in Korea in 1954, the Unification Church has grown to enormous proportions and has accumulated immense wealth. In addition to his munitions interests in Korea, Moon owns factories that produce ginseng tea, titanium products, pharmaceuticals, and air rifles. Members of his church can be seen selling flowers on street corners throughout the United States. In recent years, the church's profits have been used to make sizable investments in American real estate, including a huge retreat in Barrytown, New York -- Moon's primary American residence -- and the old New Yorker Hotel in midtown Manhattan, purchased for a reported $5 million in 1976 and now serving as the church's national headquarters.
In the last few years, the Unification Church has done much of its recruiting under the name of CARP, the Collegiate Association for the Research of Principle. The church has denied reports that it operates through a number of organizations, among them the International Federation for Victory Over Communism, the Professors Academy for World Peace, and the Little Angels of Korea. Several years ago, until they were identified, Moon had church members doing volunteer work for many members of the U.S. Congress. A church front organization was reportedly contracted to clean the rugs in the FBI headquarters in San Francisco in 1976. In 1977, the church began publishing a daily newspaper in New York City, the News World. The Washington Post has twice reported alleged links between the Unification Church and clandestine American activities of the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency.
In our opinion, the Unification Church is the most sophisticated of the cults in its activities as well as its conversion process. In order to further Moon's cause, fund-raising activities are kept up almost around the clock. A number of members report that they are not given adequate time to rest or to even begin to think about anything other than the urgent mission of the church. For many weary cult members laid low by exhaustion, doubt, and fear of the outside world, relief comes only in the form of intense snapping moments.
Before our meeting with the Gordons came to an end, we heard yet another account of this extraordinary phenomenon. We were struck by its frightening resemblance to the many vivid, first-hand descriptions of death and dying that have been published in recent years. For us, it indicated an equally significant form of personal dissolution.
"Once we were in the vans and our fuel pump broke and I curled up on the back seat to go to sleep," Lawrence told us, still obviously baffled by the experience. "Then I felt my body was going numb, going away, and I had many sensations all at once, like I was physically dying but spiritually being pulled out of my body. At the same instant, this thing was opening up before me. I could see a light and feel something coming toward me to get me or help me. Then ! heard this heavenly singing, all different kinds of ranges and pitches, like 'Ahhhhh!' But because I felt my body physically dying, I became petrified and pulled myself back together and sat up."
To us, Lawrence and Cathy's year and a half in the Unification Church sounded like a waking nightmare, a winding descent into a world devoid of free will, where personal survival loses all meaning, feelings for others disappear, and the outside world takes on dark, supernatural dimensions. We found very few people who got out of the Unification Church or any other cult on their own. In some cults, we were told members are warned to fear invasion by Satan. In others, they are told that leaving the group will result in reincarnation as an insect or in death to a family member. Apparently, many cult members experience these threats as totally believable, and they are helpless to act against them.
Can this state of mind possibly be conveyed by the term "religion" as we know it? Were the ongoing highs experienced by Jean Turner and the Gordons the result of true enlightenment or revelation? Before we can draw any conclusions about the phenomenon we call snapping, we must first examine these intense experiences within their original context of religion and then investigate the common ground that underlies both these psychological and spiritual transformations.
4 The Roots of Snapping
Religion claims to be in possession of an absolute truth; but its history
is a history of errors and heresies. It gives us the promise and prospect
of a transcendent world -- far beyond the limits of our human experience
-- and it remains human, all too human.
-- Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man
The miraculous healing of Jean Turner's legs in est and the moments of ecstasy and revelation experienced by Lawrence and Cathy Gordon in the Unification Church have their counterparts, throughout history, in every culture and civilization. In ancient Greece, audiences experienced catharsis, a moment of purgation and purification, at the height of Greek dramas and religious rituals. To this day, in Nepal, Sufi dervishes whirl around until they are overcome with religious fervor, and voodoo tribes in Africa and Latin America pursue the same moment in fiery, drum-beating, earth-pounding black masses. In each instance, the activity gives way to a moment of overwhelming physical sensation.
But physical sensations alone do not account for the violent upheaval that Jean Turner experienced in the aftermath of her est training or the abrupt change that overtook the Gordons in the course of their initial three-day Unification Church retreat. Our culture has never witnessed transformations of precisely this kind before, although there have been many similar examples throughout the history of religion. In the infinite richness and variety of religious experience, individuals have perceived an extraordinary refocusing of awareness as a great spiritual breakthrough in one form or another -- spiritual, for although it is felt "in the flesh," it cannot be directly linked to any immediate physical cause. Lacking understanding, and with no reliable method for investigating the phenomenon, people through the ages have grappled imaginatively with their experiences, looking to some higher order and ascribing these changes in awareness to a source outside the body. They have been explained as messages from beyond or gifts of revelation and enlightenment, personal communication that could only be delivered by a universal being of infinite dimensions, a cosmic force that comprehends all space, time, and earthly matter.
In the course of human development, every culture has recognized this spectacular phenomenon. The Greeks called it the 'kairos' or divine moment, for since ancient times it has been characterized by awesome sensations and celest
ial visions. Every major religion, including Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, stems from the similar experience of its founding figure. Among Western religions, Judaism is replete with the moment in the divinations of its prophets and seers, and the story of Christianity overflows with incidents of "revealed truth." The pages of history tell very little about the actual circumstances surrounding these incidents, but they provide undeniable proof of the universality of the experience.
While not a commonplace occurrence, the experience of enlightenment may be seen as a completely natural one. Stripped of its supernatural components, it is simply a moment of fundamental human growth, of overwhelming feeling and understanding when an individual pushes through to those higher levels of consciousness that distinguish us as human beings. For the prophet, the genius, and the average citizen alike, life moves forward in such sudden leaps, peak moments, and turning points.
In the course of our own travels and interviews, we spoke with many individuals who told us they had experienced the "divine moment" of enlightenment. Collecting their stories, we were amazed to find the variety of contexts in which these experiences occurred -- from huge public gatherings to lonely roads, in childhood and old age alike. The kinds of changes in awareness and personality ranged from the dark transformations we are concerned with in this book to glorious breakthroughs that seemed to us undoubtedly worthy of genuine religious recognition.
Snapping Page 4
