In recent years, the aboriginal Dream Time has been hailed as a state of profound sophistication in human awareness. Anthropologists point to the aborigine's physical endurance, spiritual satisfaction, and telepathic powers as marks of advanced evolution in a tribe that may represent the longest unbroken line of cultural development. However, they make the error of implying that this efficient and admittedly remarkable form of social control and spiritual fulfillment in a primitive, unchanging environment holds some promise for the future of our complex, rapidly changing, advanced technological society. Yet, following a decade like the sixties, it is ironic to find Americans who seek greater awareness and self-determination accepting instead a contemporary counterpart of Dream Time. What turn of events could have struck such an ancient chord in our modern time?
In the sixties, people rebelled against another modern version of Dream Time: the corporate mentality of the fifties which turned so many active, imaginative individuals into soulless organization men. But the consciousness explosion that tore through our society unleashed more awareness than many people were prepared to deal with: awareness of the empty rewards of most jobs and careers, the confining traditions of marriage and family relationships, worn-out social stereotypes and sex roles, the dangers of nuclear war, the threats of environmental pollution and dwindling energy resources, and the moral bankruptcy of our political institutions.
For a decade, Americans took action on every front and won many stunning victories, politically, culturally, and environmentally. But there were problems that would not yield to mere awareness, the best intentions, or even affirmative, aggressive action. In the seventies, people found themselves confronted with a world of overwhelming trade-offs: environmental quality versus technological progress, international diplomacy versus basic principles of morality, the freedom and independence of the single life versus the sharing and loving of intimate relationships. These uncompromising dilemmas -- and others -- gave rise to a new form of expanded awareness, one born of a maturing realism rather than the youthful idealism of the sixties.
In the wake of the fifties, America's postwar era of omnipotence and immortality, and of the sixties, a colorful, space-age decade in which people lived their dreams and accomplished the impossible without blinking, the new realism of the early and middle seventies was tainted with the specter of lowered sights. For many, it teetered midway between resolve and resignation. Cheap energy was running out, and no alternative sources appeared imminent; diplomatic breakthroughs were accomplished, but many sincere negotiations ended in stalemate or betrayal; our old social traditions and institutions had been shattered, but no new ones were evolving. Everywhere, our individual lives seemed to be less important than the demands of our mass society. The problems, pressures, and pace of modern life were irreversibly snowballing, threatening to trap each individual in a tangle of pollution, inflation, exhaustion, loneliness, boredom, and frustration.
For many Americans, the only way out of this nightmare was to stop worrying altogether, to dive into work or play with the hope of finding something that would bring results. So in the seventies, as others have observed, our entire culture took off on its last desperate, narcissistic pursuit of happiness. Panicky college seniors forged rationalized "practical" career goals that exempted them from the commitments of the sixties. Young couples settled for new "realistic" relationships that freed them from their earlier desires and standards. Runaway husbands and wives spun intricate webs of faulty logic to excuse themselves from prior responsibilities. Late-blooming hippies and disillusioned political activists set off on gung-ho back-to-nature expeditions, while businessmen in mid-life crisis and mothers with "empty-nest syndrome" sought ever greater material diversions to disguise their own lack of meaning and direction.
This shift in our basic attitudes, opinions, lifestyles, and relationships has fed into a social and cultural environment that in its own tacit way offers heady rewards for not thinking. How easy it is to be carried aloft and swept along by God's "revealed plan" or to buy some technique that causes problems to "cure up in the process of life itself." Shutting off the mind in this way provides instant relief from anxiety and frustration. It evokes pleasure by default, salvation through surrender, and, even better, its simple happiness is self-perpetuating.
Indeed, the moment when we stop thinking may be one of overwhelming joy, the moment when the search at last comes to an end. Journalist Sally Kempton, writing in New York magazine, described a series of personal and professional crises that brought her to a large-group audience with the Swami Muktananda, one of the less mercantile of the growing number of Eastern guru entrepreneurs. Sitting quietly before Muktananda along with a hundred other devotees, Kempton sought enlightenment from the Swami. She found it in a single, casual remark.
"And finally," she wrote, "out of the welter of questions about lights and visions and experiences of transcendental love, came the one question that seemed to apply to my situation: 'What do you do about negative emotions?' a woman asked, and Muktananda said, 'Let them go. . . .' "
That simple instruction may not have been as profound as it was propitious, yet it set off a chain reaction of thought and feeling that is one of the most vivid accounts of snapping to reach the media:
Perhaps it wasn't what he said that struck me, but how he said it. Or
maybe it was both. One of my deepest assumptions was that the thing
to do about negative emotions was figure out where they came from,
talk them over with your friends, work them out, deal with them. The
last thing I had ever thought to do about negative emotions was to let
them go. But Muktananda's words did something to me. It was as if they
entered my mind, sinking through my assumptions like a kind of depth
charge. It sounds strange, but for a moment I felt as if his words had
actually knocked the voices of irritation out of my mind. I hadn't even
realized they were there, those voices, until I noticed how good I felt
without them. And for the rest of that intense and dream-like afternoon
I sat feeling empty and absorbent, until at last Muktananda picked
up a large tambourine and banged on it, and I sat up with a start. A
chant was beginning, sweet and melodic, and also rhythmic; and five
minutes into the chant I noticed a warm ache in my throat and liquid
in my eyes, and wondered why I was crying. I didn't feel at all sad.
Driving home on the freeway afterward, I noticed that I had a lot of
energy. In fact, I had so much energy that I didn't quite know what to
do with it, and so I went home and ate a huge meal and talked loudly
for two hours with my friend Jane, and then went into my room and lay
down on my bed and closed my eyes and the whole thing started.
What it made me think of was Alice falling down the rabbit hole. I
felt as if a huge pool had opened in my heart ('Oh, God,' I thought,
'it's all true what those creeps were saying'), and the pool was
full of soft air, and I was floating on it. It was the most intensely
sensual feeling I had ever had. It felt so good that my first reaction
was a sharp pang of guilt, a feeling that I had stumbled into some
forbidden region, perhaps tapped a pleasure center in my brain, which
would keep me hooked on bodyless sensuality, string me out on bliss
until I turned into a vegetable . . . then I forgot about thinking,
and just let myself drift on it.
6 Black Lightning
I do not doubt that in the course of time this new science will be
improved by further observations, and still more by true and conclusive
proofs. But this need not diminish the glory of the first observer.
-- Galileo
(writing in praise of William Gilber
t
pioneer in the study of magnetism)
In all the world, there is nothing quite so impenetrable as a human mind snapped shut with bliss. No call to reason, no emotional appeal can get through its armor of self-proclaimed joy.
We talked with dozens of individuals in this state of mind: cult members, recent est graduates, Born Again Christians, and even some Transcendental Meditators. After a while, it seemed very much like dancing to a broken record. We would ask a question, and the individual would spin round and round in a circle of dogma. If we tried to interrupt, he or she would simply pick right up again or go back to the beginning and start over.
Soon we began to realize that what we were watching went much deeper. These people were not simply incapable of carrying on a genuine conversation, they were completely mired in their unthinking, unfeeling, uncomprehending states. Whether cloistered in cults or passing blindly through the world, they were impervious to the pain of parents, spouses, friends, and lovers. How do you reach such people? Can they be made to think and feel again? Is there any way to reunite them with their former personalities and the world around them?
A man named Ted Patrick has developed the only remedy currently available. A controversial figure called by the cult world Black Lightning, Patrick was the first person to point out publicly what the cults are doing to America's youth. He investigated the ploys by which many converts are ensnared and delved into the methods most cults use to manipulate the mind.
He was also the first to take action. In the early seventies, Patrick began a one-man campaign against the cults. His fight started in southern California, on the Pacific beaches where, in the beginning, organizations such as the Hare Krishna and the Children of God recruited among the vacationing students and carefree dropouts who covered the sands in summer and roamed the bustling beach communities year round. The Children of God approached Ted Patrick's son there one day and nearly made off with him. Patrick investigated, was horrified at what he found, and immediately set out on a personal course of direct action. His personal experiences with cult techniques and their effects led him to develop an antidote he named "deprogramming," a remarkably simple and -- when properly used -- nearly foolproof process for helping cult members regain their freedom of thought.
Before long, Ted Patrick was in action all over the country on behalf of desperate parents. He made front page headlines in the East for his daring daylight kidnappings of Ivy League cult members, he made network news in the Northwest for his interstate car chases to elude both cult leaders and state troopers, and eventually he made American legal history. In his ultimate defense of the U.S. Constitution, Patrick challenged the confusion of First Amendment rights surrounding the cult controversy and drew an important distinction between our guaranteed national freedoms of speech and religion and our more fundamental human right to freedom of thought. In precedent-setting cases, American courts have begun to confirm Patrick's argument that, by "artful and deceiving" means, the cults are in fact robbing people of their natural capacity to think and choose. Until recently, it was never considered possible that a human being could be stripped of this basic endowment. Patrick's efforts have been aimed at calling attention to the significance of this new threat and to the urgent need to deal with it in new professional and personal ways.
In many courtroons, however, Ted Patrick has lost his case for freedom of thought, gathering a mounting stack of convictions for unlawful detention. In unsuccessful attempts to free cult members from their invisible prisons, Patrick has been repeatedly thrown into real ones, in New York, California, and Colorado. In July, 1976, Patrick was sentenced to his longest term in prison, one year, for a cult kidnapping he did not in fact perform.
In February, 1977, we visited Ted Patrick in the Theo Lacy Facility of the Orange County Jail to learn about deprogramming from the man who coined the term. It was dark when we arrived, and we had to squeeze past the evening's incoming offnders at the main desk and make our case for visiting a prisoner after hours. Theo Lacy, we were told, is not half as bad a place as some of the others Patrick had seen. Yet upon showing our credentials, we were ushered into a glaring, airless cubicle under fluorescent light and constant surveillance. Minutes later, Patrick joined us.
A short, sturdy, round-faced man with dark skin and close-cropped hair, his physical appearance conveyed little of his notorious reputation. He wore large dark-rimmed glasses, a plain white prison shirt, and baggy trousers. Even in this depersonalizing environment, he projected an unmistakable presence. There was a sense of command about him, and even a measure of charm in his guarded smile.
When we told him something of the nature of our investigation, Patrick seemed to warm to our visit. In a sentence, he ticked off the physical and emotional stresses that make up the basic cult technique as he sees it. "They use fear, guilt, hate, poor diet, and fatigue," he said. We had heard that from many people, we told him. What we had come for was his unique perspective on the way those techniques may affect the mind. Suddenly, our interview came alive.
"The cults completely destroy the mind," he said without qualification. "They destroy your ability to question things, and in destroying your ability to think, they also destroy your ability to feel. You have no desires, no emotion; you feel no pain, no joy, no nothing."
Patrick confirmed our own perspective when he described the method of control used by many cults, beginning with the moment the recruiter "hooks" his listener.
"They have the ability to come up to you and talk about anything they feel you're interested in, anything," he said. "Their technique is to get your attention, then your trust. The minute they get your trust, just like that they can put you in the cult."
It was the classic sales pitch, carried off so smoothly that it amounted to what Patrick called "on-the-spot hypnosis." Then, he said, once the potential member is hooked, the cult keeps up a steady barrage of indoctrination until conversion is complete.
"When they program a person," said Patrick intently, "they use repetition. They give him the same thing over and over again, day in and day out. They sit up there twenty-four hours a day saying everything outside that door is Satan, that the world is going to end within seven years, and that if you're not in their family you're going to burn in Hell. When a person goes under, he feels guilty if he goes outside in that bad, evil world. He is terrified of what will happen to him out there."
Patrick stopped. His version was almost identical to the experiences Lawrence and Cathy Gordon had reported (although they had not been deprogrammed by Patrick but by one of his former clients). He leaned forward, resting his powerful arms on the table between us as he continued.
"There's just so much the human mind can take," he said. "You can stay up just so long without sleep. You can hear the same thing over and over and then it breaks you down. I went into one of the cults with the intention of staying a week. I stayed four days and three nights, and if I'd stayed six more hours I would have been hooked. I'd have never left."
It was in 1971 that Patrick infiltrated the Children of God, the cult that had tried to recruit his son, Michael, one Fourth of July on Mission Beach in San Diego. Patrick's initial concern over the cults was personal, but it also had a public side. A number of worried parents had already appealed to him for help in his official capacity as head of community relations for California's San Diego and Imperial counties. Patrick had moved to San Diego some years earlier and had become active in local politics, acquiring a reputation for his work against discrimination in employment. During the Watts riots of 1965, he helped calm unrest in the Logan Heights section of San Diego, an act of public service that won him recognition in a Reader's Digest article. The article caught the attention of California's Governor Ronald Reagan, who appointed Patrick -- an active Democrat -- to the community relations post.
In his brief experience with the Children of God, though he was alert to the cult's tactics, Patrick found that he was not immune to their effects.
&nbs
p; "You can feel it coming on," he explained. "You start doubting yourself. You start to question everything you believe in. Then you find yourself saying and doing the same things they are. You feel like you're sinking in sand, drowning -- sometimes you get dizzy."
Here, according to Patrick, was that moment when the individual first goes under, when he may experience the overwhelming emotional release characteristic of snapping. From then on, the new member is taught daily rituals of chanting and meditation which effectively prevent him from regaining control of his mind, or wanting to.
"Thinking to a cult member is just like being stabbed in the heart with a dagger," said Patrick. "lt's very painful, because they've been told that the mind is Satan and thinking is the machinery of the devil."
Having gained personal insight into the manner in which that machinery may be brought to a halt, Patrick developed his controversial deprogramming procedure, the essence of which, he explained, is simply to get the individual thinking again.
"When you deprogram people," he emphasized, "you force them to think. The only thing I do is shoot them challenging questions. I hit them with things that they haven't been programmed to respond to. I know what the cults do and how they do it, so I shoot them the right questions; and they get frustrated when they can't answer. They think they have the answer, they've been given answers to everything. But I keep them off balance and this forces them to begin questioning, to open their minds. When the mind gets to a certain point, they can see through all the lies that they've been programmed to believe, and they realize that they've been duped and they come out of it. Their minds start working again."
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