Sometime after we spoke with Koppelman, we interviewed an ex-member of another Hindu cult, the Divine Light Mission, which is led by a rotund teen-age guru named Maharaj Ji. Bill Garber, as we will call him here, painted a slightly different picture of the deprogramming process.
"Ted took me to the limits with a series of questions," he told us, "and I found myself wondering what was going on, since I supposedly had a monopoly on truth and love and he didn't, and I was not supposed to be able to be talked out of my faith. Ted's questions had to do with people in other groups. He asked me what made me think that I had the only true way when they all felt that they had the only true way. I knew I couldn't handle that one, so I just started meditating and waiting for the guru to send me the answer. Then Ted said, 'Meditation is okay, but not when someone is using it to control your mind. You have been brainwashed without your knowledge or consent.' I stopped meditating and a few ideas popped into my head. I began thinking about the interrelatedness of selling techniques and brainwashing. Ted didn't know it, but I had been an encyclopedia salesman some years before."
As Garber described it, the moment when he snapped out was more abstract than wildly dreamlike. Yet for him, as for Tom Koppelman, its abruptness was unforgettable.
"The effect was something like whipping through a deck of IBM cards," he remembered. "A couple of ideas fell together with a kind of a zap. It was the first imaginative thinking I'd done in a considerable period of time. Everything came together with such a suddenness that Ted didn't even know what he had done."
And for Garber, the moment when his mind switched back on was accompanied by extraordinary physical sensations.
"I sat there with this dazed look on my face," he said. "I was jolted, as if by a shock, and there was a momentary visual distortion which was part of the overwhelmingness of it, like having a zoom lens built into your eyes. All of a sudden, Ted's face went zip-zip. I never experienced that before, and I haven't experienced it since."
One puzzle of snapping that the deprogramming process illuminates is the enormous amount of mental activity that takes place in the cult member's unthinking, unfeeling state. Ironically, most of the individuals we spoke with fought desperately to preserve their blissed-out states, although they were saturated with fear, guilt, hatred, and exhaustion. In the beginning this seemed to present us with a disturbing contradiction: How could an individual whose mind has apparently been shut off, who has been robbed of his freedom of thought, display such cunning and initiative? What the deprogramming process demonstrates is that the cult member does not simply snap from a normal conscious state into one of complete unconsciousness (and vice versa during deprogramming). Rather, he goes from one frame of waking awareness to another in which he may be equally active and perceptive. We talked with an ex-member of the Church of Scientology, one of the oldest and cagiest of America's cults, who was capable of taking even greater steps to preserve his cult frame of mind.
"I tried doing insulting things," he told us. "There were four people in the room, and I took my clothes off and got into bed right in front of them. But Ted kept talking and occasionally he would move my bed a little so that I couldn't go to sleep. I sat up on my elbow and I said, 'How would you like it if I kicked your ass?' And he came and stood over me and said, 'Yeah? You just try it!' That kind of scared me, even though I'm much bigger than he is."
In this case, however, as in most of Patrick's deprogrammings, neither party resorted to violence. Instead, Patrick's adept conversational skills held the cult member's attention until he snapped out.
"I tried to pretend that I was listening," this former Scientologist told us, "but I also tried to stay spaced out and not really pay attention. Occasionally, something would go pop , and I would suddenly be listening to him. The feeling was mainly caused by his continuous talking and changing the speeds of how he was talking. He made his own rhythm and his own changes of high-pitched and low-pitched tones that was really refreshing. From his continuously talking like that, he just snapped me out of the spaced-out state I was in. All of a sudden I felt a little flushed. I could feel the blood rushing through my face."
Then there are those deprogrammings in which the cult member remains relatively docile from the outset, sometimes openly admitting to be in a state of doubt and confusion. We spoke with a young ex-cult member whom we will call Teri O'Connor who went through a particularly difficult deprogramming with Patrick. Now fully rehabilitated, she told us her story, providing a glimpse of just one of many profound human moments that seem to epitomize the spirit of Patrick and his work.
"He kept saying this stuff and I was trying to rationalize it," she remembered, "but it was impossible to rationalize. I began to get very uncomfortable, and I said to him, 'I feel like I've been crazy these last few months.' I was so scared, I could see myself being in the nuthouse for the rest of my life. I was a little jellyfish, and if someone other than Ted Patrick had gotten ahold of me, they could have done anything they wanted. Then it was like a light going on. I definitely felt it and my mom said she saw it in my eyes.
"In the beginning, I didn't want to say too much about the deprogramming. I was still afraid, but if it hadn't been for Ted Patrick, I would just be crazy today. I owe him my life, actually, I really do."
---
To further our understanding of deprogramming and its controversial inventor, we looked into Patrick's background and, during our interview, asked him questions about his childhood, discovering a depth of personal experience that gave clues to his pioneering insights into the tactics used by the cults. Born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, young Theodore Roosevelt Patrick had even more social handicaps to overcome than just being poor and black. The man who today works wonders with words was born with a speech impediment. This brought him into contact, at an early age, with many dubious forms of religion.
"My mother carried me to every fortune-teller, faith healer, Holy Roller, false god, prophet, voodoo, and hoodoo -- every one that came into town; but you could hardly understand a word I was saying," Patrick told us. "My sister had to interpret for me. Then suddenly it came to me. I thought, 'Are you asking God to do something that you are not willing to do for yourself? Have you tried?' And I knew I hadn't."
So Patrick cured himself.
"I'd always been afraid of words," he admitted to us. "I was unable to say a lot of words because I was afraid they'd come out wrong. So I started correcting myself over and over again, out loud. Even when I was in church, my mind would be correcting itself over and over again. That's how I got to the point where I can talk now."
After overcoming his initial disadvantages, Patrick progressed through ten years of public school, leaving high school to embark on his varied career of social activism in defense of minority rights. Later, when he began his battle against the cults, it must have seemed ironic to many who knew him that he had become passionately engaged in what superficially appeared to be a fight against the rights of individuals and minorities. When he first began deprogramming, Patrick was well aware that he was technically violating the First Amendment freedoms of the cult members he abducted. In view of the circumstances, however, and the observable changes that had come over the cult members, Patrick was led to draw his fine and now hotly debated distinction between constitutional and human freedoms.
"When you're born into this world, you're born into the laws of nature," Patrick asserted, "and only then are you introduced to the laws of the land. Anytime someone destroys your free will, when they take away your mind and your natural ability to think, then they've destroyed the person . As long as you remain in that condition, you have no more constitutional rights to violate."
From the beginning, Patrick spoke out boldly in defense of freedom of thought, knowing that his new procedure would cost him his job and his own freedom as well. Although he has been deprogramming cult members full time for several years now, Patrick remains a deeply moral and religious man. Nevertheless, in his deprogrammings,
he takes great care never to impose his own religious beliefs, or anyone else's, on the young people he rescues.
"When I deprogram people," he stressed, "I don't make any mention of a church or whether or not I even believe in God. That's beside the point. My intention is to get their minds working again and to get them back out in the world. I've been through the Bible, I know it backwards, but I didn't begin to understand the Bible until I got out of school, when I hit the streets and started studying people. That's the only way to use the Bible; you must relate it to everyday life. When the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew says, 'There will be many coming in my name, saying, I am Christ; and they will deceive the very elect,' then people should relate it to all these false gods today."
There are some signs that people are beginning to understand. Within the last few years, a number of other deprogrammers have started working around the country. All former clients, students, or self-confessed imitators of Patrick's style, they have benefited greatly from the trailblazing efforts of Patrick and his energetic colleague, Sondra Sacks. While Patrick was in jail, his followers and imitators began making headlines of their own, and many also began charging parents astronomical fees for their services. Some of these new deprogrammers, however, lacking adequate training and understanding, chalked up failures in surprising numbers, as their clients slipped back into the cults or suffered emotional breakdowns as a result of inept deprogrammings or ineffective rehabilitation periods. In the course of talking to Patrick and many of his former clients and then to other deprogrammers and their subjects, we quickly learned that, despite all the attention this controversial technique has received, few of Patrick's high-priced imitators share his expertise. Many know the legal ropes of gaining temporary custody of cult members, most have done their homework on the essentials of brainwashing; but only a few seem to have mastered the vital human elements of trustworthiness and sincerity that can reach even the most distant, detached cult member. For the deprogrammer guided by those qualities, breaking through the cult's wall of mindless happiness may be accomplished with deceptive simplicity.
"A lot of times deprogramming is just a matter of telling a person what life is all about," Patrick told us. "It's a simple thing to tell somebody to take life for what it is, not what it should be and not what you'd like it to be. But sometimes that's all it takes."
That evening, as we prepared to leave the cramped cubicle within sight of the front door of the Orange County Jail, Patrick told us of his immediate plans to write a manual of deprogramming, one that would clear up some of the public and professional confusion surrounding his technique and place it in a broader framework that, in the future might prove to be of value in treating other forms of mental and emotional disorders. Patrick grew philosophical as we touched upon the implications of his work.
"A lot of people who are in mental hospitals have nothing wrong with them," he said. "They just don't know how to accept life for what it is, and not what they want it to be. Like in here, for instance, I adjust myself to this jail. I enjoy myself in prison because I'm stuck here." As he continued, his powerful dark eyes began to twinkle. "I got them organizing here," he confided. "It's been booming the past week. One hundred and five inmates signed a petition requesting a grand jury investigation of my case."
After eight months in prison, apparently, Black Lightning was back in action.
Three days after we left him, he was released from jail.
---
Few people have spoken up in defense of Ted Patrick and what he is trying to do. No professional organization or established institution has taken a stand on behalf of his commitment to freedom of thought. Part of the problem may be attributable to Patrick's own manner of action. In his single-minded focus on rescuing cult members, he minces no words and wastes little time on social niceties. As a result, he often irks and alienates those parents, law enforcement officials, and mental health professionals who might otherwise be his natural allies.
Yet, regardless of his style, the grave questions Patrick has so flamboyantly brought to public attention are not ones we can choose to like or dislike -- nor will they simply go away if we ignore them. Is an individual free to give up his freedom of thought? May a religion, a mass therapy, or any other institution systematically attack human thought and feeling in the name of "happiness" and "fulfillment"? These are questions that we in America are not prepared to deal with, because they challenge long-standing assumptions about our minds, our personalities, and our human freedom.
In the weeks and months following our trip to the Orange County Jail we spoke with many people about Ted Patrick: parents, ex-cult members, other deprogrammers, and a number of people who were only dimly aware that there was such a thing as a controversy over some alleged forms of religion in America. We heard some denounce Patrick as a villain and a fascist, while others hailed him as a folk hero and a dark prophet of what lies ahead for America. Yet Patrick himself shows little concem for titles or media images. All he seems to ask is that people take him seriously.
We saw him a second time, during the summer of 1977, in Colorado, where he had gone voluntarily to serve out the last few weeks of an earlier kidnapping conviction in that state. There, in a private visiting room at the Denver Jail, he greeted us warmly, his hands and shirt covered with bright-colored paint from some work he had been doing in the prison workshop. He spoke highly of the treatment he was receiving from guards and prison officials, who had invited him to address them on the subject of deprogramming. Our talk turned to recent developments in the cult controversy and his own worsening legal and financial situation because of a flood of lawsuits filed against him by several large, wealthy cults. Patrick once again became somber, concerned over what he saw as the public's growing apathy in the face of the cult world's increasing wealth, power, and social legitimacy.
"The cult movement is the greatest threat and danger to this country that we have ever had," he said gravely, "but the people won't wake up, the government, Congress, the Justice Department won't wake up until something bad happens."
With regard to his own work, Patrick felt a greater urgency than ever, he said, and he was already marshalling his forces to go back into battle immediately upon his release. He said he would try to stay within the law wherever possible in future, but if it became a question of crossing over the line in order to save a cult member's captive mind, he had no doubt about what his top priority would be. At the same time, Patrick assured us, he would continue to appeal to the government and representatives of America's mental health establishment for their help, although he saw little hope of receiving support for his efforts.
"Sooner or later, they're going to have to recognize deprogramming as a profession," he said. "They're going to be forced to. But right now they don't believe that this is something that can happen to anybody. Everybody's vulnerable. I want to make people aware of that."
7 Wanted: Professional Help
"Life is a very wonderful thing," said Dr. Branom. . . . "The processes
of life, the make-up of the human organism, who can fully understand
these miracles? . . . What is happening to you now is what should happen
to any normal healthy human organism. . . . You are being made sane,
you are being made healthy."
"That I will not have," I said, "nor can understand at all. What you're
been doing is to make me feel very very ill."
-- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
In his effort to gain support for his battle against the cults, Ted Patrick has made repeated personal appeals to America's mental health community. The professionals, however, have almost totally ignored his insight into cult techniques and their effects, and they have flatly refused to become involved in the public controversy over his deprogramming procedure. But Ted Patrick is not the only person who has been brushed aside. A much less controversial figure, William Rambur of Chula Vista, California, has been similarly disregarded
in his efforts to bring the cults' destructive new threat to personality to the attention of mental health specialists.
William Rambur is another who has gone to bat for the perplexed, embarrassed, angry, heartbroken parents of America's cult members who have been legally handcuffed in their efforts to rescue their sons and daughters. Since 1971, Rambur has been an outspoken activist in the battle against the cults. In 1973, he helped organize the Citizen's Freedom Foundation and became its first president. With over 4,000 members, the CFF is the largest parents' organization among many combatling the cults. Since the organization was founded, Rambur and his colleagues have formed a nationwide network to help locate cult members who have disappeared from their schools and homes. They have circulated newsletters and given lectures throughout the country in their program of public education, and they have appeared in Washington asking for government investigation of the cults.
In our swing through southern California, we stopped at the CFF office in Chula Vista, near San Diego, where we spent an emotional afternoon that stretched into evening with William and Betty Rambur. There we heard perhaps the most appalling story of our investigation.
Snapping Page 10
