In an interview with TIME Online, Jim Picariello explains how he was recruited and ultimately escaped a Buddhist-computer cult.

Jim Picariello was a senior at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth when he was drawn into a Buddhist-oriented computer cult. Picariello's experience, which began with an apparently innocent Buddhist meditation seminar on campus, ended more than a year later, after he had quit school just short of graduation, with a formal intervention that enabled him to break the hold the cult had over him.

In an interview with TIME Online, Picariello explains how he was recruited, why he stayed so long, and how he eventually escaped the cult.