Part I: The Recruitment

Membership Drive

"Cult members need to rationalize their existence. If they can convince someone else that what they are doing is correct, they are reinforcing their own reality. They also have feelings of guilt if they don't keep up their quota of new recruits. When they don't bring enough people in, they feel that they are not as spiritual as the other people in the group, that they are not as good a child or practitioner."

The Prey

"Anybody is susceptible. Cults prey on smart, idealistic, creative and hard-working people. They don't prey on the uneducated or lazy. There is a saying in the hypnotherapy field: 'The more mind a person has, the more there is to control and the more ways there are to control it.' Often the cults prey on people who are new to a city, those who have recently lost a family member, or are depressed. Every one of us is going to go through all of those things at some point. There are many cases where people think they are just joining a soccer club, a 12-step program or an environmental protection group. My group was called the Boston meditation society. By the time I found out who was really running it and what he was really doing, I did not have the capacity to make sound judgments about the cult."

First Steps

"I went to several of the campus seminars with my fiancee because I had always wanted to learn how to meditate. The participants were very down to earth and the seminar wasn't too far out. We just listened to new age music and meditated. After several lectures, the group began to gain our confidence. They pumped us up by telling us that we seemed spiritually advanced and they invited us to meet their leader, whom they claimed was enlightened."

The Rama

"My fiancee and I were driven down to New York for a fancy dinner with the Rama. We thought it would be a really great opportunity if the leader was enlightened. If not, if he were a kook, we thought we would be able to tell immediately. The group with him was extremely nice and well-dressed. They seemed like successful businessmen and women. The food was fantastic. Rama was a tall American guy from Connecticut. He was wearing a leather jacket. He delivered a funny monologue about computers and meditation. Afterward, he answered questions about anything from investing in the Mexican market to running shoes. He seemed very knowledgeable about anything and everything."

The Hook

"We then got to meditate in his presence. We were told to meditate with a vague gaze around his body. We were supposed to pick up subtle psychic or spiritual impressions from being in his presence, like classically or historically when people were able to gain enlightenment by being in the presence of Buddha, Mohammed, or Jesus. Toward the end of the night, Rama's voice started getting very calm, very controlled and I lost touch with what he was saying. The entire room turned to gold, as if everything in the room and the room itself had been inlaid with this enchanted gold leaf. I felt this incredible surge of power, or rapture, or bliss. Afterwards, when it all cooled down, I thought to myself, God if this guy can pull this off, I'm going to stick around as long as I can. Over the months I was able to see Rama change shape into different incarnations, I was able to see the room stretch and grow 30 feet tall, and I even saw beams of light shoot out of his eyes."

The Trance

"These visions were all hypnotically induced, using classical hypnosis. Rama would say, 'Picture a mountain and the clouds floating by, and a river running down through the mountain, in between the trees.' This moves your mental process into the creative side of your brain. When he would describe the mountains, the trees and the brook, you would be picturing it in your mind. Once he gets you there, he can say, I have power and you have no idea how powerful I am because you are in the imaginative, not the logical side of your brain. The information goes straight in, and it goes in with very little question.

"It is a hypnotic technique to put people into this mode of thinking and then immediately make a statement like 'aren't you feeling good?' Then, every time you hear him talk, you will start feeling good. Even though the cult leader is not over your shoulder 24 hours a day, he will set it up during the session so that everything in life will somehow trigger you to think in a cult mind-control way. Rama made every part of my life into some extension of the doctrine. When I was ironing a shirt, I did it perfectly, in a very 'Zen' or holy sense. Every part of my life triggered a hypnotic suggestion, or some kind of mental image of his teachings."

The Scam

"The Rama philosophy was that programming computers was very similar to tantric meditation, like having multilinear mind states going on at the same time, or multitasking. He told us that he was going to give us spiritual energy so that we could meditate well. And, if we meditated well, we could program computers well. And if we programmed computers well, which is another form of meditation to him, we could make a lot of money. Since we live in America, we could use money as a scale of how enlightened we were, the more money we made, the better we were meditating. And, since we were Buddhists and lived simply, we could give the money to him as a service so he could give us more energy so that we could meditate better, program better, make more money, give it to him and on and on. It sounds almost logical. It is totally logical when you are under mind control."