THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN MIN

The impulse to believe the absurd when presented with the unknowable is called religion. Whether this is wise or unwise is the domain of doctrine. Once you understand someone's doctrine, you understand their rationale for believing the absurd. At that point, it may no longer seem absurd. You can get to both sides of this conondrum from here.

THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN MIN

Postby admin » Tue Oct 20, 2015 10:53 pm

THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN MIND CONTROL
by Pierre S. Freeman
© 2008 Pierre S. Freeman

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I dedicate this book to my mother, Annette, who passed away on September 5, 1987

Table of Contents:

• Prologue
• Introduction: My Twenty-Four-Year Captivity
• 1: The Story of Rosicrucianism
• 2: AMORC Unveiled
• 3: Anatomy of Mind Control
• 4: Haiti: The First Crucible
• 5: The Miami Roller Coaster
• 6: Diary Entries
• 7: First Initiation
• 8: Adventures in the Lodge
• 9: Second Initiation: Atrium
• 10: Atrium 3
• 11: The Protean Self
• 12: Rosicrucian Adventures in the Big Apple
• 13: The Cherished Gift of Liberty
• Endnotes

A few months after joining AMORC, I had a dream -- almost like a vision because I was in a semi-waking state. In my mind, I saw myself performing one of my out-of-body experiments. At the same time, I saw myself putting my finger inside of an electric plug with live electricity. I then became afraid and returned to my physical body. I immediately got the idea that this was a warning from AMORC to immediately stop that type of experiment.

***

Atrium 1 Monograph 1 affirms that as a new neophyte of the order, the member should begin the sanctum period by following the appointed ritual. The ritual that the monograph refers to is the ceremonial washing of one's hands and drinking of a [charged] glass of water before making contact with the celestial sanctum.

***

In AMORC, suggestions morph into mandates. The monographs begin by offering the neophyte the option of burning some incense before making contact with celestial sanctum. Later it will be more of a mandate, something like, "You must burn incense."

***

At one point in the monograph, AMORC affirms that the world as we know it is nonexistent. It all only exists in our own mind. Our vocabulary and use of words do not convey the real nature of things. This is soon followed by the assertion that "It is possible to modify the manifestation of matter." Here AMORC lays the foundation to instill in members the belief that they, the select people of this Earth, can change everything.

***

There is a long-remembered H. Spencer Lewis quotation, "You have to be a live question mark." AMORC directly states that this question must apply to their teaching as well. To me, this statement of the member's right to question, although charmingly permissive of a member's freedom to question the teachings, in fact, provides cover for an all-pervasive authoritarianism.

***

One interesting concept, brought out in this monograph, is the assertion that Rosicrucians have no actual right to property. Anything that a member possesses really belongs to the Cosmic. To me, although seemingly idealistic, this doctrine is an attempt to further obliterate personal identity and freedom. In later degrees, AMORC will ask its members to use not "I" but "we" instead. The "we" belonging to what? Perhaps the "we" of "our order." Slowly, individual consciousness is raked over to toward the hive mentality.

***

AMORC warns against spending too much time idly watching television or films, as this will decrease members' mental powers and ability to concentrate. What the person outside of AMORC will not realize is that AMORC is setting the groundwork to isolate members from TV, cinema, and eventually the world. They will do so by providing an overwhelming amount of material, including reading, exercises, and meditation practices, that will consume all of the member's time.

***

AMORC makes a big promise for those smart enough to be attentive and do their exercises. It promises that the exercises, which sharpen the members' concentration, form the development of mystical powers, which will lead to a number of psychic phenomena: telekinesis, the ability to move objects with one's mind; telepathy, the ability to transmit and receive thought, often at a distance; psychic projection, often called astral projection or leaving one's bodies; vibroturgy or psychometry, which has been defined as the ability to sense vibrations from objects; these vibrations are often believed to have been embedded in the objects from other sources, usually people; [and] absent healing (ability to treat a subject without being present).

***

To show members how important and meaningful concentration on the candle light is, AMORC philosophizes on the relation between the candlelight and fire. AMORC claims that for centuries candlelight has symbolized fire, the raw, primitive fire that hearkens back to prehistoric man, living in caves, perhaps worshiping the magical source of light and heat that provided the foundations of his warmth and nourishment. This conversation about fire is not really all that mystical. A professor of anthropology could have said this.

***

I believe that incense enhances the relaxation attendant on the candle burning and heightens the state of auto-hypnosis. I believe AMORC pushes the need for it because it facilitates a deepening of this state. Note that after you finish the candle exercise, in my opinion, you will generally be in a state of auto-hypnosis, a state that is probably deepened the more the member identifies with AMORC as the exclusive source of spiritual authority.

***

The neophyte will sit before the candle, take a few breaths, and stare at the flame. He will then perceive the flame as a kind of whitish glow or "halo" around the candle. Once he perceives the aura, the neophyte must concentrate on the color red until the aura becomes red. Then, he is asked to do this for all the seven colors of the rainbow....

This appears to be an exercise in creating a positive hallucination, a hypnotic process requiring a certain level of trance. After all, the member, in this experiment, is obviously creating a color that isn't there.

This next experiment also involves a candle. In this experiment, you try to imagine the candle flame taking on the appearance of a rosy cross or, if desired, to imagine the rosy cross in the flame, all the time mentally saying, "Rosy cross" until you actually see it. In this experiment, the member does not create a color but a complete image. The member is learning to be adept at creating a full-fledged positive hallucination, making images in his mind appear as actual, real, sensible objects.

***

They then contend that, for centuries, the Rosicrucians have used a method of transmission of thought at distance that does not require that receptor be aware of thought being sent to them. AMORC does not deny the difficulty of this process but pushes its members to keep trying until they succeed without letting themselves become discouraged.

***

AMORC states that black magic, or the process of using negative thought to affect other people's lives, is a myth. AMORC states that what does affect other people is not the practice of the sorcerer but the fear that people have of black magic.

***

In the initiation, AMORC makes the claim that their order is empowered by an egregore, or group consciousness, consisting of both incarnated beings and non-incarnate spiritual masters. The sincere members, who study and practice the teachings of the monographs, receive a spiritual energy or influx from the egregore, which provides the student with regenerative energy and a sense of direction.

***

The monograph goes on to promise the neophyte that he will soon have a more precise idea about the idea behind the teachings. It would be wonderful if this claim were true, that now the neophyte would be able to quickly assess the value of the teachings and the true goals of the Rosicrucians. But, by this point, the direction of the teachings and the monographs that embody them is still largely unknown, and I, who have been through them for twenty-four years, can verify the ambiguity of this statement. The neophyte has not moved into an area where he is now finally able to grasp the true goals of the teachings. In many ways, the intent of the monographs will remain enigmatic to the end.

***

This monograph makes clear the Rosicrucian position on abortion, declaring that life begins when the newborn takes its first breath. Implicit in this statement is the idea that life does not exist before the first breath, a position I take objection to for a variety of reasons.

***

AMORC claims that its advanced initiates will be shown special Rosicrucian healing techniques. This should not be unexpected: AMORC claims to have a lock on every type of human knowledge. Coupled with its claims about producing conditions that will result in financial wellness, the member is encouraged to be patient, postponing the dedicated actions necessary to seek proper medical or health advice or to work gainfully and seriously toward legitimate financial goals.

***

AMORC encourages its students to study the monographs when they are tired. AMORC claims that when you are tired, you will fall asleep while reading these monographs. But that's all right, because in that state, you will be more receptive to AMORC spiritual knowledge. The truth is that then you will be more suggestible. The hypnogogic state, which is the state right at the border of sleep, heightens suggestibility and makes you a better candidate for mind control.

***

AMORC states that even though Doctor Mesmer was not a member of AMORC, he was in close contact with the Rosicrucian brothers.

***

AMORC now explains the technique of respiration. AMORC states that even science recognizes that restful relaxation that can come as a result of proper deep breathing. AMORC defines positive breathing as a method of breathing in which the inhalation is held for a very long time, as long as possible, followed by an exhalation. AMORC tells its students that from a physiological point of view, positive respiration is very efficacious if they are very tired and need to regenerate themselves physically and mentally. AMORC advises its students to practice positive respiration in the morning, while waking up, because positive respiration reinforces people's strength and will put them in a better disposition to begin their day.

The exercise that follows uses "negative breathing," a technique that is the opposite of "positive breathing." In positive breathing, you inhale and hold the breath for as long as possible; in negative breathing, you exhale, attempting to not inhale for as long as possible. Holding the right thumb between thumb and index of the left hand, the neophyte is asked to practice negative breathing and observe the effect on the right arm.

***

According to the Rosicrucian theory, all sickness can be healed with positive or negative vibration. This reminds me of an incident that happened in 1993. I was in my senior year in college and found myself constantly sneezing. Seeking to rectify the cause of my sneezing, I looked carefully at my diet and decided that at least I was eating properly. So I decided to apply Rosicrucian processes for self-healing, practicing positive and negative breathing all day and all night. Unfortunately, this had little effect on my sneezing.

***

Having put all of my faith in AMORC, I tortured myself to figure out what I was doing wrong. With time, I became a complete robot, doing positive energy treatments day and night, seven days a week. Of course, the pain never stopped until I changed course after 1990 and allowed myself to be diagnosed by a doctor in Queens hospital. There, I learned that I had failed to breathe my stomach ulcer away.

***

While this is going on, the cult is basically trying to brand his consciousness with a group identity. They may give him a special name or title; they may have him participate in group rituals, including chanting, singing, game playing or dancing; they may have him use special handshakes....

Perhaps, under more honest circumstances, some of these ritualistic and bonding elements could be a good thing. There could be a case made for a type of religious organization utilizing these elements for the members to bond together in a sincere quest to find or worship God. But, in this case, based on my twenty-four years of experience, I believe that AMORC uses these so-called spiritual or metaphysical practices, such as breathing, visualization, and chanting, in a specific context that leads to the induction of a hypnotic state in their members. This, coupled with the claim of infallibility and historical authenticity, produces an agentless form of hypnosis, hypnosis without the hypnotist, a kind of amalgam of self-hypnosis and hypnosis by an outside agent.

***

Fraternal organizations, owing to their oaths of secrecy, often operate with compartmentalized protocols. In the case of AMORC, AMORC separates its members into different levels of initiation, telling them to keep their initiatory content to themselves.

***

AMORC tells its readers that the aura experiment will support a specific mystical practice, which it counsels its members to develop. To be effective, the exercise must be practiced regularly. The ideal times to do it are in the morning after waking up, after lunch, or between meals. AMORC then counsels the member to drink the water after performing the exercise, claiming that this will revitalize the member -- even more so if one drinks it after having completed intensive physical activities. So, when I was exhausted from lack of food and sleep, I practiced this exercise more to get the strength I needed, which I lacked because I did not have the money to buy food. As a part of this fantasy, I began to speculate that I had become poor as a result of the divine action of the Cosmic, which intended to use me as an example to show that people can bypass food altogether and live on cosmic power.

***

According to AMORC, there are twelve vowels sounds that are able to produce special, unique effects. These sounds and their effects have long been kept in the ancient Rosicrucian archives. This privileged knowledge was transmitted to me slowly over twenty-plus years of compliance with the Rosicrucian system, producing nothing of any substantial value to my life or survival.

***

In the reading, the master of the class, who you are imagining, tells you that he or she has looked into the neophyte's heart while they are meditating and are satisfied with their progress. In other words, you imagine someone present, who is saying that they have inspected your inner consciousness and that you are now ready to proceed. You are then enjoined to silence, placing the index finger of the right hand over the lips....a kind of symbol of the perennial silence a Rosicrucian must keep about his work, first from the outside world and secondly from those who have not reached the appropriate degree in the order.

***

At the end of this monograph, AMORC talks about the more evolved idea of God as a perfected consciousness, a universal intelligence, not as an animistic or anthropomorphic entity. The concept of God propounded here will progressively prepare members for a substantially different approach to God than what they were brought up to believe.

***

Superficially, it appears that in this monograph, AMORC is treating the subject of the soul in a very objective, philosophic way. But, after a while, the monograph suggests that most likely only AMORC itself can provide the necessary experiment to prove the existence of the soul. According to AMORC, the concept of the soul -- or consciousness fully separated from the body -- can be proven by such experiences as astral or psychic projection. The best way to prove the existence of the soul is to experience yourself being initiated to its reality during a cosmic communion. AMORC further goes on to say that you can best experience the soul, in general, through out-of-body experience.

***

AMORC contrasts its advanced teachings to the current state of science by mentioning that the "law of seven" has not yet been accepted by science. This is one of the laws that the Rosicrucians have allegedly accepted since very ancient times. The monograph then describes different cycles of life partitioned into cycles of seven years. I remember when I studied the so-called cycles of life around 1981 in Haiti. I remember saying to myself, "According to the cycles of life described in the monograph, I am already behind."

***

AMORC affirms, in effect, that it is in charge of the world. Members of AMORC think of themselves as belonging to an exclusive club. All the rest of the children of God are secondary citizens or outsiders.

***

After relating the concept of the second coming of Christ, AMORC points out that the Christian belief does not make any sense. AMORC claims that it is not their intention to attack the Christian faith, but such a dogma flies in the face of science. It is obvious, of course, that they are, indeed, attacking this Christian doctrine. The practical section continues, highlighting all the shortcomings of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection and opposing the Christian concept to the doctrine of reincarnation. Now after fully developing an antagonistic point of view toward basic Christian doctrine, the monograph asks its members to think about the Christian doctrine of resurrection. Then AMORC asks readers to consider all they have learned in this monograph and think about the concept of the resurrection in Christianity. This injunction to contemplate on this doctrine is followed by a disingenuous affirmation of their members' freedom of belief, even if their belief includes the concept of resurrection.

***

This monograph quotes Louis Claude de Saint-Martin. The teaching of Saint-Martin is a great example of how valuable it is to question and to doubt. This is very strange because AMORC chases away people who ask questions. The monograph states that by going through karma and reincarnation, you will raise yourself to the state of "rose-croix" and will no longer have to live in the physical world.

***

AMORC uses its own values to attack religion, society, our social system ... everything you can think of. Then they conclude their argument by reassuring us that their goal is "not to criticize our social system." But that's exactly what they do. After savagely criticizing every religion, social structure, and social organization, AMORC brings in its own mystical point of view to resolve the various issues they've been addressing.

***

A continuation of this lecture on the "I" will be reflected in the twelve temple degrees. Members will be asked to stop using "I" and to use "we" instead. Practical Application: The neophyte is to avoid using "I" as much as possible, as well as phrases with "me" or "myself," like "it seems to me" or, perhaps, "as to myself."

***

Here AMORC presents itself as the representative of God on Earth. According to AMORC, the cosmic masters act permanently in the service of humanity. They work through the great white lodge, the true government of the world. In their mission, the cosmic masters receive help from the great white brotherhood.

***

After twenty-four years in the order, my personal belief is that they have used mind control techniques and labeled them meditation techniques; taken elements from different teachings they have found and fused them into a monolithic, historical artifice, a continuing tradition that never existed in the way they have claimed in these monographs; developed and promoted a kind of cosmic master oversight and affiliation with their organization, which exists most vividly but solely in the minds of the founders and perpetuators of the order and the members they have convinced. In short, I believe that the AMORC Rosicrucian order was created out of elements they have found here and there, from old books, from other organizations, and from the minds of H. Spencer Lewis and other leaders. The power of their teaching is fueled by their ability to inculcate their beliefs through hypnotically fueled suggestions based on sophisticated remote indoctrination techniques. It is supported, for those who attend lodges, by enormous peer pressure enshrined in buildings set up to inculcate members with the antiquity of their rituals and traditions.

***

I got into a meditative state and became passive and open. In that state, I had a disturbing, confusing vision. I saw someone beheading me....

During the period of passivity following the commencement of meditation, I saw myself crawling on my hands and knees on McArthur Causeway in Miami. I was reaching for something in the presence of someone else, also in that same crawling position. Then, in my dream state, I saw a snake crawling across the street, followed by a strong intuitive message that I should improve my social and economic condition....

Two minutes into my relaxation session, I had to stop suddenly. I felt like my head was exploding. My eyes were blinking rapidly, and I received the impression intuitively that I was forcing it too much. I was being excessive. All is lost....

During my meditation period, I had a vision of a truck going down Alton Road near my house. But the truck was traveling on the wrong side of the street. I saw myself in the back of the truck. At the same time, an interesting message came to me: "No room for the crazy."...

While practicing the exercise from yesterday's monograph (monograph 23 of the third level), I saw the image of an ugly face and then a picture of a handicapped man with crutches and another man in a wheelchair. All during the period of relaxation, I saw other images of ugly faces. Tonight, I showed my determination by continuing the exercise despite that fact that an inner voice directed me not to continue with it....

At two different times, I again began to inadvertently and unexpectedly scream loudly. After each of these disturbing episodes, I began the exercise again, attempting to go into deep meditation. Instead of realizing that anticipated state of meditation, I saw the face of a monster, eventually leading me to stop what I was doing altogether....

This was a day of confession. I was overcome by sleep, but I forced myself to continue. I became strongly tempted to use some very foul language about my situation with AMORC but I forced myself not to vocalize anything negative....

As I was about to fall asleep, I again saw one of those unpleasant, monstrous faces....

I am trying to close the gap in my monograph study by taking on two monographs per week until I'm caught up. Today, I tried to meditate on the exercise in monograph 5, tenth temple degree. Again, I started seeing the strange monster face I had seen before....

Things are getting more extreme. In pure disgust, I spit on the monograph. I continued to read this monograph with complete indifference and only because I was afraid of what could happen to me if I did not read it. Deep inside my heart, I now believe that these monographs are nothing but a compilation of lies. I am interested now in the kind of practical knowledge that can help me to better my economic condition. Is this so strange? What use is a religious belief that grinds your mind and soul into the bleakness of poverty, that pretends it can uplift the soul without supplying some kind of solution to the needs of the human body? We all need food, clothes, shelter, and money to live. Who can pretend that we don't? I am not talking about a religion of greed or exploitation. I am just talking about a religion that takes into consideration the common need for human beings to survive in their environment with some kind of grace and dignity and not to go hungry every day....

"The 'real' self has also been responsible for generating thematic dreams. I have met hundreds of former members who reported having nightmares over and over again while a member of a cult. These dreams typically involve themes of being lost, hurt, or trapped. People have told me about having cult dreams of being lost in a dark forest, of being choked or suffocated, of being imprisoned in a concentration camp." (Hassan, 74.)

***

By the time I got to my junior year of college, I had started observing that I had a hard time staying focused when attending a class. My inability to concentrate was so bad that after attending a class, I had to go home and restudy the material on my own. It became so hard that I thought maybe I had some kind of brain tumor. But I couldn't go to the doctor because I didn't have health insurance. I concluded that although I might have had a brain tumor, AMORC was keeping me from having the means to visit a doctor so that I could learn to have more faith in the egregore to take care of my health problems. I finally concluded that I had to meditate more and practice the AMORC exercises more, so that AMORC could continue to take care of my health problems and give me back my ability to concentrate. Now I realize, from reading books about mind control organizations, that various indoctrination techniques of AMORC may have been what messed up my brain.

***

At the time of my flight, my mother was on her deathbed, having been diagnosed with cancer. I cried every day about not being able to visit her. I was still convinced that if I could only practice the AMORC principles perfectly, I could send a "treatment" to my mother, and the Cosmic would heal her. So it is no surprise that I fell back into the cycle I had been in when I lived in Miami, practicing the Rosicrucian exercises twenty-four hours a day. Healing my mother would be the ultimate test of the AMORC teachings.

***

For more than twenty years, I used to purposely bring up a specific image when negative thoughts came into my mind -- especially negative thoughts about AMORC, which was the main source of my doubts....Every time a thought like this came into my head, I would, as instructed by AMORC, visualize a chosen master, someone from the Rosicrucian pantheon whom I truly respected. This would theoretically bring a spiritual influx into my immediate experience and deflect the negative energy. Of course, the natural person to choose was H. Spencer Lewis. Lewis was the founder of our order, the powerhouse who had found a true connection with the ancient order and resurrected it in the United States, the writer of the sacred monographs. Perfect choice. Given my circumstances, as you can imagine, I visualized him a lot. Unfortunately, owing to these continuous efforts, when I began to separate myself from AMORC, Lewis's face became a trigger point for me....When I reached the point where I began to intentionally mentally distance myself from the organization, his pictures persisted and began to flood my imagination. As my efforts increased, I was bombarded with the picture of his face day and night. Since I did not have any money to hire a therapist to help me deal with the problem, I started on my own, using what I called then the "brute force method." I started by deliberately visualizing the unsavory behavior of H. Spencer Lewis. By that time, I was convinced that he had used the name of God to enslave many of his children, and this was unsavory and wrong. I also started to mentally associate his image with the other brainwashers of the world, such as Jim Jones and Marshall Applewhite of Heaven's Gate and the like.

***

At an early stage in my conscious rebellion, I started receiving impulses that were completely backward and wrong. For example, in a very compulsive way, I went to my boss and told him that I would quit my job shortly, when in fact I had no plans to get a new job. The more these types of impulses occurred, the more the missteps I was making became obvious to me. I attributed these missteps to my having imbibed some of the false teachings of AMORC about intuition and visualization. The techniques did not empower you with Cosmic attunement; they nurtured a false concept of intuition and spontaneity. You became a victim of your own false conception of yourself as a cosmically attuned adept, confusing the impulsive behavior with real intuition.

***

I am still able to meditate but am still hearing strange sounds and having daymares and nightmares. I do not know if they are psychic perceptions, grounded in genuine mystical experiences, or mental problems. Since I do not have the means to see a psychiatrist anyway, I am provisionally accepting them as some type of mystical perception. I will endure these peculiar experiences the same way I endured stomach pain in Miami, Florida, and New York, when I did not have health insurance and had to live with the pain and accept it as an AMORC test.

***

Most members at this level are conscious of the fact that they have been used and are somehow tainted by the organization. It is, again, hard to explain to someone who has not undergone what I've gone through, but their inertia to freeze themselves, their core motivation, is seriously affected by the indoctrination they have experienced.

***

In 1999 in accordance with instructions provided at the end of the eleventh temple degree, I sent a letter to the master of the grand lodge. In this letter, I described the painful experiences that had started back in 1986. I was worried that perhaps I had crossed over to a negative place in my mind or even was having some kind of schizophrenic episode. I was told that schizophrenia was probably not the problem at all, but to reflect on where I might have opened my mind to a negative influence. This response was so vague that it didn't help me in any way whatsoever.

***

AMORC is basically a religious dictatorship run by an imperator -- a Latin term used in various ways during the Roman Empire but evolving into a word basically synonymous with emperor. AMORC's strength is derived from members' blind belief in its authority, those members having been spoon-fed certain doctrines and dogmas via the weekly monographs, similar to the function of holy writ to Christian fundamentalists. These doctrines are ingested in a sanctimonious and hypnotic atmosphere, reinforced by a firm injunction against disobeying the terms of membership and thereby being cut off from the egregore. A Rosicrucian who falls from the good graces of the organization will, so to speak, be at the mercy of fate.

***

ARTICLE 15: MAKE THE SPIRITUAL REALM MORE REAL THAN THIS ONE: Question members' focus on physical reality. Create a sense that subjective reality is more objective than physical reality -- particularly a subjective reality that reinforces the cult's interpretation of the world. Question the reality of the physical world, of time and space, and of the need for logic-based decision-making.

-- The Prisoner of San Jose: How I Escaped From Rosicrucian Mind Control, by Pierre S. Freeman
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Re: THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN

Postby admin » Tue Oct 20, 2015 10:53 pm

PROLOGUE

In the literature of mind control, I believe there have been, so far, two somewhat discrete phases. The first is embodied in the work of people like Robert Jay Lifton and Edgar Schein, inspired by the dynamic psychological work of Kurt Lewin. I would call this first phase "the study of brainwashing." Its most important fruit was the study of coercion of people in captivity based on research focused on interrogation and coercive techniques practiced on prisoners in Communist China and Korea. In brainwashing, mind control influences are vested in the captor, the victim being an actual physical captive under the complete physical control of his jailer, interrogator, or state bureaucrat.

The second phase was developed by cult experts like Steven Hassan, Margaret Singer, and the team of Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad. In this phase, there was an analysis of similar techniques involving religious, psychological, political, and commercial cults. I call this phase "the study of cult mind control." In this phase, captivity is largely voluntary but under direct influence by the cult leadership. There are no physical constraints, but the point of contact to create compliance is very physical and environmentally immediate.

Cult mind control study had two progressive outcomes. Initially, it produced a form of psychological reconditioning designed to remove people from cult mind control constraints on their emotions and thought processes, which was called deprogramming. After that phase resulted in certain unfavorable psychological and social consequences, including the possibility of deprogrammers facing legal and personal consequences, including kidnapping, a new cult reconditioning protocol evolved. It was called exit psychology and involved a less coercive, more subtle approach to removing the influences of cult mind control.

I would like to see my book as part of a third phase, a phase where mind control techniques are explored largely apart from any type of physical environment. In my case, both recruitment into a cult and the imposition of mind control techniques were largely remote from any type of physical environment, although there was a human influence through the culture of a fraternal lodge. Still, in the cult that I grew up in, most of the indoctrination occurred in the privacy of my own home or, when I was homeless, the seclusion of a lonely bench or a temporary station in a laundromat.

In one sense, you could say all three phases of analysis focus on how organizations can change a human personality vested with an individual, independent frame of mind (perhaps influenced to some degree by family and sociopolitical milieu) to a fully compliant, cult-directed personality. In fact, there are, in my mind, three methods of creating a cult personality from an ordinary human being.

1) Brainwashing -- involving the coercion to change and transmute personality through physical captivity

2) Mind control -- involving the coercion to change and transmute personality though direct physical and psychological influence in a controlled environment

3) Remote indoctrination -- involving the coercion to change and transmute personality through techniques that can be largely independent of a specific environment (such as imprisonment or a controlled environment). Literature or media largely convey the influences, though sometimes after a certain amount of direct, interpersonal programming.


If you think about it, the ability to remotely control and transform a person's thinking and personality is not new. Indeed, this was one of the principal activities of the National Socialist Party in Nazi Germany and other groups in many Communist states.

Unfortunately, these techniques are also utilized in activities as contemporary as the training of terrorists, beginning with the dogmatic schooling in the madrassas of various Arab countries and progressing to the military and religious indoctrination of young suicide bombers -- the second, and often final, phase of their indoctrination.

Political parties, even in the United States, as discussed later when commenting on the latest work of Al Gore, utilize television as a hypnotic device for embalming the human mind in rigid thinking and predictable voting patterns. Commercials use these same sound bites and branding techniques, substituting jingles for political slogans and cute, visually memorable logos for red elephants and blue donkeys.

In my view, remote indoctrination is not all that rare. Still, when a bona fide religious cult embodies it, it is easier to see its actual mechanics and its chilling effect on real human beings.

That is why I think it is important to bring my story to the attention of the larger world. And I am hoping that it will help those who might entrap themselves as I did or who need to free themselves from the inner constraints imposed by a mind control cult -- hopefully sooner than I did.

But, beyond that, perhaps I am laying a groundwork for further probing of the mind control techniques in politics, in more conventional religious philosophies, and in global terror. Mind control, used in any area, only contributes to the deterioration of human judgment and liberty. Now more than ever, in a world approaching cataclysmic political, social, and environmental change, we desperately need free, inquiring minds, and compassionate, loving hearts to face the important new challenges of this next, very critical century, in order to ensure the survival of the human race and planet Earth.
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Re: THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN

Postby admin » Tue Oct 20, 2015 10:55 pm

INTRODUCTION: My Twenty-Four-Year Captivity

Twenty-four long years in captivity.

Looking back, it seems almost impossible that I had given away my hopes and dreams -- indeed, my core identity -- to an organization whose vaunted promises led to poverty, degradation, and a life without real meaning.

AMORC -- even the acronym still summons, in my mind, a world of exotic mystery, of unlimited personal power, of wealth and security grounded in a distinguished spiritual organization, an organization of unprecedented antiquity and authenticity.

For many, many decades, the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC) has solicited members through ads promising membership in a secret society graced by distinguished historical figures such as Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and Benjamin Franklin. The secrets of the ages were offered to the masses in strange but alluring ads that spoke of invisible worlds, astral projection, attunement with Cosmic Consciousness, and gifts of illumination bestowed abundantly on its true initiates.

Image

ALL THAT STUFF IN THE BIBLE IS
REALLY STRAIGHT. LOOK WHAT HAPPENED TO
SAUL OF TARSUS (FOR GOD'S SAKE) THERE HE WAS
RIDING ALONG IN THE DESERT ON HIS HORSE OR
CAMEL OR SOMETHING AND A VOICE SAID TO HIM
WHY ARE YOU PERSECUTING ME?
(HE WAS OUT IN THE HOT SUN AND YOU KNOW ...) HE FLIPPED OUT
HE WENT FLYING OFF HIS HORSE AND FELL
ON THE GROUND WHAT DO YOU WANT OF ME?"
START MY CHURCH!
"GO TO THE NEXT TOWN AND YOU'LL BE
INSTRUCTED" THAT'S WHAT HE HEARD AND HE
WENT THE WHOLE TRIP AND THAT'S AN ASTRAL
TRIP. A VERY GROOVY ASTRAL TRIP.
AND THAT'S WHAT THE BIBLE IS:
AN ASTRAL STORY
A VERY GROOVY ASTRAL STORY
... AT ONE LEVEL

-- Be Here Now, by Ram Dass


As a young man in Haiti, I was used to the ambiance of mystery and religiosity. Voodoo and the Catholic Church flourished bountifully in a society serving only the privileged few. Young men like me knew that our only hope of surmounting the deep poverty surrounding us was an education and a job.

But this route wasn't always easy. There were great complexities in it -- immense competition, laden with various levels of bureaucratic and collegiate favoritism. Money was the best way to speed the journey to upward mobility, but who had it? Could an ancient mystical order and its secrets be the lubrication I was seeking? I certainly hoped so. And when I left Haiti, intending to jump-start my upward path in the United States, I took my hope in AMORC's promise with me.

But instead of finding that promise fulfilled, I found myself in a strangely perplexing state of mind.

It's hard for anyone caught in my predicament to neatly explain how one steps into an organization subtly promising wealth, power, gratifying relationships, and true vocation and then wakes up one day in an entirely different set of circumstances than the world one had imagined -- indeed, in the grips of a mind control religious cult.

Few people, including me, who managed to be recruited, young and innocent, into such an organization, would have thought such an eventuality to be even remotely possible. I never even dreamed that I could one day be a victim of mind control, hypnosis, or brainwashing. It never crossed my mind until years after I was recruited by AMORC.

Yes, I saw myself as a victim of society, of poverty, of a social class, of an unfeeling government for the hungry masses, but never of something as strange as mind control.

Now I know that religious cults like AMORC feed on struggling, desperate, but somehow still hopeful souls like me. They prey on the confused, downtrodden, and vulnerable. Steven Hassan, in his book Combatting Cult Mind Control, explains:

Surveys of present and former cult members indicate that the majority of people recruited into destructive cults were approached at a vulnerable time of stress in their lives. The stress is often due to some kind of major transition: moving to a new town, starting a new job, breaking off a relationship, experiencing financial instability, or losing a loved one. People in such situations tend to have defense mechanisms that are overloaded or weakened. If they don't know how to spot and avoid destructive cults, they are easy prey. [1]


The key to the success of a religious cult often lies in the close structural similarity between certain traditional spiritual practices, like prayer and meditation, and its own techniques of hypnosis and mind control. There is a difference between self-inducing a hypnotic trance state and entering voluntarily into a state of mindfulness, the door to the meditative experience. Both are routes to the subconscious. Hypnosis enters through the door of sleep or trance; meditation through the door of mindfulness or waking up, becoming more conscious.

WHAT CALMING THE MIND IS ALL ABOUT
WHAT MEDITATION IS FOR
IS TO COOL YOU OUT SO YOU
RE-MEMBER
SO YOU SEE HOW IT ALL IS

-- Be Here Now, by Ram Dass


In this book, I am not making any kind of religious claims about meditation or prayer. Rather, I am firmly trying to distinguish these types of techniques, used with awareness grounded in a spiritual view of the world, from the deceptive, manipulative, and self-serving hypnotic and coercive techniques of mind control cults.

I shall show in the following pages, clearly but painfully, how I was drawn into joining AMORC, purportedly a Rosicrucian society with an ancient pedigree, and how my personality ultimately became shaped by its practices. These practices, in my opinion, were, in part, hypnotic and based on certain practices of cult mind control. When actuated, they fostered suggestibility and an unthinking conformity to the ideas and practices of the mother organization.

As I more deeply studied these teachings, I became a kind of zombie, living a life that was directly contrary to my best interests, with only a small, desperate voice inside of me vaguely protesting the person I had become.

Yet, finally, although still deep into the hypnotically induced stupor of AMORC, part of me rebelled. Although very much weakened by my long years of captivity and with the indirect aid of a few people and a few books, I began to realize who I was.

I have drawn upon these books and a small portion of my Rosicrucian diary to help give the reader some idea of my plight and what it meant. In my diary entries, I have a comprehensive account of my entire twenty-four-year journey, but I have only presented and highlighted a few of the most relevant episodes, so that the reader can focus on the most significant part of my story.

Although I have tried hard to make my case, I believe it will still be hard for an outsider to mind control methodologies to realize that there are constraints on someone whose mind has been conditioned. These constraints are difficult to recognize and more difficult to overcome.

Conditioning by these organizations involves the creation of triggers in members' minds. When one begins to question the mind control cult, these "psychic" triggers, based on ingrained associations with a variety of thoughts, feelings, and situations, awaken the "cult personality" originally designed by the cult to overcome the members' original or real personality. The pull of the hypnotically shaped personality is incredibly strong.

As you will see from the foregoing narrative, the contradictions aroused by the reawakening of this artificial personality caused me to behave erratically and sometimes dangerously. For instance, I would resolve to quit the organization, but a few days later I would be praising and thanking God for its existence.

On several occasions, while driving alone in a car, I remember talking bitterly to myself about AMORC before I slipped into unconsciousness and woke up some time later, without any recollection how I managed to get from one place to another. Talk about dissociation!

This was not the mysterious "missing time" of so-called UFO abduction cases but, in my opinion, more like the temporary amnesia experienced by multiple personalities while the individual passed from one personality to another. Such was the depth of self-division from my precult personality provided to me by my mind control captors.

At some point in my growth as an individual, while still in the confines of this mind control prison, I discovered that, indeed, there were other people in religious cults like mine, and that a whole discipline of "exit psychology" had evolved in the last few decades.

As I read books based on the psychology of cult behavior, deprogramming, and exit psychology, I began to develop a voracious appetite for freedom. Simultaneously, I became aware that since my mind and heart had been conditioned, only a careful and sometimes painfully slow process of deconditioning could restore me to normal.

As an example of some of the insights I obtained from these books, here are Margaret Thaler Singer's six conditions [2] that create the proper "thought-reform atmosphere":

1. Keep the person unaware that there is an agenda to control or change the person

2. Control time and physical environment (contacts, information)

3. Create a sense of powerlessness, fear, and dependency

4. Suppress old behavior and attitudes

5. Instill new behavior and attitudes

6. Put forth a closed system of logic


In my book, you will learn how each of these various factors and other parameters used to describe mind control functioned in my life to deprive me of my freedom, the very essence of my life.

Once I had determined that I would become free, I had to learn to consciously trick my own mind to avoid being consumed by the mind traps of others planted disturbingly in the garden of my own personality.

In this work, I will show you how I was recruited, indoctrinated, and retained by AMORC. I will show you how I broke many of the shackles of my conditioning and how I now see a happy, prosperous life emerging from the depths of homelessness and heartbreak.

I think it is important to note that, unless I am discussing other Rosicrucian orders specifically, the term Rosicrucian generally is only referring to AMORC, the organization that I was a member of. So when I speak of "time," "space," "the Egregore," or other topics covered in the teachings of AMORC as Rosicrucian concepts, I am indicating solely the organization to which I belonged. There have been many other Rosicrucian orders, some long since passed into history and some alive today. They have or have had their own concepts, their own Rosicrucian method of looking at the world. The idea of a monolithic Rosicrucian order with its own unique concepts of illumination and knowledge is, in my mind, a myth.

I am not entirely free of the struggle. I still have issues. I still have an inventory of exceedingly bad memories, disappointments, and psychological pain to contend with. There is still the backwash of decades of economic hardship that I believe were the result of myths of "manifestation" fostered by AMORC. Furthermore, it is still difficult to contend with the "triggers" that can still awaken vestiges of my divided self.

No, my current life is not entirely pleasant, nor is it free of all the shackles of the past. But, still, the light of freedom grows brighter every day.
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Re: THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN

Postby admin » Tue Oct 20, 2015 11:00 pm

ONE: The Story of Rosicrucianism

There's no doubt that the Rosicrucians, in a general sense, have a mysterious and, for the most part, hidden history. It would be hard to prove, in one sense or another, that AMORC's claim to be a legitimate heir of a Rosicrucian order is authentic. In fact, it would be hard to prove whether any group claiming the title of Rosicrucian is valid. The history of spiritual movements claiming some direct connection to Rosicrucianism remains shrouded in mystery. At various points throughout history, such organizations might surface, often veiling themselves in anonymity. In Western history, people claiming to be Rosicrucians might not fit in with the established tendencies of church and state. During such times, it might be dangerous, even lethal, to promote oneself as a member of any such organization.

Nonetheless, if one were to wish to choose a group to denote as a mysterious society with claims to having possessed the secrets of the ages, a Rosicrucian order would be an ideal one to pick.

Why? Because owing to the Rosicrucian story, in its many variations, having been addressed many times by occult writers, it is very easy to put forward your organization as one with an ancient and profound history. Indeed, if you want to become a cult leader, desire a huge repository of incredible claims to make to your followers, need impressive credentials that are very difficult to prove or disprove, and choose Rosicrucianism as your venue, your homework has already been done!

Image

WHEN YOU CAN CENTER AND SEE YOUR WHOLE LIFE
AS A STORY IN WHICH CHAPTERS ARE
UNFOLDING
THEN: THE MOMENT TO MOMENT EGO INVOLVEMENT
"AM I GETTING ENOUGH AT THIS MOMENT?"
CEASES TO BE A DOMINANT THEME
AND: YOU START TO LIVE IN THE
TAO
(THE WAY)
JESUS SAID: I AM THE WAY
IT'S THE SAME WAY!
THE WAY
IS THE WAY IS
THE WAY

-- Be Here Now, by Ram Dass


I could easily quote passage after passage about or by alleged Rosicrucians and their strange powers and history.

The Rosicrucians became known publicly in the seventeenth century, when the famous documents[url]Fama Fraternitatis[/url], the [url]Confessio Fraternitatis[/url], and the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz were first released. In addition to these documents, a strange manifesto, circulated in posters and plastered on the walls of Paris, soon became famous.

Even within the last decade, AMORC has proclaimed its pedigree by aping the manifestos of four centuries ago. Yes, on March 20, 2001, the Ancient Mystical Order Rosce Crucis, also known as AMORC, sought affinity with its remote origins by publishing a document called MANIFESTO Positio Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis. Perhaps to some the Positio will not be all that convincing, owing to its differences, both in content and form, from the older manifestos. But to others, it is probably a very convincing document, laying out the Rosicrucian principles for global reconciliation in the twenty-first century.

The original documents, however, were far more intriguing. The antique Parisian manifesto, once plastered on so many walls throughout the city, begins:

We, the Deputies of the Higher College of the Rose-Croix, do make our stay, visibly and invisibly, in this city, by the grace of the Most High, to Whom turn the hearts of the Just. We demonstrate and instruct, without books and distinctions, the ability to speak all manners of tongues of the countries where we choose to be, in order to draw our fellow creatures from error of death.

He who takes it upon himself to see us merely out of curiosity will never make contact with us. But if his inclination seriously impels him to register in our fellowship, we, who are judges of intentions, will cause him to see the truth of our promises; to the extent that we shall not make known the place of our meeting in this city, since the thoughts attached to the real desire of the seeker will lead us to him and him to us.


It is worth analyzing, for a moment, the claims of this early document, which purports to be from the "Deputies of the Higher College of the Rose-Croix." The claim of the document being from a "Higher College of the Rose-Croix" itself would be puzzling to the intelligentsia of Paris, since such an institution truly wasn't known. Furthermore, it claims that such deputies were making their stay in Paris, both "visibly" and "invisibly." But what does this mean? Does it mean openly (visibly) and covertly (invisibly), or does it imply some more magical thing, like being actually invisible, a power attributed to the ascended masters (advanced adepts who inhabit AMORC literature)?

Just in case one might question the idea of some kind of "cloak of invisibility," in the next few lines, there is the indication of another power -- the ability to automatically speak in the language of whatever country these "deputies" might visit, without books or instruction. In other words, these Rosicrucian emissaries seem to have the ability to speak "in tongues," to automatically speak in other languages.

In this case, these adepts take the usual claim of speaking in tongues (glossolalia) a step further than is normally claimed by exponents of the phenomenon in modern times. In the traditional evangelical form, persons who speak in tongues utter a human or unknown language, in all cases not known to him or her. In the Rosicrucian phenomenon, the adept apparently uses this ability to actually communicate with foreigners. To some, this ability might be reminiscent of a universal translator found in some Star Trek episodes.

According to the Parisian manifesto, these adepts use this strange ability for the sake of drawing flour fellow creatures from error of death." The error of death? What an absolutely intriguing way of putting it! But what does it mean? Does this passage mean what Paul is often thought to mean by "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" in the book of Corinthians in the Bible? Are the Rosicrucians enjoining the good people of Paris to a jolt of good, old-fashioned Biblical salvation or, as their miraculously endowed deputies might be suggesting, going along the line of alchemical tradition referencing the "philosopher's stone," that appears directly or is suggested by both the early and later purported Rosicrucian documents?

In the ancient theory of alchemy, the alchemists sought to find a substance called the "philosopher's stone." This substance had the ability to turn base metals into gold -- for instance, lead into gold. According to most modern chemists, this would be completely impossible in that era of pre-atomic fission.

Also, according to alchemical literature, the philosopher's stone not only had lucrative metallic transmutation properties, it had universal curative properties and could actually transmute the alchemist into an immortal being. Some have described the stone as a kind of metallic fountain of life.

Was this what the seventeenth-century manifesto was implying? Was it saying that these Rosicrucian adepts had somehow unlocked the key to deathlessness through some kind of alchemic process with the aid of some kind of secret, esoteric science? Would these be the byproducts of committed seekers after truth having spoken the Alchemist's Prayer?

The Alchemist's Prayer

Oh, most singular and unspeakable Presence, first and last in the universe, heighten the fury of my fire and bum away the dross of my being. Cleanse my soiled soul. Bathe me in your awesome Light.

Set me free from my past; cut me loose from my boundaries. Unite me with the One Thing hidden in my life, wherein is my only strength. Fill me with your Presence. Allow me to see through your Eye; grant me entry to your Mind; let me resonate with your Sacred Will.

Make me transparent to your flame, and fashion me into a lens for your Light only. Transmute me into an incorruptible Stone in your eternal service, like the golden Light that surrounds you. [1]


Image

The personality is the reflected picture of the Spirit, the mind being the mirror, or focus. As when reflected in a pond, the images of trees appear inverted, the foliage seeming to be the deepest down in the water, so the highest aspect of the spirit (the Divine Spirit) finds its counterpart in the lowest of the three bodies (the dense body). The next highest spirit (the life spirit) is reflected in the next lowest body (the vital body). The third spirit (the human spirit) and its reflection, the third body (the desire body), appear closest of all to the reflecting mirror, which is the mind, the latter corresponding to the surface of the pond -- the reflecting medium in our analogy. The Spirit came down from the higher Worlds during involution; and by concurrent action, the Bodies were built upward in the same period. It is the meeting of these two streams in the focusing Mind that marks the point in time when the individual, the human being, the Ego, is born -- when the Spirit takes possession of its vehicles.

-- The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, by Max Heindel


The Fama Fraternitas can be traced back to a 1614 printed edition. Its original edition may have been released prior to that, first in German, then in Latin. The translation I have used is attributed to Thomas Vaughan, the English occultist. It is sub-titled, "A Discovery of the Most Laudable Order of the Rosy Cross."

The Fama Fraternitas begins by registering gratitude for the new knowledge gained through the exploration of the New World and the growing value of a new science. This new science is esteemed over the medieval, antiquated knowledge of Porphyry, Aristotle, and Galen. Then the document begins to tell the story of the founder of the Rosicrucian order, a German named C. R. C., who was put in a monastery when he was young, where he learned Greek and Latin.

When he grew up, C. R. C. accompanied another monk, P. A. L., on a trip to the Holy Land. But when P.A. L. died in Cyprus, C. R. C. kept going, first traveling to Damascus but intending to eventually head toward Jerusalem. Quite ill, he remained in Damascus, apparently learning and practicing medicine and, at the same time, becoming familiar with the Wise Men of Damcar and their discoveries about nature. He became so interested in these inhabitants of Damcar that he traveled there to learn the secrets of these sages. Damcar, incidentally, appears to be different than Damascus, whose name it resembles.

Upon his arrival, the wise men welcomed him as though he had been expected already. He, in turned, learned their mathematics and medicine and became more fluent in Arabic. In fact, C. R. C. learned so much that he translated their Book M into Latin. Eventually, he traveled to Fez, where he learned much from the "elementals" and from the wise men there, although there was some corruption in their learning, which he had occasion to separate according to his needs for true knowledge.

Image

WILLIAM JAMES SAID:
OUR NORMAL WAKING CONSCIOUSNESS
IS BUT ONE SPECIAL TYPE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
WHILST ALL ABOUT IT
PARTED FROM IT BY THE FILMIEST OF SCREENS
THERE LIE
POTENTIAL FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS ENTIRELY DIFFERENT
WE MAY GO THROUGH LIFE
WITHOUT SUSPECTING THEIR EXISTENCE
BUT APPLY THE REQUISITE STIMULUS AND AT A TOUCH
THEY ARE THERE IN ALL THEIR COMPLETENESS
DEFINITE TYPES OF MENTALITY WHICH PROBABLY SOMEWHERE
HAVE THEIR FIELD OF APPLICATION AND ADAPTATION
NO ACCOUNT OF THE UNIVERSE IN ITS TOTALITY
CAN BE FINAL WHICH LEAVES THESE OTHER FORMS
OF CONSCIOUSNESS QUITE DISREGARDED.
HOW TO REGARD THEM IS THE QUESTION
FOR THEY ARE SO DISCONTINUOUS WITH ORDINARY
CONSCIOUSNESS. THEY MAY DETERMINE
ATTITUDES, THOUGH THEY CANNOT FURNISH FORMULAS
AND OPEN A REGION THOUGH THEY FAIL TO GIVE A MAP.
AT ANY RATE, CONCLUDES JAMES,
THEY FORBID OUR PREMATURE CLOSING OF ACCOUNTS
WITH REALITY
IN SPITE OF WHAT HE SAID
WE'VE CLOSED OUR ACCOUNTS WITH REALITY
(MOST OF US)

-- Be Here Now, by Ram Dass


When he took his knowledge to Spain, however, C. R. C. found himself and his new wisdom rebuffed, even his idea for a grand synthesis of all knowledge, called the axiomata. He did not fare well in other countries, not even in his beloved Germany.

According to later documents, C. R. C. was allegedly the name of an adept, Christian Rosenkreuz, who founded the order of the Rosicrucians at that time.

It might be noted at this point that AMORC, the organization I joined so long ago, denies that the initials C. R. C. stood for Christian Rosenkreuz. They claimed the initials were rather a title for a certain level of initiate. It also states that Christian Rosenkreuz did not found the order; that it has its roots in ancient Egypt and became publicly known first in the time of Charlemagne; and that the scenario described in the Fama is purely symbolic.

Still, this story, which was the foundation for the Rosicrucian history, needs to be examined further.

According to the Fama, the place of burial of the eight mysterious founders of the order was to be kept secret. C. R. C. is said to have lived to the venerable age of 106, and his remains disappeared until 1584, when a secret door was discovered, leading to a strange tomb. A brass plate above the door announced that this was the tomb of the Rosicrucian founder, and now his truths would be laid open to the world.

The door led to a burial mound, presumably structured with some kind of sacred geometry in mind. With seven sides, each eight feet high and five feet wide, an ever-burning lamp illuminated this strange cubicle. In the story, this wonderful lamp cast its light on the marvelously preserved body of Rosenkreuz, whose hand grasped a mysterious scroll entitled T.

A theosophical article, purporting to tell the story of the Rosicrucians, says:

Although the existence of the Fraternity was not made public until 1614, the influence of the Brothers was felt long before that time. In his Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, Elias Ashmole states that Queen Elizabeth was cured of smallpox by a member of the Order, and that the Earl of Norfolk was healed of leprosy by a Rosicrucian physician who may have been Robert Fludd himself, as Fludd's father was Treasurer of War to Queen Elizabeth. Between 1603 and 1625 several important books appeared in which the Fraternity was mentioned, the most important being the Apologia of Robert Fludd, which was published in 1616 and is still preserved in the British Museum. [2]


One of the most challenging archetypes of an adept, of an ascended master often aligned with the spiritual traditions of the Rosicrucians of the seventeenth century, is none other than the Comte de Saint-Germain. Voltaire, the French philosopher, called him "a man who knows everything and who never dies." Saint-Germain's origins were obscure, despite his alliance with very well-known royalty, including King Louis XV, the Baron von Gleichen, and Mademoiselle Lambert, daughter of a French Chevalier, who may have been his lover. Unlike the stereotypes of spiritual masters, the Comte seemed to revel in aristocratic company, fine clothing and jewels, and the adventure of mysterious diplomacy on behalf of his friend, the French king.

Although not the only side of his rare abilities, there were some peculiarities about Saint-Germain's ability to prolong his own life, which, to some, signaled that he may have been in possession of a secret knowledge. He seemed to have the ability to increase the size of precious stones (which he wore conspicuously), he was a remarkable violin player, and he was an accomplished painter. All of this he did exceedingly well, but more conspicuous was his ability to prolong his life -- and perhaps the lives of others! Various records seem to show some evidence that he retained the appearance of a man between forty and fifty years old for a period of over a hundred years.

Curiously, Saint-Germain didn't eat food with company, although he "dined out" often.

But was he truly a Rosicrucian? Like so many other so-called occultists, it is hard to establish his pedigree. If one can believe an established writer as Arthur Edward Waite, Saint-Germain's Rosicrucian leanings are somewhat hard to determine. But when commenting on his likely membership of the Masonic order, Waite also says:

If, however, Saint-Germain was drawn into Masonry as part of his business, it must be confessed that he would be attracted still more strongly by the Rosicrucian Order, and there is evidence that on one occasion he appeals to Bischoffswerder, a militant member of the fraternity, as one who knew and would speak for him. There is nothing to be inferred from this except a precarious possibility, and otherwise there is a complete blank in all the records, which never mention the Rosy Cross, in connection with Saint-Germain or otherwise. [3]


On the other hand, the theosophical article quoted above makes a much stronger claim for the role of Saint-Germain in the history of Rosicrucianism.

In 1623 there were said to be only thirty-six Rosicrucians in Europe, scattered about in six different countries. By the end of the seventeenth century many prominent men (among them the German philosopher Leibniz) were identified with the Rosicrucians, and in the eighteenth century Cagliostro and the Count de St. Germain travelled throughout Europe trying to unite the Masons and the Rosicrucians on the common basis of Eastern Occultism. With the "death" of Cagliostro the last real Rosicrucian disappeared from Europe. [4]


As we examine the claims of AMORC, we will see that their assertion of monolithic authority derived from an authentic Rosicrucian tradition are as flimsy as the historically centered claims about the life of Saint-Germain. Does this mean that Saint-Germain did not exist, that he did not live an enormously long time, that he did not possess strange talents and unusual powers? No. It just proves that it is not that simple to prove anything, but it is certainly easy to make a special claim to knowledge.

The same will prove true of most of AMORC's claims: lofty -- but difficult to prove.

In the case of Saint-Germain, I have not found any reference to him in the claims of AMORC, but he is probably the best-known of the reputed adepts of various esoteric orders. He is most popular through the auspices of the Church Universal and Triumphant, founded by Mark and Elizabeth Clare Prophet. He is included in many of Prophet's book as an ascended master.

Saint-Germain was also widely known as the figure who spoke to Guy W. Ballard, also known as Godfre Ray King, on Mt. Shasta, which gave birth to the famous cult movement, the Ascended Masters of the I AM. These claims entered the category of public dispute quite some time ago.

Image

THERE IS WRITING HAPPENING
MAYBE THAT'S HARD FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND
I AM HERE BUT "I" AM NOT HERE.
I AM WRITING BUT "I" AM NOT WRITING
INSIDE OF ME IN THE HEART CAVE IS A
MANTRA GOING ON THAT REMINDS ME
WHO I REALLY AM
OVER AND OVER AGAIN
IN THIS INNER PLACE
I AM

-- Be Here Now, by Ram Dass


Although various occult groups claim Saint-Germain as an ascended master, AMORC does not. In fact, it focuses on other persons of historical renown as persons directly or indirectly associated with their order. These people are described as "prominent persons in the fields of science and the arts." Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), is now known popularly as having been involved with an occult order because of the novel and movie, The Da Vinci Code. Healer and alchemist, Paracelsus (1493-1541), a writer and physician, is known to have been associated with these interests. The famous Catholic mystics Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross could hardly be claimed to be "prominent persons in science or art," but they were writers, very mystical writers -- but also very Roman Catholic. Could they have gotten away with being Rosicrucians?

AMORC claims that Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was the head of the Rosicrucian Order in England but also connects him, through his book, The New Atlantis, with the documents released by the Rosicrucians: the Fama Fraternitatis in 1610, the Confessio Fraternitatis in 1615, and Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz. At one point in the monographs, AMORC even credits Bacon absolutely as the writer of Shakespeare's plays. AMORC claims that Francis Bacon was initiated into the order by Robert Fludd (1574-1637), the famous English occultist and author.

Several years ago, there was a controversy about the list of the Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion, the occult organization featured in The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, but initially made public in a 1982 book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail by authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. The Rosicrucian contacts and the Priory lists share some similarities, as with the alchemist Nicholas Flamel and Leonardo da Vinci and Robert Fludd, mentioned previously. Sir Isaac Newton is on both lists, although Newton's rival in the discovery of calculus, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716), is found only on AMORC's list.

Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are said to have been in touch with a Rosicrucian settlement in Pennsylvania in a colony known as Ephrata. This settlement was allegedly founded by a colony of Rosicrucians in 1693, all leading members of the main European branches.

Like everything else about AMORC, none of this is readily provable, and I have seen nothing to finally substantiate these famous people's association with this specific Rosicrucian organization. Nor did AMORC ever do more than allege the association to me.

IT DOESN'T QUITE MAKE SENSE
NOTHING "TURNS YOU ON"
YOU HAVEN'T EXPERIENCED IT DIRECTLY BUT
YOU FIGURED THERE MUST BE
SOMETHING ELSE SOMETHING THERE
& THEN YOU READ ALL THE WRITINGS OF
ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS & ST. THERESA AVILA
& ON & ON ALL THE MYSTICS
& VISIONARIES IN RECORDED HISTORY
& YOU SAY: 'WELL, THEY CAN'T ALL BE NUTS
THEY MUST BE TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING
SO YOU SORT OF INFER THE PRESENCE OF THIS
OTHER THING, BUT YOU DON'T KNOW IT IN YOUR GUTS
NOW THAT'S A TOUGH ONE.
TO BE IN THAT POSITION

-- Be Here Now, by Ram Dass


This nebulousness does not fit well with the claim of ancient teachings and perfect, infallible knowledge.
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Re: THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN

Postby admin » Tue Oct 20, 2015 11:02 pm

Two: AMORC Unveiled

Before I begin the narrative of my own involvement with AMORC, it is necessary that I acquaint the reader with something of the history of the order. This history is somewhat obscured both by the passage of time but also because of the secrecy that surrounds certain aspects of this story.

The story of AMORC's origins should probably focus mainly on the activities of its founder, Harvey Spencer Lewis, who was born on November 25, 1883, in Frenchtown, New Jersey. Lewis was destined to bring his mastery of American commercial and promotional techniques, derived from his background in advertising, to the popular promotion of a secret esoteric order.

In order to understand the history of AMORC, it is probably valuable to look at one of its predecessors, the Order of the Golden Dawn. This society was formed in 1888, following the alleged acquisition and translation of a peculiarly intriguing document, composed in cipher (or code), by a Dr. William Wynn Westcott, a London coroner.

Before he found the manuscript, Westcott was already a Rosicrucian. In fact, he was the head of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, an English Rosicrucian order.

When Westcott decoded the document, he found it to be fragments of the rituals of a society called the Order of the Golden Dawn. He then approached an associate, Samuel Liddell Mathers (later known to the public as the controversial magician MacGregor Mathers), to expand the fragments into full-blown rituals.

According to the story, Westcott had found a name and address with the manuscript, that of a Fraulein Anna Sprengel. The fraulein was allegedly the head of a German occult group, Die Goldene Dammerung (The Golden Dawn). Westcott, according to the story, asked and received permission to form an English branch of the order.

The story of how Westcott allegedly found the cipher, translated the cipher, went to Mathers to extend the rituals, and got permission to form the order was well-known in the early part of the twentieth century. AMORC founder Harvey Lewis was five years old when the Order of the Golden Dawn was formed, and by the time he went on his search in Europe to authenticate AMORC, the Golden Dawn story was part of occult history.

Another side to this history of the Golden Dawn is that its origins are a matter of dispute among occult historians. In fact, many writers dispute part or all of the story. For instance, some claim that Anna Sprengel conveniently "died" shortly after the English order was formed and therefore could not be reached for verification of the story -- though this was mainly because, according to these scholars, she probably never existed at all.

Others say the Die Goldene Dammerung itself never existed or was actually a pseudonym for another order entirely. The Golden Dawn's origin, although fairly recent in recorded history, remains shrouded in mystery to this day.

It is instructive to compare the founding of the Order of the Golden Dawn and of AMORC. Like Lewis, Westcott and his order were Rosicrucian. In fact, the German order was also said to be Rosicrucian. Westcott's actions to create a new order were allegedly initiated by going to another order and forming a branch, getting permission from an older Rosicrucian order. This mirrors almost exactly the actions of H. Spencer Lewis some two decades later.

It is probable that Lewis did come to know the whole story eventually, although when he started out to develop AMORC, he may only have known certain fragments. In the beginning, he may not have fully understood the problematic characters of the initial contacts he made, people like Aleister Crowley, MacGregor Mathers, or Theodore Reuss.

Still, he knew, like Westcott, that finding or creating an "authentic" history of the order -- a pedigree, if you like -- was essential to establish legitimacy in the public sectors he wanted to reach. After all, the key to the appeal of the Rosicrucians since the Fama Fraternitatis and other seminal seventeenth-century documents, was that this was an organization that had special, secret information that may have been derived from very ancient times.

In its day, before it splintered into many fragments due to internal dissension, the Order of the Golden Dawn had received huge amounts of publicity and the allegiance of many famous celebrities. Despite this massive publicity, the Order of the Golden Dawn was not really an organization that targeted the masses or strove for mass appeal. It was essentially a highly secret occult society.

But, in hindsight, the Golden Dawn story did impact the public. This success may have lent confidence to Lewis as he moved to create strong PR machinery to establish AMORC's authenticity. Lewis knew, great publicist and entrepreneur that he was, that the lineage he needed for his order had to be as bulletproof as possible.

Whatever the real timetable, Lewis probably began as somewhat of a novice. At first, on his path to establishing authenticity for his new order, he encountered and was briefly involved with certain people like Aleister Crowley and Theodore Reuss. He soon found that his new contacts would not be very good shields against negative publicity. In fact, working with them was a liability that could defeat his entrepreneurial interests from the outset.

Harvey Lewis's publicity clearly eclipsed any former attempt to reach the masses, diving into the very heartland of America, as well as the rest of the world.

As a result, "authenticity" became a major key to AMORC's mass appeal, a feather in Lewis's cap of ingenious mass marketing. AMORC's alleged credentials "proved" that it was a virtually perennial spiritual organization whose origins lay in the ancient Egyptian mysteries. AMORC's advertising and its lessons soon suggested that the Rosicrucian order received its authorization to operate by a legitimate confederation of Rosicrucian organizations. This confederation was called FUDOSI, an acronym in French for Federation Universelle des Ordres et Societes Iniciatiques. In English this translates to the Universal Federation of Initiatic Orders and Societies. FUDOSI was represented by the titular heads of various Rosicrucian orders.

Scrutiny of this idea leads to the question: were all of these organizations branches of one monolithic order, or were they separate entities? As you will see, in its presentation, AMORC appears to represent itself as an authentic branch of a monolithic order that hearkens back to the Egyptian mysteries. This perennial order wielded a specific iconic cross demonstrating its authenticity, a golden cross with an enfolded flower blossom. The symbol represented the many incarnations of the adept necessary to reach the level of the rose-croix. The golden cross was the body, while the blossoming flower's petals represented the many incarnations needed to attain spiritual perfection.

FUDOSI, itself, no doubt, was an interesting experiment. According to Milko Bogaard, in an article called "FUDOSI," [1] written for something called the Forum and posted on November 2000, the organization was founded in 1934 "to protect the sacred liturgies, rites, and doctrines of the traditional initiatory orders from being appropriated and profaned by clandestine organizations" (FUDOSI Journal, Nov. 1946) and was dissolved in 1951 under what, according to Bogaard, appears to be a rather unfortunate dispute.

FUDOSI, therefore, was allegedly formed by a confederation of genuine esoteric orders. Its function would be to police the entire world of initiatic organizations. In this manner, it would protect the body of humanity from false prophets and deceiving initiates who would seek to fleece those among the gullible public drawn to this type of scam. These types of scams, undoubtedly, preyed on innocent men and women who had an honest thirst for truth and meaning in their lives.

FUDOSI would eventually be used to help resolve Lewis's search for a pedigree for his organization. But even before it began, Lewis was trying to legitimize his organization. His first attempts revolved around negotiations with Theodore Reuss, a man who became the spiritual head of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). The OTO was pioneered by Aleister Crowley, the notorious English black magician. Dubbed "The Great Beast" by the press, Crowley had become anathema to the English Order of the Golden Dawn.

Reuss was approached by Lewis, who had become aware of credentials Reuss had supplied to McBlain Thomson, the organizer of several American lodges. At one point, Lewis became nervous about Reuss for various reasons, including the participation of Crowley. Somewhat later, Reuss made a special point of letting Lewis know that he had kicked Crowley out of the OTC.

However, despite this, Lewis decided he was through with Reuss and refused to attend the "Universal Brotherhood Gathering." This international event involved Reuss and was organized by the Fratres Rosae Crucis at Ettal in Bavaria. Lewis's refusal caused a great deal of consternation for Reuss, who wished to understand why he had rejected Reuss's offer of friendship and fraternal brotherhood.

Reuss had a friend, Arnoldo Krumm-Heller, who, in 1935,had his own story to tell about the consequences of Lewis's rejection of Reuss. Krumm-Heller is quoted in an article by P. R. Koenig on the relationship between Harvey Spencer Lewis, Theodore Reuss, Aleister Crowley, and Heinrich Tranker. Writing in his own Rosicrucian magazine, Krumm-Heller says:

Nowadays in all Spencer Lewis's publications -- which I cannot deny have certain merits -- one can see, to speak bluntly, that a good deal is owed to my master, Supreme Magus Peregrinus. His faith in AMORC sustained him in his last years, when I knew him in Germany; AMORC had led him to believe that he would receive five dollars a month from their activities in Spain, since he was starving to death. And no, I am not speaking figuratively: sadly Reuss really was dying of hunger, and the disciple who owed him everything never even bothered to send him a single dollar. Reuss himself told me this on one occasion, weeping bitterly. [2]


It is clear in looking at these strange maneuverings by Lewis, his changing alliances, his entanglement in this strange world of lodges and temples, that the total truth of the origins of AMORC is not and may never be transparent. In truth, any source I cite here may be tainted by various competitive fraternal or occult allegiances. So the story I am telling now indicates most clearly the complexity of what happened and the difficulty of reporting anything objectively in the highly secretive world of esoteric lodges and orders, each having its own special claim to the truth.

Different parties, intrigued by the machinations of initiatic orders of the era, ponder whether the central symbol of AMORC, the lamen, was taken from the OTO or from another more ancient order, whether certain teachings of AMORC were plagiarized or somehow co-opted, and whether certain documents bear Lewis's signature or not. All these arguments rely heavily on Lewis's apparent intent to obtain credibility for his American Rosicrucian venture.

Perhaps the truth will never be known, but someone researching this material will clearly wonder if the cart weren't being put before the horse. Doesn't this struggle of Lewis seem more like a struggle for some kind of commercial approbation of his order by a socially acceptable institution than a personal struggle to appropriate, re-assemble, and propagate whatever valuable truths there might be for struggling humanity?

It's almost like a person more concerned with getting the benefits of a college degree than mastering a certain type of knowledge. But then again, from my point of view, maybe Lewis was more concerned for the appearance of continuity to satisfy a certain commercial objective than with providing an authentic lineage with the Visible and Invisible Masters of the Universe and their sacred mysteries.

Gary Stewart was the imperator chosen by Ralph Lewis as his successor. Owing to a serious internal dispute, which led to litigation, AMORC reorganized, and Gary Stewart formed a separate organization called the Confraternity of the Rose Cross.

Here's what the original third imperator of AMORC has to say about the group's claims to exclusive authenticity, much of which is based on the organization called FUDOSI, which will be discussed in the third chapter:

I think it is a very noble and honorable idea for a group of organizations to come together for the express purpose of quality control in the fields of esotericism, occultism, and mysticism. However, and I'm probably in the minority with this opinion, but I don't think this has ever really been done before. Anytime a group comes together with a stated purpose to protect and promote "authentic" traditions, two things become glaringly apparent to me. First, that there is an assumption that the interested parties are authentic traditions. Whereas their goal would be to examine prospective traditions, not already in their group, and to make an assessment of their findings upon that groups "legitimacy," there was no control in place to measure the founding order's legitimacy. That authenticity was assumed by virtue of founding the overseeing organization. Secondly, it becomes apparent that such an organization must necessarily become exclusive in its nature, which, in my opinion, is fundamentally contrary to the traditional work that we do. By exclusive I do not mean protective of our traditions, which is very important, but rather, closed, and judgmental of another based upon a preconceived and self-serving notion. Unfortunately, it is my opinion, based upon many years of research including discussion with several involved parties that I have come to the opinion that the FUDOSI fell under the latter category. Needless to say, AMORC, and H. Spencer Lewis, was part of the founding structure of the FUDOSI and it is arguably the case that AMORC was the motivator behind its formation for the purposes of:

1. Establishing a dominance in North America and elsewhere for the Rosicrucian work and,

2. An attempt to resolve the Clymer dispute and the many other lawsuits that AMORC was involved in from 1918 until 1939.

The effects of the FUDOSI are many, and there certainly remains a lot of interest in that organization, especially when it comes to the "authentification" issue. What many people don't realize is that there were constant internal disputes between FUDOSI members that culminated in its dissolution in 1951.

Be that as it may, I don't think the Rosicrucian tradition, or any esoteric tradition for that matter, needs authenticating in the way that has been suggested. Once again, measure the worth of an order by its deeds and trust in the epistemology of the esoteric way, and its methods to express its story and lineage over the production of charters and founding documents. The subject deals with two completely different worlds. Why compromise one for the other?" [3]


The Mastery of Life is the most famous and public document that AMORC uses to publicly promote its purposes and the advantages of membership. It describes itself as a "philosophical and initiatic tradition," whose members study various esoteric topics in their homes and progress from one degree or level to another. It lists the subjects like "the nature of the soul, developing intuition, classical Greek philosophy/ energy centers in the body, and self-healing techniques."

A curious poem called the "LAW" precedes the rest of the document. It states, "You are your own devil, you are your own God." According to this message, no one can save him or herself "from error or sin" unless they will listen to the spirit within themselves.

Image

THIS IS THE PLACE OF PURE BEING
THAT INNER PLACE WHERE YOU DWELL
YOU JUST BE. THERE IS NOTHING TO BE
DONE IN THAT PLACE. FROM THAT PLACE
THEN, IT ALL HAPPENS. IT MANIFESTS IN
PERFECT HARMONY WITH THE UNIVERSE.
BECAUSE YOU ARE THE LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE
YOU ARE THE LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE!
THIS IS WHAT MAN'S JOURNEY
INTO CONSCIOUSNESS IS ALL ABOUT
THIS IS OM (HOME)
IT'S GOING OM
THIS IS THE PLACE!
BECOMING ONE WITH GOD RETURNING
IT'S THE RETURN TO THE ROOTS
THAT THE TAO TALKS ABOUT
IT IS
THE STILLNESS THE CALMNESS THE FULFILLMENT
WHEN YOU MAKE LOVE AND EXPERIENCE
THE ECSTACY OF UNITY
THAT'S THE PLACE!
WHEN YOU EXPERIENCE A GREAT ACHIEVEMENT,
AND YOU FEEL A MOMENT OF EXHILARATION,
THAT'S THE PLACE!
WHEN YOU SEE A MOMENT OF POETRY IN A FLOWER
OR IN WORDS OR IN ART THE WAY IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE ...
THIS IS THE PLACE!
RIGHT HERE!
IT'S BUDDHA CONSCIOUSNESS
IT'S CHRIST CONSCIOUSNESS
JESUS SAYS:
I AND MY FATHER ARE ONE
WHEN BUDDHA SAYS:
YOU GIVE UP ATTACHMENT AND
YOU FINISH WITH THE ILLUSION
THIS IS THE PLACE!

-- Be Here Now, by Ram Dass


The Mastery of Life purports that unlike most groups, seminars, and books, the Rosicrucian method of development is comprehensive. The Rosicrucian teachings do not focus on just one element but on all-important components in human life, allowing for progression on a metaphysical path in a completely balanced way. By interconnecting all the realms -- the physical, the mental, the psychic, the spiritual, the emotional -- the teachings allegedly provide a unique and comprehensive understanding of all the key subjects of metaphysical study.

According to The Mastery of Life, AMORC is "perhaps the only system that does this." And by virtue of this advantage of depth of study, AMORC will lead the student to "true prosperity and peace of mind."

How Is this Accomplished?

The key to this supreme metaphysical approach is through providing the student, by mail, with weekly study lessons that will lead the student, step-by-step, to self-mastery. Self-mastery is defined as "learning how to chart your own course through life," making the right decisions, seeing current circumstances as opportunities for positive change, taking charge of one's own life, and helping those around you to "achieve a happier and a healthier existence."

AMORC'S teachings, presented in small pamphlets called monographs, are generally sent out monthly in bundles of four. The lessons are supposedly the results of many great minds cooperating over the centuries. AMORC defines itself as a "school for practical mysticism."

Does this mean that it will provide a substitute for religion? Absolutely not, the pamphlet Self-Mastery proclaims. In fact, joining AMORC does not require any change in your church or your religious beliefs. Anyone from any kind of religious background can be a Rosicrucian. Yet, by studying the Rosicrucian path, people will come to appreciate the mystical teachings of all religions.

According to AMORC, its teachings embody both metaphysical and mystical components. The order defines metaphysics as a scope of activity that transcends the five senses, citing healing, visualization, and intuition as examples. It defines mysticism as "the direct, conscious union with the Absolute, Divine Mind, Universal Intelligence, or what some Rosicrucian students call the God of their Hearts."

We are reminded that there is no credo to be believed blindly, no demand for acceptance of anything without experience. The Rosicrucian order simply provides the tools. Your experience and reflection will do everything else.

According to its official website, http://www.rosicrucian.org [4], AMORC is a nonprofit charitable organization, falling under the IRS section 501(c)(3).It is supported by a combination of dues and donations from its students, with additional funds (beyond expenses) going to support its programs, projects consistent with its humanitarian goals.

AMORC makes certain claims about its self-study program. It offers "specific techniques to reduce stress and speed up your body's natural healing processes." It promises to teach students "how to bring into physical manifestation the life you've dreamed of, whether it's happiness and peace, or success in your business." Besides promising to teach students "relaxation and meditation" techniques, it specifically states that it will teach "how to use visualization as a tool to achieve your goals."

On an emotional level, it offers a "greater sense of confidence and inner peace," buoyed by the sure knowledge of how to tap into your inner wisdom. Natural abilities are further enhanced by the development of the "psychic sense, a natural faculty which is dormant in most people and only needs to be developed."

On the spiritual level, it promises a growing awareness of the members' oneness with the universe and all creation. It offers a profound rescue from the darkness of life that surrounds most human beings, who are separate from life's magical flow all around them.

The Mastery of Life is the major recruiting tool for AMORC, and part of its function is to describe the benefits the group will provide to prospective members.

As mentioned, the major tool it provides is a "packet of weekly lessons, called monographs." These monographs are six to eight pages each, requiring "about one and a half hours once a week to study that week's lesson and perform any exercise or experiment given." The rest of the week is for reflection on the exercise and also to repeat the exercises.

AMORC reminds the prospective student that the actual exercises and techniques are at the heart of the learning process and that it is not sufficient simply to read the monographs. It compares a purely theoretical approach -- that is, reading the monographs without doing the exercises -- to reading a book on playing the piano but never practicing. So without practice, there can be no mastery of life.

For the purpose of understanding my book, it is necessary to understand what claims are made by AMORC and how the monographs supposedly serve to fulfill those claims. In one sense, The Mastery of Life is a set of specific claims made about the benefits offered to prospective members who join the order.

AMORC is basically structured like a fraternal organization, like the Freemasons, the Elks, the Kiwanis Club, or even like some school fraternities. The structure of these organizations is often derived from ancient trade fraternities, whose members were carpenters or stonemasons, or from secret religious organizations like the Knights Templar or older Masonic lodges, which clearly had some kind of mystical foundation for their teachings. Sometimes, as with the stonemasons who built the Gothic cathedrals, perhaps the trade and secret esoteric functions overlapped.

AMORC has initiations and degrees, most of which can be carried out in actual lodges, but unlike most other fraternal organizations, initiations can also be carried out at home. Participation in the lodge is purely optional.

In the monographs, three introductory sections are described: the postulant, the neophyte, and the initiate sections. Beyond that is an illumination section, whose contents are kept secret, even from members enrolled in the first three sections.

AMORC lets us know that the section titled Temple Degrees of the Initiate deals individually with topics like the aura and the projection of the psychic or astral body; ancient philosophies, psychic, and physical health. These twelve degrees take about five years to master, followed by other lessons. We are told that this is a very balanced, structured program leading to proper inner development for the member.

Why Are the Degrees Structured this Way?

According to allegedly ancient traditions, the beginning students are called neophytes, and their first steps are into the atrium, the "reception chamber of the temple." Thus, there are three introductory lessons, followed by three sections of monographs called the Atrium Lessons. A further series of lessons for initiates is called the Temple Lessons. Following the ninth Temple degree, there is continuing education in the AMORC community.

According to AMORC, its initiations are part of an ancient tradition, dating back to ancient Egypt, commemorating important moments on its members walk on a mystical path towards Divine Unity.

Each degree is preceded by a specific initiation ceremony that can be accomplished at home as well as in the lodges run by the order. Like most esoteric, fraternal orders, the idea is that these ceremonies embody important, even cosmic, truths. The theatrical element in the lodges, involving costumes, sacred objects, music, and special lighting, are like the ancient mystery dramas. In fact, it is well-known that much of ancient Greek theater, including comedies as well as tragedies, was developed by the Eleusinian mysteries, a type of mystery school, which was the focus of the Greek religion.

The Eleusinian mysteries were an offshoot of the Egyptian mysteries. So the fact that such ceremonies existed for thousands of years is well accepted by historians.

But, according to The Mastery of Life brochure, the term mystery once had a different connotation than today. The term mystery was defined as gnosis, meaning knowing. This term, used by the early Christians -- specifically those known as Gnostics -- seems to point to a unique state of consciousness, which certain groups (like the followers of Marcion and Valentinius) claimed was the original criteria for development as a Christian, going beyond the formal, external baptisms of other groups in early Christianity.

AMORC, referring to its own rituals of initiation, says, "the mystical aspect of initiation arouses your psychic and emotional response concerning the subjects you are about to study and produces an awareness, a state of consciousness which could otherwise not be achieved."

This is an important claim. It is in two parts:

1) The initiation produces a psychic and emotional response regarding the subjects "you are about to study."

2) It produces "an awareness, a state of consciousness which otherwise could not be achieved."


In the second part of its claim, AMORC states that you need the initiation to produce a certain state of consciousness. This state of consciousness could not be achieved in any other way.

Furthermore, an initiation, according to AMORC, must:

1) Encourage you to look within.

2) Create a feeling of idealism and aspiration within you.

3) Extract from you a sacred promise that you will try to fulfill your obligations.


AMORC's purposes for initiation are the same as traditional initiations, despite the fact that they can be carried out at home. According to AMORC, the real purpose of initiation is "illumination of consciousness." This illumination will only come to seekers when they are ready to work "on the inner plane." External ceremony is incidental to the inner purpose, even to those seekers who "traveled thousands of miles to reach ancient temples."

According to The Mastery of Life, there are different types of local Rosicrucian groups: lodges, pronaos, atrium group. Here lectures, seminars, and ceremonies take place. No member is forced to attend these meetings, and most members probably do not.

After attending three consecutive meetings without charge, members can join. There is an extra membership fee. Sometimes, there are meetings that are open to the public.

Rosicrucians are given a variety of reading material, including the quarterly Rosicrucian Digest, the official magazine of AMORC; the Rosicrucian Forum, a supplemental teaching publication distributed only to Rosicrucian students; the Rose+Cross Journal, an international online publication focusing on cross-discipline matters of interest. There is also an English Great Lodge Bulletin, which focuses on international and national events of interest to Rosicrucians.

Another feature of the Rosicrucian community is the Council of Solace, a group dedicated to helping those who are challenged with their financial situation, emotional crises, health problems, or other issues. Aid is available for those who request it.

As you will see, The Mastery of Life's presentation of AMORC's teachings and goals does not accurately depict my twenty-four years' experience of its teachings.
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Re: THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN

Postby admin » Tue Oct 20, 2015 11:04 pm

THREE: Anatomy of Mind Control

People are suggestible. There is no question about it. In a world of mass media, we often hear of how political handlers position themselves to influence people by the power and cogency of their sixty-second sound bites.

In his book, The Assault on Reason, [1] Al Gore -- no stranger to the use of media in political campaigns -- speaks about the "quasi-hypnotic state" created by television technology. This state is partially fostered by the continual barrage of negative images, which Gore says stimulates a trigger to set off an "orienting response" that awakens a viewer instinctively to pay attention. The constant, flickering demand on his or her attention, with the concomitant elevation of heart rate and blood pressure, creates a viewer partially traumatized by fear and very susceptible to suggestion.

Political persuasion, utilizing this knowledge, therefore has an edge over the efforts of more rational people to argue by dialogue and reason.

American politics are actually run by very sophisticated individuals trying to influence masses of people to cast their votes without going through the complex machinations of reasoning, or the agonizing process of examining their consciences or trying to carefully discern the consequences of their decisions.

It is one thing to vote on a war policy by reason and conscience, following a serious debate within oneself and with others; it is another to make decisions on the basis of cliches and sound bites.

For politicians to be tough on bad guys because it wins votes; to be charismatic and appealing when speaking, no matter what the message is; to go after easy applause by delivering multiple simplistic messages that match the audience's core beliefs and not because of important, real content, is not the way to serve a democratic people. It is not the best way to engage their hearts and minds. It does, however, get votes -- if money and power are the prime motivators.

This kind of politics -- with its chanting, its slogans, its simplistic appeal to party affiliations with oversimplified ideologies, its rallying the emotions of its followers through empty promises that are guaranteed never to materialize -- comes dangerously close to cult mind control, something I have experienced firsthand.

It is not surprising, therefore-since a great deal of the American political life is dictated by a leadership who happily use a combination of suggestion, false promises, simplistic party identifications, and the unique charisma of a powerful leader -- that Americans would be easy targets for cult mind control. It is hardly surprising that religious cults, who are sometimes even more callous in their objectives and more developed in their methods of mind control than politicians, can use these methods with great efficiency in America.

Originally an outsider to the American way of life, I have seen the same forces involved in Haitian politics. But Haiti is a small, poor country compared to America, and it is not surprising that cults gravitate toward America. This country is a great place to grow a cult because Americans are wealthy, hopeful, and consumer-oriented. And although I came to this country rather poor, I wanted to be affluent, future-oriented, and enthusiastically consumer-oriented -and that is probably why I chose such a distinctly American cult.

Although AMORC claims to be European and Middle Eastern in origins, it is distinctly American in certain ways. American groups like EST or Scientology often like to reduce their complexity to the least common denominator. Despite certain intricacies in their formulation, there is a simplistic, immediate appeal in the works of men like Werner Erhardt and L. Ron Hubbard. AMORC, like these organizations, has taken a very complex historical and metaphysical phenomenon, like Rosicrucianism, and boiled it down to bite-size consumable pieces in its signature monographs.

AMORC is also distinctly American in that as it utilizes, at every opportunity, techniques needed to "close" and retain its membership. Its contents are readily consumable -- though probably not all that good for you -- and it is sold with the promise of unlimited power, wealth, and wisdom. AMORC embodies the simplicity of a Dale Carnegie, the cleverness of a Jennie Craig weight-loss infomercial, and the brandability of a can of Campbell's soup.

Writing this now from my home in Minnesota, I am happy to say that much of my time in AMORC now seems like a bad dream. I came to this country so poor, so unhappy, and so blatantly out of touch with myself, that I have to blink my eyes and look around to see the burgeoning signs of prosperity and happiness that are my lot at present.

Still, I have written this book as a cathartic work, to get rid of old ghosts and, to some extent, hoping that the story of my extrication from the deception and loss of liberty at the hands of a religious cult can be passed on to others. This is a case history of mind control through the methodology of what I have termed "remote indoctrination." It is my personal story -- how I got in and how I got out. It will be as personal and truthfully reported as I am capable of.

Back in 1981,when I became a member of AMORC, I was a perfect candidate for a cult. Cults thrive on people's unhappiness and confusion. Recruiters for cults will target students who are changing courses, failing, or wanting to drop out of school; people who have lost someone through death or heartbreak; unemployed people or people stuck in unimaginative and soul-killing employment. They strive on discontent people that has left over at least slight residue of hope. If the cults can flame the discontent and awaken the hope, then everyone will be very happy.

When I joined the order as a student in Haiti, I was looking for that magic key to help my family out of dire and life-destroying poverty. After acquainting myself with the order, my hope was that Rosicrucian techniques of visualization, affirmation, and prayer would help me find the resources I needed to extract myself and my family from a hopeless, depressing lifestyle, rooted in the cycle of Haitian poverty. This hope sustained me through a remarkable twenty-four years of ambivalent, emotionally wrenching, dream-crushing servitude to the demands of an organization offering me their infallible authority to help me find my dream.

In actuality, AMORC's contribution to my life was built on providing me with an interminable correspondence course, somewhat sustained by my attending and/or holding offices in the Port-Au-Prince, Miami, and New York Rosicrucian lodges.

In this study, you will find me constantly questioning how I could wind up a prisoner of this organization for so many long years. How many other people does this happen to? How is it possible that an organization that largely depends on its correspondence course can exercise a powerful and nefarious hold on its members?

In this book, I will discuss many so-called secrets of the Rosicrucians, never before subject to public dialogue or scrutiny. I will also show that, although many of these "secrets" in themselves might be insightful and even important, they are buoyed up by false and dubious claims to authority. The techniques themselves are often variants of meditative and hypnotic techniques, functioning as mind control tools.

Are these practices really "secrets"? I would say that the substance of almost everyone of them could be found elsewhere in a different but related context. When these "secrets," in their specific Rosicrucian form, are administered to the general population of a religious cult in a correspondence course or a meeting hall with these limitations, the results on members may be profoundly deleterious.

Is this planned and intentional? Do the leaders of AMORC mean to use mind control tools deliberately? Instead of answering that question at this point, I am instead going to examine how, whether intentionally or not, these types of techniques can function as mind control tools and induce specific changes in the human personality.

With respect to creating changes in the behavior of his subordinates, does it matter if a Boy Scout leader or a boot camp instructor in the U.S. Marines knows exactly why those changes might occur? Does he need to know, for instance, that his manner of exerting discipline encourages psychological transference relative to it happening? Or that he has made such serious threats to those subordinates that they are terrorized to comply? Or something else? Or both?

In fact, the individual directly in charge might be communicating information that creates changes in his subordinates that he really believes in -- but which is absolutely wrong. Maybe the Boy Scout leader, for instance, has been told that merit badges will not be given out for anyone who is ever late. But that is false information provided by the Boy Scout leader he reports to. Maybe the boot camp instructor has been told that a badly kept barracks can be punished with a group dismissal from the corps. But that is just a way in which his ranking officer is intimidating him so he can get his job done, and there are no group dismissals of that sort in the corps.

Assuming one believes in the power of transference, do parents know that when they exert this influence, they are thereby creating extra compliance with their wishes? Probably not, for the most part. Transference is a psychological doctrine and effect that is often not known by the general public.

The fact is that mind control techniques can work regardless of whether anyone knows why -- and regardless of whether they were intended or not. A speaker may unconsciously use guided imagery and lull his audience into a trancelike state. A strong leader may induce transference by his demeanor when all he personally wants is people to think about things objectively.

Mind control techniques can function independently of intention. They also can be passed on from one person to another and used on others without anyone really understanding their implications. Do all cult recruiters or speakers understand that they are using mind control techniques? Absolutely not.

Many times, particularly in the lower hierarchy of a cult, it is precisely the beauty of these techniques (from the higher leadership's standpoint) that people can be manipulated to use these techniques on others once their core beliefs have been manipulated.

With respect to the outcome of a mind control technique, what matters most is the efficacy of the technique itself or its use in combination with other techniques. The intention may often be irrelevant to the outcome. If it affects human personality and causes the requisite changes, then it works.

Do the upper echelon leaders cynically use these techniques on their subordinates? I believe they often do. But there are also probably examples where the original leaders have died or moved on, and their lower-echelon followers have picked up the drum beat but have no knowledge of mind control whatsoever. And there are probably cases where mind control techniques are used unconsciously.

A religious cult uses techniques that effectively create changes in its members that promote compliance with the cult's objectives, even if those changes are not consistent with members' consciences or ability to reason. They do this by causing profound changes in their members' personalities -- by manipulating and changing their core beliefs.

In order to explore more exactly what happened to me with AMORC, I would like to dwell for a moment on the psychology and methodology of religious cults and how they develop an ironclad control over the minds and souls of their victims.

So, for the moment, let's look at cults in general: what they are, why they come into existence, and how they operate and interact with their members.

In the United States, we love our freedom. For this reason, we look askance at attempts to abridge religious and political expression or behavior. But there are limits to our patience when it comes to clear aberrations like Jonestown or Heaven's Gate, where death is the final proof of the mental imbalance and emotional instability of their leaders.

But other organizations with peculiar records of interaction with society at large, and their members -- like the Unification Church and Scientology -- are allowed to prosper among us. Still, even these still-powerful organizations have been subjected to a variety of government scrutiny and prosecutorial activities.

In regards to legal skirmishes, AMORC had been remarkably quiet for quite a few decades, until recently, when a lawsuit and scandal split the organization into several parts -- actions that, at the time, were largely shielded from their membership. Some members have claimed that this action was equivalent to a coup d'etat, where Gary Stewart, the imperator chosen by Ralph Lewis, was basically overthrown.

Still, whether an organization succeeds in escaping government oversight and prosecution or not, the definition of a cult -- whether it is religious, political, or commercial -- is generally based on the way it gains, influences, and retains its members.

We will define a cult here as an organization with a strong authoritarian leadership, which, having various political, religious, or commercial intentions, utilizes mind control and other psychologically invasive techniques to enhance and enforce its control over the behavior of its members. We will show, in my situation, that AMORC, although mostly out of the limelight for decades, has been slowly and insidiously utilizing mind control techniques, with great disadvantage to its members.

Six Stages of Cult Activity

There are six phases to cult activity. These phases, although roughly chronological in character, overlap considerably. Cults may vary as to how they interact with members and involve them in these various stages.

Phase 1: Recruitment
Phase 2: Indoctrination
Phase 3: Training
Phase 4: Deployment
Phase 5: Retention
Phase 6: Recovery


Recruitment

The cult seeks out new members, utilizing a variety of tactics to entice and entrap them. I shall show how AMORC uses a variety of widespread, seductive advertising to net its thousands of members, while at the same time using its existing members to solicit membership from family and friends.

Utilizing a center of influence like this is common in many types of cults, not unlike the practices that multilevel and networking organizations use to build an initial customer base.

Indoctrination

A cult uses mind control and other psychologically invasive techniques to create loyal, dedicated, and generally unquestioning members as instruments to reach its ultimate objectives. AMORC, as an organization whose revenues are largely based on monthly membership dues and whose activities are mainly based on a correspondence course and lodge activities, is heavily into indoctrination and entrapment techniques.

AMORC doesn't depend on any kind of massive, conventional fund-raising activity or the selling of merchandise, like the Krishnas or the Unification Church, who have historically sold merchandise publicly at airports, on streets, or door-to-door. So, in the training and deployment phase, AMORC is considerably less active than other cults. Still, there is value in examining these other phases and seeing how AMORC fits in.

Training

Most cults have very specific ways of teaching their recruits to accomplish their goals. Their training is often meticulous, repetitive, and thorough. In AMORC, there is some training in the recruitment process and training in conducting various offices in the lodges. AMORC sells certain books, spiritual implements like candles and incense, and garments, etc., but proceeds are used to support the membership, and this is probably not a giant cash-flow machine in itself. I myself was responsible for certain sales at a lodge, but a good many things are sold over the Internet and sent by mail.

Deployment

Members, as they mature, are given recruitment, indoctrination, fund-raising, and other leadership tasks and will, themselves, take over the implementation or deployment of their leaders' objectives. All AMORC members are expected to speak with their family and friends and engage in relatively mild recruitment techniques. The fact is, AMORC projects an image of itself as a centuries-old secret organization that has been able to survive years of persecution from churches and governments by keeping a low profile. This low-key attitude has probably contributed to its longevity as a religious cult.

Recovery

When members leave, it can be disruptive to the entire cult organization. Sometimes a member may be forced to leave through the introduction of family and exiting counselors to the member's life, with or without the member's consent. In this case, the cult must make a powerful effort to recover a member who may not only know their "secrets" or be a key factor in their leadership, but who also may be privy to knowledge of possible unsavory or illegal activities.

Recovery, in the traditional cult sense, has not been a visible activity of AMORC. Many of its members are exclusively attached to AMORC through its correspondence courses. Many members last a long time, but some drop out. The lodges do interact with a large number of members but tend to maintain an orderly and secret execution of rituals from year to year. I have no real evidence of any conspicuous outreach to recover lost members.

The Purpose of Recruitment

It would seem that cults go through a lot of trouble to recruit people, since in order to do this, they have to subject members to a substantial amount of carefully orchestrated changes to make them useful for the cult's purposes.

It is important in looking at cults to realize that they are not all the same, particularly in their motivations. They resemble each other more in the ways they recruit, indoctrinate, and retain their members than in their individual philosophies and motivations.

Some groups, including their leadership, appear to hold a common set of beliefs, whether it is to avoid the end times by meeting up with a UFO, converting the world to their religious dogma, or electing a member of a third party to the presidency of the United States. These groups, in whole or in part, have certain idealistic intentions, distorted as they might be. They are not wholly motivated by profit.

Other groups, centered around so-called business opportunities or self-growth, appear to be more financially oriented, particularly in the areas of leadership. They use their membership to acquire wealth from outsiders and recruit a continuous crop of new members to serve as cheap labor.

Still other groups, especially those that make the news because of their devastating treatment of their members, the public, or even components of their own leadership, seem often to be recruiting to fulfill the main leader's quest for personal power. Sometimes this quest for expansion could reflect the objectives of a charismatic leader who has managed to retain some degree of personal stability or rationality. His or her sense of power, although tainted with odd areas of focus, seems limited to control issues. He is not psychotic or totally sociopathic.

Others -- like Jim Jones, infamous for Jonestown, and Marshall Applewhite of Heaven's Gate -- can be blatantly destructive of others and themselves. These cults suffer from having a mentally imbalanced or emotionally deranged leadership and are dangerous to themselves as well as others. But they often love to recruit, too.

No cult fits into a totally neat little package, and there are hybrids and permutations of even the three main motives for recruitment that I have mentioned -- idealism, money and power. Still, the cults resemble each other in one critical way: how they attract, transform, and retain their following.

In the chapters to come, we will discuss the leadership of AMORC somewhat. However, in AMORC's case, its leaders are very low-key, very nonpublic, and mostly anonymous -- except in regard to their connection with the membership at lodges, or in their selective and generally innocuous correspondence. Mostly the public projection of AMORC leadership centers around the imperator.

Decades ago, at the beginning of its activities, AMORC was fairly conspicuous and strove for more public recognition. I will later discuss its then-widely-publicized alchemical experiment.

H. Spencer Lewis and his son, Ralph, the first two imperators of the order, were authors, and their books can be found in public libraries. But they never reached out for any kind of personal, massive publicity, and little is known or published about their lives.

Gary Steward, Ralph's successor, experienced a rash of publicity when he left the order, following some fairly well-publicized litigation activities. His successor, Christian Bernard, has been reasonably anonymous since he has taken over AMORC.

Cult Personality

One can look at a cult as a kind of factory, a factory that takes in recruits and reprocesses them for their personal use. The cult factory takes in raw material -- the personality of the recruit as they found him -- and then reconfigures the personality to suit their needs. The end products greatly resemble each other.

Members of the same cult may dress alike, speak a special "loaded language" or cult doctrine, engage in a great many cult rituals and repetitive cult behavior, and fiercely support their leader no matter what. Still, these common characteristics will vary from cult to cult.

Cults do not always use the same instrumentality for creating conformity to their objective. They do not all provide uniforms, cult rituals, distinctive language, and other bonding or hypnotic mechanisms in the same neat package.

But one thing they do have in common: the product -- the transformed personalities of their recruits, who all basically think alike and follow the cult doctrines.

We could join with many distinguished exit psychologists and cult experts in calling this product of recruit reprocessing a "cult personality."

Perhaps the biggest problem faced by people who have left destructive cults is the disruption of their own identity. There is a very good reason: they have lived for years inside an "artificial" identity given to them by the cult. While cult mind control can be talked about and defined in many different ways, I believe it is best understood as a system, which disrupts an individual's identity. The identity is made up of elements such as beliefs, behavior, thoughts, processes, and emotions that constitute a definite pattern. Under the influence of mind control, a person's original identity, as formed by family, education, friendships, and most importantly that person's own free choices, becomes replaced with another identity, often one that he would not have chosen for himself without tremendous social pressure. [2]


There are several useful paradigms for looking at the creation of a cult personality. Eric Schein, a psychologist who has penetrated deeply into the shaping of this type of personality, sees three major stages.

He calls the first stage "unfreezing." In this stage, the personality of the recruit must be broken down. The recruit must learn that the life he or she has been living is based on lies and half-truths. Recruits are taught that their pasts have been tainted by these lies and misconceptions and that continuing to live in their own lives is unthinkable, given what they now know.

The second stage is called "changing" and, in this stage, the foundational elements of the new personality are introduced. This is where the cult indoctrination techniques begin to really make a dent in the member's personality. The new personality will often be more compliant, less questioning, and more willing to work toward a specific cult goal than the old, real personality. Better still for the bottom line of the cults, this new personality will be more capable of accepting impoverished living conditions, bad nutrition, and situations leading to extreme fatigue. The new personality will be extremely susceptible to peer pressure. Cults like to have members who will work hard for little reward and not complain very much -- or at all.

In the third and final stage of Schein's protocol, there is a refreezing process. The member's original personality was created in a complex social-familial environment, combined with the cognitive, emotional, and physical freedom that is the result of growing up in a democratic society. The new personality has been released from many of these influences. Instead, the cult personality is now consolidated and refrozen with an entirely new set of values, designed to serve the cult leadership.

In light of the fact that there are severe penalties for failure to comply with the parameters of the cult and lots of peer approval if one does comply, the new personality is formed rather quickly and solidly. At the end, the member begins to feel, act, and think differently.

In 1984, the famous novel by George Orwell, Big Brother is the name of the dictator who rules his dominion through mind control processes. At the end of the novel, Orwell sums up the rebel Winston Smith's final capitulation to his brutal indoctrination in the riveting last sentence of the masterpiece. In regard to Winston Smith, Orwell writes, "He loved Big Brother."

In my involvement with AMORC, unlike Winston Smith, after twenty-four years, the forces of freedom were still slightly alive in me. I began to do things, often quite unconsciously, that began to work against my subconscious programming.

Robert Jay Lifton, who we refer from time to time here as an expert in brainwashing, published a book in 1993called The Protean Self, named after a conceptual construct of Lifton's own design. This construct described a generally healthy and appropriate form of selfhood for these turbulent and ever-shifting times.

In discussing the emergence of this protean sense of selfhood in human development, Lifton said:

We are becoming fluid and many-sided. Without quite realizing it, we have been evolving a sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time. This mode of being differs radically from that of the past, and enables us to engage in continuous exploration and personal experiment. I have named it the 'protean self' after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms. [3]


After twenty-four years of programming, I did not love AMORC. I did not love Big Brother. Was it that finally some powerful force inside of me, nurtured by the continual longing for freedom, began to fight for liberation from its awful imprisonment in my own mind? Was this my own protean self finally coming alive?

But despite the difficulty of having to begin a protracted war against my own "cult personality," which had created substantial bifurcation in my own psyche, I finally made a conscious decision to begin my campaign.

This book analyzes my experiences, based on my rather late discoveries about brainwashing and mind control. In this way, the reader can understand, to a degree, what was going on as I progressed in AMORC, and what I discovered about myself and about mind control that led to my escape.

But in order for you to understand how I escaped, you must first understand how I became a prisoner in the first place. How could I, a resident of Haiti, living and working hundreds of miles away from AMORC's California headquarters, later living in Miami, New York, and other places in the United States, become so thoroughly imprisoned in a mind control cult?

Yes, I must explain how I first became a prisoner of the Rosicrucians in San Jose. To do this, and so that you will understand what ultimately happened to me, I must begin by telling you something about my life.
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Re: THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN

Postby admin » Tue Oct 20, 2015 11:05 pm

FOUR: Haiti: The First Crucible

In alchemy, substances that are scheduled to be treated or melted by strong heat are put in a bowl or pot, usually of stone, called a crucible. In some cases, the word crucible is interchangeable with mortar, and the substances can be ground up by pounding them with a pestle.

In many cults, the first material, the raw recruits, need to be transformed into a substance that is useful for the cult. To this, recruits' personalities must be thoroughly pulverized.

In my case, the environment I grew up in was the wonderful, though sometimes frightening, magical world of Haiti. As someone who was struggling economically, determined educationally, but naive metaphysically, I was an ideal candidate for recruitment.

According to experts, a typical prospective member of a cult is going through an important transitional period in life. He or she may be failing school, having critical family problems, enduring the consequences of a broken romance, or experiencing a protracted period of unemployment.

Cult recruiters, for instance, may hang around the university offices where students are dropping classes to locate those whose college careers aren't going well. Or, conceivably, recruiters might watch for people coming out of state employment offices. Wherever they are, cult recruiters are trained to sniff out self-disenchantment, to find people smart enough to work for them but who have all the earmarks of becoming programmable assets to their purposes.

In order for you to understand me and my suitability for AMORC's purposes, I need to tell you about how and where I grew up. AMORC, like other cults, must have a crucible, a place of residence, to grind up or melt the human personality with its pestle of dogma, ritual, and forward-looking promises of personal power. For me, my first crucible was Haiti.

I was born in a remote town about 120 miles from Les Cayes, the third-largest city of Haiti. My place of birth, Les Anglais, was so remote that public transportation only came there about once every two weeks.

The public bus took about twelve hours to cover the distance from Les Cayes to Les Anglais. The bus fare was so high that only well-to-do businesspeople in the village could afford such a luxurious means of transportation.

My father, Marc-Aurele Freeman, came from one of those well-to- do families. His father had died when he was a child, and he, his brother, and two sisters were raised by their uncle, Raphael, who was a very influential, well-educated politician and businessman in the village.

Raphael's influence extended all the way to Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, where he had well-connected friends. He used his political influence to keep his nieces and nephews from making any claim to their father's share of the wealth, which had now become part of Raphael's estate. Any attempt to fight him would have been tantamount to suicide. My father was the second oldest sibling of the four.

My mother, Annette, came from a more modest family and was filled with dreams of a better life for herself and her children. Since my father was raised in a wealthy family, he was quite satisfied with his life, but my mother was anxious to move up the ladder.

I was the first of four children. My two sisters were named Jacqueline and Lucie. My brother was Abel. By the time I was completing my elementary education, my father was not faring well financially. He was also abusive to my mother.

My father bought a large property in the forest and focused entirely on cultivating his land, rarely coming to town. My mother, on the other hand, dreamed of living in a larger city. She sent us kids to elementary school and did not take any part in my father's farming life. She was a dressmaker.

As I was finishing elementary school, my mother did not know what to do. She had no money to send me to a larger city where there was a secondary school. The only options available to children from poor families who could not afford school past the elementary grades was farming or pursuing trades such as carpentry, shoemaking, or tailoring.

My mother wanted better for me but did not have the means to send me anywhere. She often talked about mothers who had left town and gone to Les Cayes to work as seamstresses or maids and raise their sons. In fact, we knew about a very successful man in our town whose mother had done exactly that.

The First Miracle

Every year in Les Anglais, about ten boys and twenty girls completed elementary school. In the year I graduated, exactly ten boys got their certificates. My teacher, Micheline, was a devoted Catholic who had gone to the convent but had not stayed to the end to become a nun. She was the greatest religious teacher I ever had.

Our curriculum included an hour-long class on religion every morning. For reasons unknown to me, Micheline talked to me about becoming a priest. It is possible that she observed how compliant I was in the classroom and how intently I listened to her when she was teaching religion. Then, too, I was an altar boy at that time. I attended church activities regularly, even when it was not required by my duty as an altar boy.

So she told my mother that I wanted to be a priest. Then she took the initiative in writing the first letter to Catholic school, which was then located in Maznod, near the city of Les Cayes, and signed my name to it. Before long, my mother and father were called to the presbytery of the local Catholic Church to have a meeting about my vocation.

Acceptance into the Catholic seminary was an almost-perfect ticket out of poverty and into an Ivy League school. Many young boys and girls were coached by their parents into claiming that they wished to be a priest as a way to get into this exclusive school, where the church prepared and groomed prospective priests and nuns at no cost to their parents. This school was popular with affluent families from Les Cayes as well as the smaller towns surrounding Les Cayes. My mother, at one point, questioned me to ascertain that I was sincere in my claim of wanted to be a priest, I told her yes, I want to become a priest.

Once I completed my elementary exam, the priest of Les Anglais set a date for my father to report to Maznod for me to take my entrance exam. More importantly, this occasion was intended to give the officer of the church an opportunity to evaluate my candidacy and make sure I really had the divine calling to become a priest.

As we got deeper into the process, and many letters were exchanged between Maznod, my parents, and myself, Micheline changed tactics. After she wrote the letters, she gave them to me to copy in my own hand. One of the last was to be written at the office of the Catholic Church in the presence of the priest. For that, Micheline wrote a letter and had me memorize it. I then went to the office of the priest and wrote what I had committed to memory.

I went to Maznod for the exams and stayed on the campus for five days.

After the written exams, all the candidates had an interview with the priest in charge of the seminar. There, we were questioned in front of our parents to detect possible fraudulence in our assertion that we wanted to become a priest. During the interview, the priest asked me whether I had written all the letters that were sent to Maznod, and I said, "Yes."

He then showed me two clearly different styles of handwriting. I claimed I had forgotten that the first letter was written by Micheline, my teacher.

He did not accept me, but he did send me to a secondary school that was run by the nuns in a town not far from Les Anglais. The plan was for these nuns to observe me and make sure I really had the calling to become a priest. If they were convinced, after I completed three years at their school, I would be brought to Maznod to continue my secondary education en route to becoming a priest.

I quickly fell out of grace with the goods sisters of the new school. Clearly, they figured out that I was not a priest-to-be. I also got sick that year and had to repeat the sixth grade, my first year in this new secondary school.

Although I failed that first year, I was awarded a certificate of recognition for my performance in math.

After I completed my second year in the sixth grade, I passed with high marks. By then, my father had lost his land in the forest. He sold part of it to pay for my entrance to secondary school and lost part of it to another ownership claim.

My father and mother had also separated by then. My father was living in a small farmhouse that he rented. From time to time, he bought farm produce and traveled by mule to resell the produce in a larger city and make a profit. The summer after I completed the sixth grade, my father bought a lot of beans to resell. Due to unexpected changes in the market, the price of beans went down, and the only chance my father had to recover his initial investment was to go to a very large city, such as Les Cayes, and resell them there.

When I was visiting my father one day, he said, "If you were a man, I could send you Les Cayes to resell the beans for me."

Without thinking, I told him I would go. The only time I had been to Les Cayes was when I went to Maznod for my examination in the seminary. I had arrived at night, and the very next day my father and I had taken the bus to Maznod, so I really had not seen that much of the city.

My father explained to me how to take care of the merchandise and make sure that gangsters did not take my money. Then he sent me to talk to one of his friends who had a truck used for transporting merchandise. The owner of the truck readily agreed to take me, because my dad had been his good friend since childhood.

I told my mother that my father was sending me to Les Cayes to sell his beans, and my mother and I thought -- almost simultaneously -- that I should take my report card to show to my uncle, Eric Simon, who lived there and was married to my father's oldest sister. I thought to myself that perhaps he would consider registering me at the Lycee Philippe Guerrier, a prestigious public school in Les Cayes. Uncle Eric was a very influential manufacturer who was well connected politically and had strong ties to some of the biggest politicians of Port-Au-Prince.

There were many other merchants on the truck en route to Les Cayes. They were surprised to see a child going to sell beans in the big city by himself and quickly offered me a price for them. Since my mother had instructed me not to bargain about any reasonable price and to sell the beans as quickly as I could, I sold them on the truck.

My mother and I agreed that if I were going to go to school in Les Cayes, I would live with Juliana, her cousin. So when I got to Les Cayes, I went to Juliana's house, took a shower, and walked to my Uncle Eric's vacation home, a two-hour trek on foot.

When I finally got to see my uncle, I did not tell him that I had come to the city to sell beans for my father. I told him that my father sent me to him with my report card so that he could register me to go to Lycee Philippe Guerrier, the biggest public secondary school in Les Cayes.

Most people had to stand in line for days to get a chance to register for that school, but not Uncle Eric. He simply began to move forward, regardless of the line. I watched in fascination as people respectfully moved out of his way, and he seamlessly worked his way toward the director of the school. It was obvious when he approached the director that the man was ecstatic to be of service to such an influential politician. I walked behind my uncle and was indeed proud of the privilege.

With Eric's help, I was registered at the Lycee Philippe Guerrier. Incidents like that played a major role in boosting my self-esteem, so that I was blind to the social reality I would later face in Miami.

When I got back to my town, I gave my father the money but did not tell him that I had sold the beans on the truck. He was very proud of me. I also told him that my uncle had seen my report card and decided to register me at the Lycee Philippe Guerrier.

My father asked me why I had taken the report card, and I told him that my mother had told me to. I did not tell him that I had been part of the plot. My father had been put against the wall and had no choice. As my father was very mindful of our relationship and cared very much about me, he did not show me how angry he was, but after I left, other people told my mother how my father had become angry and said that she was the kind of person who would make me do such a thing. The truth is that I had been much more involved in the planning than my mother had been, but I was good at pretending to be naive.

Now, my mother and I expected that once I got into school in Les Cayes, my well-to-do Uncle Eric would have to help me out. But we were in for a big surprise. We quickly realized that he was not going to help. My mother ended up heavily in debt in order to support me in school in Les Cayes. And my father's financial condition worsened, so he was unable to help either of us.

By May of 1974, my Uncle Eric became prefect of the entire region of Les Cayes, which included not only the city of the same name but also many other smaller cities. This was equivalent to someone assuming the position of governor in a state, with the qualification that this position was not elected but appointed by Baby Doc Duvalier, the president of Haiti. At that time, Eric's children, my cousins, were in school in Port-au-Prince, and his second wife, their stepmother, was taking care of them. Eric's first wife had passed away years ago and left five girls and two boys. One of these boys, Arthur, was living with Eric in Les Cayes.

It wasn't long after Eric was appointed to his new position that he realized he had been left with no time to raise Arthur as he wanted to. So he took me into his house to be a mentor and tutor to Arthur, and in this way, he relieved me from hunger and abject poverty.

An Event Without Equal

When my Uncle Eric took me in, I was, in truth, desperately hungry every day but still remained in school. I only had one school uniform and one other pair of pants and shirt. On Sunday afternoons, when all the other boys were out showing off their beautiful weekend clothes, I had to literally hide.

My mother usually sent me some food via the local bus driver's helper. The bus arrived around 4:00 PM on Sunday. In order for me to get to the driver's home, I had to cross some major streets, where the only movie theater in the city was located. All the young boys and girls of my age were out. So I developed the habit of pulling my shirt over my head and running so no one could see my face. Strangely enough, I would later be forced into adopting similar behavior in Miami and Brooklyn after my initial indoctrination into AMORC.

My Uncle Eric took me in on a Wednesday. The very next Sunday was May 26, both Mother's Day and First Communion in the Cathedral of Les Cayes, the biggest church in that whole area. The archbishop of the Catholic Church there was personally presiding over this great occasion, which was by far the biggest social and religious event of the city of Les Cayes.

My cousin, Arthur, got dressed and was ready to go to church. As he was leaving the house, my uncle asked him, "Where is Pierre? How come he does not go to church with you?" Since I was in earshot of his question, I replied that I did not have good clothes to wear to church. He asked me to put on the dirty little clothes that I felt embarrassed to wear even on a weekday and told me to go to church with his well-dressed son.

Arthur loved me very much, but he could not realize, at his age, that his father was humiliating his cousin. He stopped to talk to every friend he could find. I followed him, because I frankly did not want to raise any problems with his father. All I really wanted to do was hide from any churchgoer who might see how I was dressed. When we finally arrived at the church, I was absolutely appalled. There was no dark comer where I could hide, and almost everyone had a flower in their lapel. I had to force myself to pretend I had physically risen above the congregation to retain my peace of mind.

When I wrote to my mother and explained the event to her, she cried. This was probably one of the reasons she decided to leave Les Anglais and go to Port-au-Prince in quest of a better life.

When Eric's other children returned from Port-au-Prince, my uncle told me that he had to send me back to my father. Why? Because I did not have the proper clothes to stay in the same house with my cousins. Of course, he did not tell my cousins why he was sending me away. This was the reality I had to face about my so-called benefactor.

When I returned to Les Anglais, my mother had left two weeks earlier for Port-au-Prince, so I went to my Aunt Selita's house, where my two little sisters and grandmother, Alcine (my mother's mother), were living. The next day, I went to visit my father and told him what Eric had done to me. My father told me to come and help him with his farm work.

I went back home and told Grandmother Alcine that my father had asked me to come and help him with his farm work. Within the next few days, my grandmother gave me five gourdes (the currency of Haiti equivalent to one US dollar) and told me I could not go to do the farm work and that I must join my mother in Port-au-Prince.

My Grandmother Alcine and I decided to tell my father that I had received a letter from my mother asking me to come and see her because she needed to talk to me about something. When I told my father the story, he said, "What does your mother need you for?" I told him that I didn't know, pretending to be innocent of any deception.

I asked him if I could find his cousins, Bob and Ghuslaine, and give them a letter on his behalf. My father agreed and dictated a letter to me, asking his cousins to send him some old clothes because he was not doing well.

Both Bob and Ghuslaine felt indebted to my father for his unsuccessful efforts for so many years to procure their inheritance from Uncle Raphael. He had, indeed, risked his powerful uncle's wrath on their behalf, a fact that earned him a lifetime of enmity from his well-connected and wealthy uncle. In fact, Raphael had even blocked my father's attempt to join the military, a role in Haitian life that would have significantly elevated his status and financial well-being.

One of my mother's friends asked someone to help me with a ride out of town. So, ultimately, I got a ride and left my hometown on August 7, 1974.

When I got to Port-au-Prince for the first time in my life, my mother was surprised to see me and did not have a place to put me. She and my little brother, Abel, were living with a lady who owned a restaurant across from the football stadium (Stade Sylvio Cator). My mother worked as a waitress there, and she and my brother were allowed to eat for free. Finally, my mother found a woman who agreed to take me into her little house for the summer while her niece was away on vacation.

Without wasting any time, I started looking for my father's cousins, Bob and Ghuslaine, and for a Saint Jude church. I had adopted Saint Jude as my patron saint the year before, and I asked every one in Port-au-Prince where I could find a Saint Jude church. After much perseverance, I was able to locate a Saint Jude convent in a remote location near Port-au-Prince. That was a great surprise to my mother and her friends, because no one suspected that a church even existed in that location.

Finding my father's cousins turned out to be a challenge, because my father had lost contact with them fifteen years earlier. Bob and Ghuslaine were doing well financially, but other members of my father's family who knew where they lived hid the address from us. Eventually, I found Ghuslaine and met her at her workplace (SNEM, an agency of the Health Department). I gave her the letter that I had written on behalf of my father that asked for used clothes. When I was about to leave, she said, "What about you?" I said my father had sent me to find a job so that I could work and go to school at night.

I was so small that she looked at me and said she would talk to Bob, her brother, my father's other cousin and good friend -- to see what they could do. I told her I was living with my aunt on my mother's side. I did not want to tell her that my mother was separated from my father. I assumed if I told her she would realize that I was on my mother side and would not be interested in helping me.

When I gave my mother the news that I had found Bob and Ghuslaine, she was happy and excited, and most of all, her trust in my ability to survive increased.

When I went back to Ghuslaine two days later, she told me that her brother Bob had decided to pay for secondary school for me, and that he wanted me to go to a school called Classique D'Haiti, located at 179 Lalue (near the Sister of Lalue), a prestigious address in Port-au-Prince, to register.

When school was in recess, I was to go with Bob to work. I would also go to work with him every Saturday and Sunday. Bob was an electrician and had big government contracts.

When I gave my mother the news, she became as ecstatic as I was. This event further reinforced my mother's trust in my diligence and the power of my faith.

Image

FAITH
HAD YE BUT FAITH, YOU COULD
MOVE MOUNTAINS, SAID JESUS
AND THAT IS LITERALLY TRUE
THE BIBLE IS NOT A METAPHOR
IT'S NOT A STORY MADE UP TO TEACH US
HOW TO BE MORAL BEINGS
IT'S A STRAIGHT MESSAGE OF HOW IT IS
WHEN MAN LIVES IN THE SPIRIT, AND
THE SPIRIT IS RIGHT INSIDE.
THE WAY TO GET INTO THE SPIRIT
IS NOT A LOT OF HOCUS-POCUS.
IT'S A VERY SIMPLE METHODICAL,
MECHANICAL SET OF STEPS
BUT THEY'RE ONLY AVAILABLE
TO HIM WHO CAN HEAR
LET THOSE WHO HAVE EARS HEAR
TEACH NOT HIM WHO DOES NOT WANT TO KNOW.
THE WHOLE GAME IS BASED
ON FAITH.

WHAT YOU MAY NOT UNDERSTAND IS: THE WHOLE
GAME YOU HAVE BEEN PLAYING IS ALSO BASED ON FAITH
YOU HAVE HAD FAITH IN THE RATIONAL MIND
WE ARE LIVING IN A SOCIETY WHICH IS A TEMPLE
DEDICATED TO THE RATIONAL MAN. EVEN THOUGH
THE FIRST COMMANDMENT SAYS:
I AM THE LORD THY GOD
THOU SHALT HAVE
NO OTHER GODS
BEFORE ME

-- Be Here Now, by Ram Dass


Bob also bought all of my books, paid for me to buy a uniform for school, and gave me a small allowance of ten gourdes (about $2 U.S. dollars) every Saturday, which I used to supplement my mother's income as a seamstress. I also did some private tutoring of math to earn extra money for my family.

For most of the time I went to school, Bob thought that I was living at my mother's cousin's house. My mother's cousin was called Madame Guillaume, and she was rather well off. Although I stayed with her for about a year, at one point I was forced to leave but did not tell Bob. Here is the reason: the following year, I secretly brought my two other sisters to Port-au-Prince. They had been living in Les Anglais. Now, all four children, including myself, and my mother were living in one little room, but Bob thought I was living with my aunt Madame Guillaume.

What Bob gave me in the way of pocket money and what I earned tutoring math was therefore actually the primary income for a family of five. My mother was a dressmaker, which was not a lucrative profession in Haiti at the time. But she also waited tables near the football stadium and was sometimes able to bring food home from the restaurant where she worked.

In the private school I attended, the Classique D'Haiti, I was a gifted student in every subject, but especially in math and the sciences. Our students carne from many different backgrounds, but most were from families that were well off financially, professionally, and politically. They thought I was one of them.

I quickly earned respect from my peers, who thought I was living with my Uncle Bob, a well-to-do man who lived in a very rich neighborhood. Because I was so good at my studies, these rich children invited me to their homes to help them with their math. I gladly accepted every invitation and became known as someone who was willing to help anyone who asked for help.

In reality, I was following a calculated schedule to feed my family and myself. For example, I made sure that I went to their houses at a time that corresponded to their family's dinner schedule. So I always had a nice meal with a rich family. The parents were always pleased to have me near their children to help them with school assignments.

What worked in my favor was my physical size. I was actually two or three years older than most of my peers, but they and their parents thought that I was two or three years younger. My intelligence became a legend.

At the Classique D'Haiti, I was indeed doing very well, and by the time I got to my senior year, I was beginning to be concerned about living a multiple life. Bob thought I was living with Madame Guillaume and that he was paying for school and giving me an allowance for myself. My school friends thought I was living with my well-to-do uncle and thought I was one of them. I felt I was getting to the point where I might be discovered, and I was tired of living a double life. In addition to this, I wanted to find a way to substantially upgrade the living conditions of my mother and my brothers and sisters. I started thinking of an exit strategy, a way out.

In earlier years, I had successfully managed to keep friends away from my house by being busy and going to their houses instead. By this time, my strange schedule had become a subject of jokes. People wondered how I had the time to study and get an A in every subject.

The Second Miracle

My mother knew about my plan, but all we knew to do was pray, so'! kept on going to St. Jude's and other churches to pray.

One Sunday, I went to visit Ghuslaine in Petionville, a town near Port-au-Prince noted for its affluent residents. After dinner, I was on the patio relaxing between the plants when an idea struck me. There had to be a way for companies that needed people to work for them to identify the skills of prospective employees.

Given the social structure of Haiti, I figured it must be the case that affluent, successful people networked among themselves about job openings. And if I was right that such a thing existed, Niton's father would know about it. Niton was one of my friends from school, and he came from a well-to-do family in Haiti. So I decided to ask him how to get a job. At that time, I had absolutely no idea what Niton's mother, Ritz, did for a living.

When I got home from my aunt's house that night, I went to Niton's, told him that I would need a job at the end of the school year, and asked him to ask his father where I could look for one. He immediately told me, "My mother will give you my job. She works for INAREM, the National Institute for Mineral Resources." I had never heard of such a government agency. He explained that his mother was the head of administration and accounting for INAREM. As such, she was entrusted by the agency to buy a great quantity of items.

Owing to the culture of the time, it was common for lower-level administrators to fabricate the true amount of their purchases to be able to pocket some extra money -- sometimes a lot of extra money. Ritz needed a subordinate that she could absolutely trust to protect her from the corruption of lower officials who put their own interests ahead of the agency's. She had hoped to fill that position with her son, Niton.

But, although she thought Niton was a good choice, she was ambivalent about putting her son -- or any close relative -- in this position. It would be easy for someone in the government to target her for nepotism. So I was a good solution to Ritz's problem. And so Niton said, "I will ask my mother to give you my job."

When I went back to his house the next day, his mother said she would, indeed, let have the position. She told me when I would begin and what my salary would be. By Haitian standards, the salary was quite large, and when I got home and broke the news, everyone started praising God. It was a miracle to us.

I completed secondary school in June, and I started my new job in October 1978. With my first check, I rented a nice house for my mother and siblings and sent my little sister, who had just graduated from elementary school, to the same school I had attended.

I hope you can understand from this why my mother would not have any doubts, later on, about my approach to spirituality. She would never have thought that any person or group could use the name of God as a tool to enslave her boy, her Pierre.

In the French educational system, the year following high school is called Philosophy, which is like a college prep year. During this time, I went to school at night and worked for Ritz during the day. After I finished that year of college prep, I enrolled in and went off to Faculte des Sciences, an engineering school, in Haiti.

The Faculte des Sciences was to Haiti what MIT is to the United States. It was the greatest and most prestigious engineering school in Haiti. Many of the professors were French. The university itself was partly financed by the United Nations through the Haitian government. All Faculte des Sciences graduates are guaranteed high-paying jobs. Most of them wind up with scholarships to attend graduate school in France.

The competitive entrance examination that candidates must go through to enter the university adds more to the prestige of the engineer- to-be. Being selected out of these examinations adds more to the value of its graduate. The entrance examination, which extends over many days, tests one's aptitude in science, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Usually 1,500to 2,000students compete for entrance to the Faculte des Sciences, though less than 200 are accepted into the first year.

The year I entered the university, only 179 students were selected for the first year. The first-year class was commonly designated "PCM," because during this first year, students participate in a very competitive and rigorous full year of study of physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

The competition in that PCM year is as challenging as the entrance examination for the university. Traditionally, only half of those who were selected for admission will complete the first-year program and move up to the second year.

In junior high school, I founded a small math and physics study group. I selected all the gifted students in math and science, but I also included some friends somewhat less gifted, whom I tutored throughout high school. Four of us from that study group were accepted into the engineering program, and we continued studying together.

Since I was in charge of my siblings, I taught some math classes in secondary school part-time and did some accounting work on the side on weekends. With this money, I was able to meet my financial responsibilities to my family while attending the university.

Most students usually do not work during their PCM year, in order to keep up with the pressure of the program. In spite of my busy schedule, I excelled in my first year, ranking third in my class of 179. Only one hundred of us passed the class to move up to the second year.

My performance in school was great news, and anyone from Haiti who knew its social structure at that time would have confirmed that I was on my way to a successful life. In four years, I would become an engineer and be a well-connected person in the government -- a guaranteed success.

As a reward for my outstanding completion of the PCM year, the doyen (or dean) of the university gave me an internship at the Mining Department of Haiti. Of course, prior to that time, I had worked already for the Mining Department as a junior accountant when the organization was called INAREM. That internship paid a substantial stipend, and I was on a roll financially. I was taking good care of my mother and siblings.

My youngest sister was attending the same private school, Classique D'Haiti in Port-Au-Prince, that I had attended. My other sister was already attending high school at a semi-private school. My little brother was attending a vocational high school. I was caring for the entire family. My mother stayed at home to take care of us.

That summer, I became even more conscious of how God had blessed me with a great intelligence, and I started showing an even greater interest in spirituality.

As a result of the appeal of the Rosicrucian order, I signed up that summer and became a member of AMORC. I was attracted to its claims of being the ultimate path to spirituality.

I approached the Rosicrucian monographs with the same zeal that I approached my engineering studies. Little that I know that my zeal would became my enemy in the path to fulfilling my most cherished career path and dreams of a successful and bountiful future for my family and myself. I did not realize how far I had begun to stray until 2004, some twenty-five years later.

What happened next was truly frightening. As a result of the demanding schedule of my Rosicrucian studies, I actually failed the first semester of my second year in engineering school and left in the middle of the year.

A few years before I entered engineering school, Ritz had given me my first job as a junior accountant in INAREM (now the Department of Mining), working for the government. So, when I had to leave engineering school and find a job again, Ritz again helped me find one in the government financial planning agency that she had just joined. She was assisted in this process by Henry P. Bayard, the minister of culture and communication in the Duvalier government.

After I assumed my new junior accountant position, I was lucky enough to become the protege of Jacques Simeon, the minister of finance and of his sister, Marie-Therese Simeon Chanoine. Her husband, Jean-Marie Chanoine, became the new minister of culture and communication where I was working as a junior accountant. This contributed to my good fortune at the time.

Toward the end of 1982, I explained to Jean-Marie Chanoine that I wanted to pursue my engineering dream in the United States. But as the breadwinner of my family, it was difficult to leave my job in Haiti for the United States. To help me out, Jean-Marie gave me five years' leave with pay, signing all the necessary official documentation so that I could be secure about the stream of income for family while I was out of the country. However, I was to keep the department updated of my progress toward an engineering degree in the United States.

I gave my family a strict budget to follow and left Haiti in January of 1983 for Miami, Florida. I had $184 in my pocket at the time I entered the United States.

Fatal Mistake

The first time I experienced "physical entrapment" was the time when I went looking for the right incense and candle for initiation. I went with a friend, Carline Clermont, to the Martinez de Pasqually Lodge in Haiti to buy incense.

There, I met a "cheerleader," the secretary of the lodge, who asked me whether I was interesting in joining. I had answered "Yes," even though that was not part of my plan. It is quite possible that her cheerleading attitude made me forget my initial decision not to join a lodge and made me answer affirmatively.

The initiation day at the lodge was marked by an eye-opening experience that I did not fully understand at the time. One of the female members looked at me and said sarcastically, "Today a member, tomorrow a master." This lady turned out to be one of my teachers at the engineering school. Months later, she claimed that I did not turn in an important project -- whereas I know that I did turn in that assignment. She might have made an honest mistake. Nonetheless, this fellow Rosicrucian contributed to my surprising and sudden failure at engineering school.

Eventually, I left Haiti with the intent of studying engineering in the United States. As I prepared to leave, I followed the AMORC teachings to the letter: I went to the local lodge and presented my resignation from that specific lodge. The secretary then gave me a certificate confirming my continued membership and giving me the opportunity to eventually transfer to another lodge.

According to the rules of AMORC, I had to present this certificate at the new lodge I wished to join before they could admit me. As usual, the secretary was cheery and friendly. She told me that I should join the lodge in Miami when I got there, because they would help me.

A frater -- a male lodge member -- who was also in the room asked what she meant by that. She replied in her smiling, cheerleading voice, "He'll be new in Miami. The fraters there can help him find a job." The man looked at her skeptically, as though he didn't really believe it.

But I did. Those words were in my subconscious when, in Miami, one of my friends encouraged me to join the lodge. But the brother in the secretary's office had the right idea. No one in the Miami lodge was ever of any help to me.
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Re: THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN

Postby admin » Tue Oct 20, 2015 11:19 pm

Part 1 of 2

FIVE: The Miami Roller Coaster

I arrived in Miami on January 1, 1983.The next day, I went to Imocalie, a rural community about three hours' drive from Miami, where a lot of Haitians work as farm laborers. I carried with me my basic necessities and my AMORC monographs.

When I arrived, I stayed with twenty other farm workers in a little house with one bathroom. It was disgustingly dirty, and we slept in a dirty bed, as you would in a camp. To add to my misery, the farm season was bad. I stayed for four days and never had a chance to work, so I went back to Miami.

In Miami, I tried to join the other farm workers by going to the farm with the contractor every day. Once in a while, over a period of time, I managed to work a few days.

Even when the contractor picked me up, it did not guarantee that when I got to the farm, I would actually be used. Sometimes it was a matter of being chosen for strength or experience, and sometimes it was just pure luck. This was hardly a path of upward financial movement.

AMORC's Place in All of This

Where I was living in Miami, my friend's wife, Manita, set up a little room for me. Knowing my situation, they were kind enough not to charge me any rent.

I lived a normal life during the day, but when everyone else was asleep, I opened my AMORC monographs to study for the evening and did my experiments. This resulted in my getting only two to four hours of sleep a night, every night. Sleepless and underfed, I was unable to do the farm work, most of which involved picking tomatoes and oranges in southwest Miami.

Also, unknown to me at that time, my friend's wife, Manita, was observing me at night through an opening in the wall, watching me light candles and burn incense. Manita, like almost any Haitian, had a natural suspicion about anyone who would stay up performing strange rituals late at night. My late-night activities encouraged her to take steps to put me out of the house. AMORC had provided a powerful exit visa from my temporary home.

The Power of Remote Indoctrination

The monographs, small treatises that comprise the "weekly" lessons of AMORC, are the key to AMORC's powerful indoctrination techniques.

In most cults, indoctrination takes place in large meetings, and smaller groups are led by professionals, experienced in "programming" recruits with the key elements of their training. Although there are lodges in AMORC's system, the majority of members do not belong, either because they are content with the home-study course or because they do not have the time for the lodge meetings, or a lodge is simply not in their neck of the woods.

The amazing thing is that the monographs, which encourage the development of a home sanctum, a place for meditation and study, are sufficient to fully indoctrinate the majority of members. A review of the literature on cult psychology shows that all the elements are in place in the home-study course to fully indoctrinate members.

Indoctrination functions best when the recruit psychologically accepts the authority of the leadership of the group. This is generally facilitated through a mentor or group leader, who makes the case for the higher leadership as having the needed authority to effect the transference.

The idea of transference has been used in psychiatric circles for decades, after the promotion of the idea in psychoanalysis by Freud. It implies the transference of the patient's psychological autonomy from the patient to his doctor. In a sense, the patient surrenders his judgment and often decision-making to the higher authority, the doctor. The doctor becomes a kind of positive father figure.

This concept of transference can also be seen in very diverse relationships in ordinary life. A prisoner might, after a time, transfer his autonomy to a professional interrogator, a student might surrender his autonomy to a teacher, or a citizen may give up his independence to a political leader.

In the case of AMORC, through a manipulation of the student's view of the unique authority of the order, the exalted power of the imperator and the AMORC leaders, and the alleged presence of the invisible masters in the training, the monographs themselves assume a unique role.

As the monographs represent the authoritative voice of the AMORC leadership, living and ascendant, they take on an enhanced importance. In effect, the member will transfer his autonomy to the substance of the monographs themselves, their content representing the authentic and verified foundations of reality as understood by the enlightened Rosicrucian tradition.

The monographs then become a supereffective guidebook for creating auto-hypnotic states in the home sanctum. The various rituals of the sanctum -- such as chanting, visualization, and relaxation techniques -- provide a pathway for the member to regularly enter into at least a light hypnotic trance.

After introducing these techniques in the beginning of his membership, the member is now primed for entering into deeper, more highly suggestible states when reviewing the monographs and practicing the exercises in later stages of membership.

The Structure of the Monographs

From time to time, I am now going to refer to the basic documents of the AMORC home-study course, so it is important to understand how they are structured.

Typically, the lessons are featured in a pamphlet, which contains one or more monographs. Each monograph begins with a "Concurrence," which is a "Consideration of a Famous Opinion."

There are two main sections to the study course: the neophyte and the temple sections (except for the first introductory eight lessons, each of which is titled and numbered "Mandamus"). The other lessons throughout the sections are titled and numbered "Monographs."

The neophyte section has four divisions, consisting of the Mandamus lessons, and three atrium divisions, which include the monographs. After each atrium division, there is an initiation. After the third initiation, one moves into the temple section.

The temple section is structured according to various degrees, referring to the level of initiation, but the lessons are also organized into numbered monographs. There are twelve temple degrees.

There is also a "server analytic" lesson, at the end of each degree, which serves to summarize the activities of the various sections and degrees, pointing out that all exercises are important and should be rehearsed carefully for purposes of practice and review.

In speaking of the home-study course, I will sometimes present my own commentary. Sometimes I will provide actual diary elements, often with comments made in later review of these elements, which refer to specific documents. When I describe detail section of the monographs, I am referring exclusively to actual section of the monographs that I have copied directly from the monographs into my diaries for the purpose of reviewing. According to my understanding of AMORC teaching the monographs are sacred writing and should not be taken out of the sanctum, unless it is absolutely necessary. To comply with the teaching I developed the habit of copying almost entire monographs in my diaries so that I can review them on buses, in the park as a homeless or in my taxicab. Strangely enough these notes become very handy in the writing of this book.

I will now present some description and commentary on the first of eight Mandamus lessons.

Mandamus 1

In the beginning of the neophyte's journey, before commencing with the official monograph series, AMORC provides the new member with a set of about eight introductory papers, bound into a booklet, called a Mandamus. Inside the first Mandamus collection is another little booklet called Liber 777 (liber means "book" in Latin). This booklet contains the information about a concept called the celestial sanctum.

Liber 777 is the tool that is used to introduce H. Spencer Lewis, the founder and first imperator of AMORC, to the life of the Rosicrucian body. Progressively throughout these teachings, common forms of Christianity and other traditional religious teachings will be replaced by the Spencerian form of Rosicrucianism. AMORC postulates a place on the inner planes called the celestial sanctum, the only true launching pad for an encounter with the Cosmic, the Rosicrucian term for God.

Mandamus 1, a simple monograph of sixteen pages, contains exactly five exercises. This Mandamus has five experiments. An experiment is supposed to have predictable results. The results of an exercise will depend on the subject's "spiritual evolution."

Exercise 1: The Aura

In the first exercise, the postulant is asked to analyze impressions he might receive when in a bus, subway, or other public transportation, or in a crowd of people. The postulant is enjoined not to study any details about their appearance or behavior, but just to see how one's own impressions change as one looks from one individual to another. In this way, the postulant will be able to test his sensitivity to other people's auras.

The practice of this kind of exercise creates a kind of dual awareness in various situations. Since it is focused on the use of psychic powers in respect to other people's thoughts and emotions, there could be concerns about its invasive intention. Moreover, there should also be a concern about the attitudes that might be fostered as a result of implementing this kind of observation of people on a daily basis. How will people react if their day-to-day activities are embroiled in the development of special psychic powers, which, if developed, would give the practitioner a great advantage over ordinary people?

Whether these exercises could actually produce any clear results might be a legitimate question, but that there would be a psychological impact, a result of believing that one could enter into these psychic realms at will, is hardly questionable.

A person practicing these exercises would generally believe and desire that this type of superior development is possible and a good thing. In my case, I eventually became highly skeptical not only of the practical value of these exercises but also of their merit for me psychologically, as you will see as I chronicle some of my activity.

Exercise 2: Visualization

When in the company of a group of people, during a reunion, a party, or a meeting with friends, the postulant is asked to think hard about a certain person without looking at that person. This can be done by looking away from that person but visualizing his or her face. After a certain number of seconds, the postulant can cease all activity except to observe the person at a distance without the person noticing. In time, the person will look towards the postulant, as though he had somehow perceived the postulant's focus on him.

Exercise 3: Psychometry

This exercise is based on what the Rosicrucians call the science of vibration or vibroturgy. This means that there is a way to understand objects by virtue of their specific vibrations and to become sensitive to their vibrations. Vibroturgy further implies that an object can "pick up" and store the vibrations of other people or even events that have touched them or been in their vicinity. Psychics call this sensitivity psychometry.

In this exercise, the postulant is asked to go to a library, pick up a book or magazine, and try to sense impressions that have, perhaps, been embedded in the object after it has been handled by other people. It is claimed that this is not the result of imagination but an actual perception of the postulant.

Exercise 4: Reenergizing Exercise

The postulant will do this exercise when he is already tired. He is told to sit comfortably with his feet somewhat open but flat on the floor. Then he is asked to take the first three fingers of his right hand (including the thumb) and place them at the back of his neck. Once in position, he is told to breathe in deeply, holding the breath momentarily before exhaling. Then inhale, hold the breath, and exhale in the same way. The postulant exercises this procedure a few more times and then goes back to breathing normally. After awhile, this is supposed to produce a sense of regeneration and is part of a compendium of Rosicrucian therapeutic practices.

The monograph then informs us that AMORC's goal with these types of exercises is to gradually develop the member's special faculties and have them serve him in everyday life. "Special faculties" refers to psychic processes like telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition.

***

Who would not want to wait to get these blessings? Think of the advantages a person would have with such developed intuition!

The exercises in these monographs sound simple and relatively harmless. But, in fact, they are the beginning of a process that eventually makes you look at the world in an entirely different way, separating you from your environment in specific and unusual ways.

If one welcomed this duality and did not have to worry about survival, these experiments might be fine -- for example, for an affluent middle-class person of an extreme metaphysical bent. Of course, it would depend whether these exercises could actually help one develop one's psychic abilities.

In my case, I remember being impoverished and looking like trash, walking in the park. Other people were in the park for recreation with their families or fiancees. I was doing AMORC homework, always on duty, always putting AMORC ahead of everything else in my consciousness.

It is my opinion that the average Rosicrucian probably takes a few shortcuts with these monographs and so, for him or for her, there isn't the same danger as for those who take these monographs with supreme seriousness. When embroiled in a cult, it is those who believe the most intensely and act in full conviction and boldness who stand to lose the most -- their time, their money, their relationships.

Changing Your Sense of Reality

The simple promenades proposed in the previous monograph require the energy of focused concentration. The result is that a great deal of attention is expended while performing this level of self-observation. In fact, in a certain sense, even in a quiet park or your own living room, when performing these exercises you are as occupied as a fulltime worker, carrying a heavy bag on his or her back while engaging in their daily tasks.

Since the purpose of these exercises is to separate you from your normal experience of reality and introduce you to the ascendant worlds of mystical reality, the result is, indeed, the beginning of an enforced isolation from the world. If this were a balanced effort, if the results were clearly beneficial and uplifting, and if you were not driven to accept the improvable and the harmful, including a loss of judgment about experience in general, I would have to rethink my conclusions.

The danger here is that an enhanced and unusual state of perception can lead to wrong thinking about the teaching that engenders and encourages certain practices. So often, a few special experiences vouchsafe that the initiate is truly being given access to selected knowledge and thereby relieves him of his obligation to test the claims of the organization promoting these new, intriguing changes in perception.

For instance, just because you experience an "aura," that does not validate the pedigree of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis.

In Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, first published in 1962, Lifton talks about "mystical manipulation" as "extensive personal manipulation." He says:

This manipulation assumes a no-holds barred character, and uses every possible device at the milieu's command, no matter how bizarre or painful. Initiated from above, it seeks to provoke those patterns of behavior and emotion in such a way that these will appear to have arisen from within the environment. [1]


In AMORC, the experiences of the member, who is locked into the larger claims of AMORC, slowly begin to teach him to attribute a whole set of experiences in his life to his membership in AMORC, often serving, somewhat irrationally, to validate its claims.

But, in most cases, the initiate, if achieving some kind of results, will isolate himself even more to dedicate himself to these experiments. He will look for ways to have special walks in places unfamiliar to others who know him, so he can be alone, in full concentration.

In reality, he is being groomed to isolate himself from friends and family in the beginning and, in the long run, to isolate himself from society at large.

Neophyte Section, Mandamus 2

The long mythology of AMORC, going back to ancient Egypt, is introduced. The Pharaoh Thutmose III (reigned approximately 1500 to 1447 B.C) is credited with having established the first "Secret Brotherhood." Seventy years later, Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (whose name was later changed to Akhenaton, according to conventional historical accounts), initiated a short-lived form of monotheism as the official religious doctrine of formerly polytheistic Egypt.

A clear distinction is established between other Rosicrucian groups and AMORC These suggest you be careful of other groups claiming to be Rosicrucian. According to AMORC, the initials A.M.O.R.C must be associated with the words, Rosicrucian Order, in order for people to be assured of the authenticity of that order. The question is, what other organizations now or before have retained that exact combination of terms?

Furthermore, AMORC claims that the only authentic emblem of a Rosicrucian order is a golden cross with a single red rose in its center. It claims that the golden cross represents the physical body and the red rose the blossoming of incarnations of that body. No other cross represents the true order. The question then would be, what other organizations have used this image, in conjunction with the initials AMORC, in representing a Rosicrucian order?

Indoctrination Effect

This is a subtle way of keeping you away from other Rosicrucian literature and, later on, of keeping you away from other spiritual writings -- and eventually removing you from the world. This is exactly why, throughout the years, even as late as 2004,I was afraid to search for AMORC and AMORC-related themes on the Internet.

The second Mandamus introduces H. Spencer Lewis as the founder of AMORC After relating Lewis's pilgrimage to Europe, the second Mandamus discusses how he had to pass examinations and endure much spiritual testing before he met an official of the French Rosicrucian Order, eventually receiving his own initiation in Toulouse, France. He was then given the responsibility for reviving AMORC around the world. The Mandamus says he underwent "many tests and trials" before this could happen.

As we have related previously, the activities of H. Spencer Lewis, in his formation of the order, and in his interaction with various occult groups of the period, is quite a bit more complex than is presented here. Nonetheless, as a burgeoning Rosicrucian, I was very much taken by his story.

Homeless and without food, I was convinced that, like H. Spencer Lewis, I was being tested. Even when I had to ignore my family because of my poverty, I was under the impression that it was all a great spiritual test. Following the "test," I believed that AMORC would give me "permission" to obtain my financial freedom.

In short, this description of spiritual testing formed a foundation for rationalizing the degrading way I was living.

Mandamus 3

Here it is clearly stated that:

1. Being a member of AMORC is a privilege.

2. Initiates must be patient as they gain access to AMORC knowledge.


In this Mandamus, the reader is told that it will take sixteen months to achieve the First Temple degree. This is not true. Before the postulant is finished with the preliminary sections of that degree, AMORC will forcefully -- and probably successfully -- suggest that these first monographs be reviewed again and again. As Margaret Thaler Singer says:

Cults don't need to have you move into the commune, farm, headquarters, or ashram and live within the cult environment in order to have control over you. They can control you just as effectively by having you go to work every day with instructions that when not working -- on your lunch hour, for example -- you must do continuous mind-occupying chanting or some other cult-related activity. Then, after work, you must put all your time in with the organization. [2]


As you read this account of my life in AMORC, please try to remember the above observation. In the quote, Singer was not commenting on AMORC but generally referencing the modus operandi of dozens of cults. Still, it will explain why AMORC would tell prospective members that they will only have to spend about an hour and a half a week on exercises that will eventually dominate their waking and sleeping existence.

The illuminati section reached after the ninth temple degree is not detailed here. However, its mention serves to create a tantalizing mystery about its contents for the new member, now contemplating his journey to Rosicrucian discipleship.

As a member proceeds to the ninth degree, he finds a strong incentive to stay in the order, thinking that the real goods must be in the illuminati section. For example, one of the illuminati exercises is an out-of-body experiment. But, like most of the exercises in these monographs, there is a literature outside of AMORC that deals with very similar exercises and corresponding phenomena.

Before I joined AMORC, I bought a little booklet that clearly explains that the first step in performing an out-of-body experiment is to eliminate fear from you. It told you to lay down in a very relaxing way and simply let yourself go. With the help of that booklet, I had many out-of-body experiments.

A few months after joining AMORC, I had a dream -- almost like a vision because I was in a semi-waking state. In my mind, I saw myself performing one of my out-of-body experiments. At the same time, I saw myself putting my finger inside of an electric plug with live electricity. I then became afraid and returned to my physical body. I immediately got the idea that this was a warning from AMORC to immediately stop that type of experiment. This warning conformed to the Rosicrucian prescription to follow the pattern of the teachings. I wouldn't encounter out-of-body exercises until much later.

In fact, after my "dream," I resisted all temptation to attempt another out-of-body experiment for almost fifteen years. When I reached the eleventh temple degree in 1998, one of the top-secret exercises of the degree was to perform an out-of-body experiment.

The instructions in the temple degree were exactly the same as in the little booklet that I had used fifteen years earlier. Why is this exercise treated with such secrecy that the order forbids you to discuss even the existence of such exercises with the lower degrees?

This practice of prohibiting members from telling what they have studied in previous degrees is a policy that AMORC successfully uses to compartmentalize members. This policy functions to separate members from each other and eventually separate them from society.

The out-of-body experiment is supposed to be a privilege of the higher degrees. Members are not supposed to tell initiates of lower degrees about their work with specific experiments.

A New Center of the Universe

At first, AMORC was not of that much importance to me. It was a factor in my life along with other important factors, the chief being my family's economic survival.

I came to Miami with only $184 in my pocket. But somehow I was not worried, because I believed I was under the protection of AMORC. At that point, my relationship with AMORC changed because I now began to look at it as a primary way I could beat the economic survival game.

As things progressed, AMORC would slowly become the center of my life -- and, eventually, my only connection to God.

AMORC holds that to pray to God, you must enter into contact with the Cosmic. Contact with the Cosmic is actually a state of consciousness that some might say is equivalent to the mystical Christian state of unity with the divine. According to AMORC, this is best done by rising to the level of the celestial sanctum. This is the best platform for seeking cosmic attunement.

Entering the celestial sanctum is only possible to those who are in deep harmony with the Master of the Universe. And this works most effectively if one is a member of a true initiatic or mystical organization on Earth.

Image

THE WAY IS THE HARMONY
OF THE UNIVERSE
WHEN ONE COMES INTO THE SPIRIT
WHEN ONE SEES HOW IT IS
ONE UNDERSTANDS THAT BEHIND ALL THE INDIVIDUAL
DIFFERENCES
MAN-WOMBMAN
BIG-LITTLE
OLD-YOUNG
GOOD-BAD
EVERY LABEL YOU CAN THINK OF
BECOMES BACKGROUND INSTEAD OF FIGURE

-- Be Here Now, by Ram Dass


AMORC speaks of the seven true mystical organizations, which are all from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The only ones of these that are still in existence are AMORC and the Freemasons. But according to AMORC, the modern Freemasons are a "sleepy organization," meaning that they are not the authentic organization they ought to be. Thus, AMORC claims to be the only true representation of a mystical organization on Earth.

It did not take much thinking to realize that I had to be in harmony with AMORC in order to reach the Cosmic. Whenever I felt doubt about the AMORC organization, I quickly suppressed it and complied with their teachings at all costs, because I did not want to lose what I then believed to be my only connection to God. As Steve Hassan says,

Thought-stopping is the most direct way to short-circuit a person's ability to test reality. Indeed, if someone is able to think only positive thoughts about his involvement with the group, he is most certainly stuck. Since the doctrine is perfect and the leader is perfect, any problem that crops up is assumed to be the fault of the individual member. He learns always to blame himself and work harder.

Thought control can effectively block out any feelings that do not correspond with the group doctrine. It can also serve to keep a cult member working as an obedient slave. In any event, when thought is controlled, feelings and behaviors are controlled as well. [3]

Mandamus 4

Mandamus 4, which is to be read in your fourth week, begins -- in a very subtle way -- to separate members from the world as they knew it and put them under the complete control of AMORC. The technique used for this purpose is called "Redefining the concept of time."

In very slick and persuasive language, Mandamus 4 explains that the concept of time is wrongly defined in the ordinary world. Of course AMORC has the "right" definition of the concept of time.

In the Mandamus, AMORC criticizes today's scientific view of time. Since time is such a basic concept, a concept generally defined and utilized by science, getting the member to accept the Rosicrucian definition is a big step in disengaging him from the authority of science and outside standards for reasoning about things in the ordinary world.

Image

GEORGES I. GURDJIEFF,
A WESTERNER WHO WENT ON THIS HIGHER TRIP
OR AT LEAST ON A LARGE PART OF THE TRIP, SAID:
YOU DON'T SEEM TO UNDERSTAND
YOU ARE IN PRISON
IF YOU ARE TO GET OUT OF PRISON
THE FIRST THING YOU MUST REALIZE IS:
YOU ARE IN PRISON
IF YOU THINK
YOU'RE FREE YOU CAN'T ESCAPE.

-- Be Here Now, by Ram Dass


CHAPTER 16: The relativity of the concept of Time

AFTER A BRIEF silence Beelzebub continued "In order for you to have a more exact idea of the strange psyche of those three-brained beings who have taken your fancy and who breed on the planet Earth, and in general a better understanding of everything about this peculiar planet, in my opinion it is very necessary for you to have an accurate conception of how they calculate Time, and of how the being-sensation in their presence of what is called the 'process of the flow of Time' has gradually changed and what it has become today.

"This must be made clear to you because only then will you be able to represent to yourself and understand the events on that planet I have already spoken about and those I shall tell you about later.

"First of all, you must know that in calculating Time the three-brained beings of that planet take the 'year' as the basic unit, just as we do, and they define the duration of their year as the time it takes for their planet to make a certain movement in relation to another cosmic concentration—that is to say, the period during which their planet, in the process of 'falling' and 'catching up,' describes what is called a 'krentonalnian revolution' around its sun.

"This corresponds to our reckoning of a year on the planet Karatas, based upon the period of time between those moments when the sun 'Samos' and the sun 'Selos' are nearest to each other.

"A hundred of these years of theirs the beings of the Earth call a 'century.'

"They divide the year into twelve parts and each part they call a 'month.'

"And they determine the duration of this month by the time it takes for the larger fragment, separated from the Earth—the one they now call 'Moon'—to complete, according to the cosmic laws of falling and catching up, its full krentonalnian revolution around their planet.

"It must be remarked that twelve krentonalnian revolutions of the Moon do not correspond exactly to a single krentonalnian revolution of their planet around its sun, and they have therefore made some compromise or other in calculating these months of theirs, so that the total corresponds more or less to reality.

"Further, they divide their month into thirty 'days,' as they call them.

"And a day they reckon as that span of time during which their planet makes a complete rotation on its axis, under the action of the same cosmic laws.

"Bear in mind, by the way, that they also use the word 'day' to mean that 'trogoautoegocratic' process we call 'kshtatsavakht,' which periodically takes place in the atmosphere of their planet, as on all other planets where the cosmic process called 'ilnosoparno' is actualized. And when this occurs, they say 'it is daytime.'

"As regards the opposite process, which we call 'kldatsakhti,' they call it 'night' and say 'it is dark.'

"Thus the three-brained beings breeding on the planet Earth call their longest unit of measure of time a 'century,' and this century consists of a hundred 'years.' A year has twelve 'months,' a month has an average of thirty 'days.' Further, they divide their day into twenty-four 'hours,' their hour into sixty 'minutes,' and the minute in its turn into sixty 'seconds.'

"But since you, my boy, do not yet have any idea of the exceptional peculiarities of Time, you must first be told that genuine Objective Science defines this cosmic phenomenon thus:

"'Time in itself does not exist, there is only the totality of the results issuing from all the cosmic phenomena present in a given place.'

"Time in itself no being can understand by Reason or perceive by any outer or inner being-function It cannot even be sensed by any gradation of the instinct present in every more or less independent cosmic concentration.

"It is possible to evaluate Time only by comparing different cosmic phenomena occurring under the same conditions and in the same place where Time is being considered.

"It should be noted that in the Great Universe all phenomena, without exception, wherever they arise and are manifest, are simply successive, lawful 'fractions' of some whole phenomenon which has its prime arising on the Most Holy Sun Absolute.

"In consequence, all cosmic phenomena, wherever they proceed, have an 'objective' significance.

"And these successive, lawful fractions are actualized in every respect, even in the sense of their involution and evolution, according to the fundamental cosmic law, the sacred Heptaparaparshinokh.

"Time alone has no objective significance, since it is not the result of the fractioning of any definite cosmic phenomenon Issuing from nothing, but always blending with everything while remaining self-sufficiently independent, Time alone in the whole of the Universe can be named and extolled as the 'Ideally Unique Subjective Phenomenon.'

"Thus, my boy, Time or, as it is sometimes called, the 'Heropass,' is unique in having no source on which its origin depends, and it alone, like "divine Love," always flows independently and blends proportionately with all the phenomena present in all the arisings in any given place in our Great Universe.

"Again I say, you will only be able to understand clearly everything I have just told you when I specially explain to you, as I have already promised, all the aspects of the two fundamental laws of world-creation and world-maintenance.

"Meanwhile, simply remember this: since Time has no source of its arising, and its presence cannot be precisely established, as can be done for all other phenomena in every cosmic sphere, Objective Science has, for its examination of Time, the same 'standard unit' that is used to determine exactly the density and quality, in the sense of the vivifyingness of their vibrations, of all cosmic substances present in every place and in every sphere of our Great Universe.

"And this standard unit for the evaluation of Time has always been the moment of what is called 'sacred egokoolnatsnarnian sensation,' which appears in the Holy Cosmic Individuals dwelling on the Most Holy Sun Absolute whenever the vision of our Uni-Being Endlessness is directed into space and directly touches their presence.

"This standard unit was established in Objective Science to make it possible to define and compare with precision the different degrees of subjective sensation of conscious Individuals as well as what are called the 'diverse tempos' of the various objective phenomena which are manifested throughout the spheres of our Great Universe, and which engender all cosmic arisings, both large and small.

"The chief particularity of the process of the flow of Time consists in this: it is perceived in the same way and in the same sequence by the presences of all cosmic formations of different scales.

"To give you at least some notion of what I have just been saying, let us take as an example the process of the flow of Time in any drop of water in that decanter on the table.

"Each drop of water in that decanter is, in itself, a whole independent world—a world of 'microcosmoses ' In that little world, just as in other cosmoses, there arise and exist relatively independent, infinitesimal 'individuals' or 'beings.

"For the beings of that little world, Time flows in the same sequence as that in which it is sensed by all individuals in all other cosmoses These infinitesimal beings, like the beings of cosmoses of other scales, have the experience of a definite duration for each of their perceptions and manifestations and, like other beings, sense the flow of Time by comparing the duration of phenomena around them.

"Like the beings of other cosmoses, they are born, grow up, unite and separate for what are called 'sexual results', they also fall ill and suffer, and ultimately, like everything existing in which Objective Reason has not become fixed, they are as such destroyed forever.

"The entire process of existence of these infinitesimal beings in their tiny world requires a proportionate duration of time, which as in other worlds ensues from all the surrounding phenomena manifested on that cosmic scale.

"For them also a definite length of time is required for the process of their arising and formation, as well as for the various events in the course of their existence up to their final and complete destruction.

"In the whole course of existence of the beings in this drop of water certain definite and successive what are called 'periods' of the flow of Time are also required.

"A definite time is needed for their joys and for their sorrows, in short, for every kind of indispensable being-experiencing, down to what are called 'runs of bad luck' and even including 'periods of thirst for self-perfection.'

"I repeat, among them, too, the process of the flow of Time has its harmonious sequence, and this sequence ensues from the totality of all surrounding phenomena.

"In general, the duration of the process of the flow of Time is perceived and sensed in the same way by all cosmic individuals and by all completely formed units endowed with instinct, the only difference being due to the quality of their presence and of their state at the given moment.

"However, my boy, it must be pointed out that although, for separate individuals existing in independent cosmic units, the definition of the flow of Time is not objective in the full sense of the word, their experience acquires a sense of objectivity for them, since they perceive the flow of Time according to the completeness of their own presence.

"The same drop of water we have taken as an example can serve to give you a clearer understanding of this thought of mine.

"Although, from the standpoint of universal objectivity, the period of the process of the flow of Time in that drop of water is, for the whole of it, entirely subjective, yet for the beings existing within the drop of water itself, this same period of the flow of Time is perceived as objective.

"To clarify this idea, those beings called 'hypochondriacs' who exist among the three-brained beings of the planet Earth can serve as another example.

"It often seems to these terrestrial hypochondriacs that time passes infinitely slowly or, as they would say, it 'drags phenomenally tediously.'

"In exactly the same way, it may occasionally seem to some infinitesimal beings in that drop of water—assuming, of course, that there happen to be 'hypochondriacs' among them—that time drags phenomenally tediously.

"But in fact, according to the sensation of the duration of Time of your terrestrial favorites, the whole existence of these 'microcosmoses' lasts only a few of their 'minutes,' and sometimes only a few of their 'seconds.'

"Now, my boy, so that you may understand Time and its peculiarities better, let us compare your age with the corresponding age of a being existing on the planet Earth.

"And for this comparison we must take the same standard unit of Time that Objective Science uses for such calculations.

"Bear in mind, first of all, that Objective Science has established— according to data about which you will learn later when I have specially explained to you the fundamental laws of world-creation and worldexistence— that all normal three-brained beings, and among them of course those arising on our planet Karatas, sense the sacred 'egokoolnatsnarnian' action, by which they define Time, forty-nine times more slowly than it is sensed by the Sacred Individuals dwelling on the Most Holy Sun Absolute.

"Consequently, the process of the flow of Time is forty-nine times quicker for the three-brained beings of our Karatas than for the beings on the Sun Absolute, and this is the speed at which it also should flow for those breeding on the planet Earth.

"Moreover, it is calculated that, during the period of time in which the sun Samos completes its movement of closest approach to the sun Selos—the period considered as one 'year' on our Karatas—the planet Earth completes 389 krentonalnian revolutions around its sun Ors It follows from this that our year, according to the conventionally objective calculation of Time, is 389 times longer than the period which your favorites consider a year.

"You will surely be interested to know that these calculations were given to me in part by the great Arch-Engineer of the Universe, His Measurability, the Archangel Algamatant—may he be perfected unto the Holy Anklad! He explained them to me when, on the occasion of the first misfortune to the planet Earth, he came to the planet Mars as one of the sacred members of the third Most High Commission And further calculations were given me by the captain of the trans-space ship Omnipresent, with whom I had several friendly talks on my journey home from exile.

"Now you should note that you, as a three-brained being who arose on the planet Karatas, are at present only a twelve-year-old boy and, with regard to Being and Reason, exactly like a boy of twelve on the planet Earth who is still unformed and not yet aware of himself, an age all three-brained beings there live through in the process of growing up to the Being of a responsible being.

"All the features of your whole psyche—your 'character,' 'temperament,' and 'inclinations,' in short, all the particularities of your psyche that are manifested outwardly—are exactly the same as those of an immature and still pliant three-brained being there at the age of twelve.

"And so, from all I have just said it follows that although, according to our calculation of Time, you are only a boy of twelve, not yet formed and not yet aware of himself, like any boy of that age on the planet Earth, nevertheless, according to the calculation based upon the subjective understanding of your favorites and their being-sensations of the flow of Time, you have already existed not twelve but all of 4,668 years.

"Thanks to all I have said, you will have material for clarifying certain factors that later were the cause of the gradual diminishing of the average normal length of their existence, until it has now become, in the objective sense, 'almost nothing.'

-- Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man, by G.I. Gurdjieff


If AMORC can succeed in creating this level of doubt about science, the member will be forced into reconsidering the validity of many things he might believe. This is part of what Schein calls the "unfreezing" stage, where the basic concepts of a new recruit into a cult are forever shaken up.

Despite the language of the monograph, it was hard for me to completely grasp the Rosicrucian claim that their wisdom could redefine time. Let us say that in distinguishing between objective measures of time (like a pendulum, an hourglass, or a clock) and subjective experiences of time (as when one is watching an exciting movie, engaged in a deeply engrossing conversation, or sharing a highly romantic moment), one notices that the experience of time can depart very much from any kind of objective measurement. Subjectively, time can move slowly or very quickly.

Here are some more examples of the types of exercises outlined in Mandamus 4:

1. Have the postulant walk down a certain road, then go back and ride on that same road by bicycle. Finally, have the postulant drive a car on the same road. Have the postulant make a note of his impressions.

2. Walk for fifteen minutes in a straight line in a place that, scenically, is just ordinary, nothing special. Then, choosing a place that is scenically very beautiful, take a walk for the same length of time, in a not-so-straight line. Have the postulant make a note of their impressions.


These experiments prove that, although the objective measurements of time spent may be completely the same, the subjective arena is vastly different. Objective and subjective criteria are quite different. The Rosicrucian concept of time, as proposed by AMORC, stresses the subjective and casts doubt on the importance of the objective.

Since the Mandamus indicates, but does not closely define, the Rosicrucian concept of time, the suggested constant rereading of the home-study lessons and meditating on their contents merely reinforces AMORC's point of view, which is that subjective time somehow trumps and is more real than objective time.

Mandamus 5

After rejecting the contemporary scientific view of time in Mandamus 4, AMORC addresses the scientific view of space in Mandamus 5.

Again, the dictionary definition of space, which reflects the contemporary scientific world view, is wrong. The AMORC definition of space is the right one. To validate the so-called Rosicrucian view, this monograph quotes ancient mystical and spiritual writings to support its position.


Image

SEE:
IF YOU GET FAR ENOUGH IN
YOU CAN SEE ... KARMA
YOU CAN SEE PATTERNS UNFOLDING
(OF WHICH THIS LIFE
IS ONLY A PART
PART OF A MOSAIC)
BUT:
IN ORDER TO DO THAT
YOU HAVE TO HAVE LEFT
THE GRAVITATIONAL FIELD
OF
TIME AND SPACE
(AS A MATRIX)
YOU CAN'T THINK IN ... TIME & SPACE

YOU CAN'T BE IN ... YOUR THOUGHTS
ANY MORE!
BECAUSE: YOUR THOUGHTS ARE STILL IN TIME
& SPACE & YOU CAN'T GET OUT OF TIME
THROUGH THEM. YOU'VE GOT TO BE OUTSIDE
THAT. YOU'VE GOT TO BE IN THE PLACE WHERE
YOU SEE YOUR OWN
BIRTH * CHILDHOOD * ADOLESCENCE * MATURITY * AGE * DEATH * CONCEPTION
AND:
NOT ONLY THAT ONE BUT THAT ONE & THAT TOO ...
THAT ONE & ...
THE BUTTERFLY

I AM WITHOUT FORM
WITHOUT LIMIT
BEYOND SPACE BEYOND TIME
I AM IN EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING IS ME
I AM THE BLISS OF THE UNIVERSE.
EVERYTHING
AM I
RAM TIRTHA

-- Be Here Now, by Ram Dass


I am troubled particularly by a phrase from this monograph: "The Rosicrucians have asserted for centuries ... " The question here is, who? Rosicrucians from a variety of orders, representing a common view of space? Or AMORC, a monolithic organization whose archives exclusively bear the secret fruits of ages of study? The answer, as exhibited in the monographs, is AMORC itself.

This not-so-subtle claim of authority caused me to doubt my desire to leave AMORC when I began to question the validity of the Rosicrucian message. Was I really informed enough to question their authority? If these people know so much that they have affirmed these things for centuries, who was I to question them?

Basically, AMORC claims that time does not exist for a Rosicrucian -- except, of course, when your membership fee is due. In fact, time becomes so real at this point that you become very aware that if your membership commitments aren't met on time, you will be automatically cut from the egregore.

Severing one's connection to the egregore, the sacred pattern of the order on other planes, may not sound so severe to an outsider, but to a Rosicrucian now dependent on the organization, this is a powerful threat. Remember that a Rosicrucian believes that his fundamental connection to God is linked to his association with the egregore of AMORC.

Mandamus 6

The Temptation


According to AMORC, humans possess a capacity for sensing an invisible realm. Human beings can, in a supersensible realm, hear, see, and smell things they cannot smell now. AMORC will train you to develop these faculties. These hopes for supersensible, profound experience hooked me into AMORC like a fish flailing on a line.
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Re: THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN

Postby admin » Tue Oct 20, 2015 11:19 pm

Part 2 of 2

Rejection of Physical Senses

In the beginning of these introductory lessons, AMORC makes compelling arguments about the limitation of the physical senses. After a time, a neophyte begins to taste the promise of this supersensible experience, known only to the very few. This is part of AMORC's unique draw.

Remember, AMORC's general constituency, upon commencing their membership, is usually not familiar with the history of occultism, parapsychology, or mystical practices. Many times, AMORC is a member's first pass at this type of teaching or organization. When this is the case, AMORC's claims tend to go unquestioned, especially when information corning from ordinary scientific and religious circles is subtly questioned. Since AMORC has its unique calling in the world, other Rosicrucian orders are considered to be pale imitations at best, if not outright frauds.

So by the time a neophyte begins to question AMORC, the order has created many stumbling blocks inside his mind. To question AMORC's authority becomes dangerous and even treasonous. The initiate looks at AMORC as the only source of this supersensible knowledge. AMORCtells their initiates that these great developments can be obtained only with the genuine Rosicrucian teaching.

In Mandamus 6, we learn that even mental interpretations based on reasonable deduction or induction are unreliable. The monograph tries to instill doubt in you about the very fabric of the universe, your concept of space and time, and your normal sensory experience, as well as your ability to interpret it.

In the beginning, AMORC only proposes that you do certain experiments. Later on, after you have been thoroughly indoctrinated, this so-called invitation to try certain exercises will become a subtly imposed mandate. If you buy into AMORC's philosophy, you will have to do these exercises whether you want or not. Why? Because, after you are indoctrinated, the practice of these exercises becomes a critical matter of survival.

To gain the protection of the egregore of AMORC, you must practice the exercises and pay your dues. In fact, at a certain point, you learn that AMORC is the only authentic positive spiritual egregore that exists. This means that, indeed, AMORC is the only true link to God.

Two Experiments to Practice

Experiment 1


The postulant sits in silence, away from others, and concentrates on internal functions that usually do not command his attention, like breathing, heartbeat, perhaps the skin's sensitivity to temperature or the movement of air in the room. The postulant should try to feel the duality between the physical and the nonphysical body.

Experiment 2

The postulant should then interact among a lot of people, observing how you can be conscious of yourself while sensing the crowd of people. A sense of the inner, of oneself, coexists with the outer, "external" world.

On January 12, 1983,less than two weeks after arriving in Florida, I walked from downtown Miami on Flagler Street and First Avenue to the Social Security office in Little Havana, a journey of about four miles.

It was hot day. Still, I had a long-sleeve shirt on, and I was sweating. As I walked, I was talking to myself about how I hated AMORC's empty philosophical writing.

I was deeply convinced that I needed my green card so that I could go to college and get my mother, my sisters, and brother out of poverty in Haiti and move them to the United States.

When I finally got to the Social Security office, I got a number and sat waiting for my turn to go to the counter. Looking straight ahead at someone standing in the office, I believed that, for the first time in my life, I was observing a human aura. I hated that observation and mentally blocked out that picture.

Here I was, in the middle of a crowded government office, trying to get my Social Security card so I could work, bothering about worthless psychic phenomena like seeing auras.

At the moment, I was thinking, "I do not care to see auras. What I need is my financial freedom." When I got home that night, here's what I wrote in my diary:

My Rosicrucian Diary January 12, 1983

In the middle of my torments today, the Cosmic gave me permission to experience something new, a spontaneous viewing of a colored field of energy around the human body, which I believe may be the human aura. This could be signaling the beginning of the formation of the third eye, a coveted faculty of advanced initiates. Perhaps, as I move forward in the Rosicrucian teaching, I will discover the way to achieve my principal goal -- to obtain my green card, go to college, and get my family out of poverty.


This experience had made me more conscious of my spiritual development. In my diary entry, I concluded that I wished that "the Cosmic" -- AMORC loaded language for God -- would grant me another experience similar to the one I had in the Social Security office. After my initial distaste for the bothersome phenomenon, my cult personality kicked into full gear when I wrote that I credited AMORC for my spiritual development and I determined to continue the Rosicrucian study at any cost. Fatal words, "any cost"!

While writing these lines, I didn't mention the sense of exploitation that I had felt during the day, especially after the "auric experience." I didn't mention how I had tried to block the experience out of my mind due to its irrelevance to my current situation. During my twenty-plus years of affiliation to AMORC, there were many occasions like this one, where I felt one way during an event, but once I picked up my monographs at night for study, my feelings changed.

In a mind control environment, freedom of choice is the first thing that one loses. The reason for that loss is essentially simple: the cult member is no longer operating as himself. He has a new artificial identify structure which includes new beliefs and a new language. The cult leaders' doctrine becomes the master "map" for reality of the new cult member.

A member of a mind control cult is at war with himself. Therefore, when dealing with a cult member, it is extremely important to keep in mind that he has two identities. [4]


Yes, in working in my home sanctum at night, I became a totally different person. In a sense, this memoir is the description of the development of a cult personality in a person whom one might think, naively, to be an unlikely candidate for cult recruitment. It is also the story of how a person like myself, with some awareness, can undertake to assist in the disintegration of that cult personality and advance toward freedom.

In order to create a compliant and highly suggestible membership, certain elements of indoctrination need to be set into place. One of them is "loaded language," in which cult members use special words like Cosmic (instead of God) to give a certain flavor to the cult language.

Loading the language. As members continue formulate their ideas in the group's jargon, this language serves the purpose of constricting members' thinking and shutting down critical thinking abilities. At first, translating from their native tongue into "groupspeak" forces members to censor, edit, and slow down spontaneous bursts of criticism or oppositional ideas. That helps them to cut off and contain negative or resistive feelings. Eventually, speaking in cult jargon is second nature, and talking with outsiders becomes energy-consuming and awkward. Soon enough, members find it most comfortable to talk only among themselves in the new vocabulary. To reinforce this, all kinds of derogatory names are given to outsiders: wogs, systemites, reactionairies, unclean, or Satan. [5]


The essays in the Mandamus collection make a variety of key claims about the order. These claims comprise themes critical to the potential transformation of the member and are embedded in the entire AMORC monograph collection. Each of these claims has important consequences for a member's lifestyle.

1. They claim you are a special person, somehow selected for this important AMORC affiliation. You are not like a common person. These monographs can only be given to special people like yourself. To this end, they overload you with reading assignments (read Liber 777 plus the Rosicrucian manual of information, a book of about 200 pages, in a week.) To do this efficiently, you would need to be a speed-reading demon. This is a relatively gigantic reading assignment for someone who has a full-time job and perhaps a family.

2. They claim that the exercises have practical consequences and are not purely theoretical. To this end, they overload you with experiments to do (four experiments per reading, an extremely time-consuming activity).

3. In a subtle way, they claim you will be tested. Therefore, if the exercises and teachings do not change your life, perhaps you are ultimately to blame.

4. Since you are so specially chosen, you are assigned special work that splits you off from family and friends. You are given special tasks, like sacred sounds to chant, special breathing and visualization exercises, special conditions to set up for deep meditation, etc.

5. Since you are part of a very elevated, special spiritual organization, you are taught to look askance at ordinary institutions of religion, science, and education. AMORC claims not to be a religious organization but clearly states the shortcomings of all formal religions. The monographs imply but never directly state that AMORC is the proper replacement for the church in the member's life. In fact, AMORC continually maintains its respect for members' church affiliations. No matter what your affiliation, many members can attend a special lodge where Rosicrucian rituals are carried out and given a special sacred and fundamental meaning.


While I continued my Rosicrucian attempts to jumpstart my financial life through metaphysics, friends tried very hard to help me get a Social Security number or a work permit so that I could look for a regular job. At the time, farm labor was the only type of work that did not require these documents. Eventually, I was able to obtain a Social Security number and applied for my first job with the help of a friend from Haiti.

I moved in with another friend for two days and then rented a room. I paid my first month's rent of one hundred dollars with a gift I received from the Episcopal Church of Miami.

At the new place, I did not have my own room. I slept in the dining room when everyone else went to bed. I had no privacy to study the AMORC monographs, so I studied in front of everyone, which was not a problem since no one else in that house could read French (French is the primary language of Haiti). But I looked forward to the day when I had my own room so that I could study the monographs in peace.

The monographs, utilized properly, basically guide readers to a certain state of consciousness. This involves getting into a meditative state, in front of a mirror, while burning candles and incense. The techniques of the monographs were promoted as being highly secretive and for the use of AMORC members only. Therefore, studying them in public was both limiting and, in a sense, a violation of AMORC regulations.

Image

FUNNY THING ABOUT ALL THE SECRETS OF
THE EAST OR THE SECRETS OF MYSTICISM ...
THEY'RE NOT SECRET!
NOBODY'S SAYING "DON'T TELL HIM."
THEY'RE TELLING YOU. THEY'RE YELLING IT.
THEY'RE SAYING: "EXCEPT YE BE CONVERTED
AND BECOME AS LITTLE CHILDREN, YE SHALL
NOT ENTER THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN."
THAT'S A SECRET?
THE SECRET IS A SECRET TO YOU
BECAUSE OF WHERE YOUR HEAD IS AT.
YOUR RECEIVING MECHANISM ISN'T TUNED
FOR THAT PARTICULAR FREQUENCY

-- Be Here Now, by Ram Dass


Now I know that the entire ritual of the home sanctum and its exercises were guiding members into a state of auto-suggestion, reinforced and directed by the teaching in the monographs, but this thought never occurred to me during most of my experience in AMORC. Who could imagine that putting members into a state of hypnotic trance could somehow serve the purposes of AMORC and its leaders?

March 1983

I had been in Miami, Florida, for three months. I didn't have a job yet. I was living in a rented room on Sixty-Eighth Street and NE Second Avenue. At that time, most of the farm workers from Haiti lived in this community.

When my friend in Miami, Nadine, dropped me off at my rooming house one day, she said she felt that I should be living in a better social environment. She knew that in Haiti, I had been a university student and a government employee. She advised me to visit the AMORC lodge that was located on Sixty-Second Street. I guess that Nadine thought that I would receive some help from my fellow Rosicrucians. I did what she suggested. Not quite understanding why, I followed her advice and went to the lodge.

Prior to that moment, I had intended to wait until I was more settled before approaching anyone from the order. It had just made sense to wait. I was convinced that I needed to look more Americanized before going to a lodge. I knew that I was not ready for the social aspect of the lodge.

Still, back in Haiti, when I resigned from the lodge Martinez de Pasqually, I remember the secretary's suggestion to join a lodge immediately when I got to Miami. She told me they could even help me in the new country. Perhaps it was partly her influence that drove me to go there earlier than I expected. In fact, this was the same secretary who had gotten me into my original AMORC lodge when it also had not been not part of my plan. She was an excellent cheerleader for AMORC.

First Visit to the Miami AMORC Lodge

I dressed as well as I could and went first to attend the Catholic Mass at the Haitian church across from the lodge. After Mass, I headed across the street. Skinny and "poorly dressed," I instantly got the undesirable attention of everyone.

Almost at once, I overheard Stephanie, one of the sorors -- female members of the order -- who I eventually met, whispering to someone that I could sure use some multivitamins. Since not eating enough food forces a person into a semi-starvation mode, vitamin supplements would certainly have been useful. Three square meals might have been more helpful, though.

But despite my incessant hunger, I did not look at myself as "starving," and I dismissed Stephanie's statement as "one of those American ways of thinking." I was, after all, a high initiate suffering a needed level of spiritual testing. It took a long time for me to wonder why the Cosmic wanted to afflict with me quite so much hunger and poverty.

Convocations at the lodge are something like formal church services but even more like the ritualistic meetings of Freemasons. Officials wear certain specific uniforms. Incense and candles are burned. Processions follow a prescribed structure. Although I felt awkward at the lodge, it was nice to be part of something again, and I felt the warmth of belonging to something.

Following the convocation, I sat at a table with Yves and Roger, two fraters. At one point, I was drinking coffee and started to laugh. I was laughing at the fact that I didn't know which mix to use in my coffee. America was constantly bringing me little surprise tastes and sounds. I was very self-conscious and thought that everyone in the room must be wondering, "Who is that foolish-looking thing in front of us?"

I was recovering from my negative thought about my appearance when my table companion, Roger, asked whether I had a car. For a split second, I started thinking that the secretary in Haiti was right. Wow! Here it comes!

I told Roger that, unfortunately, I didn't have a car. He offered me one immediately, failing to mention that it was not running and had no tires. In fact, it would take me a year of dishwashing jobs to get that car running.

When the post-Convocation social period ended, as I was on my way home, I stopped outside the lodge with one American frater and another member, a frater from Quebec. The frater from Quebec was definitely sympathetic to me. The American frater, on the other hand, looked at me in a very condescending way and asked what I was looking for in Miami.

I told him I wanted a job. Looking down his nose, he said, "Like a dishwashing job?"

Now, in my circumstances, I did not have any pride about what I did. My entire focus was not on myself but on how to help my mother and sisters in Haiti. I would take dishwashing jobs, farm jobs -- anything, really. Still, I felt the sting of the disrespect in the American frater's voice.

In my mind, and despite my financial circumstances, I was still the very gifted Pierre Freeman who was studying civil engineering in Haiti. What the American frater saw before him was a skinny little thing who looked like nothing. He probably thought that I didn't even know how to sign my name.

I was not ashamed about what I had to do as an immigrant in the United States. And I wasn't about to let my good friend, the frater, change my willingness to do whatever I had to do without tarnishing my self-esteem. Still, it hurt a bit.

On the other hand, the frater from Montreal was more sympathetic to my situation and gave me some useful hints on job searching.

At the time, I lived only three blocks away from the lodge. Still, I was happy to get a ride from Yves (the table companion I mentioned earlier), particularly when I told him that I wanted to move and he replied that he had a room for rent.

In fact, I ended up renting that room with one of my first checks from my dish washing job, a job I had gotten in a Mexican restaurant in Coconut Grove with the help of a friend from Haiti. This was a job I had actually applied for two weeks after I had come to Miami.

But things didn't work out for me in that room. In fact, it turned out to be a very deceptive experience. The neighborhood was very bad near Third Avenue and Eightieth Street NW. I was very concerned about being mugged at night when returning from work. Even during the day when I got off the bus, a group of guys drinking alcohol always tried to stop me and asked for money. I stayed there for only one month.

AMORC wasted no time in entrapping me in the Miami lodge. The following incident, which occurred during my second visit to the Miami lodge, illustrates the entrapping experience.

The "Madame Lamar" Experience

During the period of guided meditation by the lodge master, I felt energy leaving my body and heading in the direction of another person, Madame Lamar. Please understand, I wasn't intentionally trying to hurt or disrupt Madame Lamar in any way. It was as if an invisible force had possessed me and was directing my energy in this strange way.

The way I began to understand this was that my own spiritual energy was protecting me from an attack directed toward me by Madame Lamar. In fact, in my inner vision, I believed she was on a horse, trying to influence me, to direct me to return to Haiti.

But the energy of my mind was bent on protecting me from her efforts, even to the point of seriously hurting her in the process. Even though I recoiled from my vision of her intent, for some reason I deliberately halted the projection of my energy toward her. I consciously didn't want to be involved in hurting her in any way, because she was my benefactor in Haiti.

Many years later, when I felt the desire to quit the Miami lodge, or when I felt I was out of place there and wanted to leave the lodge, the memory of that experience carne to me as a reminder that I needed the lodge and its teachings to protect myself.

What do phobias have to do with cult groups and mind control? In some cults, members are systematically made to be phobic about ever leaving the group. Today's cults know how to effectively implant vivid negative images deep within members' unconscious minds, making it impossible for the member to even conceive of ever being happy and successful outside of the group. When the unconscious is programmed to accept the negative images, it behaves as though they were true. The unconscious mind is made to contain a substantial image-bank of all of the bad things that will occur if anyone should ever betray the group. Members are programmed either overtly or subtly (depending on the organization) to believe that if they ever leave, they will die of some horrible disease, be hit by a car, be killed in a plane crash, or perhaps even cause the death of loved ones. Some groups program members to believe that if they ever leave the group, planetary nuclear holocaust will be the result. [6]


This belief that the lodge was somehow involved with my personal survival compelled me to continue and endure humiliation and rejection at the hands of its members.

Complying with AMORC at All Costs

March 1983


AMORC had special requirements for its neophytes to study their monographs. One of those requirements was that the monographs were to be read in front of a mirror.

Accordingly, I bought a mirror when I moved into Yves house. In spite of the fact that the room was full of mosquitoes, I still attempted to enter into a meditative state to complete my Rosicrucian exercises. This shows the level to which I was willing to abandon common sense to adhere rigidly to the rules of the order.

After one month at Yves's house my friend, Nesly Germain, found me a room at her aunt Charlestine's at 1114 Street. I rented the room for $80 a month. Charlestine is a single lady from Haiti with one grown daughter and a grown son and one teenage daughter. They were Seventh Day Adventists and took me in like a son.

June 1983

Night at the Bus Stop


I got my first job in Miami at a construction site with the help of another friend from Haiti. While that job had a lot of overtime, it was a temporary job that ended when the project was completed. So when the dish washing job that I had applied for called, I left and started my dishwashing job.

As a dishwasher, I worked from 2:45 to 11:45 PM. But when the restaurant closed at 11:30 PM., it took some time to clean the last of the dishes and the kitchen. The last bus was at 11:45 PM., so one night, I told the boss that I would miss the bus. He took me home in his car, all the way from Coconut Grove to Sixty-Eighth Street and NE Second Avenue in Little Haiti.

After he dropped me off, I realized that I could easily become a burden for the boss and that he could fire me to avoid taking me home. Also, I was living in a very unsafe neighborhood, which could have unpleasant consequences if something went wrong. The next day, I told my boss that my cousin would pick me up on a regular basis.

Sometimes I got a ride with a co-worker from Haiti. But many nights when my dishwashing job took me past 11:45 PM, I slept at the bus stop until 7:00 AM. When I woke up in the morning, I caught the bus home.

By the way, that bus stop, the first on the route, was at a location where only businesses and restaurants were located. They are closed by midnight. It was a no-man's-land after midnight.

One night, lying on the bus bench, trying to fall asleep, I saw a minivan park across the street from the bus stop. A man got out and walked to the bus bench. I was awake but pretended to be sleeping. The man sat at the end of the bench next to my feet. He looked at me but didn't say anything. I didn't make a move, pretending to be sleeping. He walked back to his van and drove off.

It was indeed a scary moment. I didn't have a knife, a bottle, or anything else I could have defended myself with.

As you will see from reading this story, I was slowly becoming more and more immersed in my daily readings of the monographs and the recommended exercises. The main reason for this is that, as a believer, I could no longer separate AMORC from the other activities I needed to survive. In fact, at one point, AMORC became my primary key to survival, more important than work itself.

Here was my schedule from March 1983, when I got my dishwasher job in Coconut Grove, to October 1983,when I lost the job.

Monday to Sunday

I woke up at 6:00 AM. I then practiced the Rosicrucian exercises from 6:00 to 7:30 AM. I left home by 8 AM and took the bus to school without any food.

English as a second language class started at 9:00. Class finished at 2:30 PM. I took the bus and arrived at my job at about 3:30. I worked from 3:45 to 11:45. Then I took a bus, which arrived at my house by 1:30 AM. I got home, took a shower, and studied the Rosicrucian monographs and did their exercises until 3 or 4 AM. In reviewing my diary, it is clear how tired and hungry I was, but despite the cost to my health and psychological well-being, I would log in two and a half hours a day, as opposed to the one and a half hours a week clearly described in The Mastery of Life. As my story progresses, you will see how there is a steady progression of influences that can lead a diligent member into following a far more rigorous schedule than the more reasonable one published publicly.

The major driver of this behavior was fear. And, believe me, the power of fear grows when you are deep into the first stage of Schein's scenario, the destabilization process. In my case, part of this occurred when I first began to doubt whether the practical parts of my life -- like work and education -- should be the primary focus of survival.

As I began to learn the Rosicrucian way, chanting certain sounds, meditating with candles and incense in my home sanctum, practicing daily observations of those around me based on my exercises, going to lodge meetings, etc., slowly became more important than working. After all, these were the tools whereby I would propitiate the gods of AMORC, the invisible masters, and thereby be further infused with the ability to survive.

This period of my life coincided with Eric Schein's period of "changing," which took some time. This was the period in which all these practices were learned while their importance and meaning were driven home by the exercises.

Indoctrination, which is the main component of the second stage, has simple but fascinating implications when you break down the word. Someone or some group is trying to insert or infuse a doctrine in you, right? In other words, you are ingesting or being injected with a doctrine -- from outside.

Substitute the word program for doctrine, and you have other interesting implications. Ingesting a fundamental doctrine or program for a core belief or a set of core beliefs can completely alter one's life. The conditions under which these programs are delivered are, indeed, often when the initiates are in states of extreme fatigue, semi-starvation, extreme peer pressure, or altered states of consciousness. Is it surprising that people who are in cults are often called "robots" or, one of my favorite terms, "zombies"? They are being run by programs that have stripped them of their true emotions and the vital connection between their intellect and their conscience. These programs shut down their relationship to reality.

Cult doctrines are more like viruses than innocuous or even beneficial beliefs like "Think positive" or "Always keep your eye on the ball." They are often filled with ideas that create in you a sense of superiority to outsiders, a belief in an invincible authority, a deceptive or exaggerated sense of historical events or life in general, as well as a belief in the necessity of propagating the doctrines to others.

Behaviors are shaped subtly at first, then more forcefully. The material that will make up the new identity is doled out gradually, piece-by-piece, only as fast as the person is deemed ready to assimilate it. The rule of thumb is "Tell him only what he can accept." When I was a lecturer in the Moonies, I'd often discuss this tactic with other lecturers. To rationalize our manipulations we would use this analogy. "You wouldn't feed a baby chick pieces of steak, would you? You have to feed it something it can digest, like formula. We, these people (potentially converts) are spiritual babies. Don't tell them more than they can handle, or they will die." If a recruit started getting angry because he was learning too much about us, the person working on him would back off and let another member move in to spoonfeed some pablum. [7]


Beliefs can behave like viruses, which, under certain conditions, can become highly contagious and also damaging. A recruit with a cult virus can become a robot who believes that everybody should be programmed exactly like himself.

Remember the human plants in the original and spin-offs of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Cult recruits are created to have a "hive mentality," similar also the Borgs featured in the television show Star Trek: The Next Generation. Both the body snatchers and the Borg are robotic, drained of their humanity and personal emotions, but fully synchronized with the thoughts and feelings of others, also with dehumanized robot personalities.

Although telepathic and other powers are prized in AMORC, you don't need to have any of them to develop a hive mentality. Insects, like bees, have hive mentalities, but most of their communication is based on external signals. In communicating the source of honey, scientists theorize that scout bees perform a "waggle dance" to alert other bees to their discoveries. Some scientists say the dance tells all the information that is needed, but others say the dance is just a kind of wake-up call to an odor plume, a trail of pollen aroma that can lead the bees to the flowers bearing the pollen. This is hive mentality, but it is based on external communication.

Someone who has never been "infected" with a cult virus will not have much empathy for an indoctrinated cult member. They often will blame the member for having become so gullible or for staying so long inside the cult before they left.

The average person looks down on those who get involved in cults, get taken in a scam by some operator who bilks people, or remain in an abusive group or relationship for long periods. That only happens to weak and silly people, the person boasts, generating for herself or himself a category called "not me" in which to place the victims of cults, scams, and intense influence. There is an almost universal aversion to accepting the idea that we ourselves are vulnerable to persuasion. I have heard this from journalists, college professors, neighbors, passengers seated next to me on a plane, people I talk with in the street, graduate students, gardeners, salesclerks. Neither education, age, nor social class protects a person from this false sense of invulnerability. [8]


And it is, indeed, hard to explain why a member, knowing what he does, might stay.

My story might explain something about that, as I document the effects of mind control techniques on my own psyche. Yes, I stayed in AMORC for twenty-four years with only one real attempt to leave, which lasted only a few days, though I was dissatisfied with my membership for many, many years. But why did I stay?

If you look at my diary entries, many of which you will read shortly, you will see a man at war with himself. But what it will be difficult for many of you to fathom is the extreme self-division that occurred within me. Sometimes I hated AMORC, and sometimes I loved it beyond belief. But, then, there were times that I was filled with contradictory feelings.

In my confused state, which I believe was the result of having been immersed in an altered state of consciousness, a hypnotic trance of varying degrees, my will to act, my certainty of who I was or what I was to do, was short-circuited. Imagining having a very high fever, say 105 degrees, for twenty-four years. It's hard to believe -- but it's true.

Worse, this state is sustained and reignited by "triggers," small actions, thoughts, feelings, and memories, which the cult injects into a recruit's consciousness. For this reason, at the end of my journey, when I became more aware, candles, the smell of incense, chanting, a handshake, certain gestures, and certain words or phrases all triggered a very different state of mind than my normal state of consciousness.

Remember how it feels to be very, very tired, when the world around you seems to move slowly and at a far distance? The experience of mind control can be compared to something like that. You go into a different place in your mind. Thoughts and feelings that were in the far background in your normal state of consciousness, sometimes contradicting it, now come into the foreground. The whole world seems different, sometimes distorted, with certain feelings of loyalty, duty, or fear now coming to center stage. In this state, you move differently, you talk differently, and, much more alarmingly, you think differently.

Toward the end of my stay at AMORC, it was like my mind was a minefield, with triggers constantly setting me off down distorted and convoluted roads. I was aware of it, but it also victimized me. I knew I was like the Manchurian candidate, a hypnotized robot, but I wasn't free to do anything about it because every time I tried, I would be sent off into an altered state of consciousness.

My schedule at this time shows that I had become "refrozen" into a personality that was driven by my new parameters of personality, created for me in AMORC. The consequence was a loss of practical, everyday reality thinking. In my case, this essential impracticality became more dangerous because I was not providing only for myself. There were other people I was trying to support. The dishwashing job paid $3.75 per hour, and I used that money to pay my rent and buy a bus pass, sending the rest home to my family. I had no money left over for food. The only way I could eat was while I was at my dishwashing station, where I would gratefully devour food left over from the restaurant patrons or given to me by the cooks.

Mandamus 7

In this Mandamus, AMORC claims that intuition is of vital importance -- but, in reality, AMORC destroyed the development of my intuition.

For example, the idea of contacting Niton, which led me to my first great job, is a real example of an intuitive idea that worked successfully at a critical moment in my life. The correlation between my idea to contact Niton and the result was very obvious. I think it is fair to say that my thought of contacting Niton was a "good intuition."

Now, in the case of Niton, this was not some kind of a ritualistically programmed, highly structured, and meticulously formatted request. It is what I would call a natural intuition, a capacity for some kind of spiritual insight that human beings have built into them.

In this monograph, AMORC additionally affirms that it will correct the mistakes of scholarly endeavors in a faulty educational system. AMORC, having successfully trumped traditional modern science, now appears to wish to trump conventional education.

To those embarking on the Rosicrucian journey, this makes AMORC appear as the savior of their disenfranchised minds, rescuing them from the shortcomings of devalued educational programs.

I can attest, as someone who has happily partaken of the American educational system, that it has been far more useful than a twenty-four- hour-a-day indulgence in the flawed teachings of the AMORC monographs.

In light of my comments on intuition, let us return to AMORC'S version of intuition, which is the main subject of this Mandamus and its exercises.

These exercises, they say, will be practiced "for many months and even years to come." So here AMORC is laying the groundwork to occupy members' lives for many years in the future.

If the postulant seeks to know the time, he is advised not to look at a timepiece. Instead, he is asked to close his eyes, putting himself in a state of intuitive receptivity. When the answer comes, he can then consult his timepiece. If the postulant is successful in putting himself in this state of inner receptivity, the exact time will flash into his conscious mind, and he will receive the impression that it is a certain number of minutes after or before the hour.

In this case, the postulant is asked to not question his intuition, but to trust it. In other words, he must not let himself be influenced by any type of reasoning, for that will inhibit him from building his intuitive consciousness. The postulant is told that true intuition comes from interior consciousness, not objective consciousness. In other words, the intuition comes internally, from the subconscious, not from logic or more external or objective ideas derived from the postulant or others.

AMORC affirms that it is possible to receive answers to our spontaneous questions. The only conditions are that these questions be legitimate and acceptable in the view of the Cosmic. The "view of the Cosmic" is loaded language for God's view or "in the eyes of God."

After experimenting with utilizing intuition to tell time, the postulant can now experiment with other scenarios. For instance, when the telephone rings, before the postulant actually picks up the phone, he can ask his inner self who is calling and why. AMORC also recommends that the postulant try this with unopened letters.

The postulant needs to be honest with himself and take his first impression as his answer. If he fails at the beginning, he shouldn't be discouraged but keep on trying until he observes that his answers are more and more right.

He is then asked to test his intuition when he receives a letter in the mail if the sender is not totally obvious. He will ask himself, "Who sent the letter? What is the object of this letter?" Then he puts himself in a state of receptivity and waits for an intuitive answer.

There are two subtly entrapping directives in these "simple but fundamental" experiments. The first is the injunction that you avoid all reasoning when performing the exercise. The second is that you will only pay attention to the first subconscious answer, no matter what it is.

AMORC tells you that there will be many mistakes at the beginning, but progressively, in time, your answers will become more and more exact. In AMORC's teaching, you are progressing toward a heightened state of intuition.

But what if this procedure doesn't work? What if the exercises do not actually produce the intended results? Are you not learning to make decisions by forsaking your reason, your experience, and then to do so, without thinking, entirely spontaneously? Are you not, in fact, subduing the reasoning process? And what if your ego gets in the way, and you begin to buy into a flawed method of making decisions, attributing spontaneous ideas to an evolved intuitive capacity? Where are the controls inherent in these instructions? Should one give over one's decision-making to this kind of intuition without some kind of controls?

Mandamus 8

This monograph is the last of the section of postulants. Any member with a compliant personality is almost completely indoctrinated by now.

The phrase "our mystical fraternity," used in the first paragraph of page one, is an early look at how members will feel about AMORC after they have been indoctrinated. As a matter of fact, the state of mind will be, in a subtle way, created by AMORC so that members will become agents of the cult.

In this monograph, AMORC insists the meditation must take place after contact with and on the level of the celestial sanctum. On the surface, there is nothing wrong with that. But in my opinion, this insistence embodies a form of entrapment.

This statement furthers a highly destructive process in AMORC, the doctrine of the celestial sanctum, which we have mentioned is highlighted in Liber 777.

Since meditation is central to the Rosicrucian study, it is affirmed that true meditation can only begin at the level of the celestial sanctum. So no matter how hard you try, you will always be concerned about whether or not you are attaining this special state of consciousness. This is difficult because the lack of definition of the celestial sanctum and its description does not necessarily lead to a perfect knowledge of its existence: This constant frustration will eventually reach deep into your subconscious, leading you into a state of perpetual confusion.

One of the factors that leads to confusion is AMORC's affirmation that, with the help of the celestial sanctum, it is quite easy for a member to get in touch with Cosmic Consciousness. But without it, there is no chance whatsoever. In fact, the celestial sanctum becomes the very portal of energy and grace that leads you to experience the Divine Presence.

Since mind control depends on creating a new identity within the individual, cult doctrine always requires that a person distrust his own self. The doctrine becomes the "master program" for all thoughts, feelings, and actions. Since it is the truth, perfect and absolute, any flaw in it is viewed as only a reflection of the believer's own imperfection. He is taught that he must follow the prescribed formula even if he doesn't really understand it. At the same time he is said that he should try to work harder and have more faith so he will come to understand the truth more clearly. [9]


Most members, if they are honest with themselves, will have to admit that this level of experience (of what is often called Cosmic Consciousness) is rare, fleeting, or entirely absent from their experience. So they must question whether or not they are reaching the celestial sanctum in their meditative efforts.

The Akashic Records

AMORC talks about the Akashic Records but, in the meantime, creates in the mind of the aspiring adept the belief that there is only one way to establish a spiritual connection to the past, the Rosicrucian way. Through access to the Akashic Records, the whole reality of human and even prehistoric history should open before the astonished adept, because that is where all past reality is stored.

If this and other amazing spiritual treasures can be found, the member becomes determined to have his share. He soon learns, though, that if he is to be able to partake of these great truths, he must comply with the AMORC way without question, for AMORC is the only pure conduit to truth of this great stature.

Ultimately, these writings would transform me into a "zombie." Whenever I internally questioned the Rosicrucian claims, I would immediately begin to think of how these ideas carne from the far past, from what apparently was an unquestioned authority. Then I forced myself to accept doctrines that created great dysfunctionality in my life.

The Curse of Confidentiality

Confidentiality, when used to protect legitimate and even dangerous truths, can be a blessing to an individual or to society. It serves important functions in doctor/patient and attorney/client relations. It enhances the vitality of military and political organizations, which protect a nation's intelligence and military assets. But confidentiality, in the wrong hands, can facilitate wrongdoing.

Religious cults like the Branch Davidians and Jonestown could only have gotten as far as they did by virtue of the members refusing to speak to outsiders, even to the point of refusing to ask for help when they were abused or even in danger of their lives. Although in my opinion AMORC is far less dangerous than rabid, bizarre cults like these, it uses its secrets to undermine the psychological integrity of its members.

One of the major undertones of the monographs, which is evident whenever Rosicrucians converse among themselves, is that members should keep their doubts to themselves. You must live alone with your doubts, which is an unhealthy proposition at best. Your doubts are so confidential that you are really not supposed to entertain them at all.

Even general subjects, such as meditation or the Akashic Records, which "belong to the Rosicrucian tradition," are not to be shared with outsiders. Although some communication is permitted between members of a certain degree regarding doctrines, this takes place without any real critical scrutiny.

If AMORC happens to be making claims that you have trouble believing, you must live with it.

Adolf Hitler would have the same solution for the doubts of his followers. Mafia organizations require the same level of commitment from their followers, threatening them with death and destruction if they leave. The Mafia cuts your throat if you leave; AMORC simply cuts you off from the egregore, the only path to God.

Mandamus 8 tells postulants to meditate during the next few days. They should choose a problem strictly material, familial, social, or purely philosophical and submit that problem to the Cosmic. Later on, AMORC will add, "Then do not think about it."

Several years after I had read this Mandamus for the first time, at the end of the fourth temple degree, I took an exam that asked the question, "Why are you pursuing a mystical path?" My answer was that I was seeking spiritual enlightenment or some such philosophical answer.

My own answer surprised me, given that I had already gone through hell in quest of an AMORC dream world. I had already had the experience of being homeless. I should have known that something was unhealthy about the manner of a spiritual quest that should have dealt with practical problems of survival but didn't.

A few hours after answering that question, I was at a bus stop near Seventy-Ninth Street and Second Avenue when I suddenly realized that my rent at the Gauthier house was almost due, and I didn't have a clue how to get it. The idea came to me to go to the public library, a few feet from the bus stop, to find a book to help me improve the way I was managing my life financially. But then I had second thoughts. I realized that my reason for staying in AMORC was, as I had written, spiritual enlightenment, a thought that counteracted my need to satisfy my material needs. Somehow leaving AMORC could be a betrayal of my primary purpose for joining, which was, essentially, a noble spiritual goal.

The problem, then, was that I was too confused and lost to really question whether a true solution to spiritual enlightenment could disallow solving basic material problems of day-to-day existence. After all, there are major strains of various religions, from certain Catholic monastic orders to Buddhist and Hindu postulants, who tell us that poverty is good.

But AMORC never made claims about the value of poverty. AMORC's promise included the promise of prosperity. So I should have realized that the question of spiritual enlightenment and material well-being do not necessarily cancel each other out. And the fact that AMORC's exercises and philosophy did not allow me to achieve my goals with any kind of reasonable speed should have cast more doubt on the specific instructions of AMORC on how to achieve those objectives, if I truly believed they could coexist.

I should not have let my half-digested thoughts and internal conflicts over staying with AMORC remain unresolved. I believe now that it was the weight of my subconscious programmed disposition to believe AMORC -- a consequence of my refrozen cult personality -- that led me to remain in a path that neither nurtured me materially nor satisfied me spiritually. If I had looked at it carefully and rethought it, I could have changed the course of my existence.

How I Lost the Job and How AMORC Manipulated Me from Above

October 1983


One day, I didn't have to go to school.

I was supposed to take the 2:00 or 3:00 PM bus to go to work. It was raining heavily, and I didn't have an umbrella. On the advice of Suzette, Charlestine's daughter, I called my boss and told him that I would be late because of the rain.

He told me, "Okay," and to see him before I started working. When I got there and visited his office, he said, "Go home, I don't want to use you anymore." I went home, now out of a job.

Beginning of the Ultimate Manipulation

October 1983


Robert Lifton, a strong influence on Steven Hassan and Margaret Thaler Singer, is one of the pioneers in the study of brainwashing and mind control. He lists eight themes involved in the process of brainwashing. Lifton's themes are described by Singer in her book, Cults in Our Midst. [10] They boil down to something like this:

1. Milieu control: control of communication in the group

2. Loaded language: utilizing cult jargon to constrain the thinking of members and to create a more insulated cult world

3. Demand for purity: having members judge themselves and the world solely by the standards demanded by the cult

4. Confession: having members make confessions to group or leaders. Singer calls this technique purge and merge, indicating how confessions of this sort, based on the cult's unique standards, help members merge into the hive mind of the cult

5. Mystical manipulation: looking at behavior in such a way that it verifies the member's purpose and role in the group

6. Doctrine over person: revising personal history to fit into the cult group more easily

7. Sacred science: putting the leader in a rich and almost sacred historical context

8. Dispensing of existence: implying that somehow the cult is "the governors of enlightenment, and all outsiders are lower beings."


One of the AMORC exercises is called the "Day of Reintegration." This became intertwined in an event that I believe is related to the Lifton concept of mystical manipulation. On the Day of Reintegration, you eat fruit in the morning, drink a lot of water, and pray and/ or meditate every two to three hours. You then eat vegetables (only a very small amount), have a one-hour siesta, and then take a long walk in a natural setting in the afternoon. The tricky part of this exercise was the injunction to "make the Day of Reintegration a habit."

After I lost my job, I decided to have a Day of Reintegration the following Sunday. On that day, I had a light breakfast and lunch. After a brief siesta, I took a lengthy bus ride to the south in search of a place to take a long walk. I wound up walking down many blocks in a neighborhood where affluent white and Latino people lived.

After my long walk, I got the next bus that was coming from Coral Gables going in the direction of my house. As I got to the bus, I saw Jose, a guy who used to be a cook at my first dishwashing job. I was very happy to see Jose. He told me that he no longer worked for the restaurant we met at and that he was now a chef at a new Mexican restaurant called Viva Zapata. He told me he would give me a dishwashing job, and I was very happy indeed.

I took that chance meeting as proof that if I complied with AMORC instructions, I would obtain my green card so that I could go to college and help my family. I attributed my meeting with Jose to my successfully completing the Day of Reintegration exercise. Indeed, if I had not practiced the exercise, I would not have met Jose on the bus where he offered me a job.

By the way, about two miles from the place where I was living was a beautiful lake surrounded by a park. That was a perfect place for a walk in nature. So, after all that, if I had been thinking about it, I should have taken a walk right near my house. But as I thought about this, my roundabout digression to another place seemed even more miraculous. It was as though I was forgetful of the nearby park because the Cosmic had intended it so.

My thoughts about this are an example of what Singer calls mystical manipulation from above. It is true that there was a synchronistic experience. If I hadn't looked for a specific spot, I wouldn't have met Jose. But it is not true that it was necessarily due to AMORC's teachings.

One could look at my serendipitous meeting with Jose as pure luck. One could look at it as a benign act of God. Or, I suppose, you could look at it as a result of certain metaphysical exercises I engaged in. But I can say this: when you start to look at events in your life and reframe them as due exclusively to the influence of a cult that you belong to, you have fallen into a major form of entrapment, because soon you may wind up looking at everything this way.

By this time, I had begun to look back over my life and had seen certain events, like my good fortune in finding a ride to Port-Au- Prince with my mother's friend, finding a job with Ritz, enrollment in engineering school, and my first job in the industry, as an effect of AMORC's benign influence. My whole life, before and after joining AMORC, appeared to be guided by the invisible masters according to a grand plan fostered by AMORC's egregore.
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Re: THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN

Postby admin » Tue Oct 20, 2015 11:42 pm

SIX: Diary Entries

My Rosicrucian Diary
October 27, 1983
Mandamus 1

Today, I restarted the Rosicrucian monographs from the first Mandamus. The reason I am doing this again is because, after two years of membership in AMORC, I have clearly not succeeded in dramatically improving my financial situation. This failure is evident in the fact that I have still been unable to obtain my green card. AMORC claims the irrefutable truth of their teaching. I believe it. But if that authority exits, the failure to obtain the green card must be my failure, the failure to execute those teachings properly.

In doing this, I will remember the miracle of the Day of Reintegration, where I found a second dishwashing job. That incident was a clear indication to me of the rightness of the Rosicrucian way. If I apply the teaching to the letter, I will reach my goal.


Rosicrucians are taught to believe that while they are studying the monographs, they are not alone. In fact, I believed so much in the master of the class, the ascended master who stood beside me while I worked, that I actually addressed him directly in some of my diaries.

My Rosicrucian Diary
November 10, 1983
Mandamus 2

To the Master of This Class

In reading this monograph, I realized that Rosicrucian education will open my mind to the knowledge of the human sciences. The reason for that conclusion is that the terms used in this monograph (i.e., subconscious, subliminal, etc.) are found in scientific literature and mystical interpretations of the human sciences.

If I ignore the real meaning of these terms in the more complete Rosicrucian sense, I will be closing my mind to knowledge. Also with the perfect understanding of these notions, again in the Rosicrucian sense, I feel that a new door will be opened to me, and the door of superstition will be closed.

This monograph convinces me of the absolute necessity to review the neophyte degrees again and again. I believe the perfect understanding of this degree will produce the freedom that I am looking for.

In short, this monograph is a "complete dish," a masterpiece, and it is welcome in my quest for true and complete knowledge of the universe.

[Author's note: Please note that freedom in these remarks meant financial freedom, the freedom to have my green card, the freedom to get my mother and siblings out of poverty and out of Haiti.]

***

My Rosicrucian Diary
November 14, 1983,
1:40 AM Annual Evaluation

I just got the idea to write an evaluation of the year 1983 on the very last day of the year, December 31. This evaluation will also be a report of my first year in the States, where I actually arrived on January 1, 1983.

After writing this evaluation, I will be able to draw some valuable conclusions and set new goals to reach.

I am confused about whether or not I should risk this evaluation. Fixing objectives like these would force me to take specific efforts to reach these objectives. If I did not take real action based on my promises, I would feel guilty.

If I did take action and failed, there might be other mystical ramifications. If I failed, I might be tempted to leave and risk being disconnected from the egregore. From my observations, my conscious efforts in Miami, to date, to reach certain specific objectives have led me to despair and desolation. Owing to these failures, I have had to ask myself whether someone on the Rosicrucian path should abstain from creating fixed goals in their life, even if these goals are relatively practical and reasonable.

Having not gotten too far in these teachings, I also asked myself whether members of AMORC should occupy themselves mainly in dedicating themselves to seeking spiritual enlightenment, with the expectation that everything else they need will come as a surplus. This is basically the same idea as the New Testament injunction to seek the Kingdom of God first and, if you do, all else you need will be added to you. I believe, but do not know for sure, that the neophyte must stay calm in spite of the fact that his life is in shambles due to his inability to reach certain goals in his life. In my current state of mind, what other choice remotely makes sense?

***

My Rosicrucian Diary
November 17, 1983, 9:35 PM
Mandamus 3

Even though last Thursday I had a very enriching night in my sanctum, tonight I was overcome by sleep and was not able to concentrate sufficiently to work profitably on this monograph. Why? Today, I ate normally, unlike last Thursday when I hardly ate at all. Does starvation improve my ability to study?

Do I have to make special efforts to reduce my food intake every Thursday to obtain the proper levels of concentration to study these monographs with the attention they deserve? Or does this inability to concentrate have a relationship to being tired?

To tell the truth I am really tired.

To find the answer to these questions, next Thursday, I will rest physically, I will eat normally, and I will observe whether I am able to concentrate on the monograph Thursday night.

I promise that I will redo this same monograph next Thursday.

So mote it be.

[Author's note: "So mote it be" is the AMORC way of saying "Amen."]

***

My Rosicrucian Diary
November 23, 1983

Last Thursday, I went home after a long day in school and a trip to the market to buy, along with other items, this current notebook for my Rosicrucian studies.

Tonight I feel confused. I have a lot of questions.

I guess the overwhelming question is: how come I am living in such deep poverty in the United States? Isn't this the land of plenty, a place of opportunity and prosperity?

I was fighting with all my strength to keep myself calm when, like a lightening bolt, the idea carne to me that the answer was in H. Spencer Lewis's book The Cycle of Life.

I first thought of buying the book by postal order from France, despite my current economic difficulties. Then I realized that I knew two brothers who probably had the book already. I thought it is best that I calm down and handle the situation step by step. So I promised myself I would wait until Saturday morning to go see my acquaintances and borrow the book.

That very same Wednesday night of my diary entry, I remembered a soror who had mentioned she had the book. I called her right away and, soon enough, I had the book in my possession. After reading only the first part of the book, I found the answer to the question I was looking for.

***

My Rosicrucian Diary
November 24, 1983

What Should I Do?

While reading The Cycle of Life by H. Spencer Lewis, I thought I had found the answer to why there was so much poverty and so many difficulties in my life in Miami. I also thought I had found the solution to my financial difficulties.

You see, according to Lewis's Cycle of Life theory, if we know the cycle of life we're in, we can take appropriate action.

According to this theory, I was in the second cycle of life when I originally left Haiti on January 1, 1983. Furthermore, any trip taken during this particular cycle needs to be of short duration. Maybe I had stayed here too long. So, based on that premise, I tried to come up with a logical solution.

Perhaps the solution is to return to Haiti. Go back there, renew my one-year visa, and return to the United States. That would buy me more time to get the green card I needed and yet be in conformity to the Life Cycle theory.

But then I started to worry. What if I return to Haiti and apply for visa renewal, and the American embassy doesn't renew my visa? I'd end up stuck in Haiti and wouldn't be able to get out.

This negative scenario kept coming to me all day. Tonight, the thought was so strong that even during the Rosicrucian study period, I couldn't get it out of my mind.

But because of the Rosicrucian study, I know that you can influence your life, positively or negatively, with your own thoughts.

So I am asking myself what to do. Is it the case that God wants me to live in Haiti instead of the United States? Is it the case that the mission of my life is in Haiti and that the mission of my life is calling me? Or am I being given a warning not to go back to Haiti?

In this last case, it would mean that I have misunderstood the book, The Cycle of Life. Or maybe God in His mighty power sees an entirely different way to resolve my problem?

I beg the masters to help me, and I beg God to come to my rescue.

***

My Rosicrucian Diary
December 22, 1983, 2:00 AM

I fell asleep while trying to read the ritual of this initiation. Am I tired because it's 2:00 AM and I just returned from my dishwashing job, or is it the mystical effect of reading the Rosicrucian monograph?

May the universe help me to understand and guide me during this trip!

So mote it be.

***

My Rosicrucian Diary
December 22, 1983, 2:30 AM
After Sanctum Study

After tonight's sanctum study, I had a short meditation session. In this session, I tried to understand my relationship with AMORC. In a brief instant of altered consciousness, I had a vision of a man on a crutch.

***

My Rosicrucian Diary December 24, 1983, 1:44 AM

For many weeks, I've been having terrible dreams. More and more, I have the impression that Charles tine, the owner of this house, is seeking a diplomatic way to get me to leave.

Because it was God who gave me this place to live, I'm begging God, with a humble heart, to show me the way to obtain peace. I wish that with all my heart.

So mote it be!

***

My Rosicrucian Diary
January 1, 1984, 10:55 AM

As I worked last night, a lot of negative thoughts kept coming into my mind. I did my best to keep the negative thoughts away because I did not want 1984 to arrive in anything but a happy state of mind. I therefore focused on love and hope. I think that/s the best way to start the New Year.

Less than a minute before midnight, I heard the people in the restaurant counting, "Ten, nine, eight, ... ," toward zero as midnight rapidly approached. Then one of the cooks told me it was midnight.

I walked to an empty room in the back of the restaurant. Since I was on the job, I continued to stand there with my eyes open but began to practice the December 31 exercise of AMORC. Through the help of the Cosmic, we really can feel the vibrations of peace, joy, and happiness, deep within the center of everything.

As people outside the room were saying "Happy New Year," blowing noisemakers, and wishing peace to each other, I smiled slightly and continued my contact in my celestial sanctum.

Fearing someone might walk in and interrupt me, after awhile, I decided to stop. At that moment, I walked out of the room, toward the others.

Of course, none of them knew I had just finished uniting myself to my brothers across the world. I did not consider myself egotistical at the time, but I believed myself to be returning from a state of mystical fraternity far above the spirituality of anyone around me.

Now I joined them in wishing everyone Happy New Year.

As I moved toward the kitchen, I looked across the room and made eye contact with Jackie, a waitress in the restaurant. I raised my hands in the air to show her how joyful I felt. She walked toward me and gave me the glass she had in her hand. It was still partially filled with champagne. I drank the rest and was very happy. So in this way, I happily welcomed 1984.


Yes, during New Year's Eve, I felt happy and even somewhat spiritually superior.

Members are made to feel part of an elite corps of mankind. This feeling of being special, of participating in the most important acts in human history with a vanguard of committed believers, is strong emotional glue to keep people sacrificing and working hard. [1]


But when you add it all up, there's something rotten in the state of Denmark when you are so spiritually superior and don't have even enough food to eat. Rotten in Denmark? Perhaps, more accurately, rotten in San Jose (the Headquarters of AMORC is in San Jose).

My Rosicrucian Diary
January 2, 1984, 1:30 AM

By the way, despite my celestial experience last night, I had to walk from the restaurant to downtown Miami, a distance of about six miles. From downtown, I took a taxi to my house.
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