Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  What is so striking about the discourse of free will in the long fourth century is its quantity and breadth. For three or four generations the Christian understanding of the universe flourished and spread across the Mediterranean. It is remarkable how untroubled this literature is by the impending Augustinian earthquake. In the late fourth century, a Cappadocian bishop, Amphilocius of Iconium, could insert the doctrine of free will unproblematically into an exegesis of the “sinful woman” from the Gospel of Luke. His sermon is revealing on many counts, not least its total innocence of the doctrinal issues that would, within a few decades, erupt with such force. The “sinful woman” was, unsurprisingly, regarded as a prostitute. More unexpectedly, she was interpreted as a figure of Eve, the protosinner. The “sinful woman” abused the gifts of sexual love, ruining the “youth” of the city and violating their sanctified bodies. Her sins were heavy, but she was forgiven by the grace of Jesus. Like the debtor, she could never repay her debts, but God called only for repentance, which was merely an act “of free will.”63 For most of the fourth century it was not Stoic fatalism, gnostic doctrine, or even vulgar pagan determinism that occasioned Christian preaching on free will. Rather, it was that irrepressible enemy: astrology. In the west, Ambrosiaster battled against the lively threat of astral determinism: “Nothing is so contrary to Christian doctrine.” It was in Syria, in the latter half of the fourth century, that the Clementine Recognitions repackaged Bardaisan’s voluntarism, but without so much allowance for the influence of the stars. Christian preachers of the age like Augustine and John Chrysostom regularly attack the lures of astrology. In Constantinople a sermon on the Magi led Chrysostom inexorably into a diatribe against astral determinism. “We are free and masters of our wills.… If human affairs were under the power of their sign, why do you lash your slave in anger? Why do you haul your adulterous wife before the courts?… If sins arise by necessity, why do you bear insult harshly?” Only someone who was possessed by a demon lost his “free will” and deserved pity rather than censure. Chrysostom’s sermon dates to around AD 400. He speaks of “free will” with complete innocence, in a fashion not far removed from Justin, Origen, or Methodius. It was still unproblematically a cosmological, antideterminist formulation. Sex, as ever, remained the reflexive paradigm of human freedom. In the middle of the fourth century, Cyril of Jerusalem could write, in his Catechetical Lectures, that the devil could suggest but not compel fornication, because the soul was self-governing. “If you wish, you will receive the suggestion, and if not, you won’t. For if you committed fornication by necessity, then for what reason has God prepared the hellfire?” Yet within just a few years, such untroubled absolutisms will come to seem hopelessly naive.64

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  What is at stake in Augustine’s pessimism, in the largest sense, is the ability of the church to absorb society. The impossibility of human perfection was the necessary adjunct to a vision of the church as an embracing institution, impure in its present form. Unlike Pelagius or Julian, Augustine was willing to accept that the church was far from a perfect body of holy men and women, standing apart from the world. The church was a collective where men and women strove, day by day, to be healed of their moral imperfections. “So not only all the sins, but all the evils of mankind, are in the course of being taken away by the sanctity of the Christian wash, by which Christ cleanses his church so that He might present her to Himself not in this age but in the future one, when she will have no stain or spot or anything of such a kind. For there are people who say that the church is already so, and yet they themselves are in her midst!” “Nevertheless, we ought to will not to experience these sexual desires, even if we cannot obtain this goal so long as we are in this body of death.” It is a measure of the distance traveled that Augustine returns, like Epictetus, to the position that a free will is an achieved state; but what for Epictetus was achieved through the cultivation of reason, for Augustine was rehabilitated by the mysterious power of divine grace. The sacraments replaced the power of reason; mysterious rites administered by the church, rather than meditative philosophy, enabled human freedom.71

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Successfully connecting with a person’s authentic identity is what enables me to help someone walk away from a cult. If the core identity is happy and content with cult involvement—a very rare occurrence—there is little I can do. Such a person would not be under undue influence; they would have genuinely chosen to be right where they are. But I almost never encounter such people. Families call me because they observe something terrible happening. And I have discovered that when someone in slavery is given a truly free choice, is able to overcome the learned helplessness, they do not choose to stay enslaved—not when they could be making decisions for their own life, having normal relationships with other people, and pursuing their own interests and dreams. The Strategic Interactive Approach has some other distinctive features. First, I focus on the process of change. What this means is that how people come to change is more important than what or why they change. Since I believe that people are naturally interested in growing and learning, my approach is also educational. I do a lot of teaching—about psychology, communication, mind control issues, and other destructive cults, as well as a great deal of material about the particular group’s history, leadership and doctrinal contradictions. Difficult Cases When a cult member refuses to speak with people who can offer them the other side of the story, or simply walks out of an intervention and returns to the cult, all is not lost. Communication about key issues has at least been opened. Often, the cult member feels badly about how they treated their loved ones and agrees to talk at a future date. It might take weeks or months for the family to re-establish a relationship with the cult member—but an opening for communication usually appears at a later time. When rescue efforts fail, often it is because the timing was poor or unlucky. Perhaps the cult member just came from an intensive re-indoctrination experience, married someone in the group or received a promotion. Naturally, the best time is when the person is in a down period, but of course such periods are impossible to predict. After a failed rescue effort, the family has two choices: 1) Back off, telling the cult member that when they want to look at more information or talk to former group members, the family will be happy to help. 2) Attempt to intervene further with the help of other people who can approach the person in other contexts. This second option is more complex and time-consuming. It means trying to help the cult member without their knowing that the family is trying to help them re-evaluate their group involvement. I need to find a pretext to meet the cult member and find enough time with them to do some good. This is never easy.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  There was a moment in time when this could have changed. In 2002, Professor Philip Zimbardo, who conducted the now-famous Stanford prison study, was President of the American Psychological Association (APA). He saw quite clearly that the APA had not served the interests of this suffering population. He asked Alan W. Scheflin, then a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, to chair a panel, Cults of Hatred, at the APA’s annual convention. In his opening remarks, Scheflin said that the mental health community has not addressed the needs of two different populations: those who accurately believe that their minds have been controlled in cultic and other situations; and those who mistakenly believe they are the victims of mind control and may be suffering from delusions or paranoia. The event brought together academicians like Scheflin and Zimbardo; therapists, like myself, who work in the area of mind control; and former members of groups such as the Peoples Temple. It was, for me and many others, a momentous occasion. Zimbardo tried to seize that moment by writing about it in the President’s column of the APA Monitor.201 His words were so eloquent that I have decided to reproduce them: “A basic value of the profession of psychology is promoting human freedom of responsible action, based on awareness of available behavioral options, and supporting an individual’s rights to exercise them. Whatever we mean by “mind control” stands in opposition to this positive value orientation. Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles. Conformity, compliance, persuasion, dissonance, reactance, guilt and fear arousal, modeling and identification are some of the staple social influence ingredients well studied in psychological experiments and field studies. In some combinations, they create a powerful crucible of extreme mental and behavioral manipulation when synthesized with several other real-world factors, such as charismatic, authoritarian leaders, dominant ideologies, social isolation, physical debilitation, induced phobias, and extreme threats or promised rewards that are typically deceptively orchestrated, over an extended time period in settings where they are applied intensively. A body of social science evidence shows that when systematically practiced by state-sanctioned police, military or destructive cults, mind control can induce false confessions, create converts who willingly torture or kill “invented enemies,” engage indoctrinated members to work tirelessly, give up their money—and even their lives—for “the cause.”

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  “Oh, so you’re going to tell God what to answer,” I said. “Why don’t you reach down to the bottom of your soul and pray without any foregone conclusions about what God wants for you and your children?” My voice was intense. “Pray fervently and clearly, putting your total faith that what He wants will be what is right for you.” Margaret asked me if I really believed in God that strongly. I told her I did. Then she asked me about my spiritual life. That gave me all the opening I needed to launch into my experience in the Moonies—how I came to believe that God was speaking through my leaders, and how I couldn’t doubt, ask critical questions, or even leave the group. I explained phobia indoctrination. I explained how I was finally able to imagine a future for myself outside of the group only because I had met so many former Moonies who were still good, very spiritual people after they left. Margaret listened attentively. I explained that I had come to distrust my own inner voice when I was in the Moonies. I was taught to believe that the voice was evil—when, in fact, I came to learn, it was a direct link to God. I described how I had been controlled by fear and guilt, and how in both the Moonies and the Children of God there was complete control over the information we received. Both groups’ leaders saw themselves as God’s chosen One on Earth; both had absolute authority; and both were extremely wealthy. Then I asked her, “Do you believe that God gave people free will, just so He could take it away through deception and mind control? Think about it: do you believe in a God who wants His children to be robots or, at the very best, slaves? If God wanted that, He never would have given Adam and Eve free will. Isn’t it a huge contradiction?” Margaret’s mouth hung open. Her eyes were wide as saucers. I gave her a hug and excused myself. I announced that I was going for a walk; that it would be good to take a break and reflect. She needed time to absorb what I had said. I was confident that her sisters would help her start working it through and deal with her feelings as they came up. Later that night, I talked with her for a few more hours, mostly trying to empower her. “You’ve got a good mind,” I told her. “You should use it.” I told her I knew she had always been an ethical person. Did she really believe that the ends justify the means? Was it Christian to use sex to recruit people? She loved her family. Would she let her fears be stronger than her love?

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The Pelagian debates erupted unexpectedly, and at first murkily, out of a brew of unsettled questions, which guaranteed that the storm was to be a multidimensional affair. The Origenist controversy continued to reverberate in discussions about the nature and origin of the soul; the perduring tensions between ascetic elitism and ordinary piety, which flared in the Jovinianist controversy, lurked within a religion that extolled virginity as an ideal; the orthodox exegesis of Genesis, especially the nature of the Fall, remained an open question. But the spark that was to ignite the conflagration was the ideal of perfection. Pelagius argued that the very existence of divine commandment implied the capacity for complete fulfillment. At the heart of Pelagian doctrine is the optimistic idea that man is always capable of doing good or evil, according to his will. The capacity for total obedience to God’s law was, for Pelagius, intrinsic to human nature. “Whenever it falls to me to speak about the rules of morality and the maintenance of the holy life, it is my custom to demonstrate, first of all, the power and quality of human nature and to show what it has the capacity to effect, and only then to encourage the spirit of those listening toward the face of virtue, lest it be without profit to be called to those things which might seem impossible to them.” For Pelagius, each human enjoyed the same plenitude of freedom experienced by Adam and Eve in paradise, and each human reenacted the fateful choice to disobey God. The possibility of individual perfection carried high stakes: “Pelagius wanted every Christian to be a monk.” Pelagius offered a particularly severe vision of how Christianity might relate to society: by transforming it. It is no coincidence that the Pelagians produced some of the most honest and acute social criticism of the late empire. The Pelagians envisioned a church that stood apart from society, pure through and through. The Pelagian movement carried within it ancient strains of Christian separatism, but in an age of Christian accommodation.67

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  SELF, SOCIETY, AND LITERARY SYMBOLSIn the days leading up to his execution, with confrontation hanging over the atmosphere like a leaden sky, Jesus relayed to the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem the startling message that they would be preceded into the kingdom of heaven by tax-collectors and prostitutes. The charismatic Galilean rabbi had earned a reputation for his charitable attitude toward society’s outcasts, and it was known on solid authority that he went so far as to share a table with them. Almost four centuries later the radical benevolence of Jesus had lost none of its original charge, in part because he had chosen his outcasts so well. In the words of the Antiochene preacher John Chrysostom, “These two represent the highest sins, born each of a grievous passion, lust for the body and lust for coin.” God, in the dispensation of forgiveness, was not a respecter of persons, and nothing symbolized the limitless potential of grace like the moral rehabilitation of a prostitute. Because of her penitence, there was hope for all. She proved that “it is easy to rise from the very depths of wickedness.” But John Chrysostom did not have to rely on ancient scriptures to find an example of such extraordinary transformation. Have you not heard how that prostitute, who once surpassed all in her wanton immorality, now overshadows all in her moral scruple? I am not talking about the prostitute in the gospels, but the one in our own time, hailing from the most lawless city of Phoenicia. For she was at one time a prostitute among us, in fact holding pride of place in the theater, and her name was famous everywhere, not just in our city but as far as Cilicia and Cappadocia. She emptied many an estate, conquered many an orphan. Not a few even accused her of sorcery, saying that she ensnared not just by her physical charms but also by the use of potions. This whore at one time held the brother of the empress under her spell, so great was her tyranny. The conversion of such a celebrity, from the most insalubrious quarters of ancient society, furnished an irresistible opportunity for a crusader like Chrysostom to make a point about the quality of divine mercy. The woman—a stage actress and quite possibly a courtesan, for the two professions shaded into one another in law, ideology, and reality—had attained a reputation stretching across the eastern Mediterranean. We need not doubt the ability of an exquisitely beautiful woman, in a world where respectability meant seclusion, to capture the public mind. But this nameless actress walked away from her fame. If Chrysostom is to be believed, her retirement caused such resentment that the governor was prodded to force her back on stage, going so far as to dispatch armed soldiers for the purpose. But having received the purifying waters of baptism, she could not be dislodged from the virgins who had received her.1

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  I helped Phil begin to unlock the phobia indoctrination, by asking him to visualize a picture of the future that he would really enjoy—playing music, friends, a wife, kids, being close to his family. Then I asked him to step into the picture and enjoy the experience. By doing this, I was helping Phil open a door out of the Krishnas. This simple visualization technique began to dismantle his phobia indoctrination. It became a bridge to another possible life. In other cases, I often ask cult members, “If you had never met this group, and you were doing exactly what you wanted to be doing, what would that be?” I usually have to repeat the question several times. “Really, just imagine, if you were doing exactly what you wanted to be doing, so that you were totally happy, spiritually and personally fulfilled, and you never knew the group even existed, what would you be doing?” The answers vary. “I’d be a doctor and work in a clinic serving poor people.” “I’d be a tennis pro.” “I’d be sailing around the world.” Once the person verbalizes the fantasy, I try to persuade them to step inside their visualization of a new life, and become emotionally involved in it. I am then able to begin neutralizing their programmed negative fears about doing something outside the cult. Once this positive personal reference point is established, the cult-generated picture of a dark, disaster-filled life outside the group begins to change. When a positive picture is in place, a bridge to other possibilities opens. People outside the group can be seen as warm and loving. Lots of interesting things can be learned outside the group. There are lots of pleasures to be experienced. Religious and spiritual fulfillment can be found. Once the outside world is seen as potentially filled with positive experiences, the cult loses some control over the person’s sense of reality. They are then in a better position to decide whether they want to stay where they are or do something more valuable and fulfilling. Key #8: Offer the Cult Member Concrete Definitions of Mind Control and Specific Characteristics of a Destructive Cult My intervention with Phil shows the importance of giving a cult member specific information about cults. Because I established good rapport with Phil, I was able to get a lot of personal information from him, so that I could better help him. In the process, Phil became curious about me and wanted to know my opinions. At that point, I was able to convey specific information about cults and mind control through my own story of being in the Moonies. I was able to explain what happened during my deprogramming, and show how it enabled me to understand that I had been subjected to mind control and that, in fact, I was in a destructive cult.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Chivers told me that one of the highlights of her career was when a woman stood up at a conference where she was speaking to tell her, “What I love about your work is that you are showing us there is more on the buffet than anyone ever thought.” Women don’t necessarily want what they fantasize about, or want to do what turns them on, of course, and Chivers is careful to emphasize this. But if her work destigmatizes the range and variation of female sexual fantasy, and the sheer force and strength of some women’s desires, she’s delighted. She hopes her work “might give women permission to enjoy this internal playground.” And help other women feel validated in their actual experiences—such as those who have had sex with other women and enjoy it but identify as straight. “They say, ‘So you’re saying I’m not weird or abnormal?’ And I’m like, ‘Nope, you’re just another woman,’” Chivers said with a laugh. When it comes to women and monogamy, and monogamy more generally, Chivers points out that it isn’t her area per se. But she believes that just as kink was destigmatized over the last decades—hair pulling, spanking, biting, and handcuffs during sex are virtually mainstream, she points out—CNM may well also gain acceptance. This could lead to even larger social shifts in institutions like marriage and partnership. “Why do we think that two people—versus people who are poly—should have some kind of corner on the market for all the legal protections and benefits that are available? I think in the next couple of decades we’re going to see more folks arguing for the broadening of the definition of what legal marriage should look like,” she mused. She understands that plenty of people want to work to stay in monogamous relationships, and she wants to see them supported, too, by a culture-wide acknowledgment that it’s not easy or necessarily “natural” to stay sexually exclusive over time. “The very idea that people could form long-term pair bonds and be equally sexually exciting to each other from day one to day seven thousand makes no sense. It doesn’t fit any psychological model we have of how people habituate over time,” she observed with a shake of her head. “I’m going to guess that it is a minority of people who live out a truly monogamous relationship with zeal.” Certainly there are things to do about that—porn, fantasy, and other strategies to “spice things up,” she mused. But from her perspective, knowing what she does of what turns women on and how strongly we desire, Chivers says of sexual exclusivity, “It’s work!” The simple acknowledgment that women struggle with monogamy as much as men do—something implied by her years of research proving that women are not who we thought they were, and in many respects are not so different from men—is as radical as it is logical and data driven.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  It was starting to become very clear that there would be no change in his condition, no reconciliation with the half of his body that seemed so utterly lost forever. He was in the rain, trapped, and there was no one. It was ugly and cold and final. HE WATCHED the island disappear as the plane took off from Kennedy Airport. For the first time since he had come home from the war, he was getting away, going off somewhere by himself. His chair was safely packed in the belly of the plane, and he was just one of the other passengers, sitting there just like everybody else. Sometimes when he was out in his car, driving around, cruising up and down the block and into the town with his hand controls, he would get the same kind of feeling. It was a really free feeling that he couldn’t get unless he was out of the chair. He had been thinking about going to Mexico for a long time. In the hospital there had been a brochure that said there was this place down there where people like himself were cared for. It was a place called the Village of the Sun. He’d even met one guy who’d been there and talked about a whorehouse he’d gone to where the whores were very understanding, where even paralyzed men could get fucked. He thought about the Village of the Sun all the time after that. He just knew inside he could make love again, even though all the parts had been destroyed by the war. It was night by the time he arrived in Guadalajara. A man named Rahilio met him at the airport and put him in his Ford pickup. It had been a long trip and now it was going to be a long ride to Las Fuentes and the Village, but he was happy to be in Mexico. Rahilio’s small son lay on the seat next to him singing a song he couldn’t understand. He opened up his window and looked out into the dark Mexican countryside. * * * The long dining hall full of wheelchairs was an exciting place for him the next morning. There were a lot of people talking and laughing and the sun was very bright on the white walls and the colorful tile tables. There were old and young, veterans from all the wars. Aides ran back and forth helping the men who couldn’t use their hands to eat. It made him feel good to be with so many others who were like himself. He felt accepted here. He thought he might be able to feel human again. It was the Fourth of July and that night after dinner Rahilio’s wife came up to him with a big cake and everybody began to sing “Happy Birthday.” Somehow they had found out it was his birthday. He could see you could have a nice life here if you wanted to.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  In the days leading up to his execution, with confrontation hanging over the atmosphere like a leaden sky, Jesus relayed to the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem the startling message that they would be preceded into the kingdom of heaven by tax-collectors and prostitutes. The charismatic Galilean rabbi had earned a reputation for his charitable attitude toward society’s outcasts, and it was known on solid authority that he went so far as to share a table with them. Almost four centuries later the radical benevolence of Jesus had lost none of its original charge, in part because he had chosen his outcasts so well. In the words of the Antiochene preacher John Chrysostom, “These two represent the highest sins, born each of a grievous passion, lust for the body and lust for coin.” God, in the dispensation of forgiveness, was not a respecter of persons, and nothing symbolized the limitless potential of grace like the moral rehabilitation of a prostitute. Because of her penitence, there was hope for all. She proved that “it is easy to rise from the very depths of wickedness.” But John Chrysostom did not have to rely on ancient scriptures to find an example of such extraordinary transformation. Have you not heard how that prostitute, who once surpassed all in her wanton immorality, now overshadows all in her moral scruple? I am not talking about the prostitute in the gospels, but the one in our own time, hailing from the most lawless city of Phoenicia. For she was at one time a prostitute among us, in fact holding pride of place in the theater, and her name was famous everywhere, not just in our city but as far as Cilicia and Cappadocia. She emptied many an estate, conquered many an orphan. Not a few even accused her of sorcery, saying that she ensnared not just by her physical charms but also by the use of potions. This whore at one time held the brother of the empress under her spell, so great was her tyranny. The conversion of such a celebrity, from the most insalubrious quarters of ancient society, furnished an irresistible opportunity for a crusader like Chrysostom to make a point about the quality of divine mercy. The woman—a stage actress and quite possibly a courtesan, for the two professions shaded into one another in law, ideology, and reality—had attained a reputation stretching across the eastern Mediterranean. We need not doubt the ability of an exquisitely beautiful woman, in a world where respectability meant seclusion, to capture the public mind. But this nameless actress walked away from her fame. If Chrysostom is to be believed, her retirement caused such resentment that the governor was prodded to force her back on stage, going so far as to dispatch armed soldiers for the purpose. But having received the purifying waters of baptism, she could not be dislodged from the virgins who had received her.1

• From Untrue (2018)

  Another new wrinkle: the polyamory movement, which has emerged only in the last decade or so and is in large part driven and led by women, according to experts. Polyamory—being involved with more than one person at once, and being honest about it—is an option that, like open marriage and swinging before it, allows women new freedoms. But might it also recapitulate old roles and stereotypes, and open them to the same forms of stigma, slut-shaming, and interpersonal violence that have long plagued women who “step out of line”? A woman with access to resources and power or celebrity, such as Tilda Swinton—who at one point reportedly occasionally lived with both her ex-partner and her current partner but denied that she was in a “dual relationship” or “ménage à trois”—may be able to get away with having an intimate relationship with two men at once. But what about regular women with average incomes? What about women of color, whose sexual lives, longings, and predilections have long been subjected to extraordinary scrutiny and social control? Will polyamory change their lives too? And what does “female infidelity” even mean in a context where, increasingly, millennials may identify as post-binary—rejecting the neat distinction between antinomies that previously defined our lives and created meaning, including heterosexuality and homosexuality, male and female, true and untrue? I was surprised to hear the phrase “I’m non-binary” from so many of the people in their twenties and thirties I spoke with, and impressed by the conviction with which so many people now live it. Finally, the book looks at “female sexual fluidity,” a term coined by the psychologist Lisa Diamond to describe both a tendency among many women to feel and sometimes act on attractions outside their orientation, and a growing social acceptance of that reality. When Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, left her husband for her female best friend, she was breaking the mold while also fitting a profile of women loving in ways that are more flexible than the categories we currently use to describe them. How is female sexual fluidity impacting our marriages, partnerships, affairs, and friendships? Is a woman who discovers she’d rather be with a woman than with her husband “cheating”?

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I’ve come here every day, M. said, walking beside me, it makes me so happy to be here. Some people walking nearby began shouting Ostavka , picking up a chant that had migrated from the front of the march, and M. joined them for a few rounds, looking at me a little sheepishly. I didn’t join in, I hadn’t joined in any of the chants, even though I felt moved to; it wasn’t my country, I kept saying to myself, it wasn’t my place, but I was sorry when M. fell silent too. We walked a little faster, moving back into the middle of the boulevard, headed toward NDK, the Palace of Culture. One side of the street was lined with apartment buildings, the gray of their façades broken by large flags draped from the balconies, on almost all of which people stood watching, elderly men and women, many of them waving, as if to say they would be with us if they could. On the other side of us the trees lining the canal were catching the last of the light, the new leaves incandescent, Sofia was more beautiful to me then than I had ever seen it. There’s never been anything like this, M. said then, I mean maybe in 1989 but nothing I’ve ever seen. Something’s really happening, I feel like I’m part of something, not just here but something bigger. It’s the same as what’s happening in Taksim Square, in Brazil, the Arab Spring, something is happening, something real, I think there’s a chance for things really to change. I felt this too, it wasn’t to challenge her that I asked what she thought that change would be. She shrugged. I’m not sure, she said, but I feel like we’ll figure it out. She paused. I feel powerful in a way I never have before, she said, and then she glanced at me and laughed, I feel like one of the opalchentsi on Shipka. These were Bulgarian volunteers who fought with the Russians against the Ottomans, there was a poem about them by Ivan Vazov that every Bulgarian knew; I had heard a poet declaim it once, drunk at a dinner party, the room quiet with reverence. I feel the power of the people, she said gingerly, cringing at the cliché.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Also keep in mind that floating is a natural byproduct of subjection to mind control. It is not your fault and not a defect on your part. Over time, its effects will naturally decrease, especially if you practice the techniques described above. Overcoming Loaded Language Substituting real language for the cult’s “loaded language” can speed up a person’s full recovery. By eradicating the cult jargon put inside my head, I was able to begin looking at the world again without wearing cult “glasses.” The cult’s loaded language had created little cubbyholes in my mind, and when I was a member, all reality was filtered through them. The faster an ex-member reclaims words and their real meaning, the faster recovery happens. When I was in the Moonies, all relationships between people were described as either a “Cain-Abel” or a “Chapter 2” problem. The term “Cain-Abel,” as explained earlier, was used to categorize everyone as either a superior or a subordinate. “Chapter 2 problems” were anything that had to do with sexuality, and any attraction members felt towards others. Therefore, all personal relationships fell into either of these two categories. The most common mistake made by ex-members is to tell themselves that they should not think of the cult word. The mind doesn’t know how not to think of something. Language is structured so that we have to think in positive associations. So, if you are an ex-member, make a new association, just as I described for the problem of “floating.” If you are an ex-Moonie and have trouble getting along with a person, think of it as a personality conflict or a communication problem. For anyone who has been a Scientologist, it is absolutely essential to stop using the enormous cult vocabulary to stop thinking in the loaded terms invented by Hubbard and recorded in two dictionaries totaling a thousand pages. These folks are still thinking in the cult cubbyholes of the human experience. This becomes an issue with ex-Scientologists because unless they have made the intense effort necessary to eradicate the cult jargon installed in their minds, they inevitably use this jargon with each other and triggering happens all the time. Check the real meaning of words in a proper dictionary. Choose your friends and reclaim your native language! It will speed up your healing! Loss Of Psychological Power Another common problem for former cult members is the loss of concentration and memory. Before I became involved in the Moonies, I used to read a book at one sitting, averaging three books a week. But during the two and a half years I spent in the group, virtually all I read was Moonie propaganda.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  The demonstration had stirred something in my mind that would be there from now on. It was so very different from boot camp and fighting in the war. There was a togetherness, just as there had been in Vietnam, but it was a togetherness of a different kind of people and for a much different reason. In the war we were killing and maiming people. In Washington on that Saturday afternoon in May we were trying to heal them and set them free. IT WILL be my turn to speak soon. They have put me up on the platform of this auditorium in this high school that is so much like the one I went to, in this town that is like the one I grew up in. I am looking at all the young faces. Kids. They were laughing, horsing around when they came in, just the way we used to. Now they are silent, looking at me and Bobby Muller, my friend from the V.A. hospital who is speaking to them from his wheelchair. It is like the day the marine recruiters came. I remember it like it was yesterday—their shiny shoes and their uniforms, their firm handshakes, all the dreams, the medals, the hills taken with Castiglia by my side his army-navy store canteen rattling, the movies the books the plastic guns, everything in 3-D and the explosive spiraling colors of a rainbow. Except this time, this time it is Bobby and me. What if I had seen someone like me that day, a guy in a wheelchair, just sitting there in front of the senior class not saying a word? Maybe things would have been different. Maybe that’s all it would have taken. Bobby is telling his story and I will tell mine. I am glad he has brought me here and that all of them are looking at us, seeing the war firsthand—the dead while still living, the living reminders, the two young men who had the shit shot out of them. I have never spoken before but it is time now. I am thinking about what I can tell them. I wheel myself to the center of the platform. I begin by telling them about the hospital. 5 AFTER THE SPEECH in the high school I spent less and less time going to classes at the university. Suddenly school no longer seemed important. What I really wanted to do was to go on speaking out. Bobby and I made a couple of other speeches at high schools together and once I did one by myself at a university. It was November and turning cold. Ever since I’d been wounded, I’d hated the cold weather. Snow was like a jailer for me. It made it so hard for me to get out of the house, to move around.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I don’t know which story is true but I try not to ask too many questions. In a place like this, those things don’t seem to matter. Of the new friends I’ve made at the hospital, Jafu is probably the quietest of the bunch, saying very little and letting his grunting and groaning down in the physical therapy room speak for itself. A runner-up in the Mr. Universe contest before the war, Jafu could bench press 250 pounds and now boasts he will soon be lifting three hundred pounds as a paraplegic. He has an incredible physique. From his waist up, his bulging muscles remind me of a championship boxer or wrestler. In high school he ran the hundred-yard dash in 9.7 seconds and set a school record. Jafu refuses to accept the fact that his paralysis is permanent. He is convinced that given enough time, determination, and effort he will be able to overcome his injury. He talks about it all the time and has even hired a Chinese herbalist on the outside who says he can help. The man prescribes herbal medicines, everything from devil’s claw to capsaicin, arnica to coca leaves. Jafu takes all sorts of vitamins and supplements, convinced his spine can be fused together through a proper diet and physical regimen. He speaks of experiments with rats in Canada that he has read about in Reader’s Digest where, miraculously, the animals’ severed spines have been regenerated. Like everyone else in this place, Jafu has his hopes and dreams. As soon as he gets out of the hospital he plans to move to Hawaii and open a weightlifting gym on Waikiki Beach where he will continue his journey toward walking again. I have often seen him sitting in his wheelchair alone in the hallway, staring off into the distance, seeming terribly lost and deep in thought. I want to go up to him but I hesitate. There are just some things a man needs to figure out for himself. While most of us here have accepted our fate and know our wounding in the war is permanent, Jafu refuses to believe that he will never walk again. For the most part we support him, encouraging him, even if we all know it’s just his way of coping. A person has a right to keep on hoping; no one wants to take away Jafu’s dreams. In a place like this, there must be hope, and even Jafu’s stubbornness and denial give us all something to believe in. I understand why Jafu feels the way he does. When I was at the Bronx VA in New York back in 1968, I was determined to walk again no matter what. I was young, twenty-one years old, and though initially devastated by my paralysis, I was convinced like Jafu that with enough hard work and determination I could walk again.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  send home. . . .” The general does not finish what he is saying. He stares at the nineteen-year-old for what seems a long time. He hands the picture back to his photographer and as sharply as before marches to the next bed. “Good afternoon, marine,” he says. The kid is still pissing in his clean white sheets when the general walks out of the room. I am in this place for seven days and seven nights. I write notes on scraps of paper telling myself over and over that I will make it out of here, that I am going to live. I am squeezing rubber balls with my hands to try to get strong again. I write letters home to Mom and Dad. I dictate them to a woman named Lucy who is with the USO. I am telling Mom and Dad that I am hurt pretty bad but I have done it for America and that it is worth it. I tell them not to worry. I will be home soon. The day I am supposed to leave has come. I am strapped in a long frame and taken from the place of the wounded. I am moved from hangar to hangar, then finally put on a plane, and I leave Vietnam forever.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  quite well that men become murderers, adulterers, or perpetrators of other sorts of wickedness because of stellar confi gurations, and in the same way women who are honorable and chaste behave well because they are compelled to do so.” His own wife had been born under an evil horoscope, with a confi guration of Mars and Venus that “leads women to be adulteresses and lovers of their own slaves, to perish in travels and in waters.” When his wife mysteriously abandoned him, he concluded that the awful destiny had materialized. Peter, in reply, off ers a lengthy defense of free will; Peter admits that external agents, such as demons, encourage and intensify sin, but he insists that every human is endowed with an internal faculty of choice, free of all external causation and ultimately responsible for sin. Only a friend of Satan would “attribute to the course of the stars his own sins, which he chose deliberately and willingly.” It shortly emerges that the old man is Clement’s father, and his deterministic philosophy collapses in the cascade of ensuing recognitions. His wife, far from succumbing to sexual lust, had fl ed to save her virtue from the nefarious designs of her brother- in-law. Like a romantic heroine, her chastity was imperiled but safeguarded by her virtue. Her example proves that “a chaste mind can prevail over irrational impulses . . . and horoscopes mean nothing.” She was the author of her own destiny; her sexual honor stands as a rousing vindication of free will. Once again sexual action is the truest test of individual freedom. Th e Recognitions are unusual only for the extent to which the reworking of traditional literary mechanics becomes an explicit refl ection on the order of the cosmos. Christian fi ction, as we will explore in Chapter 4, consciously manipulated the conventions of Greek and Roman narrative. Stories of Christian sexual austerity turned the pagan romances inside out, right down to the fatalism that is built into the very structure of the ancient novel. Sexual austerity was a symbol of absolute human freedom. Unlike the protagonists of romance, the heroes of Christian fi ction are the agents of their own destiny. Th eir “freedom,” unlike Leucippe’s, is not a passive attribute, not a mysterious dispensation of the stellar lottery, nor an adjunct of social position. Christian freedom meant the power to choose one’s sexual fate. It was a choice with eternal ramifi cations. It was a model of human agency that would not long survive the mainstreaming of the religion, as Christian leaders came to encounter, at a more intimate level, the contours of the human will and the material complications of freedom and unfreedom. But, we might imagine, the power of Christian narrative, with its  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Through my investigations and experiences, I have come to believe that human beings are all born with an authentic self as well as a desire for love, fairness, truth and meaning. It is something that no group can program out of a person and therefore there is always hope for real healing. A subsequent chapter focuses on recovery strategies and a future book will be written on this subject.110 However, I do wish to make a special note about courage. People who choose to exit a group where they know they will likely be cut off—shunned, disconnected from by all of their family and friends—face incredible suffering, pain and hardship. The level of pain is unimaginable for the average person. If those trying to exit do not succumb to the pressures to return to the group, they can become resilient and strong. They often become staunch atheists or strong believers in the Bible, God or some Higher Power. People kicked out of these groups are most at risk for serious emotional breakdown, addiction, suicide and other major public health issues. Research must be done to ascertain what I believe is a monumental drain on our health care system by destructive cult involvement. Mental health professionals, unless sensitized and trained, do not know how to even do a proper intake when it comes to involvement with undue influence. However, I am working on a forthcoming book and a training curriculum to help address this profound need. Over the decades, people who were being born into large cults—the Moonies, Scientology, Hare Krishnas, Children of God,111 TM—began coming of age and started to question their group’s programming. With the creation of the Internet, online discussion groups and support communities sprang up. These have been very helpful for people raised in cults. I am pleased to share the stories of a woman raised as a child in TM, two former Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a former Mormon. I understand that these organizations are very high profile and that the public generally does not think of them as psychologically harmful. The Watchtower Society and the LDS Church have been around since the 19th century and have millions of members worldwide and enormous resources. I understand that I risk being put on enemies’ lists, though I hope their leadership has more foresight than to do this. My hope is that the leadership will actually read this book and take steps to reform the policies of their organizations. Gina Catena and Transcendental Meditation (TM)112

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Once you have finished the book, give yourself at least a few days before reading it again. When you pick it up a second time, read it objectively, as though it may or may not apply to your own personal situation. Make a new set of notes on what you agree with, what you disagree with, and what you need to research further. On completing this second reading, go find the answers to the issues that are raised pertaining to your own group. Take some time off (if possible, a minimum of a few weeks) and go to a restful place, away from other group members, and gather more information from other sources. Remember, if the group is a legitimate, valid organization, it will stand up to any scrutiny. It is far better to find out the truth now than to invest more time, money, and energy, only to discover years later that the group is very different from its idealized image. Truth is stronger than lies, and love is stronger than fear. If you are involved with a religious organization, keep in mind that God created us with free will, and that no truly spiritual organization would ever use deception or mind control, or take away your freedom. If you are a family member, friend, or loved one of someone who is involved in what you suspect is a destructive cult: It is best to approach the problem in a systematic and methodical manner. Avoid overreacting and getting hysterical. Don’t jump the gun and tell the person that you have bought this book or are reading it. Wait until you and other relevant people have had a chance to read and get prepared before planning a team Strategic Interactive Approach (SIA). Be sure to also read my book Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults and Beliefs, which will offer a great deal of further information and guidance. Unfortunately, there have been cases in which people have bought Combating Cult Mind Control and impulsively given it to cult members. This can backfire badly if anyone from the cult finds out. Most cult groups fear anything and anyone that might cause them to lose members, and giving a member this book will tip them off that you are educating yourself. Be careful! Instead of sounding the alarm, adopt a curious yet concerned posture. Try to avoid confrontations and ultimatums. Read this book as many times as you need to in order to clearly explain to others the characteristics of mind control, the criteria of a destructive cult, and the basics of cult psychology. The BITE model in Chapter 4 will be a particularly valuable tool. Get as many concerned friends and relatives involved as you can. A strong first step will be for them to read this book, too. If everyone is prepared, they will not be caught off guard.