I was into the 60's scene pretty deep. I marched in the streets in protest against the War in Vietnam, against the Draft, for civil rights, for student's rights, etc. In 1968 I went to Washington DC for the Poor People's Campaign. Lived in Resurrection City, a city within a city, lived in tents and makeshift shelters in one of the larger DC parks in order to draw attention to the plight of the poor in this country. Later that summer I attended the National Peace and Freedom Party's convention in Ann Arbor, MI, where we nominated Eldridge Cleaver to run for President on the party's ticket, with Dick Gregory as VP.

At home I had Huey Newton (of the Black Panthers) and Che Guevara (Viva Che!) posters on my walls, plus what was to me the quintessential draft resistance poster; it pictured Joan Baez and two other women known in the "movement" wearing sweetly coy smiles, and the blurb at the bottom said, "Girls say Yes to boys who say No." I was also very involved in my church youth group, LRY, the Unitarian Universalist's version of Sunday School and Bible Camp. Loved it. I loved the folks.

And yeah, I smoked pot, dabbled in psychedelics a little. Listened to a lot of music - Frank Zappa and the Mothers; Moody Blues; Jefferson Airplane; Jimi Hendrix; Joni Mitchell; Led Zeppelin; Savoy Brown; Pink Floyd; Black Sabbath; etc. You get the picture.

I dropped out of high school during my senior year (I was three credits short of graduating) and broke up with my girlfriend (under strong protest from her - I still wince to this day whenever I remember) in order to join the group.

What kind of work do you do now?
Started out as a shoe-repairman. I've been programming computers for 20 years (it's okay to do that to machines, but not people).

What kind of cult were you in? What was it called? What traditions, rituals, etc. did you have?
It was a scripture cult, or Bible cult. When I became a member it was called the Children of God. They have since changed their name to Family of Love, or just the Family. Traditions and rituals? Well we lived together. We had all things common, like the early church disciples did (Acts 2 and 4). We prayed together, sang together, had meals together. Had a lot of Bible classes, at least at the beginning. We memorized scripture, at least three a day. At our prayer/song times we'd praise God, speak in tongues, prophesy. It was quite a scene. Like from another world. And so it was: just not the world we thought it was from.

How did you get involved with that cult?
My two best friends in High School, Gary and Renee, met some folks on campus at the U of M who invited them to dinner. After a couple of dinners and conversations and Bible studies with them, my friends in turn invited me to accompany them to the CoG house for dinner.

It was Renee who called me on the phone, initially. She was real excited. First thing she said was, "Rick! You got a Bible around? Go get it! Now! I want to show you something!" I found a Bible and she just had me look up about ten or so specific verses and read them back to her. "Look up Jn 3:16 and read me what it says ("For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life."). Now find Romans 3:23 and read that ("For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." and then Rom 6:23 ("For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord."). Ephesians 2:8 and 9 ("For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast"). Titus 3:5 ("Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost;"). Okay, now read Romans 10:9 and 10 ("That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.") and so on.

I had never read those verses or considered the implications of what those portions of scripture were saying. It was essentially just the simple message of Salvation by Grace, a Gift of God, not according to how "deserving" or not we were. The message was that God "loved" us, loved me, to die for, and wanted us, wanted "me" to be with Him forever. And there it was, written in black and white, in a book I knew was important, and very old, but never took the time to look at seriously. I was impressed. And I got excited, too. If God was like "that", well that would be wonderful! Then Renee said, "Rick, I met these people. I've never met anyone like them. They're Christians, but they're like no Christian you ever met. They are RADICAL! Not "churchy" at all. In fact they don't even "have" a church or even go to a church. They actually LIVE it, every day, all the time! For REAL. You have to meet them! You'll see what I mean. They're having a free dinner at their house tomorrow. You HAVE to come and meet these folks!" So I went.

I didn't know it at the time, but the moment I walked in the door, I was a walking target, a sitting duck. Everything they did and everything they said was geared to "get" me to become one of them, to join their group. They had a specific agenda, and everything was choreographed just so, all in order to elicit a certain response or decision from me. But it didn't "feel" like it was staged to me at the time. It all seemed very genuine and spontaneous. All they did was pay attention to me.

They seemed really interested in who I was, what I believed, what I was interested in. They were good listeners. But in every case, whatever I shared, they turned the conversation to God and the Bible, what the Bible had to say about whatever subject I brought up. And for every question I had, they had a ready answer from the Bible (some of the "answers" were evasive, if not out-and-out deceptive. For instance, I asked point blank, "Who leads this group?" Their answer was, "Well, God does, by His Holy Spirit and by the commands of Scripture." The truth was, David Berg was the leader, and if they would have been up-front with me at that point, I would have asked a whole lot more questions and might not have joined.)

They weren't preachy, and they didn't attack me personally or contradict me or say I was "wrong" or "deceived" or "wicked" or "evil" or whatever. They established rapport by going with my flow, rather than counter to it. They just steered it to where they wanted it to go, is all. They'd say, "Wow! Yeah! That's so heavy! Did you know God is concerned about the same things? Jesus was a Revolutionary! Look here, it says in so-and-so…" and they'd read a verse or sometimes a chapter from the Bible.

Then they'd ask me questions, like: "Do you know for sure God knows you intimately, and loves you more than His life? That he cares for you more than you'd dare imagine?" Or, "Have you ever thought about serving God full time, all the time? Did you know that God is calling all His lost children home, that he's searching for the lost, and seeks to find people who will help him find all the lost sheep who are scattered over the face of the world?" Or, "Did you know God is angry with this nation, that because they have forsaken Him, and turned their backs on Him, that He is about to judge this country, that America is going to fall, and time is short, and we need to warn people, people need to be warned about this coming judgment?"

I remember one guy saying, "See those smokestacks? What do they remind you of? Have you ever considered how they look like gigantic burning incense sticks? Well look at this: it says in Jeremiah, the Prophet who was sent to Israel to warn them of God's coming judgment on their nation, like He's doing today, calling the so-called christian churches - we call it once-a-weeker churchianity - to repentance for their spiritual adultery, it says, 'And they burned incense unto other gods, and filled the face of the earth with their idols, the creations of their own imaginations, and forsook Me, their Creator and Redeemer.' Heavy, huh!" And I said, "Wow! Yeah! I had no idea!" And they'd say, "Neither did we. None of us ever learned that in Sunday School, either.

"Why is that, do you think? Maybe because it's so self-incriminating, you think? The people who claim to be for God would have to admit they weren't truly obeying Him. So they deceive us with their lies and pretensions. I suppose you always just assumed they were who they said they were, that they were "real' Christians, huh? Well, it says right here, Jesus said, "By their fruits ye shall know them." And, "Not everyone who says to me 'Lord, Lord', shall enter into the Kingdom, but those who do the will of my Father in Heaven." It's a lot more than just "going to church" on Sunday. A lot more. See, it says right here that, "the Most High dwelleth NOT in temples made with hands, saith the Lord." Once a week isn't it. God wants "all of you", all your days, all your love, your "whole heart, soul and strength." Only then will you "know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free." Thank God He wouldn't leave us to our blindness and deception. He gave us the Book. Trouble is, nobody in the Churches ever reads what it says anymore, and if they do, they don't believe it, and make excuses. They don't "Do it." Like it says here…" And they'd read me another verse.

And they would sing to me. They knew a lot of songs, some where they'd put my name into the lyrics. And they wouldn't just sing "to" me, they sang "about" me. They would insert my name in some of the songs. They did that with everyone who visited them, or just folks they'd meet on the streets when they were out "witnessing." They sang a lot. Three of the songs I remember especially will give you an idea of the "flavor" of it. Just about everyone in this group played guitar, which they likened to harps. Imaging 18 people singing along with 8 guitars and a tambourine.

Their most popular song was "You Gotta Be a Baby."

Another song was "The Message of Jeremiah":

This one's called, "Jesus Really Loves You":

They knew and sang hundreds of songs.

When I was with them they made me feel special, made me feel like I was noticed and wanted and appreciated. Like my name should be on a cereal box, as a friend of mine described it. You know: Special. Chosen. I was 18 at the time. It's a technique many groups use: it's called love-bombing. It's quite a sensation. Lots of smiles. Lots of hugs. And they would talk about "love" a lot.

Why did you join the cult?
They had a pretty compelling rap. They introduced me to the notion of taking scriptures personally, as if God were talking to "me" through the pages of the Bible. So they just had to point out a couple of verses. I had never considered "serving God full time" before they invited me to consider it. "See, Jesus says here, 'Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.' And look what they do: it says, 'and immediately they left their father and their nets, and followed him.' Do you think God stopped calling out disciples? Was twelve enough for Him? Got any nets you're too tangled up in to leave on a moment's notice for the sake of God and His Kingdom? See, Jesus says, 'many are called, but few are chosen.' Because so few chose His way. Everyone has their own ideas they think are better than God's. And then here it says, 'Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatsover ye shall ask of the Father in my name, He may give it you.' What "fruit" do you think he was referring to, do you think? Well, if an apple tree makes apples, then what do you think Christians would make? Other Christians, of course! See, it says here, and this is Jesus again, 'Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature,' and here he says to "make disciples in all nations, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you, an lo I am with you always, even unto the ends of the world." Do you see? Disciples make disciples. But we need help to do that - we can't do it on human terms with our human strength. We need supernatural strength to be a true witness to God and the Kingdom. See it says, "But ye shall receive power after the Holy Spirit is come upon you, and you will be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem and in Judea, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth." Have you ever received the Spirit? Well, it's easy. You just ask! See, it says right here, "If you, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more then shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask?" So, like you asked Jesus into your heart and life, and He came in just because you opened the door of your heart and said yes, so also the Spirit. Do you want power to witness? Well, just ask!"

So I asked.

The other compelling thing that got to me at the beginning was their take on biblical prophecy. They believed we were living in the last days, the End Times that Jesus and Daniel and the book of Revelation talks about. A lot of their Bible studies had to do with fulfillment of prophecy in these days. They convinced me from scripture that time was short, and that whatever plans I had made, whatever dreams I had for the rest of my life were futile in light of the fact that the world might end within my lifetime. It became apparent to me that there were more important, more urgent things to do, such as saving the world.

How did you feel about the cult and the people? How did they treat you?
I loved them. But as it went, I was treated a lot better before I joined than after. It got really strict. And extremely de-personalizing. But there was a scripture for that too: He must increase, but I must decrease. I remember someone telling me after I'd been in a month or so, "We don't want you or your goddamn money - we just want Jesus."

Also, there was a lot of scrutinizing of behavior and attitudes and conversations of each other. If someone heard someone grumbling or "speaking doubts", they would "rebuke" them, like the Bible said to do. Rebukes were not fun at all. They almost always contained a pointed Bible verse, one that made you feel guilty or ashamed or afraid. But always diminished. So I had to watch myself really carefully, what I said, and felt even. I had to "put on Christ", in order to mask my true but unacceptable parts. But the pretending took its toll. It made me very, very ill.

But, I thought I was doing God's highest will. That was pretty cool. I thought I was one of God's elite. That was also pretty cool. But I was extremely lonesome, all the time. Miserably so. I was always checking out the women in the group, wondering if this one was The One, the one I was supposed to marry. The notion of God selecting a perfect companion for me excited me to distraction. I wanted that. Real bad. Too bad. I was starved for intimacy, for affection.

I put on a happy face, and tried to play the part right, but like I said, it was a mask, a masquerade. I played the part, went through the motions, performed what was expected, did the disciple thing. But I knew who I was inside, underneath. I saw. And I didn't like what I saw, when I was honest. I thought there was something wrong with me. I always felt like I wasn't quite good enough, wasn't getting whatever I was supposed to be getting, whatever it was that everyone else in the group seemed to have. So I felt bad most of the time, all the while claiming I was so thankful and happy to be a part of God's end-time movement, saving souls for the Kingdom.

Do you remember any special times or anything that ever happened when you were in the cult that you will remember forever, whether it be good or bad?
I remember the kindness of a couple of folks, people who were not in the group. Two were Pakistani, so they may have been Muslim. One had me over for dinner, and prepared an awesome meal of curried chicken with yogurt, and boiled potatoes with mango chutney.

Another took me to his home late Christmas day, fed me and gave me a warm dry place to sleep. He found me (was I weeping, or just dazed and confused?) on the curb in front of the Liverpool colony I had spent two days trying to get to by hitch-hiking, but ended up walking, because no one picked me up (on Christmas day, even!) the entire twenty miles from the colony in Aspool, where I had spent the night in the coal-shed in back, because when I got there I found out they had all gone to Liverpool to be with the "brethren" there for Christmas. When I finally got to the Liverpool colony, I arrived at the exact same time that three fire engines had showed up - the entire house was totally engulfed in flames. It turned out no one was there, either. They had all gone, along with the Aspool colony, to Scotland, the day before.

It was a good thing I hadn't gotten there before the fire. If I had gotten there an hour or more sooner, I'd have found a way to get inside, and would have gone straight to sleep. I was dead tired. I was also lucky. So this kind Pakistani guy saw me, and had pity on me, and took me in.

The other folks were a couple of Anglican priests who put me up in their rectory for a night (they smoked cigs and drank bourbon! I was intrigued), and a couple of Catholic women who were with the Little Sisters of the Poor whose company I found extremely delightful and inspiring.

My other vivid memories are of three particular people I met on the street. One of the memorable folks was the one and only person who actually "asked Jesus into his heart" as a result of my witnessing throughout the entire time I was with the Children of God. He happened to be out on the town with a group of people who lived in an institution home for mentally retarded folks. I engaged him in conversation on the sidewalk, just quoted a couple of scriptures which spoke of the love of God for us in Jesus, and he said, "Really?!!! Oh, Jesus! Come into my heart! Come into my heart! Come into my heart!" He made me cry. Still does.

What kind of things happened while you were in the cult? What did you do there?
We lived together with 5 to 15 other members. We shared what we had, like in Acts chapter 2 and 4, shared meals, bible study. The first year I was in we would go out two-by-two with our little 3X5 inch bibles and a guitar and just witness to people on the streets, usually around a college campus. The more receptive ones we'd invite for supper.

Every day we'd go out, after breakfast and a bible study and prayer, and we'd stay out until past dark, then come home, tell each other what happened that day, who we met, who received Jesus, testimonies we called them, then we'd sing together, pray together, go to sleep for the next day when we'd do it all over again.

I hopped around a lot, from colony (that's what we called the homes we lived in) to colony. I was in Chicago for a month, St Louis a couple weeks, Carbondale, IL for a month, Lansing, Michigan for a month, and New York for a couple of weeks before I went to England.

When I got to England, things changed a lot. I went to work in the kitchen at the Bromily (Bromley?), Kent colony where the writings of the leader (Mo letters) were printed. It was an old abandoned warehouse with a few amenities like bathrooms and showers, and a kitchen. It was pretty big.

As I recall, more than a hundred folks (perhaps more than 200) lived and worked there at the Bromily colony. I lived there for about 6 months. It wasn't too cool: we got our food from places that agreed to donate their damaged or outdated food to us, so we'd get some really strange, barely edible stuff. Like frozen ox liver (stacks of 15 pound slabs) which we would serve with rice (if we were lucky - every have ox liver gravy?) for supper days on end. And brussel sprouts that needed to be peeled before cooking because the outsides had gotten gelatinous from sitting around so long. And boiled wheat berries for breakfast - just wheat and water - nothing else. But by golly we were thankful for it, and praised God for being such a faithful provider.

At that time the leader decided we shouldn't witness like we had been doing anymore, but instead we should get his special writings out to the world. He would do the witnessing from now on. We called it litnessing, the lit meaning literature. The leader thought it was important that only his words were used to convince the world - we could be good at being paperboys, but no one could preach like Berg. So instead of simply talking to people about Jesus and the Gospel, now everyday we'd go out and just distribute Mo letters. Only now we were required to get "donations". No freebies. We had quotas, even: 200 a day, with donations. The folks who brought more money home got rewarded ("shiners"), and the ones who didn't do so well weren't ("shamers" - I was usually a "shamer" - well, you'd understand why if you saw the clothes I wore - we shared everything, but we were mostly students and hippies, so I did the best I could with what I could find. Would you believe dark pink stove pipe high-water trousers, a navy sweater, purple and green platform shoes, and a steel-grey sharkskin sports jacket to complete the ensemble? It was pathetic. Hideously so).

Anyway, after six months at the printing factory, I moved around England quite a bit - Portobello Road in London, Leeds, Birmingham, Liverpool (actually Wigan, which is north), Manchester, and Sheffield. I stayed at each place about a month. Hitch-hiked around a lot, as well. Spent the night in an open bus shelter on the Isle of Wight. Don't remember seeing much of anything, however. Too bad.

Did you choose to leave the cult? If so, how did you come to that decision?
Sort of. I snuck away. Like I said before, I was always struggling with feelings of loneliness, condemnation, and self-doubt. I came to the point where I believed I just wasn't good enough, that I wasn't discipleship material, that I wasn't sold-out 100 per-cent enough (in our group we said a lot that there were NO NEUTRALS, meaning you were either all the way for God, or you were an enemy. "No one can serve two masters", "he that is not with me is against me", "no one who looks back is worthy of the kingdom", and "a double minded man is unstable in all his ways.") I rationalized that perhaps it would be better for me to step down and give my place to someone more worthy. I felt like I was more a burden than a blessing to the group, so it would be best if I just went away. No fuss, no muss. I got in touch with a former member of the group who I was close with for a time, and he put me up at his place long enough for me to get my return ticket back to the states.

How did you leave if not by your own will?
I felt like I was squeezed out, or pushed out. But I kind of did it to myself. I condemned myself more than I was condemned by folks in the group. But the environment of the community served to set up that kind of logic, for me at least.

Were there people who helped and supported you to get you out of the cult?
You betcha. A lot of folks. And so far, it's been meeting those folks which has been the best part. They're the shiniest part of that silver lining I've been intent on discovering out of the midst of this whole deal. I find myself in excellent company. That ain't bad. Finding out I wasn't the only one was the beginning of hope for me. But it didn't happen until about 5 years after I left the group.

My church was real supportive, as much as they could be, not really knowing or understanding what cults were about. And my wife was, for a while, at the beginning. My friend Jack helped a lot. He was a newspaper journalist, and he did like an interview, simply asked me a whole lot of specific questions about what it was like in the group, and what I was thinking, and especially the why's. That was helpful because when I answered them, I heard them out loud for the first time in 5 years, and they sounded a whole lot different out loud in the presence of another human being than they did when I heard them inside my own head.

The most helpful thing to me was the former member community, especially the folks in Focus, the former member network, and Unbound, the rehab people in Iowa. Those, and the people in the cult education network helped immensely: Free Minds in Minneapolis, the Cult Awareness Network, and the American Family Foundation. I went to national CAN conferences every year from 1982 to 1995, got together with folks who've become some of my most favorite people in the world. It was being with people who understood and encouraged me to go forward and remind me I wasn't alone which helped the most. I miss them now. CAN (the Cult Awareness Network) got beat up pretty bad, if you hadn't heard, so there hasn't been a national conference in a couple of years.

What kind of struggles did you encounter escaping the influence of the cult?
The first hurdle was to be convinced that there might be something wrong with THEM instead of ME. That took five years to get to. Once I got to there, then it was a matter of taking my life back, one step at a time.

First it was critical thinking skills. I had to come to the place where I could seriously entertain the once heretical notion that my own thoughts were indeed valid, particularly thoughts which contradicted the group's interpretations of the Bible. It's hard to argue with or contradict God. Reading Robert J. Lifton's Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (chapter 22) encouraged me to do exactly that in a round-about way. He was writing about Chinese re-education camps and the techniques used on them and the culture at large in order to control and engineer changes on the personal and social levels of life. It described the dynamics of life in the group to a "T". Since it wasn't written from a scriptural standpoint, but from a sociological perspective, I was better able to side-step the ingrained defensive responses I'd internalized while in the group.

The hardest part was to simply "let" myself doubt. It was hard because I knew it would be spiritual suicide to allow myself to seriously entertain the possibility that all I had learned and believed to be true was in fact wrong. If one part was bogus, it was all bogus. It was excruciatingly painful for me to seriously consider something which to me seemed to go totally against God, against the Bible, against everything I was sure of. It was terrifying. But it was worth it. And something in me knew it.

So then, when I did, when I let my little word-world shatter to bits in my own mind, then it was time to start to feel again. I had to come to the place where I regarded my feelings as friends rather than foes, that they weren't moral acts which I was judged for, but gifts of God given to test reality with.

In the group I became emotionally crippled, kind of like amnesia, by choice. I did it to myself. In the group, feelings were for the most part seen as "fleshly" at best, and sin at worst. For instance, if I felt angry or even just a little miffed at being ordered around or rebuked, then that was seen as rebellion, and it is written that "rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft." Or if I felt attracted to a "sister" in the group, that was regarded as lust, or adultery of the heart. So in order to cope, I shut myself down, emotionally. I cut myself off from myself.

Because of that shutting down and cutting off, I was extremely out of touch, not only with everyone and everything around me, but out of touch with myself, as well. I was Michael for so long, I forgot who Rick was (we changed our names when we joined - we were born again, new creatures, old things had passed away, etc). But I couldn't do a complete job of it. I couldn't totally pull the emotional plugs. Thankfully. I was still really lonesome. All the time.

As it turned out, however, looking back, I see that I wasn't so much lonesome for other folks as I was lonesome for "me". I missed me. Getting back to me, taking back all the co-opted and given-away and stolen and cut-off parts of me, that was essentially the struggle.

The spiritual struggle was the most complex and most difficult to get to the nub of. Now I had a whole lot more questions, and at the same time a whole lot less trustworthy answers.

To what extent was I indoctrinated? What was truly mine and what was borrowed or stolen? What was true and real, and what was bogus and counterfeit? How could I tell? On what basis? How could I trust myself to know? And if I couldn't trust myself, how could I trust anyone else to really know what was what, what was most important, most essential, most ultimate?

Those are rough and tough questions. It takes a lot of courage to let yourself ask those kinds of things after coming out of an environment which was so choreographed, so pre-fab, so utterly free of ambivalence and uncertainty. An environment whose internally self-referant logic was so flawless that, even though you didn't fit, it seemed utterly complete and balanced and impervious to critique. When you come away from such seeming perfection and ultimacy, you are left with no other alternative but to attempt to re-construct your own world from scratch, from the debris of the old once-sure world you've lived in and were so certain was real for so long. Hopefully you don't have to do it all by yourself, but some do just that. Former cult members know exactly what Post-modernism is all about - they know it in their bones. We're an interesting community. But we're pretty shy. So far, anyway.

One particularly difficult hurdle was all the scriptures I'd memorized, particularly the ones that eat at your gut from the inside out, hung around to haunt me. All the negative ones, like "I would that thou wert hot or cold, but because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot of cold, behold I will spue thee out of my mouth.", and "if anyone draws back, my soul shall take no delight in him", and the ones about the foolish virgins who didn't trim their lamps, or the ones about the "dog returning to its vomit or the sow to her wallowing in the mire." Actually, the entire litany of curses upon Israel from the book of Jeremiah I now took personally and to heart.

Do you have any regrets from being in a cult?
Yes and no. Kind of like my first marriage. I should never have gotten married so soon after leaving the group (a couple months), and certainly not to the person I married (we lasted ten years - we should both get medals - me the bigger one). But then Reuben and Leah, my son and daughter wouldn't be here. I can't imagine a world without them. So regrets, yes and no. If I knew then what I know now, if I knew what the long-term consequences would be, then I wouldn't have joined, and things would be a lot different today. How different, or whether better or worse, I'll never know.

I do have deep regrets, some things that I've done and some relationships I've had with some really dear people, people I love, people I've hurt, which I'd give anything to go back for a chance to reverse the damage done. I won't go into the grisly particulars, but I do see a connection between some of my more regrettable behaviors and decisions, and the effect my time in the group had upon me. I don't know, perhaps it's a cop-out - you know, blame it on the cult. How convenient for me. But since there are some direct parallels, it's real tempting. It doesn't make it any better, just easier to live with myself. At any rate, yeah, I regret the hurt I've caused to the folks I love. Terribly.

How has being in the cult affected your life?
It made me crazy. And I still am. I'm serious. But I haven't concluded whether I'm any more or any less crazy than any and everyone else on the planet.

That time of my life did affect me deeply, no doubt about it, as deep as I can imagine "deep". It changed everything. Literally. Actually, I should be more specific: getting better, or trying to, or looking for healing and freedom and reality has changed me. They are of a piece. My attempts to recover from that madness has left its mark on my life, perhaps more than the experience in the group. But I was put on a particular path, a course was set for me a long time ago, a course which I cannot go back and change. Ever. It is what it is. So far. I will never know what might have been. But nobody does, do they. It's been… interesting. I wouldn't trade those experiences for anything in the world, but I wouldn't recommend that course to anyone, either.

What advice would you give to keeping others from joining these groups?
Get educated. Think. Beware of "wanna-be". Ask pointed questions. Don't assume that someone is being truthful or has integrity just because they talk about God or the Bible or ultimate issues.

If you run into someone who seeks to recruit you into something or other, should you decide to engage them, insist on straight answers in response to your specific and direct questions. If they're evasive or obscure in their answers, remind yourself there are no rules that say you have to be polite or even "nice" to folks who have an agenda, especially if that agenda happens to involve the rest of your life. Honest and straight are our friends. If they can't take the scrutiny, or if they respond to your questions offensively, chances are they're bad news.

If you do feel compelled to participate in something you believe is legitimate, find out all you can about the group and their beliefs and activities before you make a decision to join. And don't get all or even most of your information from those connected with the group. Talk to former members. Perspective is critical. Read articles and books on the subject. Learn about the characteristics of mind control, study up on subjects like hypnosis, find out about the dynamics at work in abusive relationships. Include your family and friends in any decisions involving that level of commitment. Get honest feedback. Listen carefully.

Any kind of pressure, any suggestion of "urgency", any hint of "seduction", your BS detector should go off. Keep it tuned up.

And don't get too cynical. Just because there are wolves in sheep's clothing, just because there is such a thing in this world as as spiritual fraud, don't dismiss the possibility of the authentic, the beautiful, and the worthy. In my experience I've found them in more humble, more ordinary and hum-drum places. Places a lot closer to home, or next door. Even in my own backyard. Or next to me at table. Or in the quiet darkness each night in my bed.

Bottom line, the most effective way to keep folks out of groups like these:

Love each other. It's that simple.

Hope this helps. Thanks for the opportunity to express this stuff. I don't get asked to very often, and I like it when I do.