Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
MY 24-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.
A.M.O.R.C.- 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 and Mystic Order of Rosae Crucis had been soliciting members through ads promising potential membership in a secret society graced by distinguished historical figures such as Sir 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, gifts of illumination bestowed abundantly on its true initiates.
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 myself knew the only hope for 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 grease the journey to upward mobility- but who had it?
Could an ancient mystic order and its secrets be the lubrication I was seeking?
I certainly hoped so. And, when I left Haiti, bound for jumpstarting my path upwards in the United States, I took my hope in AMORC’s promise with me.
But instead of fulfilling that promise, 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 wake up one day in an entirely different set of circumstances than in the world one imagined; indeed, in the grips of a mind control religious cult.
Few people, including myself, who managed to be recruited, young and innocently, 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 even 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 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 pray on the confused, downtrodden and vulnerable.
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
Steve Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control p.49.
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.....