Chapter 3

How to become a cult leader and how you are lured in as a cult member.

I would like to invite you before we proceed any further to check this quite revealing short video on YouTube, that will describe pretty much to its uttermost precision the working of being a cult leader and the manipulation that subdue the cult members.



I will go through point by point like the video is presenting to illustrate my own version of the particular experience in Miracle of love and the mind control that this group is inflicting upon its members.

The structure of Miracle of love
The Miracle of love organization is structured in a hierarchical way, where Kalindi and her family are on top controlling and dominating the game, all around her you can find many leaders with different degrees of power and consequently able to manipulate and psychological harm people close to them. And so it goes down to the rank of the last new member who afraid of disagreeing is buying into the poisonous cake.

Miracle of Love promises to fulfill your dream and that is: to break free from the bondage of life and death and go Home to God in this lifetime. They promise you "a Path to freedom and to the love of God". During the course of my participation in the group I never heard of anyone achieving that task. If one day, one leader was praised by Kalindi as having a "broken free soul", the next day that same leader was back to step number one of doing "illusion work".

The Front groups are as simple as a breakfast party, a dancing evening, or an introduction to the GMP workshop or the Mol Intensive. In recent years "sitting with a master" evenings are new marketing events aimed at attracting "spiritual seekers" from other spiritual groups, especially in Germany. Mol this way is trying to steal recruits from other new age pseudo spiritual group.
To do this, some of the leaders, amongst them Scotti, Mazzarati and Racole, have been upgraded to this position and have been appointed by Kalindi as masters.
All of these events are geared to recruit people to the Miracle of love Intensive. This is the ultimate seminar in Mol, where the beginning of the brainwashing will take place.

Miracle of love manipulation
Mostly there is a very manipulative use of language and jargon used respectively to create guilt, therefore reinforcing a sense of urgency and to bond people for an higher cause. Already in one of the above events you can witness and hear expression like: there is no time to waste, the solution of the problem is to go deep, don't you want to feel the love of God, don't you want to have your dreams fulfilled, we care so much for the people.........and so on.
For each of these topics and many more Kalindi has made a tape, where she instructs the disciple through a path to God with an apparently simple quote: give up, let go, surrender.
This stands as the golden rule in Mol. It says it all: give up your life the way you want it to be, let go of who you think you are and surrender your whole existence to the will of God/Kalindi/Gourasana. Internalizing this statement makes it possible for the average recruit to cope with the difficulties of giving your life to somebody else. Striving for "surrender" every day will diminish the essence of who you truly are, rather you start to take on the cult-like identity, loosing in fact your true identity. The more you fight and resist this basic guidance the more you will have hard time in the group.
I have hundreds of tapes from Kalindi, Gourasana and the Lady/Gayle. which in the appropriate time I will toss into the garbage. For now, they are research material into Mol.

Happy true believers.
Of course you will be surrounded by happy true Mol believers who are overwhelming you with attention, the love bombing described in my previous post. Like you see in the Youtube video, the cult leader is making sure you feel very welcome in the group, that there are truly loving people waiting for you, so you start diminish your resistance and want to become like one of them. Also it fulfills one of the basic needs in people: the desire for being accepted and loved. Well, too soon these friendships will loose their spontaneity, and you will have to work hard to maintain them. For all it's worth! None of those friends is in my life any longer. Somehow they all vanished. More about that in another posts.

The use of deception
Everyone seems so sincere and honest, but in front of serious questions, no one will answer and the process of attacking the self and breaking down your mental capacities starts.
Deception is taking place and there is no way that you will find out the real goal of the group, finances are unclear, power games are well hidden. Also I shouldn't forget to mention that what attracts a person to a group is a sincere desire and intention to find an higher goal in life. For myself I can tell that the very goal of "being with God" was blinding me. I could not see behind the masquerade of happy people looking for freedom through MOl. I was starting to believe the lie. Or so it seemed!

Mental breakdown
Breaking down the mind happens mostly by a confessional method, very often used in LGAT, where members are confronted and at times psychologically forced through a method of subtle persuasion and guilt trip to share their most delicate issues, often violating somebody's privacy. Freaking out and anger are encouraged, and any bad emotion will be invited to the surface. You will feel less and less yourself but you are told that this the way to make space inside for God, that "transformation" is really happening and that a cleansing of bad emotion is required in order to "become pure" again. Otherwise God cannot love you!

You are made to believe that there are parts of your mind that need to be eliminated.
In Mol jargon, those parts are called the "illusions" - and you need to fight against those illusions, in other words your ego.
The Mol work is to let go of these illusions how many you have, all of the time. After 8 years I was far from being pure and my main core illusion, was still in place. There must have been something good about it!!!
Like me all of my Mol friends were dealing day after day, year after year with the same old crap, endlessly praying to become our "true selves" and in this way further distancing us from our true nature.

I only re-discovered my real self/identity once I left Mol.

In the course of many confessional sitting I witnessed leaders diminishing my life before Mol (and that of others), humiliating us and discounting anything from the past that was of any value to us. As a consequence you start to develop a tendency to re-write your past, so that only the present moments are beautiful and meaningful. Foremost Mol deserves the merit for it!!!!

Miracle of love control structure
Mol controls its members by a set of rigid rules: the 'lifestyle'. After the initial period of "getting to know the work" you are asked to moved into houses where the process of controlling your life, your thoughts and the information from the outside world are set in place.
You eat the same food, wake up at the same time, write on a board where you go and when you come back, go through many austerities, forced to participate in the daily meditation in your house and many other chores. Everything in the house is labeled and needs to be maintained in perfect order. One of the major control system is the "letter writing" to the "house leader" via email, with a cc to your buddy. Buddy systems are also used to keep each other in check and spy on each other. A venting partner is fulfilling the function of containing your anger, doubts and critical thinking before it spills out into the group and infecting other people.

Of course nothing of the above appears to be imposed upon you. You are made to believe that you want this form of guidance and control, that you want to improve your endeavor, to better yourself, to match the expectation of Kalindi in order to gain more love of God. In fact you would do anything to be loved!
In reality guilt is already activated in you and the appointed house-leader keeps blaming you that you are not doing enough, that you don't live up to your potential, that you are not giving enough, surrender enough, loving enough, not following the guidance. All of your daily moves and behaviours are spied upon and reported to the superior leader.
In the next community gathering you are reprimanded and humiliated for any misbehaviour. It is enough to have expressed some opinion or show some attitude to be punished. The punishment varies to the degree of your rebellion. I was told not to speak in any public Mol meeting and not to draw any attention to myself.
This is just one of the many heavy social restriction and guidance I received.

Claim authority - transcendental power
The You tube video illustrates very well how easy it can be to have a group of "sweet and willing followers" when you claim your authority coming straight from God.
Miracle of love as a group exists because of the presence of Gourasana who declared himself being an "Incarnation of God". After David Swansons death, Kalindi became "the voice of God". There are many stories around the "entry" of God/Gourasana in the body of David Swanson. Most of them are really fantastic and very theatrical. And I believed them!!!
One claim for instance was that Gourasana was the coming on earth of the Father - Jesus' Father, that is. The Father of Jesus... claiming this authority made Gourasana even more powerful then Jesus himself!

What is the best way to seduce someone into your belief? Give them something they like.
In the Mol you will experience various form of trance states by practicing prolonged meditation sometimes up to 8 hours of uninterrupted dance or frantic movement of vibrating the body. More then once I stayed up all night with the group going through break free meditation. This is comparable to mass marathon psychology.

TM is trying to jump and levitate, Mol does playing chicken dance and move like a snake for hours. After the exhausting experience, you start to feel as if you are possessed by some kind of power which the Mol leaders call God's energy.
I must admit that it was nice to feel that level of relaxation/trance state after so much work. But honestly you can achieve the same level of serotonin flushing through your system after running, or a long walk in the mountains, without the deep indoctrination that comes along with it. Of course I never had the time to do those healthy activities. There was no private time. All my time was for Mol.

Thoughts stopping ritual
During meditation and throughout the day you are asked to chant the name of "Kalindi la Gourasana". One of the most simple and effective forms of stopping your thought process was the beep watch. You have to set up your (digital) watch so that it beeps each hour. Whatever you are doing or thinking has to stop at the beep of your watch and you have to pray, remember the goal of the path, or think about some new recruit you want to invite to the next event. Other methods were singing mantras with names of the leaders. I still possess a CD we recorded singing "Home Gourasana". Short version for: please Lord Gourasana takes me/us home in the house of the Father!!!!

Elite group
Not to sidetrack from our Youtube video, I like to come back to it and to remind you of the importance of a sense of special family and a sense of purpose, that helps people to stay together even in more destructive cult like Heavens' gate. There are thousand of smaller versions of Heaven's gate - I can only witness and testify my own experience in the Miracle of love group.
In Miracle of love the bonding amongst members is very tight and you feel you are part of an elite, a chosen few with an important mission in life. Mol actually sometimes calls itself "the mission", which is very common to many other spiritual group/cult. The Mol-Mission has its goal in: increasing the love on earth, to let the people know that an Incarnation of God has come to bring a path to God and to break free from bondage of life and death. At least this is the apparent goal.
You as a true believer become one with the purpose of the group, the Mol mission. Any autonomy in thought or action is highly discouraged. Any self purpose must be subordinated to the highest purpose of the group. The more you comply with no much rebellion the more you become a sheep, one of the many following the guidance and moreover thinking you must be right.

Childhood dependency
In this way a sort of childhood dependency and mind dependency is created. You start to refer to some of the leader as your mother. Mazzarati, who was given this name by Kalindi supposedly because of her "fastness" in letting go, is an example of creating this dependency. She is the leader/master appointed by Kalindi for Europe, and she is regarded by her closest disciples as a mother. Also known as Mata, which means the great mother in the Indian tradition, this woman in her fifties has an incredible (in this contest incredible means not just beautiful) look in her eyes and a very subtle authoritarian attitude disguised in a loving motherly affection. One of the most double sided personalities I had the pleasure and pain to be with!
Disciples looks at her as she is the perfect example of "how to let go" in this "difficult" path, "how to be" in her devotion to Kalindi and her selfless giving to the Mission. Disciples run to her for advise, suggestion, guidance but especially for approval and love. To see Mazzarati angry at you was the most excruciating experience so everyone is trying their best not to disagree with her.
Personally I made her angry many times and she made me real furious hundred of times.
I remember driving away from Munich across the beautiful mountains in Austria and North Italy on my way to my family for a couple of days (never much time for a break from a cult!!!).
I was sitting in my car, in rage for the constant abuse and sacrifice I was forced to do, and being really resentful for all the things I had to give which I didn't want to give or let go. It made me feel like a rebellious child. I fought against that dependency, like I always did against my family in my teenager years.

Establishing scapegoats, fighting resistance
The group bond is tightened by establishing an enemy or a dissenter. I was one of them and will talk more about scapegoats later.
In Mol there is a "us" versus "them" mentality, specifically directed to ex members who spontaneously left the group or where kicked out. The Mol members are encouraged not to be with them anymore and to consider them as true enemy of "God's mission". I don't have any friend left from the Mol circle.

If you express any criticisms, leaders will fight against you and manipulate you with guilt and shame with expressions like: Do you expect breaking free is easy? You need to sacrifice more! You haven't let go yet! Stop complaining! Get out of you self absorption!
I was threatened many times that I would be kicked out if I didn't fully surrender!

The demands from the group for more fund/money, give more time and reduce your living space were increasing everyday. The leader's different form of punishment were also accentuating. And I am speaking of my particular experience.
My life in Mol was far from perfect but I didn't really consciously thought about leaving the group. I still wanted that sense of family, bond and purpose that Mol was offering.

Strangely enough, more then once in the past years Mazzarati warned me that if I would leave Mol one day, I should be very cautious of attacking Mol. She was indoctrinating me with fear. I remember coming away of those personal meeting with her, where I was made feel less then nothing, feeling bad, and having a lot of anger (ahhhh ya this was my illusion) which in itself is a great sin in Mol, the clear evidence that you were resisting the guidance.
God bless my anger and its intrinsic healing power during my recovery process!
The fear of being kicked out didn't really help me to adjust my behaviour to the Mol standard, instead I reinforce my rebellion spirit and fought against everything and everybody even against myself, my real self.

A few months after I was kicked out, I received a card from Mazzarati in which she threatened me not to badmouth the Mission, or my consciousness would be hurt badly. There was no mention or asking about my well being and concern about me, whatsoever. Two months earlier I was one of her "children" with a great destiny in Mol and one of the people, she declared more then once, she loved so dearly!

The end
At the end of this long essay I want to conclude with thanking the author of the Youtube video to provide with such accuracy the subtlety of mind manipulation. Much too often, to prove mind control and coercive persuasion of a group is not that easy, because of the lack of real evidence of the psychological abuse and the reliability of ex members. It is all very individual and what harms one person may not have the same impact on another.
Also not everyone is prone to speak up, most ex-members want to forget and sweep under the carpet the dust they have seen.
I choose to speak not because it is better, but because I believe in the power of telling your story.

This coming June 2007 I will be speaking in the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) in Bruxelles, exposing for the first time to the academic world the methods and beliefs of Miracle of love.

About ICSA. Founded in 1979, is the leading professional organization concerned about psychological manipulation and abusive relationships, especially as they manifest in the interaction of individuals with cults, new religious movements, and related groups.


Links for this article:
ICSA conference in Bruxelles
Characteristics Associated with Cultic Groups .Cult checklist
Leaving a cult
RickRoss on Miracle of love
Miracle of love language manipulation

See also:
The goose is out - first article by me, posted on the Rick Ross website
A warning on Miracle of Love
Sarlo's Guru Ratings on Kalindi and MoL