The Manson Family. Jim Jones. Rajneeshpuram. Heaven's Gate. Scientology. The Unification Church. Branch Davidians. Nxivm. Bikram hot yoga. MAGA.
You've probably heard of one or more of these infamous cults. Each of them has been in the news for various nefarious reasons, and several have been the subject of one or more documentaries or docudramas. Each also fits at least the base definition of "cult," which is "a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object." Other definitions are...less forgiving.
Many cults, however, have never made the news, likely because none of their members ever committed a serious crime such as murder, rape, sex abuse, polygamy, kidnapping, extortion, or insurrection.
One such cult was the Emissaries of Divine Light, or EDL. The Wikipedia description of EDL reads, "An intentional community initiated by Lloyd Arthur Meeker in 1932. The foundational premise of the network is that human beings' true qualities can only be known as they are expressed in practical daily living." Unlike most of the other cults mentioned above, EDL is still active, albeit in a new incarnation. Its current vision statement begins, "Our vision is of humanity becoming a sun—for all human beings to become on the outside what we already are on the inside: a radiant, individualized aspect of the reality of the Divine."
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| EDL founder Lloyd Arthur Meeker, aka "Uranda" |
Pretty benign, right? And as much as I'd like to offer a contrary perspective, I'd have to say that EDL was, in fact, pretty benign. Or at least I thought so then.
I was involved with EDL for several years. And as far as I know, no one in the cult ever committed murder, rape, polygamy, kidnapping, extortion, or insurrection. This is not to say, of course, that they never committed the occasional garden-variety transgression, like human beings are wont to do—within or without a cult (more on that later). But to my knowledge, no one in EDL ever committed a serious crime.
I was first introduced to EDL by a friend, who joined the cult in his senior year of college, around 1974. I don't think he knew at the time that it was a cult, or that it had the potential of becoming one; to him, I believe it was just a cadre of smart, kind, generous people with a different take on spirituality than the one he and I grew up with (mostly traditional Protestantism). Back then, it was common practice for such cults to recruit on college campuses, typically via intimate "sales" presentations advertised on flyers, and that's how EDL found my friend.
At first I didn't pay much attention to what was happening with my friend and EDL; I was too busy navigating my own freshman year in college, going to classes full time, working off campus five hours a day, playing in three bands, and, um, socializing. But thanks to my friend's mom, who was growing increasingly concerned with my friend's burgeoning interest in EDL, I was unable to keep his activities entirely off my radar. Even then, I just assumed my friend knew what he was doing—he was no dummy—and that his mom was maybe overreacting just a bit.
As I became more aware of my friend's involvement in EDL and his mom's concomitant concern, I became intrigued. What was this organization all about? Was it a cult? Who was its leader? Why was my friend interested in it? At the time, I was a fledgling staff writer for the college newspaper, so naturally I began to wonder if EDL merited an article. Investigative journalism!
I asked the managing editor if he thought an article about EDL would appeal to our readers. He said yes. So I started doing some background research on the organization, consisting mostly of perusing the few written materials I somehow managed to get my hands on. Sensing that this wouldn't be nearly enough to even begin composing an exposé, I decided to ask my friend if I could visit the communal house where the local EDL chapter held its meetings. After conferring with what I assumed was the head of the house, he said yes...on the condition that I attend a meeting, not just mingle casually with the residents.
So I attended a meeting. And it was...kind of nice. From my vastly limited 18-year-old perspective, the tone seemed genuinely spiritual, and the people both intelligent and kind. I didn't see, hear, nor feel any of the causes for concern that my friend's mom harbored. My friend was not in any danger that I could detect.
And yet...I couldn't keep my skeptical brain from thinking that something had to be wrong. There had to be something awry with this apparently harmless organization and its superficially altruistic doctrines and practices. Was it the communal aspect? Was it the fact that most of its adherents were young, like my friend? Was there something about the organization's financial practices? I decided to do a bit more digging and see if I could find out.
So I asked my friend for the house head's—or "focalizer's"—phone number, which he was happy to provide, and gave him a call. It was a terse conversation. After I briefed him on who I was, the name of my "employer" (the Pioneer Log), and what I was looking for, he paused for a moment, took a breath, and said, "While I appreciate your interest in who we are and what we do, it sounds like what you're after is an exposé, and I just don't want to go there."
I couldn't argue with him; I was planning to do an exposé. And judging by the way the guy shut me down, there likely was something to expose. However, because I had virtually zero spare time and energy to devote to such an in-depth project, and because anything I wrote would inevitably affect my friend, I decided against pursuing the story.
Flash forward a few years. My friend and I are both out of college and working in the "real world." I'm living alone in an apartment. He, however, is still living in an EDL commune. And my dad, whose dad and mom were both ordained Christian ministers and who himself earned a degree in theology from Texas Christian University, has started attending EDL services. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?
My interest in EDL is re-piqued. What is it about EDL that appeals to my friend and my dad, both of whom I regarded as intelligent people and critical thinkers? Is EDL's approach to spirituality a useful or helpful one? Could it be useful or helpful to me?
Partly to satisfy my own nagging curiosity, partly to fill both a spiritual and social void in my life (I was living alone for the first time and feeling a little...lonely), I decided to start attending an occasional EDL service—some with my dad—at my friend's commune. However, as an inveterate skeptic, I was determined to remain on the periphery of this relatively unknown and unproven quantity. I would not become a card-carrying member.
The services consisted mostly of the house focalizer delivering a kind of extemporaneous sermon to attendees, who sat in folding chairs in a circle. The sermons themselves were insightful, thought-provoking, pertinent, and...vaguely unsettling. I couldn't quite put my finger on what, exactly, was unsettling about them, but something wasn't right. It would be a few years before I learned what it was.
Perhaps the most interesting part of an EDL service was something they called an "attunement," which is a mostly no-touch variation on the traditional Judeo-Christian "laying on of hands." In this case, the focalizer positioned his or her hands on an attendee's shoulders, then slowly turned and raised the hands to just next to the subject's ears, then raised the hands to just above the subject's head, and finally placed his/her hands on the subject's shoulders again and squeezed gently, to let the subject know the attunement was over. The duration of each attunement was just a few minutes, and only those who requested one received one, so only a few attendees received one during any given service. Otherwise, the services would have doubled in length.
I never experienced anything particularly memorable during these attunements, except for pleasant sensations of warmth and electricity. However, on one occasion I received a much longer individual attunement, separate from the regular service, that resulted in my having an out-of body experience. I described this experience years later in my master's thesis on "contemporary mystical experiences":
I sat in a recliner, not reclined but straight up, feet flat on the floor, hands on knees, eyes closed. Ron [a pseudonym] stood silently behind me, his hands resting lightly on my shoulders. We remained in this position for perhaps two minutes, and then Ron removed his hands from my shoulders and slowly began to move them upward, following the contour of my neck, maintaining a distance of an inch or so from my skin. I could feel the warmth of his hands and was aware of his breathing—whether I felt it or heard it, I don't recall. My own breathing had slowed considerably, and my body was becoming increasingly relaxed. My thinking also was slowing and relaxing, becoming increasingly focused on my physical being.
Ron continued to move his hands up my neck and around my head, and when he finally reached the top of my head, he paused for a minute or so, holding his hands steady just above my hair. Now, perhaps because of the insulating quality of my hair, I could feel not the warmth of his hands but instead a kind of energy emanating from them, and this was my last awareness of Ron's presence before I slipped into a state I can only attempt to describe.
I was no longer in my body, but I was floating, weightless, above myself, against the ceiling. I was looking down and could see my body in the chair, with Ron standing beside me. I felt nothing and knew nothing but an amazing contentment, a sensation of absolute perfection. There was no anxiety, no apprehension, no fear—only awe. Thee was no doubt of my worthiness, no question of the purpose of my existence. I just was, and just being was enough.
I didn't now whether the experience lasted a fraction of a second or several minutes, because time had disappeared (a common experience during mystical experiences, I later learned). I was aware of eventually returning to my body, but even after I returned, the experience was not quite over. I felt a oneness with the universe that included my physical being, rather than excluding it as I had expected. I must have thought I could be one with the universe only spiritually, that my body was somehow uninvited—that I was a kind of clumsy, grotesque vehicle necessary only for carrying me to the party ("It's ugly, but it gets me there"). Now I felt that my body was not just a vehicle but a mate, an equal and integral part of my being. Even though my spirit could leave my body, it could not reach its ultimate destination without my body. This analysis is entirely retrospective; during the experience I was aware only of the sensations of warmth and energy from Ron's hands, and of my own unified spiritual and physical presence.
The attunement lasted about an hour, and Ron concluded it by placing his hands again on my shoulders and squeezing gently. I came out of my "trance" slowly and somewhat reluctantly; it had been a nice vacation. As I regained my senses, I gradually became conscious of what I had experienced during the attunement, and following a brief recapitulation with Ron, decided to try describing it in writing. This is the result:
I Was One
I was one
with
the uni-
verse.
This poem, like the narrative preceding it, was a vain effort. The words barely reveal the outline of the shadow of the experience itself, and disclose nothing of the residual feelings. I have experienced similar frustration when trying to describe it orally. Even when sharing my story with someone who has "been there," I find the experience compromised by words. I would not try to describe the experience at all except for the understanding I seem to gain in the process.
Fast-forward a few more years. I'm married to my first wife, and we attend EDL services together at a commune in rural Oregon called The Farm. The head of the Oregon chapter of EDL lives there and conducts the services. He seems like a genuinely nice guy. My friend has moved to an EDL commune in Washington, but my dad still attends some services here. In addition to the in-person services, my wife and I are on the EDL mailing list, and we receive paper copies of each week's international sermon, delivered extemporaneously by Bishop Martin Cecil in a service at Sunrise Ranch, EDL's headquarters in Loveland, Colorado. We are expected to respond in writing to each mailing, and we are strongly encouraged to include a check for a minimum of $10 with our response. "Encouraged" is the operative word here; if donations had been required I would've bailed on EDL in a heartbeat, despite feeling I was getting something worthwhile from the services and sermons.
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| Bishop Martin Cecil |
So yeah, still not a card-carrying member.
About a year later, however, I came perilously close to becoming a member—by attending a thing called One-Week Class, at an EDL commune in Vancouver, BC. Tuition was something like $450, which covered room and board plus "class," which consisted of twice-daily EDL catechisms (similar to standard EDL services, but with a para-educational slant). In addition, participants were expected to contribute to the household workload, and for me that meant helping to re-roof the house. Yep: working up high on a pitched roof as an unpaid, semiskilled laborer (I had previously helped re-roof two other houses)—sans license, bonding, or insurance.
Even though I found myself helping to install a roof for free and easily could have gotten hurt or killed doing it, that wasn't what finally turned my head around. It was the way the house leaders required women to wear skirts and work in the kitchen (while men had to wear pants and work on the roof); the insulting, micro-aggressive tactics they used to compel compliance; the nonblinking, pseudo-beatific gaze of some adherents; the desperately concealed yet still obvious mental health issues of a few longtime members; and, yes, the organization's questionable financial practices. It wasn't so much that I felt the $450 tuition fee was unreasonable; it was that there was no accountability or transparency for how any of the money they took in—from people like me or those who lived in the communes—was used.
In addition, I couldn't help feeling that there was something else, something maybe a little creepy, going on behind closed doors. Maybe those mental health issues I mentioned had something to do with it? As I learned later, from accounts provided by my friend and others after they left the cult, those feelings unfortunately were not unfounded.
About a year after attending one-week class, I found myself back in college, working toward a secondary English teaching certification. Among the few electives I enrolled in was a fascinating course on Utopias. The course required a lot of reading and writing, and one of the books I read and reported on was Dianetics, by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. The gist of my report was that both the book and the "religion" it spawned were massive scams, and that adherents of Scientology had to be among the most gullible people on Earth. Having myself been involved peripherally in a cult for a number of years, the irony of my bias was not entirely lost on me.
Another assignment required us to conduct research on a Utopian or paraUtopian organization and present our findings to the class. I chose EDL, and interviewed several members as part of my research. Because I personally liked the people I knew in EDL and sincerely appreciated the graciousness of those I interviewed, I asked them what real investigative journalists would consider softball questions, such as, "How did you learn about EDL? What attracted you to it? How long have you been involved? What do you like/dislike about it? Describe EDL in a nutshell."
In retrospect, I should have at least asked, "Do you consider EDL a cult? Why or why not?" But I didn't, and the resulting presentation, unlike my report on Scientology, was commensurately...soft-hitting.
Interestingly, my professor liked my presentation just fine. And while the class followup discussions on other presentations were rife with critical analyses of the "Utopia" in question, the response to my presentation on EDL ranged from politely indifferent to curious. The professor's summation of the discussion amounted to his furrowing his brow, scratching his head, and muttering, "I'll have to look into this group further." I couldn't discern whether he was stumped by EDL's apparent innocuousness or by its stealth—its ability to keep its inherently nefarious cultish activities off the radar.
I never heard whether the professor looked into the group further, but at this point I had looked into it enough to know it wasn't for me. Still, I remained on good terms with some of its members (one of whom I even worked for a few times as a house painter), and loosely tracked my friend's continued involvement, despite his mother's continued vehement objections. My dad, meanwhile, lost interest in EDL rather abruptly when the Oregon faction put on a wine-tasting fundraiser dubbed "Wine Extravaganza." Dad was inexplicably annoyed by the word "Extravaganza," which I guess was too...extravagant for him? He wasn't opposed to wine or wine tastings, a far as I knew, but he did harbor a semi-moralistic antipathy toward alcohol in general (and the word "extravaganza" in particular, apparently). So he suddenly quit going to meetings, cold turkey, and never looked back.
This image and text came to me in a dream
during the time I was composing this post.
It seemed fitting to include here.
