5: Ben Shenton & The Family

Dave speaks with Ben Shenton about his upbringing in Australia's most notorious cult, The Family, founded by Anne Hamilton-Byrne, who claimed to be a Christ figure. Ben reflects on the influences that shaped Anne and her cult, as well as his experiences both in and after the cult. Ben's world was turned upside down at 15 years of age when police raided their home in 1987, bringing to light an illegal adoption scheme which forced the children to reckon with their past and future.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Hi, I'm Dave Mullins. Welcome to Aftercult, a podcast of interviews with former cult members by a former cult member. My guest today is Ben Shenton, who was raised inside perhaps Australia's most well-known cult, the family, run by Anne Hamilton Byrne, who claimed to be a Christ figure, like many other cult leaders. Anna illegally adopted many children, including Ben, claiming them as her own. Many of the children's biological parents were in the sect, though the children were unaware of their true parentage until a police raid in 1987. Ben was just 15 years old at the time of the raid. Despite knowing about this cult for a long time, I was surprised to learn that it shares significant traditional influences with my own cult, the Gnostic movement, in the form of Helena Blavatsky's theosophy. We also touch on Anne's connection with Swami Mukhtananda's Siddha Yoga School. It was also interesting to chat to an ex-cult member who is Christian, rather than atheistic like myself, with both of us looking at our experiences through very different lenses and yet seeing a lot of the same things. If you're interested in learning more about the family, I highly recommend the documentary film from 2016, simply titled The Family by Rosie Jones. But for now, let's chat to Ben.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Ben, welcome. Thanks so much for joining me. And Dave, thanks for the invitation. It was great to get the email and get a bit about your past and find some synergy there, I think. So I'm looking forward to this discussion. I hope it helps all the listeners. And thank you, everyone, for listening.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Indeed, indeed. I mean, I was I was quite amazed. I had no idea that our respective cults, I think we're both comfortable calling our groups cults, that our respective cults share an ideological tradition in a way, which I did not realize.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Yes. And what's interesting, Dave, is I think a lot of people who were part of the family, one of the more notorious Australian cults, would probably not know that connection directly back to theosophy. But what was fascinating is my biological father, according to my biological mother, told me that he was involved in theosophy over in England, was in Sydney, met a another lady, or Dette, I think her name was, and they both connected with Anne, Hamilton Byrne, who was the leader of the cult, and very quickly joined it and stayed with it for a long time. So their introduction into the cult was theosophy. So yes, when when we began to talk, I'm like, wow, this is this is interesting.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Yeah, I mean, and so to give our listeners an idea, because a lot of people will be familiar with the family. I think a lot of people are familiar with it when I bring up the photos that were in the news. So I mentioned the family, and people say, Oh, I think I've heard of that. And I say, Well, do you remember the photos of all the kids with bleach blonde hairs all dressed sort of the same way? And everyone goes, Yes, I do remember. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so this was, I'll give my understanding of it. You tell me if I've got anything wrong, but it's something that was started in the 60s by Ann Hamilton Byrne, who was a yoga instructor, who eventually went on in the 70s to adopt children in not such legal ways. A little bit of a scam that was going on. She was raising these children, pretending they were her own, telling the children that she was their mother biologically, uh, and was pushing a doomsday philosophy. And at some point in the 80s, there was a police raid that saw uh the police show up at the property and essentially break the system down, take the children into safety. And this is when the news started coming out about what was going on and what Anne was up to and so forth. Is that a decent summary?

SPEAKER_00 3:50

That is a very good Google out view of what happened, yeah. And and the doomsday component was around the thought of the age of Aquarius, connecting back to the theosophy thought. We heard that said often. And the thought in the 60s, which anyone who was going through that, it was nuclear warfare. And you've got the Bay of Pigs, you've got the Russians and the Americans arming themselves to the teeth with nuclear armaments, and the fear that at any moment there would be this nuclear holocaust. And students, school kids were told if there's a nuclear holocaust, you hide under the desk, you do this, you do that. So there was a fertile ground for this, and Anne was able to very quickly connect it to that and just say, when that happens, I'm bringing up a group of children that will be specially picked. God will guide me as to who they are, when they will be produced, what families they'll be from. Now she said, yes, it was a complete in-cult scam from doctors, lawyers, the persons that adopted them, uh, social workers, cult members that handed them over, as was my case. And the plan was that, yeah, when Euchar Holocaust wiped out the majority of the world, we would be the great new good that would help start this new world that God had directed her to. When we say God, we're speaking in a theosophical world, the thought that the Christ consciousness that she was reincarnated down into.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

And that was Anne's that was Anne's whole thing. That was the truth.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

She was she was the incarnation of Christ, right? She was the Christ spirit that had come down that has come down on many occasions, which is the claim of theosophy, and among many other, going back to Blatsky and others. So she began to do the study of where this came from.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

Yeah, and it is, and theosophy, you know, theosophy is very interesting because um I mean I think it started in the late 19th century, maybe 1875-ish, I want to say. Yep. And Helena Blavatsky, who founded this movement from Russia, sort of a mysterious history, travels over to, I think she travels to the UK, she travels to the US, and there's a lot of Tibet, yes. Yeah, and there's a lot of interest in this sort of worldview that she has and this spiritualism that she professes that people really get engaged with. And I think this is a sign of the times. And a lot of people who are quite high standing in society take interest in this stuff. Plenty of lawyers, doctors, military men are getting involved. They have an interest in this sort of left of field, esoteric, occult-like view of spirituality, of religion. You know, what is actually going on? Who are these spiritual figures that Plavatsky is talking about that have been living for a millennia, walking the earth? It's there's something that people gravitate towards during that time. And even though today there's there's less of that, it was really quite a big deal back in the day for society, what she was talking about.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Absolutely, and the thought of the great white brotherhood. So that's these spiritual beings that exist outside of the world we live in that impinge upon the world we're in. So the thought, and this this is, I think, what Western society's done is it's taken the two layers that there is a spiritual world somewhere out there, and then there's the physical, and the two don't connect. There is no connection between them. What a lot of the world outside of the judo Christian view is is there actually is this second, there's three layers, and there's a layer in between where there's a connection between the spiritual world and the physical world, and you can reach into that. So she taps into that thought. And so other parts of the world would say the witch doctor, the sharan. It would be the pig oil that sits in the corner over in Africa, warding off spirits. It's this awareness that there are spiritual forces at work that impinge upon us. I know there's a spiritual component, I know there's more than just the here and now. What is that? Let's try and understand that. Let's see, let's interact, let's see what it is. And so we're all spiritual, I would say there's a God-shaped vacuum in all of us. It's the search of what is that, and then putting a belief system around that to define and then explain the world we're in. How do I explain it? How do I explain things that don't seem to have a scientific explanation that I can I can't measure it, yet there's stuff going on. Yeah. So it bleeds into that.

SPEAKER_01 8:12

Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is definitely uh rings true for me in terms of what got me involved in the Gnostic movement with Belzeboob, as he called himself, Mark Pritchard is his his real name, who claimed to be, you know, incarnation of a Christ-like entity uh under the name Belzeboob, as we all probably know is a name that's used for the devil, colloquially. And he claimed to be a fallen angel who had reawakened and was now, you know, on the side of good and light. And that's how he uh was referred to. And the whole Gnostic movement philosophy, which I think I mentioned before, goes back to sort of even the late 40s, I think, but the 50s and 60s in Colombia, in Mexico, it's so clearly inspired by theosophical teachings, as well as other teachers like Gurdjieff was very influential on the Gnostic movement. And the pseudoscience is really what drew me in when I was, you know, 18, 19 and first coming across these teachings. The notion that, you know, hell, for example, was was not just some sort of abstract place, but it was a clear set of infra-dimensions that existed that we could experience, just as there were supra-dimensions that we could experience, which refer to heaven. Yeah. The fact that there are that human beings can incarnate this Christ-like presence or capacity and can live forever. And when you do buy into that philosophy, obviously it happens slowly when you join it like I did as an adult, but you gradually get to a point where, I mean, I I don't know if I ever believed this 100%, but I believed it enough. I it got to a point where I was like, yeah, I think there's something to this. Maybe this guy is, you know, really this walking spiritual figure who has the truth. And again, this is a movement that suggested no one else did. You know, he was the one who had the truth. But it was fascinating in the sense that when I look back at it, I think it was that pseudoscience, that theosophical base. You know, there was a lot of work that went into that. Helena Bolvatsky poured hours and hours into creating this philosophy, wrote enormous books, um, really developed a great code base, yes, so to speak, for new religious movements or cults, which you can sort of pick up and run with and add your own spin to. And I think that's often what is happening with these more new age sort of cult-like groups.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

And I call it the occult. So Helen Bleckey, and I hope I'm saying her surname correctly. Blavatsky. Blavatsky. Okay, so so she pulled on stuff that was from thousands of years before in first, second, and third John in the Bible. They're already beginning to deal with the issues of Gnosticism. So as soon as Christ came, you had Antichrist immediately opposing it, saying the the flesh is wicked, nothing can dwell in the flesh. There's a spirit, there's a Christ spirit. So begin immediately speaking to that. So the thought taking away the worship from Christ and directing it to another being is always what's been sought after. It's what the devil did with Jesus was very much worship me. So giving a frame of reference to be able to do that and a belief, and then inserting it with spiritual power. Not everything that's spiritual is good. Yeah. And that's what we're dealing with here. But when you begin to see supernatural things and someone has a spiritual experience, they begin to have a, and that's why I began to dig into what was the philosophy behind what Anne came up with that brought people in that were intellectual that were smart, that were competent. There is, as you said, absolutely, there's a seedbed of ideology. Yeah. And it's very easy to be deceived. My mother very much dealing with her over the years the same to her mum, just because you had a spiritual experience doesn't mean it's God. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

I mean it's very easy. Yeah, and and let's go back to the beginning of this group. So Anne Hamilton Byrne struck me, and I don't know obviously, but just from the footage I've seen and the things I've read, seems to be someone who really thought she was spiritually important. And this is a question that I have about Mark Pritchard, who ran my group, is I can't tell how much he believed his own myth and how much he was manipulating us. And I think it was actually a mix of the two. Spot on. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

I think going back and digging into Lann's past, and I have to thank Rosie Jones, Chris Johnson, and many others that did so. Rosie Jones, who's the editor and also did a lot of the research into what people would know, as you said, the the photos, the videos she put together, a three-part series, the ABC picked up, and Chris Johnson, her, wrote a book. So they they did a lot of the analysis that separated what Anne said compared to what the document said. And so what was very interesting, and I knew part of this anyway, so it made sense to me, was that Anne's history was her mother was involved in the occultic stuff. Um she was communicating with spirits. She set her hair on fire. I mean, she was in mental hospitals.

SPEAKER_01 13:16

That's right, she was diagnosed with uh some sort of schizophrenic disorder. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

So Anne claimed, which I think was correct, she was directly communicating with sciences, with spiritual beings, able to do this. So Anne flowed with that.

SPEAKER_02 13:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

And it's interesting, all this stuff's hereditary growing up around it. So think of this as a young girl, mum's away in mental asylums. Her dad had left the army, he was itinerant, he was on the run from the military police, barely around. She went along to school, boarding school, so separated from parents, parents not to go back to, and so wanted to control her environment. So she's the perfect candidate for someone looking for something bigger than herself to control her world.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

Yeah, interesting.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

And and found in the 60s, so she connected herself with Margaret Sergman, I think it is, who was a proper yoga teacher, and connected herself with that and very quickly attacked into spiritual power. So you meditate, you involve yourself with a lot of uh substances. So the word of God speaks about witchcraft, is uses the word pharmacia, pharmacy, and a lot of the occultic use substances to give people experiences and dialed into that, used it, and was tapping into the supernatural. I had some experiences which are covered in my book, which are very much that. So she sought power, she connected herself with an ideology and stole bits and pieces from people's stories, but also wielded spiritual power. And Margaret separated herself from Ann Almogen Byrne when she had an altercation with one of the other yoga disciples, muttered a curse that he wouldn't be there the next day and he wasn't, and she went, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, no, not happening, and separated her ways very quickly, saying, That's not what I'm of, and was, and wielded spiritual power to get her away. Right. So I I think she saw power available, she meditated all the time. She wielded a force that controlled people, she cursed people and it had effect on them. And then the ideology helped her to wield that power. So whether she believed she was a reincarnation of Christ or not, I don't know. But she definitely wanted a world that she could control and use spiritual power to do it.

SPEAKER_01 15:32

Yeah, okay. I'm very interested in the fact that she started this group with the help of Raina Johnson, who was a published physicist who was working on the electromagnetic spectrum. He worked at the University of Melbourne for 30 years. Uh, it looks like it was a long time.

SPEAKER_02 15:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

And she hunted him down by the looks of it at Melbourne University for one reason or another. I think he had started publishing books on mystical subjects, uh, which the uni got uncomfortable about, and he eventually retired from that position. And that transitioned him into, well, why don't I hang out with Anne? And he then sort of accepted her as his spiritual master, is the impression I get.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

Yes. And there are PDF files out there that his diodes that do a very good job of unpacking that.

SPEAKER_02 16:20

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

Um, and so what you've once again a high-level view, and I don't say it's inaccurate, Dave, but but yes. So originally from London at the University of London, came over interested in the paranormal, and Anne's husband at that time was working as his gardener. Oh, okay. Is this Bill? No. No, no, this is this is a former husband. She married Bill in 77. This was one of the early ones. I think she was married three times. Right. So she got wind of him, and you imagine she's on this role, and she tapped into the supernatural, and I believe was given supernatural revelation, understanding of some future things, as well as you've heard about him make stuff happen. So you you believe she had access to that. Absolutely. I she managed to get into my mind at times. Right, right. She walked into his office in 1964, I think it was. He's about to take a trip over to India, and she warned him his wife would end up with serious illness, and she did. She got dysentery. Now, it's a fair call in the 60s with health issues, that's probably going to happen anyway. The probability, yeah. Yeah. But she also remembered wielded power to bring stuff on people, causing someone to fall ill. Her daughter, as we tracked out as well, had an accident where she was major trauma, broken bones, broken neck, and within three days, she's up in walking, functioning, leaving the hospital. And that convinced Rainer Johnson, according to his diaries, that he'd met an incredible pat spiritual power. So this convinced him. So your fascination with Rainer Johnson is 100% accurate. It's the second individual that joins with the credibility that validates the individual. And you couldn't have picked a more influential person who was highly respected than Dr. Rainer Carey Johnson, Dean of Queen's College at the Melbourne University. Had just had people that followed him, deeply respected people came for talks he gave on these issues. And to his dying day, he was her greatest ally, supporter that was completely convinced that she was who she claimed to be. And whenever there was doubt, when it came publicly, when it came police, when it came media, out would be the respected Dr. Radaker Johnson, who it's interesting, died no more than probably four months before the cult stores got blown off.

SPEAKER_01 18:42

Oh, right.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

Yeah, that is I think he died in May, and August was when the place was made.

SPEAKER_01 18:48

Right. I mean, it's fascinating to me to hear how much people believed in her. You know, I mean, from the outside, you look at it, and I'm sure a lot of people listening will just find it hard to imagine how it's possible to to buy into that sort of myth that she was pushing. But this is exactly what happens. And it is, it can be hard to understand after the fact when you look back, is like, well, how did I get how did I get so swept up in that? In retrospect, and that's what brings the shame about talking about it's like, what the hell was I doing? Um but you know, this is a possibility in our minds to believe in something that at another point in our life we may think is crazy.

SPEAKER_00 19:25

And Dave, something that's healthy is we can be sincere, it's sincerely wrong. Yeah. So the shame should mean an individual with someone looking into something, going, that seems convincing. When I go into that sound bubble, when I close off other voices, when the echo room is only repeating that back to me, I have experiences that seem to validate it. So what do we look for to love and be love for meaningful relationships and belong to something bigger than us? When you can create a group of people that allow that, that put those needs satisfy them, and then add on some supernatural experiences, it's intervalidate it. It's it creates an environment where you believe in something and it's not just spiritual. You've heard of people that believe in a political party and they're shocked that the opposition got in, going, How is that possible? Everyone was telling me we'd get in. The polls, the media, the the news, they're shocked. And then they realize, hang on, I've been listening to a sound bubble. Yeah, I've been in this world where I haven't gone and got extra information that's given me reality. So when it's healthy, you can change your mind on something and you should be able to, but without having to be deprogrammed. That's what you believe in allows you to be able to transition and change minds and change opinions and mature, where you can leave that without having to then get your money back, get your family back, get your sanity back, rebuild your life. You know it's a cult and that has to happen.

SPEAKER_02 20:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

And I mean, that brings me to your childhood. And of course, you grew up in this until you were 15. So as far as you knew, this was just normal life. Yeah. As far back as you can remember, until you were 15, which is an enormous amount of time and very critical years, of course. Yes. That and I get the impression that it wasn't until the police raided the property and you were removed from the house that you started going, oh, hang on, maybe everything I've experienced in my whole life is not quite right.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

So, yes, at that time, that was the point where the light started to turn on. But what had really happened, and this I think was the challenge Anne had, how do you take you you bring up a plant inside a glasshouse? How do you then take it out into the world and make sure it doesn't die? It has to be this incremental slow process. And so she was teaching us we had access to history. Bit by bit, the the light shone into the prison walls, and you're making up your mind. We weren't told to be dumb. We had to think, we were taught critical thinking and all of that. So we called the plan. To grow up in the concentration camp. Yeah. We read history, we understood that. There were pieces of newspapers that were missing. There were programs on the radio that were turned off. We saw censorship on a daily basis. So when I finally got removed, it wasn't difficult for that which I was not allowed to entertain to suddenly become front and center. And I very quickly made up my mind by joining the DOS that Anna was afford.

SPEAKER_01 22:25

Yeah, okay. Did you ever but did you ever buy into the ideology in any strong way? Or because I imagine as a kid, you you, you know, I I didn't really pay much attention to what my parents were teaching me. It was a very different environment, obviously. But I'm curious, I mean, some of you probably absorbed it more than others, I'm guessing.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

And yeah, it's spot on, David. And so the biggest influence we had is Anne Hamlet and Byrne tried to take over city yoga. City yoga.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

Swami Mukten Underschool.

SPEAKER_00 22:52

She made a huge play. So you go back into the late 70s, early 80s. I think he passed away in 1982 for maybe from a heart attack. She made a play probably from the mid-70s. So it's probably a good six to eight years there, where we went down to his ashram in Gore Street in Fitzroy. Some of the girls went over to Hawaii where his ashram he traveled the world. She bought a place right near his ashram in Folsburg in upper New York State. There were Swamis from the city yoga that visited us and many defected to her. So we listened to his tapes, we listened to so much of his ideology. I probably believed in his stuff that was not far misaligned to what she claimed to be more than hers. I hadn't got to the point where I began to dial into that she was the Christ. I still saw her as mum. Right. I knew what she believed in, I knew what she taught, but I hadn't taken it on board as my ideology. Right. I was more believed in reincarnation. I was still making up my mind. At 14, I think it's safe to say that's when you transition from parents, they've been your world, everything they believe in is what you believe in, into what do I believe. Yeah. Um and that probably, yes, I was 15. I thought I was 14. I was still in the process of deciding what was I going to believe. And I think that helped me. I think probably because of my age, it helped me. Whereas one of the other girls, Sarah Hamilton Byrne, uh, one of the girls who wrote the book Unseen Unheard Unknown, Sarah Moore. I was her actual biological surname, ended up probably believing in this more than others. She eventually became a Buddhist. She called it Swami Mukhtananda.

SPEAKER_02 24:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

It took a process which was very much played in the media with some of the interviews. Uh, so she went through a process of attempting reconciliation, resolving it, working through it. So it's had the gambit from total rejection into those that continued, in a sense, to revive around her orbit.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

Yeah, yeah. You know, another thing that interested me is that Anne got off quite lightly, really. I mean, she there was some minor fine for forgery or something around the uh some sort of document. Um, it really wasn't much of anything, despite it going through the courts. And it, you know, it's quite fascinating because, you know, you were all essentially raised under false pretenses with this woman who was pushing an ideology. As I understand it, there was physical abuse on a regular basis. You were isolated from the world. She was using LSD to encourage people to have spiritual experiences that saw her as this Christ figure, yes. Um, which is exactly what Charles Manson was doing. Um, very simple thing. So sort of getting people high and then creating this show and pushing this ideology on them when they're high. And LSD is a very powerful drug. I've I've done it a fair bit. It was kind of something I was doing a lot before I joined my group. And um it provoked what I thought at the time was an out-of-body experience, but was probably just a very lucid dream that changed my life. And then I came back to Sydney. We'd been in Byron Bay, a classic 90s sort of hippie experience. Came back to Sydney. I saw this poster for a free talk on out-of-body experiences, and I was like, well, that's exactly what I should be going to see. Yeah. And, you know, I was very idolistic. You know, I was parting a lot, uh, you know, multicolored dreads and all the rest of it. I was I was very open-minded. I really wasn't thinking critically about things, and I liked that. I wanted to be open to anything, you know, and I think that can be a really healthy attitude to have as a young person. Yes. Uh, it can get you into trouble, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad attitude to have. But it did get me involved. And I have an interest in psychedelics now from a therapeutic perspective. You know, there's a lot of research coming out of Monash in particular, using psilocybin to treat treatment-resistant anxiety disorders, which uh have some quite profound outcomes. So I think psychedelics are a somewhat neutral drug, but the effect they have on people can range from quite horrid to extremely beautiful and transcendent. And we know that psychedelics kind of cause us to learn things very quickly under the experience in the brain. So it amplifies a certain learning. So if you're being taught something that's harmful, then LSD is going to really embed that a little more than it would if it weren't for that drug. Yeah. Um, but I'm very curious about your experience. Um, I don't know if you were subject to this. I know some of the kids were, but others weren't. I think there was an age difference.

SPEAKER_00 27:32

Yes, there was. So there was an age component, 16 or 14, for female or male. Let me just take a step back because you've you've said some fascinating things in there, because we've got different perspectives on this.

SPEAKER_02 27:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

So the 60s brought about, if you go and track LSD, go through where it came from, what it was, I mean, some have connected to CIA, the use of because it's powerful. It has the impact I said at the beginning that a lot of occultish groups use drugs. Uh the reason they use it, it alters the state of consciousness and allows the supernatural to kick in. And people can have supernatural experiences that aren't that are definitely meeting spiritual guides and stuff happening. Drugs can help that to happen, as well as, as you said, it it changes the brain, how it functions, how it perceives things. So in the early 60s, Anne connected to a very interesting program being run in Victoria. And two doctors, Dr. Mackay, John McKay, and Dr. Whitaker.

SPEAKER_01 28:38

Yes, I think I read a bit about maybe Harry Whitaker or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 28:40

Yeah. Yeah, that's that sounds right. Howard Whitaker. Howard Whittaker. That's it, thank you. Howard Whitaker. So Howard Whittaker. So what was interesting with him is he was actually given the oversight over the use of LSD clinically, so that it could help with exactly what we've spoken of. They saw great possibility there to use it to help people with major blockages, major issues, uh the oversight that was supposed to be done, which was handed to this man who Anne connected herself to, and his wife at that time, Elizabeth Whitaker, was a cult member heavily, okay, right into it. So the supply lines went back to Switzerland where it came from, and she got access to it, and they would administer ampules of this stuff to people. So heavy abuse. If you do it to teenagers, I would say it's it's criminal. Yeah. 100% criminal.

SPEAKER_01 29:34

And just to just to interject, this this was a a psychiatric hosp hospital that was used in New Haven, that was that was using uh these substances to in experimental ways or in research ways or treatment capacities. But there were members, including Howard and Elizabeth Whitaker, who were involved in the cult and would take advantage of their position to do Anne's bidding, provide these drugs to members to further her goals of making everyone believe that she was who she said she was. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 30:05

And New Haven, the matron in charge of that, uh, Villemick, was a cult member as well. So Anne had this place stitched up. She used it to put people she didn't like into it, banish them to it. It's where she both, yeah, both of these people practiced. Bill Hamilton Burns' first wife, Mayburne, was actually sent there for help and guidance and stuff. So it was horrendous stuff when that and the winkel in all of this, New Haven was also used by Ronald Conway, a prominent Catholic psychologist, who used the hospital to administer LSD to potential Catholic priests, and you can track his story down. Wow. In The Great Australian Stupa, an interpretation of the Australian way of life, it's mentioned, and then broken rights, Ronald Conway, the celebrate psychologist, uh who helped screen Catholic trainees. You can pull that out of the broken rights stuff and some interesting stuff went on. Wow, that's fascinating. So Anne Anne would set herself up with it. So um I've seen the effects of it on people. Um, I've stayed clear of it, but I'm not saying that they're done correctly under the right environment and the right oversight. It was used in the 60s with it with supposed right oversight, which got abused.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

Yeah, and it was a fairly, you know, it was very new back then and um not regulated at all. You know, it's flying around, people are experimenting with it, whereas now I think there's a a much clearer idea of its potential and what it did. Obviously, even in scientific research, it wasn't touched for for decades because it sort of got a bit out of control. I think somewhere in the 70s or 80s, it was kind of blacklisted, and now we're back to it, looking at its possible advantages in a psychiatric capacity. But yeah, back then I can imagine it being abused in this capacity in the way Anne did quite easily.

SPEAKER_00 31:53

Yes. Yeah. And think of it, the government attempted to put a well-respected psychiatrist to give oversight. Yeah. So the government did try and do the right thing. And as soon as Four Corners got with this, Howard Whitaker disappeared. He completely separated himself from the cult and never anything to do with it. Yeah. So I think, in a sense, perhaps he got used. John McKay, though, Mackay continued to. Yeah. Right. And you many would have seen the video of him swinging his briefcase at Marley Moore. She found him as a current affairs reporter, I think it was, in Hawaii.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

Right, okay.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

And trying to bring the task over it. Right. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, continued to be a very dangerous figure. Right.

SPEAKER_01 32:35

So you so you who I who I have no problem mounting. Yeah. And you and you were never you were never subjected to that LSD protocol? Good question.

SPEAKER_00 32:43

And thankfully, no. I was 14, um, or turned out I was 15. They changed all of a lot of my birth dates. And Anne was when she was due to come back, I would have gone through it. And I'd seen many of my older brothers and sisters in advert comments, those I thought when brothers and sisters go through it. Yeah. And I wasn't looking forward to it. Um, and I'm and to this day, I have to thank the three girls, Leanne, Antie, and Sarah, for going bravely going to the police. They'd all been through it, and that was their driving reason for going to the very organization we've been told was going to beat us up, drain us, put us in prison. They overcame that fear and went there because of how horrific it was. Right. So I'm in debt to them to my dying day.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

It's an incredible story, truly. Oh, yeah. I mean, when you when you left at 15, uh, it sounds like you went through quite a hard time adjusting, which is very understandable. Was there any sort of support that you received during that time from institutions that helped you? Or I just find it very hard to imagine there was anything that really any institution that would know what to do to help you through that process.

SPEAKER_00 33:56

So that and that's the case. Yes, there was, they did their best to provide support. I remember going along to a psychologist a couple of times. So that was, they realized they had to. They tried to keep us together because the the wisdom at that time is break us, separate us, and that'll be horrendous. We need to stay together. We were sent to an Anglican place, St. John's Home for Boys and Girls in Melbourne. They brought in staff that had been at the Bellambe Reception Center, which we were first sent to to help that transition, and they employed staff, a lady called Mary Rose Yuncan who was in charge of that, as well as the CEO of the um St. John's Home for Boys and Girls. There was no file for this of what to do, of how to do it. Uh, we were given cottage parents, I got close to them, they were sacked because they had suggested that the older ones, which were adults, always had been, needed special care that we younger ones didn't need. And I would agree with that. We had very different needs, um, very different issues. Keeping us together was not helping. And they were sacked because of that, that suggestion, as well as some accusations made that could never be supported. And I go into that in my book, without making accusations that can't be backed up. I I avoid that. It has to be public, people have to be able to defend themselves. But I just don't think they knew what to do and how to do. And I still to this day, I still think that there would be a struggle. How do you take children brought up in a religious cult with all the abuse? Two of them, the youngest, suffer from psychosomatic dwarfism, which is where the body stops producing growth hormones in height and weight, you're almost a dwarf. And as soon as you remove that environment, the growth hormones start to be produced and you're back to height. So the environment was, you know, as Dr. Ed Ogden, the police surgeon, said on a uh on video that was out on Channel 7. Uh, when Sarah brought a book out, he said, we knew from that point that that's what was so bad, that it was so I think they really struggled to know what to do, and they made it up as they went along. Edmund along tried their best, and I can't fault them in the attempt. I critique them in the effectiveness. And so, really, uh within a year or so, I was I'm out of here. I want a foster mother. Um, you failed me by sacking the cottage parents I'd grown very close to. I'm I'm this is not working for me. And I remember blowing up uh all I could say was like a volcano. I said things to this day I wish I hadn't said to the girls and boys I'd grown up with. I was I was as angry as a cut snake that they had removed people I'd grown to love, they got sacked. I was told I couldn't have anything to do with them, and I I said, I'm out of here. Um this is it, this is the final straw. So I would have probably been 16 at that stage, uh, year 10, and I was I was out of there. I asked for a foster mother. Um, I wanted to be adopted, and my social worker found some. She put my name down with Blackburn Baptist uh Shack, which was a recognized organization that boards of the state could be put with. And the secretary there, a lady called Bobby Ashwell, took me in. And I spent the next nearly three years up until I finished year 12 under her care. Right. Um, which was very helpful.

SPEAKER_01 37:28

Yeah. And and uh during this process, what were what were your your spiritual thoughts moving out of this cult over the course of your teenage years? We did you sort of deny it all initially? Because of course now you are a a Christian man. Uh you know, in my case, I I really rejected anything spiritual when I came out of my group. And I wouldn't say I reject anything spiritual now, but I am I I still am an atheist at heart, but I am very interested in the experience of mysticism, of religion, and what that means. I think of it as all, you know, a product of the brain, but I am very interested in in the impact that it can have. But I'm curious about your journey after the cult that led you to. I'm not saying that, you know, churches are the same thing as a cult, but just in terms of like taking on a belief system again after that experience. I mean, how did you reach a point of comfort with that? Okay.

SPEAKER_00 38:22

And that's that's a deep question, though. And a very, very, very good question. I appreciate you for asking it. And and look, I cover a lot of this in the book. And I don't think we've got time here to go in depth because it is a thing. How did you come out of a cult where the leader claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus and end up worshipping Jesus Christ and serving him from the age of 18? And I'm 52, I passed to a church in the Potter's House, which others would say is a cult. But you can look up any church and somewhere, even, you know, the most benign, caring the Salvation Army's been called a cult. People took to the streets when the Salvation Army started off, you know, throwing tomatoes and rotting eggs at them, um, you know, of the worst thing possible. And that's why they were an army, in a sense, understanding the spiritual warfare involved. So I moved in with Bobby's foster mother, began to ask her lots of questions just about life, about what she believed in. I rejected everything Anne had taught. I had no interest in Jesus whatsoever. Um, heard Bobby's life should come out of major drug and alcohol addiction, single mum with a boy my age. She was a Christian, went along to a Baptist church. Uh as I said, she was a secretary working in Shaq and began to have an influence just as I saw her life, began to interact with her friends, get around them. People would ask me, Do you believe in God? And that was a that was a bowl, that was a grenade, I should say, that the pin's been removed. I'm like, what the heck? But I thought about it and thought I've grown up with, yes, I I look around myself. And when someone challenged me, I believe there was I saw order, I saw design, I saw a creative hand that didn't just happen, you know, chaos. As soon as you see something that has meaning, you immediately think intelligence. As soon as there's order, as soon as there's design, um, things just don't happen randomly. So I began, I that made sense to me. And my answer when someone asked me was just yes, I do. I've grown up, I not because of what I've experienced, I repudiate the demonic, the occult, all that I'd involve in, but I believe that there is a creator. And so if within a couple of years, I'm very messed up, I'm suicidal, depressed. Um, I'm in a youth baptist in Blackburn, where and where I lived in your pastor's office for prayer. I'm struggling. I realized I needed help outside of me. Bobby spoke of Jesus, he performed miracles, he could answer. He created it all, could answer, and I began to challenge. Okay, God, it's made the world make it rain and stop raining at certain times. Stop dogs and barking. It happened consistently for about six weeks to the point where I'd say to people on the train platform with me, it's going to start raining in five past four and ten seconds. I'd say, God, can you make it happen? It would. And stop three minutes, two seconds later, and it would. I mean, it was like, wow, there's a this supernatural power that I experienced as a kid is benevolent and kind. There is another force out there that that can work. So I had a vision of Jesus in the Blackburn Papist office, uh, taken back to being waterboard torture, which I went through. He picked me up, put my head against his chest, said I never meant it to be. Which you went through in the cult. In the cult twice. And I go into detail of that in the book of what it was like. And Sarah wrote to that. It was horrendous. I mean, you're talking a horrendous naked fear.

SPEAKER_02 41:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:51

You're talking desperation. People with power over you to destroy your life, and you think it's and you're experiencing that happening. Starved a breath. I mean, just horrendous, horrendous experience. It's it's called waterboard torture for a reason. So Jesus took me back to that and said, I never, that was never my plan. And then in that vision, and it was a vision, I would, they'd ask me a question, I'd open my eyes, I'd have a discussion with them. I'm not under any psychedelic psychotropics as I was given when I was growing up at all. Completely lucid, no alcohol, no drugs, mostly deprivation, no one giving me anything. This is me functioning as a human being.

SPEAKER_01 42:32

So this so would it be fair to say that you your your view remains in sort of a spiritual sphere in the sense that there's sort of a good and a bad side, and Anne's manifestation of that was on the the dark side, and um whereas there are churches that uh can express that in on the lighter side.

SPEAKER_00 42:49

Yeah, yeah, and as God planned and designed, and we see God's plan still playing out in history. Uh, I still see the IMWAS light. I think it was C. S. Lewis. I had I don't have the quote in front of me, but he said, every inch, and we know C. S. Lewis is an academic in from Cambridge University, wrote the line which you know wardrobe, contemporary of Tolkien, the the you know, who wrote The Lord of the Wings. And he said, every inch, every square inch is fought for by Satan and by God. And you see that arm wrestle going on throughout history, millennia history continues.

SPEAKER_01 43:26

This this reminds me, I hope this doesn't seem too lighthearted, but it reminds me a lot of, you know, when I was growing up, I was really into into sort of like fantasy books, uh, you know, about wizards and dragons and all the rest of it, got really, really obsessed. Yes. And I loved, you know, as a kid, this notion of the dark magicians and the light magicians, the good and the evil, the black and the white. And I've often wondered if that had some influence on the way I romanticized the battle between darkness and light and getting involved in my cult. And that was very much part of that teaching where there's There's good and there's bad, and this is an ongoing battle throughout the universe and throughout time.

SPEAKER_00 44:05

So isn't it fascinating that that has always it runs through all religions when you think about it? The good and the evil. There's an eternal hell or heaven, there's a good place, bad place. There are entities that wield spiritual power. There's books, and I've I've read some of the fiction of the bad magician, but that framework, that ideology is spat out in many different ways in many different forms.

SPEAKER_01 44:29

And this is why I think it's so important that as a society we're we're able to criticize belief systems, no matter what they are. Whether they're they're religions that are considered sacred by people, we have to be able to have open discussions and be critical and challenge the sorts of things that people believe because it keeps it in under control. If you do have a small group and they're isolating themselves from the world, as you know, Anne was doing, as we were doing to an extent, you don't see what's going on outside of that group that you're in. And that is extremely powerful in manipulating the way we think and the way we behave in a way that I don't think we fully appreciate unless we've been in that situation, because it is a very insidious and gradual process. 100%.

SPEAKER_00 45:13

And here's the winkle. So what do cults do? They have a belief system, they have someone who is the champion of it, who lives it out, who we respect, who's got some ones on the board. We have people that believe in it, that mirror those beliefs. We have an echo chamber where we have people that support it and we have a narrative control. Yeah. Now all of those things are healthy, but you can take those same tools and put them into the hands of bad actors, and it's just as dangerous. And the seed beat is individuals who are looking for answers, who are making sense of life. We all have a component in us to follow in any room, in any group of people, forming, forming, norming, performing. Like it, like any group put together is always a default leader, whether it's a servant leader or not. So the very things that are in us can be subverted. And the great danger here is you can, it's not just religion, it's every belief system. There's political cults that are out there that are very dangerous. And I'm watching the same tools in the world at the moment being used in the American elections in the world of stuff going on we all know is on the nose. We all know, but we've been told no what you seem is not true. And anyone who disagrees is shut down and labeled, censored and removed, and there are bad actors in control of it. And I would say to you, that's been played out in front of us. So everyone beware. Cults are not just religious.

SPEAKER_01 46:37

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we categorize all of these things uh uh in order to understand them or talk about them a little easier, but they all come from belief systems are are important in every aspect of our lives. You know, we we all believe things about people outside of us, about the world outside of us. We believe things about ourselves that sometimes aren't even true and aren't particularly healthy. Yes. And we can believe those things very strongly and they can damage us. So this brain that we have and its capacity to come up with meaning for it to believe things is incredibly powerful in a way that I think we do sometimes underestimate, even in our daily lives, let alone in a in a cult or in a in a in a major political party.

SPEAKER_00 47:17

Absolutely. So so think of this, Dave. You can live beside a train line with freight trains going through there. And when you first move in, you can't sleep. Give it time, and you learn to filter it out. You don't hear it, you're just used to it. Yeah. So you can get to a place, you said I grew up in this things going on that everyone would say there's a freight train running through the middle of your mind, you know, of your life. What is that? So you can get to a place where things that everyone else goes weird, you just you filtered it out. So two people can look at the same body of evidence and come to two completely different analyses because of their cognitive bias, because they've filtered stuff in and out in naturally. So you can look at something in because of your what you want to believe, because you are believing, because of the group, whatever it might be, because truth has a cost. This is the problem. And my mother to this day, and many of the cult members are a part of, when they were presented with the truth, it's a bridge too far because it meant they had to take a personal responsibility for the decisions they made. And that's often what happens with people. If I buy into that, it means a personal cost I don't want to pay. I'd rather be a victim, I'd rather live in this world where I'm able to do what I'm doing. I'd rather have these appetites I can maintain. I'd rather this friendship group that I'm familiar with. I don't want the cost of truth.

SPEAKER_01 48:41

Yeah, you know, it was interesting as I was working my way out of the cult that I was in, and I always had my doubts, and then eventually got to the point where I I was uh kind of kicked out of the school in a way because I was running, I was running a chapter of it in Toronto. Sure. And I made some sort of administrative error according to Mark Pritchard, and I was demoted to the lowest level of the courses. So all of these guys that I'd brought in in Toronto, these younger guys, I mean I was quite young as well at the time, but that I had brought in who looked at me as this spiritual figure, as much as I tried to deny it at times, I did sort of let them do it, I'm gonna be honest. Yep. Um, because it felt good. Of course it does. And then it got to a point where I was demoted and they were my teachers. And some of them took this as a sign that I was doing something right. I was being tested, I was all of this sort of stuff. Yep. But it was the last straw for me when I really listened to my doubts more fully. And I was like, what am I doing? This is ridiculous. But you know, years had taken and I was overseas, away from my family. It was, it was just me and my my wife who we married because of this cult. We were really just in our own world. We did not, yeah, we, you know, this freight train that was running through my mind, I was just, it was there, but I was like, oh, that's that's a problem. I'm not listening to that. Yeah. Um so when it came time to leave, and I did choose, all right, you know, I'd been demoted. I I don't think I'm gonna try and crawl back up the ranks. I think this is all bullshit. I'm out and headed off. It was, it was still, you know, a good. I think we were in Canada for another year or so. And even coming back, it was it was a it was a few years before I felt like I was able to be normal socially again. Rather than looking at every single person I interacted with as some sort of spiritual test, you know, as someone who was being used by dark forces to send me on the wrong path and all this sort of stuff. It was just insane when I look back at it. Yeah. But it was so ingrained in what my thinking about the world and other people that it took a long time to start listening to those doubts and become normal again in a classic way. Yes. And you know, I miss, I often realize that I miss the delusions that I had when I was in this cult, which might be a weird thing to say, but I miss, I miss feeling like my life was so important and my suffering was so important and was somehow important to the universe outside of this temporary physical realm. I felt like something really important was happening inside of my suffering. Whereas now, you know, I do think it matters, but only to me and to the people immediately around me, you know, my children, my family, and the people I relate to. Yeah. So it's a much more narrower scope of interest, which is perhaps healthier. But I do miss that heightened feeling like there was something so important, like a real hero's journey that I was going through that was connected to was beyond time, beyond physicality. I miss that feeling. I miss sitting in front of, you know, I would sit in front of a cross at a church that was near me, even though we weren't Christian in a traditional sense in this cult. I would sit in front of this cross as a representation of Jesus' suffering and and and it connected me with my suffering and the possibility that I had to become like Mark, to become this immortal being if I did the work, which was impossible to achieve in retrospect. You know, it was just the standards of perfection we had to reach were just out of control. Would never none of us would ever be able to achieve it. So you were always failing. And that gave that gave the leaders a lot more control over you because you always felt that you were letting them down. You were letting the spiritual, spiritual journey fall down around you. So it was very, very, you never felt like you're doing the right thing. And I think I've realized as I've gotten on that, you know, my ability to sort of um be self-compassionate really took a huge hit. And I think it took me years to understand just how bad that was. To be frank, I think I'm only figuring it out in recent years.

SPEAKER_00 52:53

And and I think Dave, part of that journey is these discussions and others, as you begin to, as you said, you begin to analyze what happened, why didn't it happen? What's interesting is the desire to love and be loved and to belong something bigger to ourselves is built into us. So when something seems to push that, no wonder you miss it, because that's there, it's in all of us. We look for leaving something behind us. Why am I here? What's the purpose? What's the meaning of life? All of those things. What a lot of these cults do is they use and abuse that, but there's this deep need in us to have that, which is why it connects. And that's the danger of this, is when an individual puts themselves in the place of God.

SPEAKER_01 53:31

Yeah, yeah. And you know, despite my atheistic tendencies, you know, I listen to you talk about it and I do get it. You know, I do. Even though I can't imagine myself in the future getting involved in church in the way that you are, I do I do, I can understand, and in psychological studies, we've seen a lot that people who are involved in religious groups tend to flourish. Um, and I I think it is because there's something bigger than themselves that they're involved in. They're they're part of a bigger community. It's not just about their own individual personal suffering. It's about being connected to something bigger that has that has a worldview that's bigger than just what's happening in our daily lives. Yes. You know, it's interesting. I don't, I think I've moved away from this notion of there being a a truth, in fact. Uh and and that that life is very ambiguous, that it's constantly changing, the universe is constantly changing, we're constantly changing, that there's nothing to really settle on. And in some way, the more I get comfortable with that, uh, the more at peace I feel. You know, I'm kind of moving through things, uh, you know, appreciating that I'm never going to get that certainty. And letting go and accepting that has really given me a peace, a connection with myself, a connection with others that has improved things quite dramatically. But I was psychologically misled at a very severe, very harmful level in the context of the culture that I live in. Yes, yes. That held me back from things I could have been doing. And as I get older, I realize I resent that a bit more. I think in the first 10 years out of it, I didn't resent it as much because I still felt young. I could get on with things. As I've gotten older, I'm like, oh, damn it, fuck them. You know, I I feel like increasingly that something has been taken from me.

SPEAKER_00 55:21

Stolen. That's exactly it. I got that, it wasn't. They created a framework of a belief system that allowed them to steal things from me.

SPEAKER_01 55:31

That's a great way to put it. That's exactly what's happened. Yes. That's a great way to put it. And so, I mean, in your case, you know, you were very young and sort of taken into this house and isolated. Yeah. But there's this notion that we do have the free will to come and go. You know, Mark and Edith were not keeping us locked up anywhere, but the it's the belief systems that trapped us. It was, it was uh it was a mental prison more than a physical prison.

SPEAKER_00 55:57

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 55:57

And it and it's a very effective prison.

SPEAKER_00 55:59

Which is even worse. It's even worse. And that's why what you believe matters. And I would say there's lots of belief systems out there that trap people.

SPEAKER_01 56:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 56:08

There's there's a whole lot of belief systems that are very dangerous.

SPEAKER_01 56:11

Absolutely. Yeah. And um I've this embarrassment that I have that I believe this as an adult. I was young, obviously, but the fact that I went ahead with this and even started a chapter of it in another country and uh got other people involved who are still, some of whom are still imprisoned in this ideology and feel like they're doing the right thing and feel like I'm part of the dark forces now. You know, I got in touch a couple of times, trying to sort of say, hey guys, how you doing? Like, yeah. Maybe you should come to your senses. Come to your senses, essentially. And you know, I'm I'm clearly the bad, the bad guy now that I'm out of it. Um, but yeah, it's look, I I'm yeah, it's I'm so far away from it in time. You know, this was um going back 20 years now that I feel like it's a different version of myself entirely. But whenever I talk about it, I can't avoid this feeling of just how embarrassed I am to have believed this and then to have gone over there and perpetuated it, got other people involved. And finally, thankfully, I woke up and walked away. And I did try to get people out of it, but there's only so much you can do.

SPEAKER_00 57:24

100%. And and that, I think, is the difficulty of feeling the responsibility that comes as you are from something. You know, to my so what I've tried to do is I've tried to reach back into my mother, especially, and do my very best to speak truth and to the level at which she's capable of processing that. So this is based upon the ideology.

SPEAKER_01 57:45

My biological mother, um, who's still alive?

SPEAKER_00 57:48

Still alive.

SPEAKER_01 57:49

She's 92, I think, now, living overseas. There was a challenge reconnecting with her, as I understand it afterwards. I mean, you she was involved in the group, so you knew her, but you didn't realize she was your biological mother.

SPEAKER_00 58:01

Originally, and then I got presented with the documentation to show that she was. Um, she didn't want to have anything to do with me. She trotted out the line Anne gave her. Don't bother turning up at my door,'s taking an embarrassment to me. She separated herself from her biological kids who've been in contact with her openly because Anne said that was supposed to happen. And to this day, I mean, she's aware that Anne's not everything she said she was, but uh still very thankful to her. And then she's been involved in which I don't cover in my book, but she's still involved in another cult, I would say, which is a worldwide thing that's a similar type of ideology. So it's it's interesting, and it's it's she represents a truth that she wants to live in, and it's very difficult because of the cost of it and the experiences that people have. But we're all individuals of our own will, our own views, and we can't take on the baggage of others that don't want to. And I think we've got to absolve ourselves of that if we say, listen, I feel responsible due to what I did, but I can't take responsibility when individuals themselves are happy with that. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 59:11

And and it's their courts, it's their choice. And you know, I have to remind myself as well that I was brainwashed. Absolutely. And I woke up to that eventually and walked away. And the shit off to you. And I can't do much more than what I did, I think, to reach out to these people. And yes. And I think they know that I would be here if they if they needed to talk to someone. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 59:31

And I guess this is the benefit sometimes of podcasts and books, is when you have processed it and looked at and analyzed it, is that people come across, they listen, they gather their brain around it. People ask me why do I do what I do? Well, I feel a responsibility for people. I have a care and a love for ended for people. Uh people are the most wonderful thing there is. People are the great the greatest good and the greatest bad can happen in people. Relationships with humans are the most wonderful thing there is. We need it and love it. And so I my desire is to help people, for them to be able to make an opinion, for them to be able to see what truth is as best as they can, and whether it's what I believe in or whether or not that's okay. Everyone's got a free will and should be able to do it, but at least to have a conversation, to do a deep dive, to look at things they might have ignored in the past, be careful of what cults are and understand they're not just religious. There's gangs out there that are cults that function the very same way. I have no problem telling a story, I have no problem being challenged with what I believe in as well. I think that's healthy. We can't live in a cognitive bias where we don't allow anyone who believes something else to speak to us. We have to forever have what we believe in challenged and looked at, and not just I'm listening to you, but I'm not listening to you.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:50

Yeah, I do um think it's that openness to knowledge and the progress of knowledge and and critical thinking and trusting our common sense and trusting our gut. You know, all of this stuff is very, very important. And we are all very complex and we all have very unique sort of profiles, so to speak. You know, our brains are wired slightly differently. We're all a bit different. But we have to trust ourselves, you know, we have to pay attention to these intuitions. Not that our intuitions are always right. And so it's that lack of trust in myself that I experienced in the cult where my very thoughts and feelings were things that I couldn't, I couldn't listen to. And I was like, that's bingo, that's perhaps the devil talking, or or something in me that is leading me astray. So I shouldn't listen to what I'm thinking or feeling. I should just absorb the lessons of the master. And what an what a damaging way to view the world for years and years and years. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:46

One of the things that I speak about in this book, what helped me is I got pulled out of the cold August the 14th, 1987. I'm lying in bed in a bunk for the first time in my life, and I'm lying in bed, new pajamas, brush my teeth, food as much as I want, wash dishes. I mean, all the stuff. It's just everyone takes for granted I didn't. It was incredible. And I'm checking through everything I'd said. The reason I'm checking through is we live by the ideology of unseen, unheard, unknown. You never shared anything with anyone outside the cult. And so I'm, and if you did, you got into trouble. And I'd been in trouble before. Seriously, I don't talk trouble. It's not just naughty boy, it's it's serious stuff going on. So I'm lying there doing this by reflex. As you said, you're trained to do this by reflex. And suddenly I realized I don't have to do this anymore. And I say in one of the interviews in in this thing that Rosa Jones put together, the family, I'm free. And it's the first time when I spoke to her that I actually registered that was the moment. That was the moment I realized I'm free. I can now make the decision of what I think, what I say, it's up to me. And it was liberating her. Then the issue is what is healthy what's not. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:59

What should I and what shouldn't, because you still need to filter. Of course. And and going through, you know, these things at at critical developmental times, of course, when we come out of it, we're kind of having to catch up on our learning about well, what hang on a second, what is this good? Should I try this? And then, you know, I think I had a bit of a delayed sort of social experience in that sense. And I think my 30s in particular were me trying to get my 20s back a bit. You know, I was doing a lot of things in my 30s that I think a lot of my friends were doing in their 20s. But, you know, it's I mean, I must say to try and, you know, end on a more positive note, like I I do feel like I have come a long way. And I find that having these conversations is very, very helpful for me to reflect on what had actually happened and also to sort of get into the more subtle effects of the cult experience on my on my way of thinking and feeling, which I think I still need some, there still needs to be some processing done there.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:55

Yeah, and and it takes it does take a long time. And I'm 52 now. I began writing the book back in probably 2017. I just released it. It it took me probably three to four years to write it. Obviously, when the the series came out with Rosa Jones, the cult of the family, it was front and center in my life. And so you start to do a deep dive on it, analyze, work through stuff. And it tends to happen around, as we've talked before, we start just on the phone, it tends to be around the 40 mark where you begin to connect with your past, what's ahead. You're often putting down who you are, your spirit, what you believe into your children because they suck up everything. You're very mindful of that, you're thinking about what the consequences are. Any any reasonable adult will. We know those formed reviews are so important. Um, so all those things are in there. So, yeah, in the process of me going there, I've I've and I've gone through a process of rewiring, I think it's the word. I you know, I lay a hold of the psalm, God will perfect that, which concerns me. Um, God, I'm there are things in me that are not good. There's things in there that you know are there that you can help me, and I've gone through a process bit by bit and will forever go through that process of self-analysis, being critical without being over-analyzed where I can't do anything. And then finding people around me that can help me be what I've always wanted to be, that that are there purely as a servant leader, not as someone to dominate and manipulate. And they're rare, but to find them is precious. And I can I've been fortunate with that with some of the pastors I've had over the recent 10 years or so that have been the wheel dealer.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:33

You know, I think that's a beautiful way to put it. I think that idea of, you know, we'll we'll we'll always be looking at ourselves and figuring ourselves out, and that's okay. There's no final answer. This is just life. And totally, you know, once we get through the the agonies that I think, you know, this sort of certainties that cults demand that we possess and we just relax a bit and we can let go and we can be self compassionate and we can move through our lives. And just um I I do. Notice that relaxation coming back to me in a way that is very relieving. Yes. Um, and I think just loosening the grip on the way I see myself and the way I see the world and just accepting what it is is has just been like a revelation.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:16

And I guess you could summarize that by saying becoming comfortable of living in your own skin.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:21

Yeah, exactly. 100%. Ben, this has been an amazing chat. Um, I really appreciate you coming on. It's been really, really fascinating, even though we have very different um paths, um, both in terms of our cold experience and what we've done since. It has been really interesting to me to hear from you and and your perspective on things. And um, yeah, I mean, every single one of these conversations that I have has been been helpful. So I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:47

Thanks so much for for being here. Thank you for allowing me to. I find these sorts of conversations wonderful because you you do a deep dive on different things. Every podcast I've done, every chat, it's a different slant because of the person running it. Yes. Um, and you can touch on different topics. So as I said, you I look for, could I use the word a library of conversations that I think are helpful? And I found speaking with you Dave very much so is allow uh stuff to be looked at from a perspective that I'm honored to be able to be here, to be able to speak on things and even to be trusted by people to listen to me, to be able to go, well, they might have something to say could be helpful. Um, and finding a similar journey uh with you as well of something. So I I would say to you, congratulations as well. If you're doing if I if I could say that just from someone who's been through some experiences, you're doing well. We should be very proud of where you're at.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:39

Well, thank you so much. I appreciate that. And and you've finished this book, I suppose we should mention it. Yeah. Uh what's the title of the book?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:45

Okay, so Life Behind the Wire. And I realize there are other names like that out there, but it's the true life of me growing up in the cult. Uh so life behind the wire. It's I put out a Kindle version on Amazon, and if someone heads to my website, rescue just www.rescuethefamily.com and download it onto a Kindle app and you can read. I hope it's a journey. I've done my best to do a bit of a chronological journey and explain where I am now. It's been a very good life. I feel I'm very much past what I started out with, and I hope on some posts I can help people on that journey themselves.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:23

I think that's a great sentiment to end on. Thanks again, Ben. Really appreciate it, and uh, I hope we stay in touch.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:29

Absolutely, and thank you for the time. All the best.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:33

Once again, very grateful that Ben was happy to chat with me. Obviously, his experience is very unique. It was also really interesting to reflect on our cult experiences from two very different and perhaps even opposing philosophical outlooks, and yet feel very connected due to our experiences. There's something I find very, very beautiful about that. Also, if you're interested in the research on psychedelics in therapy, I highly recommend the series Psychedelics, Stepping Into the Unknown, which you can find on SBS here in Australia, which follows the work of Dr. Paul Lignitsky at Monash University. Really excellent work. So I'll leave it there. Hope you enjoyed the chat, and I'll see you next time. Bye for now. Thanks to Neil Sutherland for producing and the band PVT for the music. For extra content and updates, please visit us at aftercultpod.com or on Instagram at AfterCultpod.