International Cultic Studies Association
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Vol. 1, No. 1, 2001 |
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| Featured Personal Account | ||||
| Nancy Miquelon, M.A., L.P.C. Grand Junction, Colorado |
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Moments of GraceI have really enjoyed this seminar with the Seminary and AFF—it’s an exciting format to be part of. And I have really enjoyed listening to the other speakers; it’s amazing how similar our stories are. I grew up in a Christian home as well and went to Methodist and Presbyterian churches. We moved quite a bit, so where we worshipped depended upon which town we were in. I had a love/hate relationship with my churches in high school. I would get very angry at the church for its hypocrisy, but I was very involved. I was a youth leader and
went to church camps in the summer. Then at the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, I went off to college. I got into the whole hippie scene and got very far away from church for a while. I was in Wisconsin at the time, and I had friends who were looking into all the areas of New Age and alternative kinds of groups. My friends were coming out here to Colorado to all these seminars, particularly one with the Divine Light Mission and Guru Maharaji. At the end of that seminar, they were all set to sign up for the classes
and receive enlightenment. For some reason, the guru bestowed enlightenment upon one of my friends that same day (he was evidently more enlightened than some). But my friend figured out then that this guy didn’t know any more than he did, so my friend took off and ended up in a place in Loveland [Colorado] called Sunrise Ranch, where he was told he could get a good free meal. In fact, a couple
of my friends stayed there for a week, then came back to Wisconsin to tell us all about this place they had found. We sort of humored these guys as we heard their story—they had done this with several different groups, and we were just listening to the most recent escapade. For some reason, though, they stuck with this group longer than they had others, so we had to listen a little bit more. We eventually got on the group’s mailing list and started
receiving its literature. My friends got a speaker from Sunrise Ranch to come out to the campus in Wisconsin. When he spoke, he gave us the standard line about love and acceptance and living what we preached, not just talking about it. So we got more and more involved. Group Experiences In that phase, we were not told the organization was called the Emissaries of Divine Light. The organization had a sort of front group that members referred to as The Universal Institute of Applied Ontology—ontology was a good buzzword
at the time—it sounded very academic and philosophical. And I was very interested in existentialism, so this was appealing to me. We stuck with this group for a while, and it was several months, possibly even a year later, before we heard of the Society of Emissaries and later of the Emissaries of Divine Light. Again, the recruitment process and indoctrination into the group were gradual. This all began in 1971. My involvement with the group continued through my years of college. The summer after my junior year, I went to a one-month-long class in upstate New York, which is really where the indoctrination set in. The class involved all of Lifton’s eight points of thought reform. We were isolated. We were outnumbered. We
had four hours of classes every morning. The group dynamics were very strong, because half the people attending the class were already members. We ate all of our meals together. We had what they called a “work pattern” in the afternoon; then, after supper, we had either more classes or lots of homework to do. We were not to contact family. That wasn’t an absolute; it was just a strong
suggestion. And with only one phone on the property, contact was difficult. We had no televisions (there were one or two televisions on the property, but some of the leaders owned them, so we didn’t have access to the news or anything else). The milieu control and the indoctrination through the classes were thorough. We initially had not been told the group had anything to do with religion, yet our classes were definitely about spiritual issues. One of the morning classes of the four-hour sessions was an hour of Bible study, which for us gave lots of credibility to all the other stuff we were learning. Somebody would go to the front of the room with the Bible every day, and even though it might never be opened, it still had a really strong symbolic effect on us. This mix of the group’s own theology and the Biblical teaching was confusing, but it also sucked us in more easily. After that summer, I did go back and finish college, but I was unusual in the group. Many people were talked out of finishing school. I think now that part of why the group allowed me—even encouraged me—to finish was because I was getting a degree in education and I would be valuable to them, because they wanted to start their own school. I finished school, and then I skipped graduation to go to a three-month-long class of the same sort as the previous one-month class I had taken. At that point I was really entrenched, and I stayed at the training headquarters in upstate New York to continue training new recruits, where I lived for another
five years. During that time, I met another member of the Emissaries whom I married a year later. (Because the group initially would not sanction our relationship, it took him a year to convince them to do so. They finally decided they’d have to sanction it, so they made it look like the idea was theirs, and we got married.) Now that I look back, I realize that, fortunately, the fellow I married was a rabble-rouser, even within the context of the group. He was as thoroughly indoctrinated as I or anybody else was, but he pushed the edges a little more than some people did. About six months after our marriage, he decided that this part of the group was
becoming corrupt, and we really needed to move to some other part of the group. We felt the group was still fine, and that they truly did have the truth with a capital T, but we needed to be with a different part of the organization. So he managed to get us out of that part of the group. Move To Colorado It was now 1979, and we moved to Manhattan for six weeks to earn money to move out to Colorado. The group had not given us permission to go to New York City. So I was in major turmoil because we were going against the hierarchy and, I felt, must be out of the grace of God as a result. I was terrified that we would be struck down at any
moment, but I still went along with my husband. We went to New York and earned the money to come to Loveland, Colorado (the international headquarters for the Emissaries) and attend another class, thinking that this would redeem us—clear our involvement with the group and make everything holy again. In and of itself, that move to New York City was a culture shock; but as I look back, I realize
it also was significant as the beginning of our eventually leaving the group. We did live at Sunrise Ranch for a few months, but then the group moved us to a very small center in Colorado Springs, which was a demotion. We had been in the big center in New York where we trained everybody else, and we were now being pushed to the outskirts of the group. We were in Colorado Springs only about six months, then we moved to Glenwood Springs with another couple who had also been rabble-rousers of a sort. The four of us thought that together we would start a new Emissaries Center, and thereby redeem ourselves, and regain the good graces of the group. Well, I can say now that fortunately we failed. That was 1980, and it was still another four years before my husband and I finally left.
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