Category: Unspun Episodes

0:00 Welcome to Unspun, our first interview.

0:03 I think you hold the privileged position of being our first interviewee. It’s pretty exciting to finally get the Unspun project off the ground, so welcome, Jaya. I’m really looking forward to hearing your story today. If it were me being interviewed, I’d imagine it would feel pretty scary, and I’m wondering if that’s how it is for you.

0:21 No, it’s really exciting. This is the first time I’ll have told my story in this format, and I’m really looking forward to it.

0:29 Great. From my understanding of your experience, you were part of three different cults, so it sounds like an incredibly long journey. Let’s start at the beginning. You were born into the Fourth Way cult. Through my research, it seems to be based on the teachings of George Gurdjieff, an Armenian mystic and philosopher. From what I can tell, there were groups built around this philosophy. Is that the same for your group, and can you give us an overview?

0:59 Yes, it was the same. It was one of the first English groups to use his teachings in that way. The cult was initially named the International Academy for Continuous Education and it was run by genuine academics and philosophers. It didn’t really start off as a cult. It started off as an alternative school for learning and, as with a lot of these things, proceeded to become a cult over time.

1:31 I’m just wondering if you could give us a brief sense of what it was like growing up in this cult, because you were born into it.

1:38 I had very little awareness that I was in a cult as a child. The children were fairly much ignored and left to their own devices. The cult really didn’t involve the children or indoctrinate them to a large degree. We were abandoned, if you like. We played with each other — not too much different from normal kids — but there were aspects of life that you knew were different from, say, the kids in the primary school or the village nearby.

2:12 In terms of our practices around ecology and recycling and all that sort of stuff, we did all of that, and that was seen as hippie and weird in the local village. We were definitely the outsiders in our community.

2:30 Right, yeah. I can imagine. What felt ordinary or unquestioned to you compared with growing up in some other way?

2:38 Well, as a child I knew there was something else going on. There was a lot of drug use, a lot of psychoactive drugs. There were lots of parties, big group gatherings, weddings — there was always something happening. If you were part of a church in the village or surrounding neighbourhoods, it might be a bit similar. But in Scotland it was a very dour landscape, if you like. They didn’t really have happy-clappy churches that went on picnics. You went to Sunday school, you went to church on Sunday, and that was it. That’s the community I grew up closest to. Their social cohesion was getting drunk together.

3:28 So I knew it was very different in the way we communed, in the way we reacted, in the way we worked together as a group.

3:37 Kind of a lot more outrageous compared to a conservative church-type thing?

3:44 Yeah, absolutely. It was all about free love and all of that stuff — very much the zeitgeist of the early ’70s and late ’60s. That’s why I say there were a lot of drugs going around. Everyone was smoking pot, and that was commonplace. It wasn’t hidden at all. I grew up aware that there was this thing people smoked and it made them feel better, made them feel nice. But I never tried it until my teens.

4:16 And in terms of the philosophies, how did that impact you as a child? Is there a memory of that?

4:24 Oh yeah, there’s a lot. My father took the core tenets very seriously. He was a stoic man, a very solid, no-nonsense kind of guy. The family referred to him as “the rock” because he was immovable and impenetrable — and stubborn. One of the core tenets of the Fourth Way cult was intentional suffering.

4:56 So basically, taking the hard way, making things harder for yourself. Instead of using a gardening tool, you’d use your hands — stuff like that. And that tended to get pretty extreme quite a lot. That principle was definitely instilled into us: hardship was a good thing, and not taking the easy way out all the time. Dad was really restrictive with stuff. It wasn’t that he wasn’t fun, but he took the practice seriously.

5:30 It did get to some extremes. I think because he was a child in the Second World War and experienced rationing, he had a very frugal mindset. I remember having to plead to have butter and jam on my toast. He was like, “You don’t need butter if you’ve got jam.” And I was like, “Dad, it’s not the war. We’re actually really well off and we don’t need to save money on butter.”

6:09 Can I ask about intentional suffering? If you experienced more suffering, did that lead to a higher spiritual awareness, or what was the purpose?

6:19 Yeah. The purpose was about building character, fortitude, resilience, but also transforming karma. They didn’t use those words, but that’s the language I’m familiar with today. It meant exactly the same thing: because of your hardship, you were gaining virtue, and through hardship you learned lessons about yourself. But I know of several cases where it led to the mental breakdown of people, and many left. Some people experienced forms of spiritual and psychological abuse through people pushing intentional suffering on others.

7:12 I found that to be the most damaging aspect of it, and it pervaded everything and everyone. For years, decades to come, those core principles stayed with people. I remember some really horrible times when an adult would freak out and have a meltdown. I saw that enough as a kid to know there was something darker about what was happening.

7:52 How do you feel that environment shaped how you understood yourself and the world around you?

8:00 Well, actually, it put me at a disadvantage. I lived in a fake world, surrounded by other people who all thought the same. I wasn’t deliberately isolated, but we were on a remote farm in the Highlands of Scotland, so we were isolated anyway. I didn’t realise how much it affected me until I’d left home much later.

8:36 The most damaging aspect of growing up was not having any boundaries. As a child, I was allowed to run around and do whatever I wanted. Because the cult said, “We’re the leaders of tomorrow. We’re special people,” and my mum would say, “You’re a special child,” I grew up believing I really was special. So I came out of the cult entitled. I expected everything just to come to me. I didn’t realise I had no social cues. I didn’t realise when I was being rude or overstepping boundaries.

9:20 Those things were accepted within the group because the group was very open about debate and experience. Sharing your ideas was encouraged. If I said something direct, they wouldn’t be shocked — it was the culture. And if you challenged an adult, they would treat you like an adult, not like a child.

9:55 That really warped my sense of who I was. I thought I was better than other children because I got spoken to like an adult. In some respects it was respectful — adults would take the time to explain things to you. But in terms of how to be a kid and a normal person in society, they were useless. No one told you the basics.

10:29 If I had trouble at school or something, I was always expected to sort it out myself. I wasn’t consciously told not to come to adults with my problems, but it was like: the adults are busy, so if you can deal with it yourself, do that. If I got bullied or something happened at school, I had to figure it out myself. It was quite stressful sometimes.

10:57 A lot of cults tend to treat children like mini adults. I get the feeling it was like that.

11:05 Oh yeah, absolutely. Your childhood was what you made of it, not what your parents gave you.

11:15 So they weren’t the ones responsible, essentially.

11:22 They were and they weren’t. They never did anything intentionally harmful to me. But on the flip side, they were completely naïve and we were often left with other adults we didn’t know while they went out partying or did whatever they were doing. It happened a lot. I often remember waking up in an unfamiliar household and thinking, where am I?

11:46 We were taught to trust all of the adults within the group, and that led to a lot of abuse. My brothers were abused. I was abused. I know of at least half a dozen other children who were abused, just because of being put in someone’s care who you didn’t know.

12:01 From what I know about people being raised in cults, when you don’t learn boundaries, you don’t learn how to say no to anyone.

12:11 That’s right. And that puts children in a really dangerous situation. The group had this view that it takes a village to raise a child. But to a child that just means every single adult is an authority figure. So who do you trust? It was very difficult navigating that. And you definitely didn’t say no to any adult.

12:35 How long were you and your family involved?

12:44 My parents got involved in the late ’60s. I was born in Sherborne, England, and then we moved that year up to Scotland with a group of other people from the cult. They built a series of farms next to each other. Some of the cult went to America in 1975 and started up a place called Claymont. Others who didn’t want to go to America joined Mum and Dad and bought farms all next to each other in Scotland, so there was still the community.

13:34 Looking back, I remember ceremonies and things on other farms, like sun dances. There was a lot of dancing — free-form dancing — and then there were these things called the Movements. That was from 1975 until 1985, when we moved to America to join the cult there. I went to school for two years and it was then that my dad, mostly my dad, became disillusioned with the group. The current leader had passed away, and they asked him if he would be the new leader. He said absolutely not. He lost interest, and we moved back to Scotland. That was the beginning of our process of leaving the group and living a new life.

14:34 From what I know about your story, it wasn’t just a clean ending. There was always a search for ways to live life differently. What happened after that?

14:49 I guess I left the group completely when I left home at 17. The desire to search for enlightenment or something out there — I don’t think I was even conscious of it. It was so ingrained in me that it was just part of my life. I was naturally inclined to Buddhism. My godfather was a Buddhist monk, and I found it easy to understand. It didn’t have strange tenets like intentional suffering. It made sense to me.

15:27 I was in my early twenties at art school and started going to a meditation practice. Of course, free meditation practice is almost always a front for a cult. That Buddhist monastery actually pushed homosexuality as the preferred sexual encounter, basically just for men. They said homosexual sex for men was spiritually superior because there was no attachment to a family unit. I thought that was absurd. One of the so-called monks actually tried to come on to me, and I narrowly escaped that.

16:47 A few years later I was walking down Tottenham Court Road and a Scientologist accosted me with a personality test.

16:54 Lucky you.

17:01 My narcissistic self went, “Oh yeah, I’d like to know what I’m all about,” and I did the personality test. It was very accurate, to give them their due. But then they’d say, “It says here you have problems sleeping. We have a course that can help with that.” It was cheap enough that I thought, sounds like a bargain.

17:35 I wanted to fix myself. Some conscious part of me knew I was broken and I wanted to be a better person. I’d been out of the cult on my own for about five years and I was really struggling with relationships, with friends, with getting on with people. I wanted something to help fix me.

18:13 So, to fix the effects of the first cult, what I needed was another cult.

18:16 Yeah. I went down the Scientology rabbit hole for about six months and I was so excited about it that I wanted to tell my dad. I told him, “Come along, do the personality test.” His reaction was totally unexpected. He was furious. He thought it was a load of crap. I was shocked and disappointed because I wanted him to agree with me. But because he had such an aversion to it, I started looking at it differently. Then things started to happen that were dodgy as hell, and I realised he was right.

19:26 The only reason I got away from Scientology was because I broke up with my girlfriend, decided I needed to go snowboarding, and moved to New Zealand. That’s literally the reason I got away from Scientology the way I did. It was a narrow escape.

20:11 And sort of in between leaving Scientology and moving to New Zealand, my father discovered Falun Gong.

20:27 My understanding of Falun Gong is that it’s a Chinese movement founded by Li Hongzhi in 1992. Is that about right?

20:39 Yeah, that’s right. Its teaching is known as Falun Dafa, and it draws on the practices of Buddhism and Daoism, particularly meditation and breathing techniques, with the main principles being truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

20:56 Sounds great, right?

20:58 Yeah, it sounds amazing.

21:05 When Dad and I started, it was literally just exercises in the park. There’d be an hour of standing meditation with arm movements, then an hour of seated meditation, and that was it. There were no uniforms, no payments. It was all free. People came and went. You could talk to people if you wanted or just come and go. I liked that it was so free. No rhetoric, no dogma, no uniforms, no structure, no temple, no priests — nothing. I was like, “Yeah, this is what I want.”

21:43 Sounds like there was no pressure.

21:47 No pressure. It felt like a pure spiritual path. Dad felt the same way. He said, “It’s so simple, it must be powerful.” We were both convinced it was a really good practice. But after two years, in April 1999, the Chinese Communist Party cracked down on the practice in China and said it was a heretical cult.

22:22 Being foreigners, we couldn’t read the Chinese news, so we had to take everything second-hand from our Chinese friends. They were feeding us information and we thought we had to do something. So we started protesting and doing all this stuff, and before you knew it, it had become this whole other monster. It became a political human rights movement, and there was a lot of pressure. All of a sudden the focus wasn’t on the practice and cultivating yourself. The main priority was telling the world about the persecution.

23:03 I imagine the human rights element would have been quite attractive.

23:10 It was attractive to me. I loved that sort of thing. I went to my first protest when I was 16 — an anti-fascist protest in East London — so that appealed to me. But I hadn’t done my due diligence at all. The internet was embryonic at that time and there was very little information available. We got dragged into it, and it became everything I disliked about religion. People started wearing uniforms and you could buy trinkets, badges, hats, jackets — all of that. I couldn’t stand it.

23:58 I really thought the practice was about developing yourself, but all of a sudden it became this groupthink, “we must all do everything together” thing. The ironic part was that they were so anti-Chinese Communist Party and anti-communist everywhere, but as time went on the practice itself acted like a communist party. There was talk of spies and backstabbing and politics. I was like, what has this got to do with spirituality?

24:43 What was the most difficult thing for you about being in Falun Gong?

24:56 Looking back, it was the beliefs I acquiesced to that I didn’t really believe in. The cult was sexually repressive and believed that homosexuality was sexual deviancy. It would go further than that and say that homosexuals were subhuman. It had lots of conservative right-wing values and a lot of racism, although the racism was quite covert. The Chinese really did consider themselves superior to Westerners, and they would let you know it all the time.

25:54 They’d say, “You don’t understand because you don’t speak Chinese, so you don’t understand the deeper meaning behind the teachings.” To a degree they were right, because the translation mattered. For example, the word “tolerance” in English means one thing, but in Chinese the word can also imply conformity. And in the teachings he says you must conform as much as possible. I thought that meant conform to mainstream society, but he meant conform to being a practitioner.

26:24 There was this weaponisation of language. He could use one translation against Westerners and the original against Chinese practitioners to manipulate both. And he would retroactively change the teachings. Everything was online, and if he changed something in a previous book, you either had to destroy the book or paste in the new translation. At last count there were six translations of the main book. He could say whatever he wanted and claim that’s what he’d meant all along.

27:25 Toward the end, how did it impact you?

27:32 It unravelled me emotionally. I had to get a lot of therapy — although I didn’t get therapy until eight years after I left. I had a mental breakdown in 2017 and that led to a diagnosis of bipolar type 2.

27:54 Had you left at this stage?

28:02 Yeah. I left in 2012, and in 2017 I had an episode, got diagnosed, and started treatment. At that point I realised a lot of my extreme actions and impulsivity — traits connected with bipolar — had been played out within this cult environment. The cult had some very rigid boundaries and some very porous boundaries, but very few healthy ones. None of them were useful for living life. My undiagnosed bipolar went unchecked.

28:45 How old were you when you got diagnosed?

28:48 Thirty-six. It’s a long time. And 2017 was the start of my recovery. In 2020 I finally admitted that I was in a cult — that I was in Falun Gong and that it was a cult.

29:02 How was that process for you?

29:10 It was horrific. Huge shame, embarrassment and anger — anger at the lost time, the wasted time, the wasted opportunities. I was behind in my career compared to my peers. It was really devastating. I felt like I had to build myself up from the beginning again. And there were no resources to help. I didn’t even know it was really a cult-specific thing. All I had was this trauma. I went to the psychologist and said, “What is me and what is the cult? If you take all the cult away, what’s left?”

29:54 I think that’s really common for people who are born into cults — because you didn’t know who you were before.

30:06 Exactly. When I realised I’d been in cults all my life and that almost everything I knew to be true was no longer true, it was like that nauseous cold-sweat feeling multiplied by a million. It was really hard to take. I thought, my God, the past 35 years have just been a fantasy. What am I going to do? How do I carry on?

30:35 What struck me about your story is that each cult seems tied to the question, “How do I improve who I am?”

30:56 Yes, that’s right. A lot of people ask me why I went into the cult. At first I said, “Because my dad went in and he said it was great.” But then someone asked me what was in it for me personally. I had to think about that. When I went back to that point in my mind, I realised I was undiagnosed bipolar type 2 and I hated myself. I couldn’t get on with anyone. I’d make friends, but I’d lose them even faster. I was intense and effusive and funny and outrageous, but I couldn’t turn that off. Eventually people would say, “Sorry, Jay, you’re too much.”

32:00 How long did it take you to recognise the cult experience for what it was?

32:07 Eight years. I left in 2012 and realised in 2020. For some people it can take up to 20 years. When you first get out of a cult, you really want nothing to do with it. You want to leave it behind and build a new life and live like an ordinary person.

32:47 But I don’t think that does people any favours because you’re still pushing it under the carpet.

32:55 Yes, you are. But there’s no real process in New Zealand today to help someone transition. There’s no mental health service, no proper system within the health system to help you. So you either push it down or you white-knuckle it. And that’s very hard. I think recovery is a lot about giving yourself time to process things.

33:31 I think that’s one of the reasons we encourage people not to join support groups right away — they haven’t processed it yet.

33:44 Exactly. People need time to think about the ins and outs of where they’ve been. That just takes time.

33:51 What helped jump-start that process for you?

34:00 The single most important thing was choosing my friends carefully. The first thing I did was get rid of toxic relationships and decide I wouldn’t participate in relationships that were harmful to me. That meant cutting people off, and it was easier than I thought. When you cut toxic people out of your life, your life gets better.

34:26 The second thing is having a social group. Being social is so important. If you don’t have family, it’s difficult. My family are overseas and we’re largely estranged. I had to look for friends I could rely on, trust with my feelings, and who wouldn’t be judgmental. Those are two things you can do right away, and they helped me on my way.

35:04 So one of the biggest supports has been good friendship and a good community around you. How do you hold your story now?

35:13 I’m still processing it. I feel like I’m about 80 to 90 percent there. By that I mean there’s still part of my story where I haven’t uncovered the full truth of what happened. I’m in the process of writing a book about it, and I’m also part of a documentary about Falun Gong that’s coming out on Disney+ later this year. Being part of that documentary has allowed me to talk with producers, directors and other ex-Falun Gong practitioners. There’s a group of us and we discuss a lot of stuff together. That helps them process and it helps me process.

36:14 I feel like I’m nearly at the point where I have a version of the truth that feels authentic. I’m sure in the future I’ll understand things differently or more deeply, but this feels like the first time I’ve had a complete, authentic picture.

36:29 Could you rapid-fire give me five things that help you cope on a day-to-day basis?

36:38 Breathing helps. Grounding helps. Scanning. I don’t know if that counts as one or three. I suffer from meditation fear because the meditation in Falun Gong was so brutal, so meditation isn’t something I really like. But I do mindfulness, which is completely different — non-spiritual, just awareness and being present. So: grounding, breathing, being present, mindfulness. Those are so useful for trauma and mental health. The fifth one is my dog, Haggis.

37:24 He’s an amazing, gentle soul and having him as a companion has been really helpful.

37:34 Dogs are great because they make you get outside and walk them.

37:45 Exactly. I walk every day, and having Haggis makes me do that. It’s extremely beneficial — being in nature and walking.

37:53 I also know that you’re a bit of an artist. How has that played a role in your journey of leaving cults?

38:03 Not as much as you’d think. I’m not ready to tackle the cult thing as an art project yet. Like I said, I’m still 80 to 90 percent through processing it. Once that’s done — once I’ve got the book out of the way — I might start looking at it. I only admitted it in 2020. The trauma made me very sick. I developed a chronic illness which I’m still recovering from today. The art I was making at that time was stuff I had already processed prior to 2020. It takes a long time. It might come out in the work eventually, or I might choose not to make art about it at all.

39:06 What do you wish people would understand about life after a cult?

39:12 I think it requires compassion and non-judgment. For someone who’s come out of a cult, the way they behave is not who they are. There are so many things going on in their head, and their behaviour may seem strange or unusual, but it’s coming from a place you’ve never been and won’t understand unless you’ve been through it yourself.

39:51 So holding them in a really non-judgmental space.

39:54 Exactly. People who have come out of cults are incredibly fragile — more fragile than you could believe. They can get triggered by the smallest things. I wish people understood just how fragile and damaged people can be after leaving cults, and that some of that damage is permanent. I don’t know a single cult survivor who says, “I’m completely over it. I’m cured. I never think about it.” Being part of a cult, and being a cult survivor, stays with you for the rest of your life.

40:39 Can you leave us with a few words about where you’re at right now in your journey?

40:46 I like to keep busy. Staying still isn’t good for me because it means intrusive thoughts. Right now I’m volunteering as much as I can. I’m doing this thing called the Unspun podcast. I’m volunteering for Decult. There’s a huge ambition among a lot of us that we want to see a respite centre — a facility where people can come, stay, get wellness treatments, and be in a protective environment. Maybe like a transition centre. That’s the big hairy audacious goal. I keep myself busy by volunteering, helping others, and putting all my skills toward that.

41:56 I’d just like to say it was really amazing to hear your story. I always really admire people who can come forward and share their story because it takes a lot of courage. I feel really privileged to have sat next to you today and had you share that with me.

42:11 Well, thanks Alisa. Thanks for interviewing me today. I really appreciate the opportunity. It’s really great to work with you.

42:19 Thank you — and same.

42:24 I’m going to enjoy returning the favour.

42:27 Yeah. So next week, folks, it’s going to be my story. Thanks for listening in.