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THE PRISONER OF SAN JOSE: HOW I ESCAPED FROM ROSICRUCIAN MIND CONTROL |
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TWELVE: Rosicrucian Adventures in the Big Apple In July 1987, I left Miami and went to New York. It was my first time ever in New York. Before I left Miami, I had become friends with a New York taxi driver named Delano, a fellow Haitian who was thinking about moving to Miami. We became good friends, and I showed him around Miami. In gratitude for my interest in his prospects, he invited me to stay in his house if I ever came to New York. I took him up on his offer and wound up staying at his home in Brooklyn. He quickly had me change my driver's license to a New York driver's license. Without an employment permit, there was only one type of job I could do in New York, driving a gypsy cab. After about a week in Brooklyn, I was driving one. At the time of my flight, my mother was on her deathbed, having been diagnosed with cancer. I cried every day about not being able to visit her. I was still convinced that if I could only practice the AMORC principles perfectly, I could send a "treatment" to my mother, and the Cosmic would heal her. So it is no surprise that I fell back into the cycle I had been in when I lived in Miami, practicing the Rosicrucian exercises twenty-four hours a day. Healing my mother would be the ultimate test of the AMORC teachings. By then, I had left Delano's house and was renting a little room on my own. But my landlady soon got upset with me as I again became so focused on the AMORC teachings that I was not taking care of my financial obligations. I was aware that I was slipping into poverty again. I was aware of the amount of time I was putting into these teachings. And what was really happening? Very little that would seem like a spiritual blessing. For a brief moment, this time seriously, I began to think that maybe it was not me but something was wrong with the Rosicrucian ideas that diverted my energy and time away from practical matters. This thought became so strong in my mind that I actually sent a letter to AMORC in which I resigned from the organization. This was the first time I had taken any constructive action upon my doubts. During that same period, the owner of the gypsy cab I was driving took the cab away from me because I was falling behind in paying the rental fees. I was working so little that I could not pay either my rent or the cab fees. My landlady locked me out too, that very day. I spent the next night sleeping in a park on Eastern Parkway. I slept on a bench, and I saw or heard the many ladies and men of the night come in and out of the park. I meditated many times during the night. In the morning, a miracle came my way. The idea came to me almost like my first homeless night in Miami. It came to me, suddenly, that I had become homeless in New York because I had separated myself from the egregore of AMORC by my resignation three days earlier. An egregore is a divine thought form, rooted in the Cosmic, which supposedly gives substance and strength to the physical manifestation of an occult organization such as AMORC. In the language of my thinking back then, by separating myself from the AMORC thought form, I had brought upon myself the negative karma of homelessness. At that moment, I forgot my many homeless nights in Miami and the futility of practicing AMORC's teaching there as well. Desperately grasping for straws, I felt suddenly blessed by receiving such an enlightening message about my foolishness in leaving AMORC. I promised myself that I would be smarter in the future and never leave the great protective umbrella of the AMORC egregore. Such is the amazing power of cult teachings when one is fully in the grips of the cult personality. Such distorted thinking has occurred to thousands of cult members when attempting to leave their organization. In AMORC, the loss of connection to the AMORC egregore was my main fear, and it was upon me now. I quickly went to the place where my luggage was, wrote another letter to AMORC that asked them to ignore my previous resignation, and put the letter in the mail. So, again, I put myself in bondage to AMORC, chained to the egregore with no way out. As Steven Hassan says:
Still I had to face the fact that the teachings weren't really working in my life. I then came to another interesting conclusion: the problem was my refusal to cut my ties to the Catholic church. According to my new conception about my cosmic misdemeanors, stimulated by AMORC's claims to exclusive spiritual authority, I was "stuck" in non-manifestation hell because of the religious beliefs I had held earlier in life. As mentioned before, AMORC creates distance between members and their church, even though AMORC claims that one of its principles is for members to be involved in a church in their community. At this time, it was obvious to me that this was the moment when I believed I had matured enough to realize that a true Rosicrucian had to make a choice. The original principle, advocating members' church involvement, seemed to me more to create political cover than for reasons that genuinely supported this type of involvement by the member. After all, the Rosicrucian order was, in its own way, revolutionary in its claims and could be subject to persecution if it outwardly attacked the church. That is why it probably had to outwardly suggest church membership to its members, particularly before they came in or at early points in their membership. They needed political cover. Also, AMORC is a membership organization. It is much better, for the sake of recruiting and maintaining members, that church affiliations, which are often family and community connected, should not be conspicuously challenged. If challenged, that would alienate the new members' family and friends, also potential recruits for the organization. So I began to create in myself a profound separation from the Catholic church. In fact, I began to blame the church for everything that had gone wrong in my life. I was convinced that once I mentally broke from the church, I would finally gain the blessings of the Rosicrucian masters. The urgency to finally and definitively make this break was even greater when I realized that my mother was dying. While my mother was dying of cancer, she was crying day and night asking whether she would have a chance to see her Pierre, her son, before she died. She was asking whether anyone knew my whereabouts, and no one could actually tell her where I was. I, on the other hand, was going through a homeless experience again, this time in Brooklyn, New York. I was crying day and night, asking the Cosmic to give me the courage to accept, without complaint, this ultimate test from the egregore of AMORC. I believed that if I kept my faith, the God of AMORC would eventually give me the knowledge to remotely heal my poor mother. I'd told myself that I had better move quickly to free myself from church beliefs so that I could obtain the promised spiritual enlightenment and be able to successfully apply AMORC's distance-healing treatments on my mother. Unknown to me, while I was going through much of this convoluted thinking, my mother was already dead. The sad reality was that my sister wasn't able to inform me of my mother's passing because she didn't know exactly where I was living in New York. Furthermore, because my sister thought that I had become wealthy by driving a yellow cab in New York, she thought that I had literally abandoned my mother. When I eventually received the letter from my sister telling me that our mother had died quite a while ago, I was so speechless that I could not even cry. At that time, something switched off in me, and I began to blame my sisters and brother. Were they completely forgetting how I had helped them when I could? Did they have to assume that I had abandoned them? Didn't they realize that my lack of providing for them might be based on my own lack of finances?
1988: Lenora I came to realize that my financial condition was a serious impediment to my marrying a Rosicrucian. Somehow, Almighty God inspired me talk to someone outside of the AMORC lodge, someone who was not a member of the lodge. This was Lenora, a single mother of two boys. She was from Philadelphia and was three months pregnant. We went out on a date, and the next day I asked her to marry me. She said, "I need some time. I just met you." I went to her house and met her boys. She was having problems at the place where she was living. I asked her to move to my place. We sent the boys temporarily to her father in Philadelphia, to give us a chance to organize ourselves. The day after I met Lenora, she discovered the AMORC aspect of my life. I had gone inside a closet in my little apartment and started singing, "Om." In AMORC, we used this sacred sound as a preparation for meditation. Lenora and the boys never heard of anything like that, and they thought I was going crazy. When I came out after my meditation, I explained that I was a Rosicrucian and that I did a lot of meditation. Lenora and the boys were quite curious, and given that I am a very persuasive person, they began to believe me when I told them how valuable an organization AMORC was. Soon, we got into a fairly stable regimen. I drove a gypsy cab, and Lenora worked as a cook. For three months, my life became somewhat stable. I didn't go to a lodge during that time, but I continued to practice the AMORC exercises. Despite that, Lenora became very concerned about the amount of time I was spending on reading the monographs and meditating. There was, indeed, a financial consequence for my misspent time, for Lenora found herself paying most of the rent in the basement where we were living. At that point, my AMORC personality, developed in relationship to the order, began to overtake me, and I began to think I should have been living with a Rosicrucian. After all, if I were living with a Rosicrucian, my companion would not be complaining about the time I spent reading AMORC monographs. I then decided to go back and attend lodges in Manhattan (the New York City Lodge). I sometimes used Lenora's money to put gas in the gypsy cab to go to the lodge, and of course I was meditating so that I could find a Rosicrucian who wanted to marry me. I asked Lenora to move out, but she could not leave because she didn't have a place to go. So she slept on a mattress on the floor, and I slept on the bed. One night I went to the lodge to attend a convocation. After the convocation, I drove by a take-out Chinese restaurant and bought some food. I went home and ate my dinner without sharing it with Lenora, who was sitting right next to me. When I finished eating, something inside of me told me that I had been very selfish in not sharing my food with her. I then said to her, "Lenora, I am sorry. What I just did was not me." I gave her a few dollars and said that we would go and get some food for her. She took the two dollars from me but told me she would not buy food with it. She told me she had just seen an advertisement for an employment agency in Manhattan, which was hiring people. She was going to take the two dollars to take a subway to that agency. I really did not believe her when she said that. The next morning, she woke up at 5:00 AM and went to that agency. That same day, they hired her as a cook. The very next day, the owner of the gypsy cab took the car from me because I was falling behind in payments. I had spent too much time meditating and not enough time driving, a pattern that for years had constantly affected my ability to survive. Lenora said she would ask the manager of the temp agency to give me a job, even though I did not have an employment permit. She took me to the agency, and they hired me immediately. That was the first time I'd had a regular job since 1984. By this time, we were both working and seemed to be doing much better together, and I stopped my endless search for another prospective wife. In fact, I began to seriously again ask Lenora to marry me. But now Lenora hesitated and would give me no clear answer. She still thought I was spending too much of my time with the AMORC monographs rather than communicating with her or even working. Finally, she decided one day that we would go to City Hall and get married. So we went first to Manhattan to pick up our paychecks from the agency, and then to City Hall in Brooklyn. But when we had almost arrived at the train station near City Hall, she changed her mind and said she didn't want to get married any more. She later told me that the reason she changed her mind was because I had been reading an AMORC book on the train and didn't pay any attention to her. That was true. I was reading an AMORC book as I always did on a bus or a train. I read constantly, whenever I could, because I believed it gave me more spiritual "power," a power that Rosicrucians were able to acquire and strengthen through their practices and studies. Lenora's actions increased my desperation, and I didn't know what to do. I went home, and the next morning we both went to work as usual and continued our routine. I kept on meditating everywhere I could -- on the job, in the train, on the bus, and so on.
In New York, I came upon one of my long-time friends from Haiti, Sky Toussaint. Sky and his brother, if you remember, helped me get my first job in Florida. Sky was looking for a room to rent. I introduced him to the owner of the house where I was living in the basement, and Sky rented the other empty room in the basement. Soon after he moved in, he met a single mother of two children who moved in with him. So now it was four of us in the basement. Sky didn't have his green card, either. We talked about his marrying his roommate and my marrying Lenora. One day, Sky and his girlfriend took Lenora and me with them to City Hall to be witnesses at their wedding. They got married, and we went home, bought a bottle of champagne, and had a little celebration in the basement where we lived. After the celebration, I went to my closet and meditated. I thanked the Cosmic because I thought that my mystical power had made Sky's girlfriend marry him. A reasonable person might think, "What kind of nonsense is that? What did Sky's marriage have to do with my mystical power?" The fact is, as a Rosicrucian, you think you are in charge of the world. You think you can influence world leaders in their decision-making processes. In fact, you think you can influence anyone in their decision-making processes. Sky applied for his green card and was approved. Lenora, at that point, felt sorry for me. She decided the moment had come. I was still spending much of my time meditating and studying monographs rather than working. I could not afford the ring, so she bought the ring, and we went to City Hall in Brooklyn and got married on May 9, 1988. Eventually, later, we were blessed with a baby daughter, Katherine. Important Notes When I finally obtained my green card in May 1989, I was very grateful to the Cosmic and took it as proof that the AMORC principles work. I forgot the confusing experiences of homelessness, poverty, and loneliness in Miami and in New York. I justified these negative experiences by blaming myself. I basically concluded that all these AMORC teachings were right and I was on the right track. Now, extremely grateful about the green card, I promised to myself I would do everything according to the "letter of the law," as prescribed by AMORC, so I could continue receiving AMORC blessings. I didn't even take a moment to reflect on how I had been forced to give up on my mother at such a crucial moment in her life. At one point, the idea of my mother's painful death came to mind, but the cult personality quickly took over. It provided me with the idea that my mother's death at that time was actually a result of AMORC's blessings. Otherwise, I told myself, she might have lost her mind. Again, I fooled myself into believing this last thought, and I expressed gratitude to AMORC. When I left AMORC in 2004, I was able to reflect on the fact that this thought was a result of the AMORC indoctrination process. As a matter of fact, my abandoning my mother to serve AMORC could actually have made her lose her mind. September 1989: College Entrance One week before I was scheduled to start college, I was fired from my job. Lenora had to lend me money out of her paycheck to buy my first books. When I received my first loan disbursement check, I paid her back. I had work/study as part of my financial aid package. The office sent me to the chemistry lab to work with the lab technician. I quickly learned to prepare the lab for the different classes. I'd had a good three years of chemistry back in Haiti (in engineering school), and in spite of eight years away from any academic environment, I was catching up quickly. My declared major in college was mathematics. The reason I choose math instead of engineering was because of an experience I'd had during my third month in Miami. I was practicing a mystical exercise where you write out where you came from and arrive at certain conclusions about your own life. I now know that psychiatrists give people this type of exercise. When I was doing it in 1983, I had never heard of it. Because AMORC emphasizes the antiquity of its knowledge, I thought this exercise was one of those special ones that AMORC was passing on to members, we who were specially selected people. I therefore took it very seriously. Of course, from AMORC's Rosicrucian perspective, the masters are always watching everything you do. So I was sure that the determinations I made about my life following this exercise were communicated to me by the Cosmic and/or by its invisible masters. One of the conclusions that came up out of this project was that I should cultivate my aptitude in math. So I took that as a message from the masters that I must study math instead of engineering. When I started college, my reasoning went like this: "If I do everything that the egregore wants me to do, I won't delay my success in life." Remember, at this point, I was convinced that it had taken six painful years to obtain my green card because I hadn't fully complied with the AMORC teachings. So, in compliance with my concept of the dictates of the egregore, I decided to go through the college program in four years, take a bachelor's degree in math, and then get what the Cosmic has prepared for me. One morning, while working at the chemistry lab, I was on break. I thought, "Why am I wasting my time in the chemistry lab? It's smarter to take some extra student loans and take some more math classes so that I can finish more quickly." I quit the work/study, and I took some more SLS loans. To give myself more exposure to math, I got a part-time job in the math lab. I did a lot of math tutoring to supplement my financial aid package. I was still spending a lot of time reading AMORC monographs and practicing AMORC exercises. When I got to my sophomore year, Lenora told me that the city was giving an exam for people who wanted to work for the traffic department and asked whether I wanted to take the exam. I told her no. She tried to convince me that I could get a job working for the city and go to school part-time. I refused. I told Lenora the Cosmic wanted me to study math and finish quickly to get its blessing. Lenora got tired of my AMORC non-sense and kicks me out of the house exactly as she took me (with one clothes on my back). I spent that night in a dirty YMCA room in Queens. I only had $45 in my saving account. With the help of a friend I was able to find a room and bought some clothes the next day. I made arrangement to visit my daughter through her godmother. Lenora and I were divorced before I graduated from college.
One day, I was practicing an exercise from the oratory when two mathematics students from my college came to my mind. Both of them were then teaching math in high school. Prior to this meditation session, I had run into a Haitian guy I knew who also used to study math at the university but transferred to the engineering program at a different school. During the session, I began to think that it was likely that I would wind up teaching high school math like my friends. I hated the idea and began to get depressed. But then, a moment later, it seemed almost as though an inner voice was telling me about a student I knew named Michael who studied math at school but didn't have to teach. He currently works for an actuarial firm. The voice then pointed out how a lady I knew who recently graduated in mathematics had gotten a job with IBM. My impression was that the idea about the lady came from my own voice, the voice of reason, but the idea about Michael was an intuitive idea or one given to me by a master. By the time I got to my junior year of college, I had started observing that I had a hard time staying focused when attending a class. My inability to concentrate was so bad that after attending a class, I had to go home and restudy the material on my own. It became so hard that I thought maybe I had some kind of brain tumor. But I couldn't go to the doctor because I didn't have health insurance. I concluded that although I might have had a brain tumor, AMORC was keeping me from having the means to visit a doctor so that I could learn to have more faith in the egregore to take care of my health problems. I finally concluded that I had to meditate more and practice the AMORC exercises more, so that AMORC could continue to take care of my health problems and give me back my ability to concentrate. Now I realize, from reading books about mind control organizations, that various indoctrination techniques of AMORC may have been what messed up my brain. In spite of all these internal problems, I was able to graduate magna cum laude (GPA.3.50)with a bachelor's degree in mathematics.
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