A last look at cult expert Steve Hassan's Freedom of Mind

After producing a series of articles in which I highlight and comment on material of special interest from Steven Hassan's best-selling guidebooks Combating Cult Mind Control and Freedom of Mind, I thought that I had reached the end of the exercise. However, Freedom of Mind has inspired just one more post.

Steve Hassan's detailed advice about how families and friends can help cult members and cult leavers via his Strategic Interactive Approach (SIA) is very useful indeed. It is best to go straight to the source for his wise words on building teams, planning interventions, role playing, winning the trust of the cult member, asking key questions and other associated exercises and procedures; here I just want to feature a few miscellaneous extracts of particular interest, some of which have a wider application.

Indirectly asking for help
Steve Hassan describes a technique used by clever cult members to drop subtle hints to their families:

“I have had several families contact me after their cult son or daughter told them not to get a professional counselor to get them out. Before the cult member made that remark, the families had not realized that they could contact someone like me for help.”

This approach could be used in other situations - and I don't mean just by people who say, “It's my birthday tomorrow, but please don't tell anyone and don't get me anything!”

Echoes of Dion Fortune
A recent article contains this quotation from a Dion Fortune occult novel:

“You don’t know what you do want, but you do know what you don’t want.

Steve Hassan says something similar:

“It is useful, for instance, to be able to recognize and articulate the difference between what you do not want (a mediocre job) and knowing what you do want (a fulfilling career).”

It is indeed very useful to bring goals, preferences and requirements out into the open and nail them down. 

Steve Hassan calls this exercise 'assertive motivation'. It can help to remove blocks, increase understanding and get someone going in the right direction.

Another scene of interest from a Dion Fortune occult novel

As mentioned in the article inspired by The Demon Lover, there are scenes in Dion Fortune's occult novels that have particular relevance to some of the topics on here. 

This post features another of these scenes, this time from Moon Magic (1956). It presents the idea that people with certain metaphysical powers and the right training and intention can use occult methods to draw others to them for mutual benefit.

Lilith Le Fay calls out for a colleague
Moon Magic contains much occult-related material that people who live entirely in the three-dimensional universe would dismiss as ridiculous rubbish, purple prose, or, as Richard Hannay describes a speech he makes in John Buchan's Greenmantle, confounded nonsense!

I skip through many of the occult scenes myself, but find this novel worth reading for the commentary-inspiring material that it contains.  

Lilith Le Fay is one of the main characters. She is a priestess of Isis and a practitioner of ceremonial magic. 

She needs to find someone to work with her when she performs the rituals. She advertises the job vacancy in a very unusual way:

“There was nothing for me to do but watch and wait. I could not go and find the people I wanted; I had to wait for them to find me. This I knew they would do because I was sounding the call of Isis, vibrating it on the Inner Planes as a wireless operator sounds his key-call. Those who were on my wave-length would soon be picking it up, and then curious combinations of circumstances would do the rest. They would come from the ends of the earth like homing pigeons, picking up the call subconsciously and not knowing what it was that drew them.“

The procedure may seem preposterous and the practitioner delusional, but it works! Lilith Le Fay attracts the right man for the job by broadcasting on the right wavelength: she puts out the call, and a man who has the qualities that she requires eventually appears in her life.

The shadow side of the Moon Magic scene
Most people will immediately dismiss the suggestion that some people can communicate via other dimensions as very unlikely indeed - or even crazy. However, when people who are interested in unseen influences and have had certain unusual experiences are first introduced to this idea, they find that it makes sense and could explain a lot. 

Further consideration by such people may cause them to realise that, assuming it is correct, this proposition has some alarming implications; they may rightly suspect that the forces involved do not always work for the benefit of the people using or affected by them. 

In particular, there is a negative or shadow side to the calling phenomenon. 

Three writers' words on two kinds of pain

Extracts from L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery's Green Gables letters have appeared in several articles in the past. 

Ephraim Weber, the recipient of these letters, was someone to whom she could express her true thoughts and feelings about many mundane, metaphysical and philosophical topics and experiences. She was very lucky to have this kindred spirit in her life.

She covered a lot of ground: she wrote about envy, writing, religion, the flowers in her garden, books, housework and many other things. Her letters also contain some amusing anecdotes. 

The inspiration for this article comes from some thought-provoking words that she wrote about two kinds of pain. 

As with the extracts in the previous article, this one was chosen because it reminded me of something that I had read in the works of other writers.

Two kinds of pain
L. M. Montgomery said this in a letter dated May 8th 1905:

“...I agree with you in regard to one kind of pain. There are two kinds, don’t you think! The pain God sends to us and the pain we bring on ourselves; the former is the fire of heaven, the latter the flame of hell. 

God’s pain is indeed one of his ministering spirits. Great mysteries of soul-birth and soul growth are bound up in it and if we have the courage and the endurance to make a friend of it it will bring great gifts to us. But the pain we bring on ourselves through folly or wilfulness or even simple blindness! Ah, it is horrible; it is degrading; there is no fine, high ministry in it; it burns and scars and defaces for our punishment.”

This is strong stuff; it is all very biblical. It contrasts the purifying flames of Purgatory with the everlasting fires of Hell. 

This is not the place to go into the events in L. M. Montgomery's life that caused her to develop these ideas about pain – and at this point the worst was still to come. For now, I just want to give examples of two other people's words on two very different kinds of pain.