THE SPIRIT OF THINGS RADIO NATIONAL
Sunday at 6pm, repeated Monday at 9pm
and Friday at 4am
Presented by Rachael Kohn
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/spirit/stories/s1564488.htm

True Stories
Sunday 12 February 2006

Summary
In the search for religious Truth, the cost can sometimes be higher than expected. Three young people explain how they got into groups that promised more than they delivered.

Program Transcript
Rachael Kohn: It’s been said many times before, that one man’s Cult is another man’s Truth.

Hello, welcome to The Spirit of Things on ABC Radio National. I’m Rachael Kohn.

Whatever you believe on the issue, there’s a raft of groups today that claim to have the One True Divine Revelation, or the Spiritual Cure for whatever ails you.

What advice do you give to the hopeful seeker ready to embark on a spiritual journey? Apart from the consumer ethic of ‘Buyer Beware’ some cautionary tales can provide real insight. And voluntary groups like the Cult Information and Family Support, or CIFS, can also be helpful.

Today we hear from three young people, who full of trust and idealism, believed they found what they were looking for in the groups they joined. But their experiences finally led them to believe otherwise. Now as ex-members they’ve had to cope with the aftermath, which has been traumatic.
My next guest belonged to a group that believes salvation comes in a bottle. The promise is simple: buy the energised waters and imbibe Infinity. The group was targeted by the New South Wales Fair Trading Commission in 2002 for marketing its products as miracle cures when they were nothing but distilled water with exotic names, like ‘Heart Spider’ and ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’.

But there was more than selling going on. The group’s leader, Gerald Attrill, who now calls himself Jessa O’ My Heart, is described in its literature as ‘one who has already gone to God’, he is ‘the hole in the universe and as a social being he does not exist.’ Mysterious? Perhaps that was part of the attraction.

Nicola, what was the group that you first joined?

Nicola: It was a group called Infinity Forms of Yellow Remember. But it’s now called Hermes Far Eastern Shining.

Rachael Kohn: Both those names are very difficult to understand; what did the first one mean?

Nicola: OK. Jessa O’ My Heart is the leader of the group, and he believed that we live on what he called a Red Realm world, which basically, this world we live in, is a hell world, that he has been enlightened to the Yellow Realm, which is kind of a lot higher than that, and we’re to kind of remember that we are from the Yellow Realm, not the Red Realm.

Rachael Kohn: And what did that entail? What were the sort of things that you had to do to remain on the Yellow Realm or to get on the Yellow Realm?

Nicola: Well he is the alchemist, and he has created a whole company that sells discs that empower water that you drink, and the water then is alchemically empowered by the leader. So it’s a healing energy which will bring you more and more to the Yellow Realm and become more enlightened and more like him.

Rachael Kohn: Were you encouraged to buy this water or these discs?

Nicola: Definitely so, and the more you bought the more you would become more enlightened and more healed.

Rachael Kohn: How much did you buy?

Nicola: I began to become involved in this group in 1998 and I bought a threshold pack, which consists of 100 vials and that cost $5,000. I left four years ago and since then, they’ve brought out another four different threshold packs that are all the same amount of money and all those energies are supposed to have different healing properties. So you’re encouraged to buy more and more of these threshold packs that cost that amount of money, yes.

Rachael Kohn: Did you feel good about the group, I mean when you first joined? You obviously laid out quite a bit of money.

Nicola: Well at the beginning I didn’t necessarily believe that he was God, but more and more you just believe that these waters and these vials actually work, and that you’re becoming more healed and then you become more and more involved in the group and then I began to live in the group.

I changed my name to a name called Soon Gathers Delight in Grace and everyone gets different names, and so then, slowly but surely, the belief system kind of comes more and more into your mind that you believe Jessa O’ My Heart is God himself, and so anything that he says you have to do, because that’s God’s purpose for you.

Rachael Kohn: Was it a pretty demanding lifestyle?

Nicola: Yes, it was, you know you would be up very early in the morning, and you would be in bed very late. Sometimes after 12 o’clock at night. But he would recommend six hours of sleep as an average, and if you got more than that, you were pretty lucky. And it was pretty – well it wasn’t too strenuous work, but you were focused continuously on your process and transformation. So you were constantly working on yourself the whole time.

Rachael Kohn: And you were in Australia, this was in Australia, wasn’t it?

Nicola: I began in Australia, they had centres in Sydney and Maroochydore and centres in New Zealand and America. They had a centre in Wisconsin, and I worked in all of those. But now primarily, I think they’ve closed down all of those centres except for the one in New Zealand, and all of the centres have kind of conglomerated to the Murwillumbah area and Tyalgum area.

So they all live around that area and they’ve opened clothing shops now, and they sell empowered clothes and they actually have a coffee shop, two coffee shops, one in Tyalgum and one in Murwillumbah, and they sell empowered coffees.

They don’t actually say that they’re empowered now because when they were originally Infinity, the Fair Trading took them to court, and they were no longer allowed to say things were empowered. So everything’s got a disclaimer on it now. But that’s how they get money now, they just work in cafes, and work in clothing shops, but they still sell these waters and vials, but in a shop that is invitation only to get into those shops.

Rachael Kohn: Well how long were you a member and when did you start to have some doubts?

Nicola: I became a member in 1998 and I didn’t come out till 2001, and even though I physically was asked to leave, and I still don’t really understand why I was asked to leave, they wanted me to still be part of the cult and still use the waters and everything but not actually live on the community. So I’d still be mentally and emotionally locked up with the cult for another 3-1/2 years and it wasn’t till last year that I finally saw through all of the mental programming that was involved in the cult.

Rachael Kohn: Is that why you call them a cult? I mean some people don’t use that term; what do you mean when you refer to it?

Nicola: I refer to it as a cult because I’ve learnt a lot just over the last year of how these particular groups use mind control, and in a very systematic way, and these particular groups that control your lifestyle and prevent you from having any interaction with families, only believing in one set of ideologies which has come from the leader. All these groups are out there, and they work in exactly the same way as our group did. So I kind of group those groups together in the word ‘cult’, that’s what I’ve come to believe that they are.

Rachael Kohn: So do you think they did exercise control over you in every way?

Nicola: Definitely, there’s no doubt about that. I would have done anything for this man, Jessa O’ My Heart, because I believed that he was Jesus Christ incarnate. He never said it himself, but all the disciples of him definitely spoke about it regularly, that he was Jesus Christ and it was always wondered who we were in the time of Jesus Christ, like that we were all reincarnated and we were all there, and this was just the same life playing out again. And so Jesus Christ, this is playing out his life again.

So I definitely would have done anything for this man who I really believed was Jesus Christ, and anything meaning anything, I would have done anything. If I had any idea that I was going to be asked to do these things before the cult, before this group, I definitely wouldn’t have done them, if I knew that they were going to ask me to do these things, such as I had sexual relations with Jessa O’ My Heart, because he asked me to, and I know that that does happen regularly in the group, but it’s never talked about.

And once there was a new recruit and we were all talking, being very open in revealing our secrets and I thought it was a good opportunity to tell everybody about my wonderful experience with Jessa in the bedroom, and it came down from Show Me Showers Heaven’s Bliss who is the second-in-charge, Jessa’s ‘wife’ in a sense, that you do not talk about that, and you keep that to yourself and you mustn’t ever reveal that to anybody. And so in that sense, you are asked to be truthful and honest, but only about particular things. Not about the things that involved Jessa and your experiences with him.

Rachael Kohn: How did you decide to leave a group that you were so committed to?

Nicola: Well even the fact that I was out for another three or four years before I actually realised how much mind control this man still had on me. It wasn’t until I got to the point where I realised I wanted to go back again, this was this time last year, and I have two beautiful children, one’s almost four and one’s two, and I was willing to give up those two children to go back to this man, and that’s how much I was still committed to going back to him.

And I was willing to give up all fears of telling my family how I still wanted to live with this man, but I said that I would be willing to talk to anybody they wanted me to talk to before I left, because I wanted to be making the right decision, because I did really want to follow God. And so they had me talk to a pastor, and he put on a whiteboard who Jesus Christ really is, and actually documented it with the Bible, and had me say everything that Jessa O’ My Heart did and it was like a side-to-side thing, who Jesus Christ is and who Jessa O’ My Heart is.

And it was very obvious to me at that point that he wasn’t Jesus Christ, and that just shattered everything for me, because I was really in search of Jesus Christ, and I really believed that if God wanted us to believe something, he would give us a book like the Bible, and it would be spread to all ends of the earth because he is that powerful. But he wouldn’t just have this special leader that had this one book that maybe 100 people only read, and I knew God to be a lot more powerful than that.

And it’s just that kind of comparison did a lot for me, and the pastor had me ask Jesus Christ into my heart, and it was like this curse had been finally broken on me. And I was like dancing for joy for weeks, and just the amount of unravelling of the mind, it is still happening for me, and every day I feel more free because of that unravelling process, and it’s amazing how indoctrinated I was mentally. It just controlled every aspect.

Rachael Kohn: Do you feel that what the pastor gave you was a freedom of choice, or did he just replace one belief with another?

Nicola: It was definitely freedom of choice because he was just stating the facts from the Bible, and he just had me put up there that Jesus Christ was walking through the streets and literally healing people, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that these were miracles, people were being raised from the dead, the blind could see. And with Jessa O’ My Heart, it’s all very elusive and very mystical and mysterious because he’s locked himself away in his house, and when you see him, you might feel amazing, you might feel like you’re with God himself, but there’s no real healing, there’s no real change other than if you’re in his presence, and really, when you look at it, this man is built up to be God himself.

No wonder you think you’re having a godly experience because you know, you really think you’re with God, and you’re almost hyperventilating at the sight of him. Whereas with Jesus Christ there wasn’t any doubt, it was obvious things that Jesus Christ did that were actual miracles. And also, I don’t exactly where in Revelation, but he actually referred to a time when Jesus Christ will come on the clouds, and it will be undeniable that everybody will know that God has come a second time, and that also really made me think that why is there only a special select few that have discovered that Jesus Christ is actually here? That is the alluring nature of it, because we felt like the special ones, we know who Jesus Christ is on this earth, and all the rest of the world are just, you know, they have no idea about this special man.

Rachael Kohn: What are the challenges for you now that you are out, back into society, back with the crowd, as it were, not the special mystical group?

Nicola: I find I guess it is an extremely large grieving process every day because of the alluring nature of being in this beautiful community, where you think you’re doing beautiful things every day, loving people, and you’re changing the world, to go back to a life where you’re creating a relationship with your partner, in a real sense. You’re doing the nitty gritty things every day.

You’re actually building your children’s life to being one of love and trust in a real sense; no real psychic kind of ‘We’re giving you lots of loving energy’, you’re really doing the hard stuff when these kids are having a ratbag day, and you respond to them in a loving way. That’s the hard stuff, and just remembering that that’s actually what God wants from us is the simple stuff. Nothing grandiose or nothing where you’re changing the world, I think just getting back to the simple stuff is what God really wants from us.

That’s why I’ve just got to keep on bringing myself back to everyday is the simple things, yes.

Rachael Kohn: How much has outside support helped you, that is groups like CIFS and others, your family for example?

Nicola: Enormously. I really don’t think I could have done it without my partner, and for me because he struggled so much in his own life, he had a drug addiction of sorts, and I kind of paralleled with him and realised that my group was like an addiction in itself. So it’s been a process of relating with him of how he goes NA every night, you know, to get out of his addiction.

It’s very much a support, him going through that is like I’m coming out of my – I can’t stop saying cult, that’s how I refer to it – as my cult experience. It was like an addiction, and my family have been wonderful, and just meeting other people that have come out of cults, how similar the experiences are. And like it’s amazing, I’ve had a year-and-a-half with a psychologist, and they did more work in actually making me grow up and be a mature individual in life, and more functional than the cult ever did with all these energies that you had to buy for like three years or more. So that was a real big clincher too, that it actually didn’t do anything.

Rachael Kohn: It’s been great talking to you, thank you so much.

Nicola: Thank you.

Rachael Kohn: That was Nicola, a former member of Infinity Forms of Yellow Remember. In its promotion literature, it says ‘These vials and waters are literally the Radiant Vibratory Current of Jessa O’ My Heart’s Recognition and Radiance of his own awakening as Only God.’ !!!

You’re listening to True Stories on The Spirit of Things here on ABC Radio National, about people who take a leap of faith into a totally lifestyle and beliefs, and eventually find that it’s brought them more problems than they expected.

 

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