Rob: What about the cult that you were in? Can you talk about that?
DS: I can. That's the same group that Elizabeth Gilbert wrote about in Eat Pray Love. And I long ago stopped being afraid of being litigated or suppressed. It hasn't been tried and I no longer think about it. Where I publish material which I've named the names and so on.
Rob: So can you name it here? Can you name the group?
DS: Yeah the group is called Siddha Yoga and it's run by the SYDA foundation the S-Y-D-A foundation. The current guru is a woman called Guru Mayi. She ousted her brother who was a co-leader at one time, now he runs his own group. He's Swami Nithyananda. She's know as Guru Maya. They don't talk to each other. Guru Mayi was the successor or she, some say she may have manipulated herself to be the successor to Swami Muktananda who was originally brought to the west by Werner Erhardt of EST and I think Baba Ram Das. The guy from Harvard, what's his name, Alpert? So anyway Muktananda died, Guru Mayi and her brother took over. She got rid of the brother. I followed her for more than ten years. I first got involved when Muktananda was still alive. I had very profound spiritual and mystical kinds of experiences at first. That felt quite extraordinary and quite beautiful. The type of thing William James talked about in The Varieties of Religious Experience. I made the unfortunate mistake of assuming that because I've had that kind of experience in that group that the group was where I belonged and where I needed to stay. And pretty rapidly I put aside my life, which at the time was rather disappointing. I had studied and trained quite rigorously to be an actor.
I had performed in various groups at various times but I wasn't able to really make a living at it. And I was pretty miserable and depressed and I was not psychologically prepared for the kinds of rejection you go through in that business. So I was ripe, and there were a lot of actors and show business people involved in through the yoga at the time. Celebrities. And they used to host introduction and meditation programs. So I got brought to one of those. I got hooked into it. I had my experiences. And not too long after my big mystical experiences I sold everything and sublet my place on the upper west side and went off to be with the guru. And I did that for about ten years. I worked my way up in the organization to become a leading spokesperson and teacher and writer and producer of events and promoter of tours for Guru Mayi's travels around the world. I had some success in managing these groups that promoted her tours, and brought in new recruits. I was put in charge of all kinds of things in that group.
And then quite suddenly one day Guru Mayi turned on me. I was actually defending someone she was berating and she gave me a look I'll never forget it, it was chilling, that you know I wasn't going to get away with contradicting her. And for the next six months, pretty much, she berated me and humiliated and embarrassed me and kind of tortured me in public, as well as in private, every day all at the same time while I had more and more responsibilities in the organization because at that time it was huge. It was international, up in the Catskills in their ashram, they'd have 4,000 people on a weekend. You know so it was really doing well back then. And I was busy, and I was being broken down, day by day, and finally she told me to leave, get a job, move out. She kept me in favor for a while but I was now on my own in the city, and you know I started to slowly, well I went into therapy thank goodness. And it took about three years for me to actually utter the words, I think that the Guru was cruel. And by that time I was married, I was already 40 something, 41. I got married. My wife also had been in the group.
We were not living within the group, we were on our own in Park Slope Brooklyn. And yeah, I could finally say it, I think she was cruel. And that was the beginning of leaving, it wasn't long after that that the New Yorker came out with a terrific article by Liz Harris who I mentioned earlier exposing the whole ugly side of Siddha Yoga, all the sexual abuse, all the criminality, all of the lies. And all well fact checked as anything in the New Yorker is usually. It was all true and I knew it and I was able to leave, my wife and I together, left. It was difficult in many ways because everyone we knew had become somebody in that group. So that experience and leaving it, I almost tried to pretend that it never happened and just go on with my life. I was going back to grad school and getting my master's degree in social work, planning to train in psychoanalysis. I tried to forget all about it, and then I read Steve Hassan's book, Combatting Cult Mind Control. And I suddenly realized, boy, I've got to do something, I can't just pretend this didn't happen. I felt so ashamed of what I had done to myself and how I had allowed myself to be so deceived. And how I had basically thrown myself away and tried to be this thing that would please this narcissist and I had to figure that out. And that was the genesis for me, of this book, because it was at that point that I began to really think about narcissism. What it meant to be the follower of a narcissist, or subjugated by a narcissist. And what the narcissist was doing. I wanted to figure it out from both ends. Because everybody know what the follower was, what the battered wife was doing, everybody had a theory about that.
The only thing they could say about the batterer was, oh well they're just a bad person. But then there was every kind of psychological theory about the masochistic submissive battered person. Well, I felt it had to be more complicated than that and I wanted to get into the psychology of the narcissist. So first of all deciding that this kind of person was a narcissist was the first step and then slowly over a long period of time I began to really try to refine what I was saying about narcissism and really look at it as a relational system that was traumatizing.
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