An Interview With Cult News 101 Founder Patrick Ryan
By Syran Warner
There’s a small but dedicated social media community that focuses on the world of cults and if you start following accounts, the algorithms at sites like Twitter and Instagram will eventually funnel you towards Cult News 101, which aggregates stories from newspapers across the globe.
When we first found the consistently updated trove of articles, I was curious who was aggregating all the content. Was this a true crime rubbernecker? An A.I. bot programmed to feed AP dispatches? Or was this the work of someone with a vested interest in spreading the news from Cultland? A few exploratory clicks around the web proved that the accounts and the site that hosts the insanely large archive of backdated stories were the work of two exit councilors: modern cult deprogrammers Patrick Ryan and Joseph Kelly, who both have experience on the inside of coercive organizations themselves.
Having found that the source of all these stories sprouted from people with incredible stories of their own, it seemed prudent to reach out, which is how I got in touch with Patrick Ryan for an interview. Originally, I thought we’d discuss social media and Ryan’s involvement aggregating all the stories he funnels on his channels, but the councilors own story and opinions on spreading the word about cults ruled the interview. Here you’ll find a story about the cult of Transcendental Meditation and a survivor fighting back.
I asked Ryan how he got into the profession of exit counseling and spreading stories as a career. He clearly had heard the question before.
“It wasn't the [career] that my parents chose.”
Ryan went on to explain how he got involved with Transcendental Meditation or TM at the age of 17 and stayed until he was 24. He then offers some backstory about the group and his place in it. It might be easy to dismiss TM as something benign that hippies are into that doesn’t deserve cult status. The Beatles were into it, right? However, Ryan’s experience shows another side of the group.
“So, like most groups there are many layers and in TM’s case about 10 million people have learned the technique, but there's probably like 50,000 of us who were in the inner core of the organization.”
TM was started by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and when he died, Ryan estimates that his empire was worth between 10 and 14 billion dollars.
“Maharishi was like a Hindu TV evangelist. He sold magic words. The inventory could just be endless, he could come up with new magic words and sell them for a lot of money.”
It’s difficult to overstate how big TM was in its heyday.
TM was huge in the 1970’s, when Ryan discovered it. It was even being taught in public schools. One night Ryan saw Maharishi on the Merv Griffin show and became curious. A writer for his high school paper, he then became interested in a story about The Philadelphia Phillies using TM with their athletes which seemed to bring more validity to the practice. Once Ryan learned to meditate, he was encouraged to take a weeklong course, and after that he ended up enrolling at a Maharishi university where he could study the practice, even though his family protested. Maharishi’s school was accredited, and Ryan mentions that, since the school had money, he had some great professors with resumes like CERN and Harvard, but there were also ideas taught that he calls “supernormal.” For instance, Maharishi wanted students to learn things like levitation, walking through walls and becoming invisible.
This is where I really began to understand the culty nature of TM. Ryan described that there were many hypnotic ways Maharishi would get his disciples in a trance-like state to become suggestible to ideas that were metaphysical but wouldn’t go as far as to call it brainwashing. To him, these ideas weren’t much different than more commonly accepted views from western religions.
“It's a worldview. So, there's other competing world-views and each of them have fundamental assumptions. The fundamental assumption in the Christian worldview is that there's God the father, this whole story, but in the Eastern worldview, it's another kind of story. And that kind of story is based upon a fundamental assumption that we evolve over time.”
Ryan then described how isolating systems were in place at school in a way that jives with ideas of how cults cut members off from the rest of the world and bring them further towards their own ideas.
“Every three months in the university, we stopped studying academics and we studied Marharishi’s teachings, and that was for a month. And so that month you didn't go to the bathroom alone or watch TV, read newspapers, call home, write letters. Basically, your eyes were closed about 20 hours.”
The meditation was grueling, but it was still just meditation. I was more curious about ideas like levitation. How you could convince someone this was a physical possibility was interesting to me, but the process of deep secrecy Ryan described in the teaching of the process was even more intriguing. He explained that at this point it was believed the CIA wanted to know secrets of human potential and that many safeguards were put in place to protect learning levitation from falling into the wrong hands. What he described reminded me of the below the surface “DOS” group in NXIVM. There’s a real cloak and dagger element to the process, but everyone can probably understand the appeal of being in on a secret.
Patrick Ryan’s badge.
“When we entered the course, you had to sign affidavits that you'd never tell anyone. It was all secret. And then you were given badge with your picture on them.
So, every time you went into the classroom, so to speak, you had to hold your badge at your face and there would be two people who are your friends who would make sure that you were who you said you were. And then you'd go through another set of doors where there'd be two more people to check your badge to make sure that you were who you were. And then the room was set up in rows, and each row had six chairs. The first person in the room was called the group leader and [the group] was made of sets of buddies.
So, there'd be my buddy and me, and then the next two would be two buddies and the next two would be two buddies. Once we were in these rooms, then they would come around and say, “we need to do a security check.” They would say, “group leader, check everyone in your row’s badge.” Now they've already checked it twice. And the group leader gets up and checks your badge, and then they see the people on the right of you and the left. You check the person's badge next to you that's from a different group to make sure it's who it’s supposed to be. So, it's setting up this idea of exclusivity and specialness.”
Now that everyone’s badges were checked multiple times, you might think they were free to discuss the process of levitation in peace, but there were still more precautions, although they may have been counterintuitive.
“And then they put wires up and down the aisles and give everybody an earphone because it has to be whispered because people could be listening in, but in reality, this creates a huge antenna.”
The course went on and the pupils would have their eyes closed while they practiced the procedures involved in lifting off the ground. At the end, the group leaders would ask if anyone levitated. Some would say that they had. Ryan would wonder why others had the experience and he hadn’t which he’d pinpoint to tiny infractions he’d made in his practice. However, he kept trying and trying to reach this special state that he’d been convinced by his teachers had the potential to do things like end war on earth.
What Ryan sees today is that the class was a fraud, but he also sees the ways in which the students were able to convince themselves it was real. The people who took the course did jumping exercises and believed they were, for a moment, suspended in the air. This would go on for long periods of time. It’s amusing to hear Ryan describe what this would have looked like to an outsider.
“Two and a half hours in the morning and evening we would spend our lives bouncing up and down like frogs.”
Patrick Ryan then got a dose of reality when his family became concerned, not for him, but for his sister who just so happened to also be in a cult. I get the sense from Ryan that the cult his sister was in looked more like a nefarious organization from an outsider’s perspective than TM, so he didn’t feel threatened by the information he and his family were getting to help her. Still, all cults share common DNA and have similar characteristics when broken down. Ryan started to realize TM might involve coercive control and at a certain point realized his suspicions were well-founded. Now a dissatisfied customer, Ryan thought about the levitation course he’d spent over $1,400 dollars on. He could see that students were getting robbed by a billionaire and tried to recoup the money. The time he put in, of course, he’d never get back.
“I said, well, I want my money back. You lied to me. And they said, “no.” So, I sued them in federal court, in Washington for fraud and for negligence. I had to convince a jury of my peers in Washington, DC, which was predominantly a middle to lower class community that this white kid from privilege who went to a university could believe he could levitate, and he wants his money back. I mean, it's kind of a tall order and I mean, how do you do that?
Ultimately, it took many years, but I settled out of court with them, and they spent millions and millions of dollars. Probably $50 million not to give me $1,407.”
In the process of recouping his tuition, Ryan became involved in the world of cult conferences and met a few experts in the field. He started visiting different religious groups and gathering information. Eventually, he developed a reputation as something of a cult crusader and became involved in deprogramming.
“All of a sudden people started calling and would say, “my son is completely off the walls with TM.””
When Patrick Ryan entered the world of deprogramming it was still in its kidnapping and holding cult members against their will stage, which was popularized by Ted Patrick in the ‘70’s. Ryan now sees this as a process that was barbaric, but such were the tools of the time. After adopting a gentler form of exit counseling, Ryan’s work continued with a mix of helping people out of cults and collecting literature on the subject, which continues with his work curating Cult News 101. The man is serious about good information as a gateway to get people out of cults, and he sees intervention as something that doesn’t need to be scary. In fact, he believes scare tactics can cause more harm than good.
“We have to do this thorough assessment because we have to assess the situation to find out what's real for that person, because you don't want to talk about them doing these horrible things if that group's not doing these harmful things or the group might be doing the horrible things but only to some people, so you don't want to impose it.
There's a thing when Nancy Reagan, President Reagan's wife, started her anti-drug campaign called “just say no.” She started a program that began drug education in high schools and wherever they did drug education in high schools, drug usage went up.
And the reason is because they were talking in extremes. So, we all knew people who did acid. We all knew people who smoke pot. We knew people who had mushrooms. If you knew people did that and they didn't jump off bridges, the person who says, “when you do this, you jump off a bridge,” well, they have no credibility.”
It's the same thing with cults, Ryan proclaims. The right information, the appropriate information, will help people out more than thinking of every cult as a mini-Jonestown. And Ryan sees what he’s doing today as a means of getting people to see the universal in his message. It’s been a long process. Ryan first started collecting articles as the internet became a consumer technology, when he’d pay a dollar for each article and collect them online. Since then, he’s always spread cult news as it rolled out in newsletters or reached the AP.
“I started sending out news every day and then I started working for the International Cultic Studies Association in the mid-nineties. We sort of rolled it into that and we built a huge database of close to 80,000 articles. And then I stopped working for them maybe eight or nine years ago, and I had that database and I just kept it going.
And that's how this thing came about. It always was amazing to me, families and people say, “I never hear anything about cults.” I’m like, what you mean? It's in the newspaper all the time. It’s just a way of disseminating information constantly.”
I finished the interview by asking Patrick Ryan why it’s important to tell cult stories. I pointed out that I felt that these stories illustrate that coercive control has proven to be a feature of humanity, which he agreed with.
"It’s a bug, it's a feature, and it's the whole history of mankind. It's nothing new. You know, the history of humanity is oppression of people, of a certain class with money and wealth or swords and spears oppressing other people, making them slaves either physically or mentally. It's the history of mankind.”
