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It was hearing these words, "Don't ever tell," that broke for me what Ernst Becker (1973) has called "the spell cast by persons -- the nexus of unfreedom." As I began to explore my experiences and those of others in connection with SYDA, I realized that because I had accepted the leader's claims to perfection and enlightenment, I had been unable to recognize abuses in the ashram for what they were.

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Thought reform (also known as mind control) is the foundation on which cults are built. Lifton identified 8 phenomena that were present in the systems of "ideological totalism" that he studied, all of which can be found in cults:
1.        Milieu control - control of communication within an environment. Maintained primarily by increasingly isolating members from non-members, this sets up what Lifton calls "personal closure." One is constantly receiving reinforcement to suppress personal doubts and struggles about what is true or real;
2.        Mystical manipulation, or planned spontaneity - a systematic process, covertly planned and managed by the group leader, whereby others come to invest him with omniscience, omnipotence, or divine authority. This gives rise to the embrace of an "ends justify the means" philosophy, since the behavior and directives of the leader are always and only interpreted as having a divine origin and purpose;
3.        Demand for purity - the call for a radical separation of pure and impure, of good and evil, within an environment and within oneself. This creates a world of guilt and shame in which devotees become obsessively preoccupied with hope of reward and fear of punishment;
4.        Cult of confession - linked to the demand for purity. Required confession sessions, ostensibly for the purpose of purification and spiritual evolution, manipulate the guilt and shame mechanisms of followers, expose them totally to the group, and deepen their sense of being owned by the group;
5.        Sacred science - a set of dogmatic principles which claim to be a science embodying the truth about human behavior and human psychology. These principles must never be questioned, and all experience must be filtered through them;
6.        Loading the language - reduction and distortion of complex concepts, thoughts, and feelings to simplistic cliches and slogans, which are used to still and limit mental processes of judgment and critical thinking;
7.        Doctrine over person - one is made to feel that doubts of the doctrine are a reflection of one's own inadequacies, defects, or sins. The dogma is truth, and one's subjective experience must be aligned with the dogma. To do otherwise is to risk exclusion from the group. Since the doctrine is created to serve the purposes of the sociopathic leader, followers must split off or dissociate parts of themselves, and jettison their own values, to justify actions or tenets of the leader which would otherwise be intolerable to them.
8.        Dispensing of existence - in the totalist vision of truth, one who disobeys, or deviates from the dogma, is false, deluded, or evil, and therefore instantly dispensable. The leaders are the judge of who is deviant, and can change their criteria at whim. Cults use the fear of banishment and shunning to control and contain members. To fear rejection by one's absolute ideal is tantamount to the profound dread of annihilation. (See also Singer and Ofshe, 1990; Tobias et al. For other theories of social control relevant to cults, see Festinger, 1964; Gramsci, 1973; Zimbardo, 1988.)

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"The ultimate effect of these techniques is to convince the victim that the perpetrator is omnipotent, that resistance is futile, and that her life depends upon winning his indulgence through absolute compliance. ... More than just being between a rock and a hard place, this is a desperate and degraded position to find onesself in.

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Cult thinking may be superceded

Daya Yama