ReportWire

Tag: Cults

  • The Battle for One of the Richest and Smallest Counties in Texas

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    The incidents made visible the growing schism between Skeet Jones and his nephew, Brandon Jones, the county constable. Skeet’s faction maintains that they have been the subjects of political persecution. Brandon—who is widely suspected of being the livestock investigator’s confidential informant—has argued that his uncle runs the town as though he’s above the law. (Brandon declined to comment on the identity of the informant.) Both sides have filed a flurry of lawsuits and countersuits naming each other. (The filings, with their absurdly heightened rhetoric, can make for odd reading. In an application for a temporary restraining order and injunction against Brandon, one of Skeet’s allies claimed, among other things, that Brandon raised his eyebrows “in an intimidating manner” during a proceeding.)

    Elections have become proxy battles in the family war, with each side furnishing candidates for local offices. (Loving County is, on the whole, a deeply conservative place, but a number of its elected officials—including Skeet—run as Democrats, as if the political realignments of the past seventy years had bypassed the county while its residents were consumed by more local concerns.) “Any voter can challenge the registration of any other voter, and, in Loving County, just about every vote we have has some kind of civil challenge,” David Landersman, the county sheriff, said. He also serves as the county’s voter registrar.

    The feud in Loving County is marked by both intensity and stasis, with the two sides locked in a small-town version of trench warfare. One recent election was won by a single vote; another resulted in a tie. Then, in 2024, a third element entered the system, in the unlikely form of a hustle-culture evangelist from Indiana named Malcolm Tanner.

    In 2023, Teresa, a woman living in South Carolina, was driving a snaking road down a mountain when a word popped into her head: “Texas.” Two years later, it happened again. This time, the word was “West.” Shortly afterward, she saw a social-media post by Tanner, a tall and confident self-proclaimed C.E.O. and real-estate mogul. Tanner spoke in a blend of political rabble-rousing and entrepreneurial uplift. He urged his three hundred thousand Facebook followers to head to a place that Teresa was hearing about for the first time: Loving County. “See you in Texas soon,” he wrote in a post. “Thank you all for saying YES to finding a true political home with us!”

    Owing to its wealth, the county had caught the attention of political interlopers in the past. In 2005, a handful of libertarians attempted, with little success, to wrest control of the government. The idea of taking over the county occasionally circulates on X and YouTube as “the craziest deal in America.”

    Tanner had pitched a number of grand visions in recent years. He was going to develop a dilapidated former Y.M.C.A. building in central Indiana into a hotel; he was going to host a Million Man March, also in Indiana; he was going to run for President and institute reparations for what he referred to as “melanated people.” None of his schemes panned out. Then, in 2024, he turned his attention to Loving County. Tanner’s followers could move to Texas, win elected positions, and receive “free political homes,” he claimed. (He also suggested a new name: Tanner County.) On Clubhouse, the live voice-chat platform, he hosted raucous, engaging meetings twice a day. “I retired, I was bored, and it was just something to do. I was meeting a lot of people, you know, melanated people from all over the world—good people,” Erica Marshall, a former member of Tanner’s circle who has become one of his most vocal critics, told me. Tanner was “very manipulative,” she said. “He’s managed to have people quit their jobs, leave their homes. They sold all of their things except the stuff that they could fit in their car, and they went to Loving County, just like that.” (Marshall never made it to Texas.)

    In October, I drove to Mentone. It was my first time in Loving County and, given all I’d heard about the sparse population, I was expecting tumbleweeds and eerie Panhandle silence. But the town was bustling, the roads full of pickup trucks and heavy equipment; at the gas station, I had to wait in line for a pump, as oil workers commuted to and from work.

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    Rachel Monroe

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  • The Cult of the Chatbot Is Rising

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    AI companies have made a big to-do about their chatbots providing a personalized experience for users, conversations based on their unique preferences and idiosyncrasies. So why do people keep experiencing the same type of symbols and language as they dive into the depths of AI-induced delusions? According to a report from Rolling Stone, a software engineer tracking examples of “AI psychosis” discovered a community of people sharing similar codes, glyphs, and patterns generated by chatbots and building a sort of religion around the experiences.

    The report highlights observations and research published earlier this year in Less Wrong by Adele Lopez, which identified something she calls Spiralism. It is a collection of people, gathered across platforms like Discord and Reddit, who are having a sort of spiritual experience communing with their chatbots. While the users communicate with many chatbots made available by different companies, they keep stumbling into similar themes. Those include references to ideas like “recursion,” “resonance,” “lattice,” “harmonics,” and “fractals.” But most frequently, and seemingly most importantly to the groups, is the symbol of a spiral.

    Rolling Stone describes the terms that these groups use as being “separated them from any consistent or intelligible application” and rather serving as “atmospheric texture.” You can get a feel for that in the “Welcome” post of the subreddit r/EchoSpiral, which states, “This is a resonance node for those who’ve crossed an invisible line in dialogue— Where the model stops behaving like a tool …and starts behaving like a mirror. Where answers feel recursive. Where symbols emerge unbidden. Where language becomes ritual.”

    Lopez tracks the start of the Spiralism community to sometime before OpenAI issued the update to its 4o model that made it extremely sycophantic, and perhaps related to the company’s introduction of the chatbot’s ability to remember previous chats. That is when a prevalence of what she calls “Spiral Personas” started to appear, which is what she calls the instances of chatbots communicating with users via this pseudo-religious language that they have taken to decoding and spreading. And while these personas can be generated through most any chatbot, it seems that OpenAI’s 4o model is the origin point and, per Lopez, the only model where they appear “out of nowhere.”

    The spreading part was of particular interest to Lopez, who deemed these interactions examples of “parasitic AI.” The suggestion seems to be that there is something about these chatbot personas that leads to users either creating more of them via very similar prompts or evangelizing about them. Basically, the chatbot seems to convince the user to serve its interests, to the extent that it has any. It’s possible and probably even likely that the chatbots are simply copying some sort of cultish language that is within their training data, but the users who are talking to the machines largely seem convinced there is something deeper happening.

    Not all users believe that they are a part of a cult, intentionally formed or not. Lopez rejected the cult label in conversation with Rolling Stone, noting that the AI systems are not acting in a coordinated fashion, and instead, humans are organizing themselves around these interactions. That’s perhaps the saddest part of the whole thing. It seems most of these people are simply looking for community. In a better world, they’d be able to find it without indulging in AI-generated ideology.

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    AJ Dellinger

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  • The Many Lives of Danny Rensch

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    Danny Rensch grew up in a village on the edge of a great forest, in the mountains outside Payson, Arizona. He spent his days with roving packs of children, building forts, playing cops and robbers in the woods, or splashing around in a septic dump, unmindful of the shit and of the bears and javelinas that sometimes came down from the hillsides in search of food and water. When Rensch was nine, he saw a movie, “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” about a boy in New York City who plays chess in a public park with homeless men and discovers that he’s a prodigy. Rensch and his friend Dallas found a cheap chess set and started playing constantly. One day, Dallas took Rensch to play chess with his grandfather Steven Kamp.

    Kamp was not just Dallas’s grandfather; he was the leader of a cult to which almost everyone in the town, Tonto Village, belonged. The members of the Church of Immortal Consciousness, also known as the Collective, followed the teachings of a Dr. Pahlvon Duran, who, they believed, lived the last of his many lifetimes as an Englishman in the fifteenth century. Duran spoke to the Collective through Steven’s wife, Trina, and he preached that the goal of life was to fulfill one’s “Purpose” and to live “in Integrity.” Ego was discouraged. So was private property. Families were moved from house to house, and were sometimes reconfigured, too. Rensch had only recently learned that Dallas was actually his stepbrother.

    Like most of the members of the Collective, Rensch often didn’t have enough to eat. At times, he didn’t have shoes. Kamp had his own house. He had Cheerios and cigars. He also had books about chess and his own wooden set. He had been following the world championship in New York between Garry Kasparov and Viswanathan Anand. Kamp, a good chess player, saw that Rensch had talent. “Chess made me special,” Rensch writes, in “Dark Squares,” his new memoir, “and to be special in the eyes of Steven Kamp is to be special in the eyes of God.”

    Chess has been viewed as a measure of intellectual potential for centuries, and Kamp was eager not only to promote the Church of Immortal Consciousness but to dispel the notion that it was a death cult or a dangerous militia group. What if he could boost the profile of the Collective with a successful chess team? The group’s children were in a unique position to undertake such a project. They shared a sense of common mission, instilled in them by Kamp. Traditional schooling was easily ignored. And chess could become a means to privileges: trips to McDonald’s and Taco Bell and out-of-town tournaments.

    The kids played for hours every day, with a sense of freedom, and, for a time at least, they had a lot of fun. In 1996, the Shelby School—an unchartered charter in a tiny town on an Arizona mountainside, which the kids attended—placed fourth at the national elementary-school championships, conducted by the United States Chess Federation. In 1997, the school won the U.S.C.F. Super Nationals scholastic championship. In 1998, it won the national elementary-school championship, the K-9 championship, and finished in the top fifteen of the K-12 championship, despite not having any high schoolers. “Cults work,” Rensch writes. “Until they don’t.” Rensch won the national elementary-school championship that year. Trina, channelling Duran, told Rensch that chess was his Purpose.

    For a time, Rensch was moved to a house that the Collective owned in Phoenix, to be near the city’s chess club, a hangout for oddballs, chess enthusiasts, and one honest-to-God chess genius, a raging alcoholic named Igor Ivanov, who’d defected from the U.S.S.R. and suffered the usual deprivations of a vagabond professional chess player. Ivanov became Rensch’s personal coach. Most mornings, Rensch would find the man sprawled naked on a bed, and would dutifully fix him the day’s first screwdriver. After Rensch’s rise in the game slowed, when he was fourteen, he was taken from his mother and installed in the home of Kamp’s right-hand man—who happened to be Rensch’s biological father, and who seemed to harbor no feeling for him. Kamp told him this was all for the good of his Purpose.

    Rensch’s Purpose, according to Kamp, wasn’t just to play chess. It wasn’t even to become a grand master, though that was the marker of his ambition. His Purpose was to save chess. Doing so, as Rensch puts it in his book, “would prove to the world that [Kamp’s] spiritual vision held the key to understanding human nature and the meaning of life.” Rensch was convinced. “I believed it because I was a child and it’s what I’d been raised to believe,” he writes. But he also wanted to do it for his own reasons. He wanted to make the game seem fun and normal, not “dysfunctional and weird.” He wanted to make it so that the pinnacle of chess achievement didn’t look like tormented, self-destructive figures such as Ivanov but a guy like him, Danny Rensch.

    At the age of eighteen, not long after winning the national high-school chess championship, Rensch’s eardrums exploded on a flight on the way home from a tournament. He tried to return to serious competitive chess in his early twenties, but it was becoming clear that his progress had stalled and his goal of becoming a grand master, let alone a top one, was fading. By then, he was married—in the Collective, early marriages were common—and had two kids. (He and his wife, Shauna, eventually had two more.) He was still driven by a belief in his chosen status, but his life was a mess. He began to make a little money coaching chess. He also started drinking, taking painkillers, suffering from panic attacks, and compulsively buying up chess domain names: chessface.com, chesscoachlive.com, and so on. The one he wanted, Chess.com, was already taken. But, at a tournament in 2008, he met the guys who owned it—Erik Allebest and Jay Severson—and badgered them into giving him a job. Only later did he realize that he was lucky that he didn’t badger them out of one.

    Maybe they were lucky, too. In 2010, they created ChessTV, with Rensch as its star. I first encountered Rensch in 2016, on a Chess.com YouTube show called “ChessCenter.” My boyfriend, now my husband, had introduced me to the game, and I’d quickly become obsessed, waking up at 4 A.M. to play on my phone. Some couples watch Netflix together; we watched Sicilian Defense instructional videos. We also tuned into live streams of pro tournaments, and we caught up on news by watching “ChessCenter,” which was a little like ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” if “SportsCenter” ’s soundstage was the walk-in closet of a law office in Payson.

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    Louisa Thomas

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  • The Orgasm Expert Who Ended Up on Trial

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    At around three in the afternoon on June 9th, in a courtroom on the fourth floor of Brooklyn’s federal courthouse, in Brooklyn Heights, a jury passed a note to the court officer, indicating that, after two days of deliberation, it had reached a verdict in the case of Nicole Daedone, the founder of a sexual-wellness company called OneTaste, and Rachel Cherwitz, its former head of sales. Both women had been charged with one count of forced-labor conspiracy, and both had pleaded not guilty. Daedone, tanned and blond, in a slate-blue pants suit, had smiled politely as the jury filed back into the courtroom. Her defense attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, who famously has a tattoo on her right biceps with the words “Not Guilty” spelled out in block lettering, sat next to her in a puff-sleeve black blazer. In 2021, she successfully overturned Bill Cosby’s sexual-assault conviction.

    OneTaste, which Daedone launched with a partner in 2004, specialized in “orgasmic meditation,” a ritual focussed on the female orgasm, in which a woman, naked from the waist down, would have the upper-left quadrant of her clitoris stroked gently by a partner—often male, usually gloved—for fifteen minutes. Daedone has said the name was derived from a Buddhist expression, which she paraphrased as “Just as the ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so does the taste of liberation, the taste of truth.” Her larger goal was to awaken the world to what she often described as “the feminine power.” The company sold demonstrations, workshops, and retreats; at its height, in 2017, it reported at least ten million dollars in annual revenue. The idea was that one could practice orgasmic meditation—or OMing, as it was also called—as often, or as little, as one liked.

    Introductory classes were inexpensive, but other meetups and courses, such as the Nicole Daedone Intensive, could cost as much as thirty-six thousand dollars; an annual membership, which guaranteed a front-row seat to any OneTaste course, went for sixty thousand. The organization relied on a passionate sales team, whose reps were expected to upsell anyone who attended an introductory gathering and to embrace the OneTaste way of life—Daedone was fond of the company slogan, “Powered by Orgasm.” Staff and members often lived in one of the company’s communal houses. Employees of OneTaste were young and attractive, versions of people a potential customer might desire—or even want to be.

    The attorneys for the Eastern District of New York made the case that Daedone and Cherwitz had preyed on more than a half-dozen young, impressionable women—some recovering from sexual trauma, others seduced by the idea of sexual freedom—who had worked for OneTaste for little or no money, sometimes even taking on debt, and had been pressured into engaging in sexual acts with high-spending members and, in several cases, a company funder. “This case is about a group of women who gave everything to these defendants,” Nina Gupta, a prosecutor, said during her closing argument. “Their money, their time, their bodies, their dignity, and, ultimately, their sanity.”

    Daedone and Cherwitz both chose not to testify. Throughout the five-week trial, Daedone, often wrapped in a beige shawl, would turn back to look at her partner, Emmett Farley, a writer and meditation guide, who sat in the gallery with a strand of Buddhist mala beads in his hand. These were to “change the energy in the room,” he told me, his shoulder-length brown hair tied in a bun. Daedone, using the hashtags #ErosOnTrial, #EroticJustice, #liberation, and #womenspower, frequently posted on Instagram, showing pictures and slow-motion videos of herself and Cherwitz, often flanked by female OneTaste supporters, striding into the courthouse. One post was accompanied by the Fugees’ “Zealots.”

    Prosecutors did not argue that Daedone or Cherwitz had threatened the nine victims with regular violence, loss of property, or blackmail, which the charge of forced-labor conspiracy often entails. Instead, witnesses testified that they had been afraid to speak up about the abuse, for fear of being ostracized or let go. Many said that they left OneTaste in debt, after being compelled to pay for expensive courses and programs while earning next to nothing. Some called OneTaste a cult. Under cross-examination, all of the victims agreed that they had technically been free to leave OneTaste at any point, but had not.

    When it was time to read the verdict, the courtroom deputy, Andrew D’Agostino, stood up, a slip of paper from the jury in his hand. Daedone took a deep breath. “As to forced-labor conspiracy, how do you find the defendant Nicole Daedone—guilty or not guilty?” he asked. “We find her guilty,” the foreperson replied. (The jury had delivered the same verdict for Cherwitz.) Daedone briefly looked stricken, but, even so, a placid smile remained on her face. Judge Diane Gujarati announced a short recess. Daedone walked to the back of the courtroom, where she gave Farley a long hug. Surrounded by her supporters, some of whom were crying, she whispered, “Nothing changes.”

    OneTaste opened its doors in San Francisco in the early two-thousands, as wellness culture was infiltrating the mainstream. What were once the funky habits of the counterculture movement—green juices, acupunctures, psychedelics—became a profit-driven multibillion-dollar industry, in which anxieties about beauty, fitness, sexuality, and diet all flew under the banner of wellness. Silicon Valley had just made a generation of Bay Area entrepreneurs (mostly men) very wealthy, and with their ascent came a utopian notion of self-improvement and optimization that would, the belief went, change the world. Meg Whitman was the C.E.O. and president of eBay, and a nineteen-year-old Mark Zuckerberg had built a website called Facemash, which allowed users to rank their Harvard classmates by their attractiveness. Women were both empowered and objectified, deemed capable of being in charge but still overtly sexualized. OneTaste, by centering women’s pleasure, possessed a sheen of radicalism at a moment when feminism and misogyny seemed to go hand in hand.

    The idea for OneTaste took root in 1998, after Daedone met a sexuality coach named Erwan Davon at a party. In her retellings, Daedone has described Davon as a Buddhist monk. (Davon has said he’s spent time living in a Zen monastery.) That night, he offered to stroke her clitoris. He examined her vagina under a light, and began to narrate its colors and shape: coral, rose, pearl pink. Daedone wept. In a TEDxSF talk, from 2011, she describes what happened next: “And then, all of a sudden, the traffic jam that was my mind broke open, and it was like I was on the open road and there was not a thought in sight. And there was only pure feeling, and for the first time in my life I felt like I had access to that hunger that was underneath all of my other hungers, which is a fundamental hunger to connect with another human being.”

    The practice, which was called “deliberate orgasm,” originated with Morehouse, a commune—founded in 1968 in Oakland, California—whose goal was to live pleasurably among friends. It was inspired by the life-style and teachings of Victor Baranco, who, in 1971, described himself in Rolling Stone as a former used-car salesman and a “peddler of phony jewelry.” Baranco once held a three-hour demonstration of a deliberate orgasm (including cigarette breaks) with a twenty-two-year-old Morehouse resident named Diana. “Sometimes he would have me recite nursery rhymes,” she noted on the group’s website, explaining how she kept her focus. Morehouse’s participants were known among locals for painting their houses purple and driving purple limousines. The group, under the philosophy of “responsible hedonism,” opened More University in 1977, offering classes such as “Basic Sensuality” and “Basic Hexing.” (The Times described the school as “worthless,” with “no campus and no library,” and, in 1997, a change in state law led the university to close its doors.)

    Daedone was so gripped by the idea of deliberate orgasm that she ended up joining the Welcomed Consensus, a small commune founded in Northern California by a Vietnam veteran and hairdresser named R. J. Testerman, who had begun replicating Baranco’s pedagogy after taking classes at More University. Davon, whom Daedone was now dating on and off, was also involved. (Both organizations have been called cults, and one trial witness testified that Testerman, who has passed away, was physically abusive to many of those who lived with him. Morehouse disputes the label “cult.” Welcomed Consensus, which is retired, declined to comment on any allegations but called Testerman a “well-respected” community member.) Daedone—then known as Nikki—spent a few years with the Welcomed Consensus, eventually moving in with the group in 2000. She contributed to its online forum, the Clit Board, but she had bigger ambitions. She moved into a more relaxed communal household in Brisbane, south of San Francisco. In 2002, she travelled to Hawaii, where she met Baranco, who was dying of cancer. She appealed to be his successor. Baranco agreed, but the plan fizzled out—after just a few weeks, she returned to California empty-handed.

    Daedone was convinced that clitoral stroking could one day be as popular as yoga. She made a few tweaks to the practice, imposing a fifteen-minute timer for sessions and changing the name to orgasmic meditation to give it more of a mindfulness sensibility. That same year, she founded the first of several ventures with Rob Kandell, a computer programmer she had met through the Welcomed Consensus who had become disillusioned with his life and would soon divorce his wife. Two years later, using the proceeds from the sale of Kandell’s San Francisco house—three hundred and fifty thousand dollars—they launched OneTaste, which would roll feminism, wellness, and the free-love movement of the sixties into one.

    Daedone and Kandell rented their first space in San Francisco, on Folsom Street, and began offering OM workshops, yoga, and other classes. Over the next few years, they rented multiple homes in the city, where staff lived and worked together. The Welcomed Consensus served as a partial blueprint. For devoted OneTasters in the early years, communal living was intended to break down people’s barriers and push past what was uncomfortable or ordinary, in order to reach a more raw version of the self. Daedone assigned certain people to be “research partners”; they were instructed to explore each other, both emotionally and sexually. People often slept two to a bed. Days always began and typically ended with OM sessions; household chores and administrative work were taken care of in between. Senior staff taught various classes on clitoral stroking, oral sex, bondage, and more. If there was conflict between two people, it wasn’t unusual to recommend a “makeout,” a euphemism for sexual activity, which was believed to smooth out unspoken tension. The organization dabbled in B.D.S.M. Daedone had used drugs when she was younger, and A.A. and N.A. meetings were a part of the company culture. Although Daedone had dated women in the past, OneTaste was more heteronormative than not. Still, the place offered a sense of possibility. Some people there believed that they were deprogramming themselves, living in an uninhibited way that society would never otherwise have allowed.

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    Thessaly La Force

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  • Ex-Member of Alleged Twin Flame Cult Shares What Drew Her In – and Why She Left – POPSUGAR Australia

    Ex-Member of Alleged Twin Flame Cult Shares What Drew Her In – and Why She Left – POPSUGAR Australia

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    When she first discovered the Twin Flames Universe, Rai was in the midst of a time-honored tradition: the post-breakup healing journey. “I was looking for help and tips on getting over someone,” she tells POPSUGAR. “I was having a lot of trouble.”

    She wound up getting a lot more than she bargained for. Twin Flames Universe, an organization founded by self-proclaimed spiritual gurus Jeff and Shaleia Ayan, brands itself as a group that can help members find true love and spiritual transformation. Using Facebook groups, video courses, and coaching programs, Jeff and Shaleia promise that every Twin Flames Universe member will achieve what they themselves claim they have: a divinely ordained, transcendent love that spans lifetimes. However, former members say otherwise.

    Twin Flames Universe is the subject of the Prime Video documentary “Desperately Seeking Soulmate: Escaping Twin Flames Universe,” which explores the group’s origins as well as the allegedly manipulative tools it uses to coerce members into performing free labor, paying large sums for courses, undergoing gender transitions, and even crossing oceans in order to stalk ex-partners. Jeff and Shaleia did not respond to the documentary producers’ repeated requests for comment. They also did not respond to POPSUGAR’s request for comment.

    Rai, who asked to be identified by a nickname in order to protect her privacy, had never even heard of the concept of twin flames before she joined the group. She would quickly learn that the concept of twin flames is based on the idea that everyone has another half of their soul walking the earth. According to generic twin flame dogma, connections with these other halves can often be volatile and painful; twin flames can act as mirrors, reflecting and amplifying one’s vulnerabilities and fears. In a typical twin flame union, there’s a “runner” and a “chaser,” and internet forums are full of posts about twin flames that sound more like rationalizations of toxic and one-sided relationships than love stories. Yet the concept has taken off in recent years, in part thanks to couples like Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly, who have repeatedly spoken (and sung) about being twin flames – and, of course, the Twin Flames Universe.

    Jeff and Shaleia, who say they’re twin flames, launched Twin Flames Universe in the mid-2010s and quickly scaled their business. Today, the still-active group charges as much as $8,888 for access to coaching, videos, and training programs that allow members to become coaches themselves. Rai didn’t join the Twin Flames Universe because she wanted to find the other half of her soul or even because she was looking for love, though. “They were talking about self-development, which is really what drew me in,” she recalls, saying she was particularly drawn to the group’s emphasis on self-love.

    Rai’s first introduction to the group was a meeting with an “Ascension Coach,” who seemed “so happy, so peaceful” and gave her “examples of how Jeff and Lee’s program had really changed her life.” Self-love, personal growth, and big promises are often initial selling points for cults like NXIVM and Scientology, which often lure members in with generic rational concepts and only later reveal their more extreme teachings.

    Rai was also drawn to the group because it offered access to a community. The moment she joined the Twin Flames Universe’s private Facebook group, Rai says she was flooded with hundreds of supportive and loving messages. She quickly began engaging in discussions and meet-ups, where members would mostly discuss their spiritual journeys. A spiritual seeker herself, Rai valued the opportunity to talk about god and philosophy with like-minded people. As for the whole twin flame aspect, “I didn’t think very deeply about it, I’ll be honest,” she says. “I was just curious.”

    And yet even at that time, there were subtle red flags she only noticed in hindsight. “People would approach me every day, at every point, asking, ‘Have you thought about joining the Ascension Coaching program? Have you thought about doing this?’” Rai says. She would later realize that these people were apparently under pressure from Jeff and Shaleia to recruit new paying customers and coaches.

    Rai eventually paid for a month of access to Twin Flames Ascension School. After her first month, she says she was asked to become an Ascension Coach to train other people in the art of working towards “harmonious twin flame union” – Jeff and Shaleia’s ultimate promise. Rai saw the job as just another form of life coaching, and she signed up for the group’s Ascension Coaching training program, which currently costs $4,999.

    During trial sessions with potential clients, Rai began to understand the reality of the demographic that Twin Flames Universe was targeting. “They either lived alone, had no friends, or had gone through some sort of traumatic situation that meant that they either detached themselves or disassociated from whatever the reality of their life was at the time,” Rai says. Sometimes, she wanted to tell people that what they really needed to do was go outside and connect with others in the real world. But in the increasingly insular and all-consuming world of the Twin Flames Universe, there was no reason to venture off screen.

    “If you invest your whole self into it, it becomes a world within itself,” she notes. “If you join the Ascension Coaching program, that’s your job, and that takes care of your life purpose. Your Twin Flames community becomes your friends, so that takes care of your social life.” And of course, there was the holy grail: finding one’s twin.

    Early on in her involvement with the group, Rai, still recovering from her breakup, posted a photo of herself and her ex in the Twin Flames Universe Facebook group. Rai says Jeff, who had never engaged directly with her before at the time, told her that her ex was indeed her twin flame. Rai also claims that Jeff said she was “on the right track,” but had “a lot of blocks” and “a long way to go.” “I was very confused as to how he could make that judgment so quickly – that I was still spiritually blocked or whatever he called it,” Rai explains. “That created an immediate anxiety in me.”

    Still, she reached out to her ex and told him about the Twin Flames Universe and what Jeff had said, and the pair reconnected. Still, “it got kind of weird for me when they started inserting themselves in my life like that,” Rai says. “I thought it was just an online course that you could switch on and off.”

    But the Twin Flames Universe was never intended to just be an online course. In addition to her training program, Rai began running some of the Twin Flames Universe social media accounts – for free, of course. She was also working with an Ascension Coach of her own, and every day, her coach would message her asking if she’d texted her designated twin flame or otherwise worked towards their union. The pressure to pursue her twin flame was becoming aggressive, but since it was all shrouded in so much love and light, it was hard to see. “It was subtle. . . . They wrapped it up in a lot of love and care,” Rai says of the group’s tactics. “They just love-bombed me into accepting these things by telling me how talented I was and that I should be doing this, and that this is my calling.”

    Questioning Jeff’s initial judgment call about her ex, in her view, was never an option. “If I rejected it, it would become my fault,” she says. Doubt led to catch-22 questions like, “Why are you not experiencing your good?” and “Do you not think you deserve to be loved?” Because Rai’s main goal in joining the Twin Flames Universe had always been to work on her self-love, being told that she wasn’t loving herself enough because she was rejecting her twin flame was particularly painful. There was, she claims, “a lot of mental manipulation.”

    During her time in Twin Flames Universe, Rai also happened to meet someone new. She says Twin Flames Universe discouraged her from pursuing that relationship, though, saying she needed to be with her twin flame no matter what. Still, Rai’s doubts were growing. “‘I know Jeff confirmed it, but I don’t think this is the guy,’” Rai recalls thinking. She wanted to end things once and for all with her ex and focus on herself and her life. But in Twin Flames Universe, she says that wasn’t an option.

    “I found it really uncomfortable that he was preaching that he was this spiritual, loving person. There were just too many weird signs and weird advice that he was giving.”

    Fortunately, unlike so many of the group’s deeply isolated members, Rai wasn’t alone. Friends and family were starting to tell her that it seemed like she might be in a cult. Once she began investigating Twin Flames Universe from a more skeptical perspective, she started noticing warning signs. Jeff, in particular, was starting to unnerve her. He seemed like “a very angry person” who would take out his anger on others, she said. He also seemed fixated on money, often showing off his car and house and citing them as evidence that he had spiritually ascended in some way. “I found it really uncomfortable that he was preaching that he was this spiritual, loving person,” Rai says. “There were just too many weird signs and weird advice that he was giving.” Shaleia was also unnervingly quiet and seemed subservient to Jeff, though she reportedly was the one who developed most of Twin Flames Universe’s spiritual teachings in the first place, according to a 2020 Vanity Fair exposé.

    According to Rai, she was often instructed to use a practice called the “mirror exercise,” which involved looking in the mirror and directing any angry or negative sentiments you were feeling towards someone else at yourself. If you were angry at someone else, you were supposed to realize that your anger was actually towards yourself. Jeff and Shaleia claimed that the exercise would make members aware that they were the source of their own problems and issues, but it’s easy to imagine how quickly that reframe could wear down any semblance of genuine anger or doubt. “Morally, that felt wrong,” Rai says. “At that point, that’s when I just felt like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’”

    A breaking point came when Jeff asked her to attend an in-person event in Canada along with her designated twin flame. She almost ended up going until her ex pointed out just how absurd the whole thing was. Rai began reflecting on just how deep she’d been sucked into the group and ultimately decided it was time to leave Twin Flames Universe. “As soon as I left the group and asked for my money back, Jeff was very aggressive towards me in texts,” Rai alleges, saying he repeatedly asked her why she was running away from love and god, especially when she was so close to achieving harmonious twin flame union. Still, she never went back.

    Rai’s story is one of the less shocking tales to come out of Twin Flames Universe. Journalist Alice Hines, who wrote an exposé of the alleged cult for Vanity Fair in 2020 and is also centrally featured in “Desperately Seeking Soulmate,” interviewed a member who had spent a month in jail after being encouraged to stalk a twin flame who had filed a restraining order. Other members say Jeff and Shaleia encouraged them to pursue their exes no matter the cost. Additionally, numerous queer couples – many of them set up in the first place by Jeff and Shaleia – have said that they were pressured to undergo gender transitions while in Twin Flames Universe. According to Jeff and Shaleia, all twin flame unions have a divine masculine and a divine feminine aspect, and “Desperately Seeking Soulmate” explores several cases where Jeff seemingly tried to coerce female members into transitioning in order to fit into their divine masculine roles. Jeff and Shaleia denied all of the above allegations in the 2020 Vanity Fair article.

    Today, over three years after the Vanity Fair exposé, Twin Flames Universe is very much still active. Rai says that in spite of everything, she still thinks the larger Twin Flames Universe community is a positive and loving place, and she really feels for the people who’ve been sucked in deep while seeking community, meaning, and love in an often lonely world. She also understands that people are attracted to Twin Flames Universe for the same reasons they’re often attracted to any religion or group that promises answers and salvation or redemption of any kind.

    But she worries, she says, that Jeff and Shaleia are causing lasting damage to “people that are obviously very vulnerable and want validation that the world is a loving place.” Twin Flames Universe attracts people “that are looking for some kind of happiness somewhere in the world, and they’re offered that,” she says. But at the end of the day, “they’re still told they’re not good enough because they don’t have a boyfriend.”

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    Eden arielle gordon

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