Warning: Meditating May Be

Hazardous to Your Health

San Francisco Weekly, August 28, 2002

BY SANDY BRUNDAGE

Bad Vibes

Karen Long (a pseudonym), in her mid-20s, turned to meditation as a way to feel connected. “I wanted to experience that ‘oneness with the universe,’” she says. At a nondenominational San Francisco temple, she hooked up with a group of women practicing a hodgepodge of relaxation techniques, drawn from books and discussions. Long spent one to two hours a day meditating over the next three years.

“Then I began hearing voices,” she says. “I heard profound messages. The other people thought it was a sign of enlightenment. Some people at the temple told me that I had ‘contacted a spiritual guide.’ During my normal awake hours, I found myself feeling spacey sometimes.”

Unconvinced that aural hallucinations were a sign from God, Long quit meditating. The voices stopped.

Long’s experience isn’t unique. Researchers have known for 30 years that meditating can have adverse health effects on some people, inducing psychological and physical problems ranging from muscle spasms to hallucinations. But around the Bay Area, eyes seem closed to the data.

“A lot of people do experience negative side effects,” says Dr. Maggie Phillips, the director of the California Institute of Clinical Hypnosis and a licensed psychologist in Oakland who teaches workshops to colleagues around the world on the proper applications of relaxation therapies. “I’ve had people that went to these five- to eight-day-long retreats, and they were practically basket cases when they came out the other end. And they’re told, “You just have to be more patient.’ A lot of spiritual teachers don’t know how to look at the internal dynamics and how they interact with types of relaxation and meditation.”

Just as some people are allergic to penicillin, some people react badly to meditation. Billed as a “one size fits all” technique for self-improvement and even healing, meditation is packaged in a hundred different ways. Mantra meditators chant a phrase with numbing repetition. Others practice walking meditation, or empty-mind meditation, sweeping the mind clean of thought. The harmful effects aren’t limited to one specific technique or even long retreats.

Those effects can include facial tics, insomnia, spacing out, and even psychotic breakdowns. Dr. Margaret Singer, clinical psychologist emeritus at Berkeley, with research partner Dr. Janja Lalich, collected case histories from 70 clients seeking treatment for problems that began during meditation practice. Their research presents several examples of these symptoms and notes that prior to meditating, none of the patients had individual or family histories of mental disorders:

• A 36-year-old business executive now lives off welfare as a result of the relentless anxiety attacks and blackouts he suffered after taking up meditation. “Everything gets in through my senses,” he told Singer.
• A young woman watched rooms fill with orange fog when she “spaced out” at random moments.
• A 26-year-old man was overwhelmed by rage and sexual urges whenever he went out in public, driving him to stay home to avoid these episodes.

Singer and Lalich point out that most people never have problems with meditation. The danger for those who do is that many instructors call the problems a welcome sign of enlightenment, as in Long’s case, or proof of the student’s insincere effort. In either situation, teachers encourage the student to meditate longer. One former mantra meditator, who did not want his named used, called it “being strangled by concepts.” After increasingly frequent panic attacks, he abandoned mantra meditation in favor of informal, unstructured contemplation and a Paxil prescription.

The tricks played by the meditating mind are based in physiology. Over the past year Dr. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of eight longtime practitioners of Buddhist meditation, snapping images of blood flow within the brain while they were meditating and comparing them with images taken when they were not. The scans tracked increased blood flow to the frontal lobe — used for concentration and focusing — during meditation. But blood flow to the parietal lobe, which calculates the boundaries of your body in relation to its environment — “You are not the chair, you are sitting on the chair, the chair is on the floor” — decreased. Other parts of the brain also activate during meditation — the limbic system, which is the heart of emotion and memory, and core areas that control heart rate, blood pressure, and arousal.

These results support what other researchers have discovered about the side effects meditation can cause. Dr. Michael Persinger, a psychologist at Laurentian University in Canada, found in 1993 that meditation induces epilepsy-like brain seizures in some people. His study of 1,081 students showed that the 221 meditators among them had a higher rate of hallucinating floating spots of light, hearing voices, and even feeling the floor shake. Other studies reported that meditators complained of feeling emotionally dead and seeing the environment as unreal, two-dimensional, amorphous. Those results aren’t surprising if meditation reduces blood flow to the parietal lobe. In longtime meditators, unreality can strike spontaneously. Singer describes it as “involuntary meditation.” One of her patients took anti-seizure medication for 25 years after quitting meditative practice to regain control of his mind.

Other side effects fall under the paradoxical umbrella of “relaxation-induced anxiety,” or RIA. Instead of relaxing during meditation, RIA sufferers feel distressed. Psychologists at Virginia Commonwealth University monitored 30 chronically anxious people during guided meditation. Seventeen percent indicated that their anxiety got worse. A previous study led by Dr. Frederick Heide at Pennsylvania State University reported that the same happened to 54 percent of the subjects. Symptoms of RIA include panic attacks, sweating, a pounding heart, spasms, odd tingling sensations, and bursts of uncontrollable laughter or tears. RIA can also aggravate conditions, such as schizophrenia, depression, asthma, and bleeding ulcers, that were previously stable.

What physiological changes explain RIA? During meditation, the brain releases serotonin. People with mild depression might enjoy the increased levels of serotonin because the neurotransmitter can ease their mood. Drugs like Prozac mimic this effect. However, too much serotonin can cause all of the symptoms of RIA, according to Dr. Solomon Snyder, head of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. In some cases of schizophrenia, an excess of serotonin coupled with meditation can drop-kick someone into psychosis.

“Most people, when you’re working with anxiety, the treatment of choice is relaxation,” says the California Institute of Clinical Hypnosis’ Phillips. “But if you have people that get easily overwhelmed and may not even know what it’s about, don’t even have words to go with it, you have to avoid hypnosis, relaxation, meditation until you teach them how to handle what comes up.”

Meditation is a huge industry in San Francisco. We asked 14 Bay Area instructors, chosen at random from different fields of meditation, if they inform students about the possible side effects. Only three of the teachers knew what we were talking about. Of the remaining 11, Sam Geppi of S.F. Yoga gave a typical reply:

“Negative side effects from meditation? There really are none. Meditation is just about going within, toward what is real. There is nothing ‘created’ through meditation. We create our problems and negative side effects more by escaping into the world, escaping from meditation. Meditation is a long-overdue look within. Sometimes a student will discuss their initial fear of the inner void once the space and depth of being is first encountered, or that they feel like they are going crazy. I simply tell them, ‘Meditation is not making you crazy. It is making you aware that you are already crazy.’”

Lalich, now a sociologist specializing in psychological manipulation at California State University in Chico, says, “The problem is that everyone thinks that meditation is great for everybody, and people are always surprised to learn that it can cause problems. Certainly there’s plenty of context where it’s completely harmless, but it’s like driving a car — people don’t think, ‘Oh, I’m the one that’s going to have an accident.’”

Lalich hopes that 30 years of research will finally open our eyes. “If you were going to buy a car you’d look at Consumer Reports. It’s the same thing — you’re talking about your body and your mind; you should be as cautious.”

http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2002-08-28/bayview.html/1/index.html

Why Did She Not Escape?

BY BROOKE ADAMS
© 2003, THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

The sightings now seem to be coming from everywhere – Elizabeth Smart, disguised in wigs and veils, glasses and shapeless overclothes, at parties, at stores, walking a public street in broad daylight.

So why didn’t she run?

The details of Elizabeth Smart’s nine months in captivity — police say she was kidnapped and held against her will — are still unfolding. Family members say the teenager never had a chance to escape.

“She said there was no way — she had two people with her at all times,” family spokesman Chris Thomas said — a reference to Brian David Mitchell, who had changed his name to David Emmanuel Isiah for religious reasons and held himself as a messenger of God, and Wanda Ilene Barzee, who are being questioned by police.

Based on similar cases, one expert said it is likely fear or psychological pressure kept the 15-year-old from making an escape — that she experienced Stockholm syndrome or another psychological reaction that made her believe escape was impossible because of mystical or overt forces.

“We have no idea what psychological or pressure manipulations he used with her,” said Janja Lalich, a sociology professor at California State University, Chico, and author of Captive Hearts, Captive Minds and co-author with Margaret Singer of Cults in Our Midst.

Still, she said, past experiences show that “when you are removed from your normal environment and kept confined in some way, which we know [Elizabeth] must have been at the beginning, you can enter a very distorted reality,” said Lalich. “If they are good at what they do, they use a punishment/reward system. It doesn’t take much for your reality to shift.”

That reality, Lalich said, is governed by fear and works to keep a captive in check, even in public settings. “You can’t figure out how to [leave] rather than you don’t want to,” Lalich said, adding that Elizabeth’s youth could also have been a factor.

Stockholm syndrome, coined in 1973 after a bank holdup in Sweden, has been identified in hostages, cult members, battered women and abused children. Researchers say, in what may be an instinctive survival strategy, it causes victims to sympathize with, care for and be compliant with their captors, according to the Australian-based Center Against Sexual Assault’s Web site.

A similar scenario, experts said, involves a psychologically controlling relationship orchestrated by a charismatic person who professes a belief system or mystical power that is used to control and influence a small number of people.

Lalich says recovering from such an experience depends largely on having a strong support network, and “Elizabeth Smart clearly has a fabulous support network.”

This article in the San Diego Union-Tribune was published on March 18, 2007, ten years after the collective suicide of the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult.

The article includes an insert entitled “Overview: Cults Today,” based on an interview with Dr. Lalich.

This link will take you to the site:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/northcounty/20070318-9999-lz1n18heaven.html

CNN Interview with Janja Lalich

CNN Impact/March 30, 1997

Moderator says, “Welcome to the TIME/CNN IMPACT forum. Tonight at 10 p.m., we’re discussing the mass suicide in San Diego last week with Janja Lalich, the Educational Director of Community Resources on Influence and Control, an outreach service directed at educating the public about the potential dangers of cults. Please join us.”

Moderator says, “This is a moderated chat; If you would like to ask a question, you must go to the auditorium. To do so, type “/go auditorium.” Once you’re there, click on the red question mark or type “/ask question,” type your question in the box, and hit enter. It will be passed to the moderator. If you want to chat with other users, type “/go Time,” to enter the TIME room.”

Moderator says, “Let’s go to the first question.”

Moderator presents the speakers with question #28 from Anivil: In your experience counseling how common are instances of belief in something much of society believes to be wholly fiction?

Janja Lalich says, “Most of the time the cult is built around a fiction, so that in general just about everybody that I work with, I try to help them see though the manipulations that were used so that the person can see though the mythology that was used, and most of that centers around the cult leader.”

Moderator presents the speakers with question #44 from Carrie: How often do the leaders of these deals believe in what they’re selling, and how often is it a scam to take advantage of lost souls?

Janja Lalich says, “In my opinion I believe that in most cases its probably 90% scam and 10% them getting wrapped up in their own fiction, and it’s hard to know sometimes because many are getting so good at playing their own game, and most likely a lot switch back and forth between working to maintain the control and the fiction, and believing that they are the messiah. In many cases the longer they are allowed to act without any checks and balances the more likely they’ll become more and more delusional.”

Moderator presents the speakers with question #46 from Anton: A sociologist said that in each of us, there is a God-shaped hole waiting to be filled. What are these people missing?

Janja Lalich says, “These people are no different than you and I, if you mean people who join these groups. According to all the studies, people who join these groups are above average intelligence, from stable backgrounds, they do not have any pre-existing psychological difficulties, or problems. But they were at a transition point in their lives, when perhaps they were not completely connected or totally fulfilled with what was going on at the time, and if there is any common thread or traits, it is idealism, curiosity, and urge to create a better world, and wanting a sense of meaning and purpose.”

Moderator presents the speakers with question #43 from Carrie: How can people get so drawn to such far-out ideas? Is it a question of brainwashing? Loneliness? I mean, how do you arrive at the conclusion that a UFO will save you from the earth’s evils?

Janja Lalich says, “People get drawn into these thought systems a step at a time; a person is never told at the outset what the bottom line is going to be. It’s a kind of seduction process, and cult leader and cult recruiters use a powerful combination of social and psychological influence techniques that are meant to hinder and break down a persons thinking abilities and sense of self, so that the person can no longer evaluate what is happening. Over time the result of these techniques and pressures is to transform the person into a deployable agent for the cult leader.”

Moderator presents the speakers with question #27 from Anivil: Jim Siegelman believes that some people just “snap” into mind control/extraordinary belief patterns, has your experience as a counselor shown you that people will also “snap-out-of-it”?

Janja Lalich says, “Thought reform or brain washing is essentially a behavior modification program that works to change a person’s patterns of thinking and perceptions of the world, and it needs to be continually reinforced, this is why cult members are separated from their normal reality, and put through such rigorous daily routines and rituals. To them, after leaving the cult, it is similarly a process of undoing those cult induced patterns of thinking, and so there isn’t just one moment of “snapping out of it” but many moments of recovery.”

Moderator presents the speakers with question #55 from Jreesing: What are those techniques that they use. I keep hearing people say they use certain brainwashing techniques without explaining what they are.

Janja Lalich says, “In general they are sleep deprivation, special diets, controlling information going in and out, peer pressure, extensive indoctrination sessions, such as long hours of chanting, meditating, listening to droning lectures and mild forms of trance induction that again, reduce the person’s ability to think clearly. Much of this is aimed at attacking the person’s sense of self, getting them to doubt their own instinct and judgment, inducing fear, anxiety, and guilt, and creating the series of crises so that the person has to choose over and over again, FOR the cult. Specifically in the Heaven’s Gate group, they did such things as, mate members go through various disciplines and rituals over long periods of time; for example, sleep for 4 hours, be awake for 4 hours, sleep for 4 hours, be awake for 4 hours for months on end….be on liquid diets for months on end, remain sequestered with hoods on their faces so they couldn’t see each other for months on end.”

Moderator says “Welcome to the TIME/CNN IMPACT forum. We’re discussing the mass suicide in San Diego with Janja Lalich, an educator who has studied cults intensively, and worked with their victims. She joins us tonight from her home in California.”

Moderator presents the speakers with question #56 from Spmartin: Would you agree that Christianity started as what we would today call a cult with a charismatic leader extolling his followers to give up all earthly desires and follow him?

Moderator presents the speakers with question #59 from Smoothwave: Is there any organized religion that didn’t start as a cult?

Janja Lalich says, “I am not a scholar of religion, but I would suspect that the origins of Christianity, were rather cultic, but since I didn’t live at that time to do my own research, I can’t say more than that. A number of religions started with cultic behaviors, but over time shed those behaviors in order to become legitimate main stream religions. And I do believe that there are other organized religions whose origins were more routed in breaking off from another religions as an off shoot, and were not necessarily cultic.”

Moderator presents the speakers with question #29 from Anivil: Do you use the word “cult” and if so, how do you define a cult?

Janja Lalich says, “Yes, I do use the word cult. The definition I use is that a cult is essentially a corrupt and abusive power relationship that has certain characteristics: those are, 1. It is lead by a self proclaimed living leader, who demands all veneration, and complete loyalty. 2. It has a totalitarian top-down structure, with no input from the base, or the members, 3. It uses a coordinated program, of thought reform techniques, as I described earlier, and 4. It is rooted in deception, manipulation, exploitation, of the members by the leaders. 5. There is a double set of ethics, in that members are required to be completely open honest and disclosing within the group, but are told that it is OK, to lie and deceive those outside the group, because the end justifies the means.”

Moderator presents the speakers with question #69 from Anton: Do you think a small community of celibates who rigidly follow a leader are always a destructive cult?

Janja Lalich says, “No.”

Moderator presents the speakers with question #68 from Carrie: If cults are so absorbing, how can you escape, once you’re inside?

Janja Lalich says, “People leave cults in a variety of ways, some are kicked out, because they may have broken the rules, some get out when the leader dies, and the group goes through a crises period. Some get out as a result of information learned through an exit counseling intervention, and some walk away on their own, prompted by a variety of personal factors. In general it is extremely difficult to leave, because most cults induce the dependency that makes you believe that you simply couldn’t survive outside of the cult environment. Regardless of how a person leaves, if they don’t educate themselves about how they were drawn in and manipulated they are likely to either go back to the cult, or join another cult or spend many years of their lives in guilt confusion, and self blame.”

Janja Lalich says, “What I do is primarily an educational process, in working with the person to help them understand what happened. If I am not already familiar with the group the person was in , I find out as much as I can. I then engage the person in a sort of de-briefing process, which includes having them recount their experiences, having them do some readings and exercises. Among those are to do a chronology of their experiences in the group, and to analyze their experience according to the 8 psychological themes outlined by Dr. Robert Lifton. Lifton was one of the first to write about and describe brain-washing techniques used in communist china in the 1950s. As former cult members begin to see the aspect of their experiences according to these 8 themes, they gain an understanding, of the system they were a part of, and they can then see how they could have succumbed to such powerful pressures. Through that process they begin to regain a sense of self, and having a view of life separate from the cult.”

Moderator says, “Folks, we’re getting close to the end of our discussion, so please submit your final questions.”

Janja Lalich says, “My meetings with people are anywhere from 1 to 6 meetings to help them acquire the tools to help them asses the experience and integrate to help them carry on with a new life. Their personal recovery process can take anywhere from a year to 5 years.”

Moderator presents the speakers with question #76 from Jacobite: It seems that many in the H’sG group already had these ideas, or some variation of them before joining the group, and the group itself and “Do” were the “glue” that held them together. Is this a common role for a cult leader?

Janja Lalich says, “I don’t think its accurate to say that the members had the ideas of “Ti” and “do”, they perhaps had an interest in UFO’s or a dissatisfaction with modern society or their lives. It is true that a cult recruiter’s pitch has to resonate with something in you, but what you are drawn into is far and beyond what you might have imagined to start.”

Moderator presents the speakers with question #83 from Anton: Have you ever had a subject of your deprogramming crack up? Suffer a total breakdown:?

Janja Lalich says “I don’t call what I do deprogramming, I am an educator. I can’t speak about such specifics.”

Moderator says “Any final thoughts to wrap up our discussion?”

Janja Lalich says, “I hope that out of this tragedy, perhaps we can have more open public discussion about this very complex issue and some broad based educational programs on this subject. Thank you for participating in tonight’s discussion.”

Moderator says, “It’s about time to wind down our discussion. I’d like to thank Janja Lalich for a fascinating conversation. If you’d like to continue talking, head on over to the Time room. Thanks for joining us.”

From the Oakland Tribune

By Jill Tucker and Jason Dearen

Sunday, November 16, 2003

THE WHITEWASHED chair is empty.

Several bodies are face down on the floor in front of it, their arms wrapped around each other — a final attempt at comfort, frozen in death.

Hanging above, a wooden sign with stark white words deliver a pointed message:

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

This photograph is 25 years old, an indelible image from the Guyanan jungle that vividly documents Nov. 18, 1978, the day 913 people died from mass suicides and murders in a remote encampment called Jonestown.

Jonestown.

The word is enough to bring the memories flooding back.

Memories of the Rev. Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. Of parents giving their children cyanide-laced punch before drinking from the poison-filled vats themselves. Of San Mateo Rep. Leo Ryan shot dead on an airstrip.

And of the seemingly endless bodies bloating in the jungle heat.

It is a past too painful to forget.

And yet there is the fear that remembering has not been enough.

Those with personal ties to this past and those who have studied it say society is still susceptible to another Jonestown.

They say there are lessons to be learned from the Peoples Temple tragedy — not just how cults or apocalyptic groups form or function, but how aggressive intervention by a perceived enemy can trigger or fuel violence.

They say these are lessons that can be applied to situations similar to Jonestown, to Waco or even to al-Qaida and the war on terrorism.

“Jonestown kind of inaugurated an era of apocalyptic terror,” said John Hall, a professor of sociology and director of the Center for History, Society and Culture at the University of California, Davis. “People who didn’t understand Jones- town took the wrong lessons when they went into Waco.”

Concern drove them

Jackie Speier didn’t want to go to Guyana, on the northern coast of South America, 25 years ago.

Official State Department briefings indicated nothing wrong at Jonestown. But her boss, Democratic Rep. Ryan, urged on by concerned relatives of Temple members, wanted to see for himself.

Speier sensed something would go horribly wrong.

Now a state senator, Speier said she ultimately overcame her sense of dread. She thought if she didn’t go, some might think women weren’t strong enough to play key roles on congressional staffs.

So she went — and barely survived.

The gunmen came suddenly out of the jungle on a flatbed truck, according to witnesses, ambushing the group standing on the airstrip waiting to board a plane back to Georgetown, the Guyanan capital.

Ryan, Speier and a group of journalists had just finished an overnight visit to Jonestown to investigate claims by a Bay Area opposition group that the cult was holding people against their will and subjecting them to violence.

When Ryan left, 16 Temple members went with him. Their defection apparently was the last straw for Jim Jones, who allegedly sent the gunmen to the airstrip before instructing his remaining followers to die.

At the airport, bullets pierced Ryan in the head and neck. He died next to the airplane. NBC reporter Don Harris, NBC cameraman Robert Brown, Temple defector Patricia Parks and San Francisco Examiner photographer Gregory Robinson were struck dead nearby.

Speier was shot as she played dead on the tarmac. Hours later, Guyanan troops rescued the survivors, many of whom had fled into the nearby jungle.

Could it happen again?

Her scars and an “Elect Leo J. Ryan” campaign memento on her office desk are reminders of that day — an event she believes could happen again.

“Jim Jones and the other cults that followed wrapped themselves around freedom of religion, and we are very loathe to take any actions against any, quote unquote, organized religions,” she said.

Yet even before Sept. 11, 2001, back to the new millennium in 2000, government officials and law enforcement have worked desperately to determine which new religious movements or cults were a threat to public safety or themselves and which were harmless, soul-searching sects.

“Of the nearly 1,000 cults operating in the United States, very few present credible threats for millennial violence,” the FBI wrote in a 1999 report. “Cults with an apocalyptic agenda, particularly those that appear ready to initiate rather than anticipate violent confrontations to bring about Armageddon or fulfill ‘prophecy’ present unique challenges to law enforcement officials.” The report continued, “Ascertaining the intentions of such cults is a daunting endeavor, particularly since the agenda or plan of a cult is often at the whim of its leader.”

In 1978, however, it appears federal officials or law enforcement had little knowledge of what was happening at Jonestown, of the suicide drills or the cache of weapons.

It was a group of Jones’ former followers along with worried family members — who comprised a group called the Concerned Relatives — that warned of the dangers.

Clearly, law enforcement and government officials today have a better understanding of the potential dangers associated with apocalyptic groups.

Yet academic experts say that understanding doesn’t necessarily translate into official actions that mitigate the potential for violence — whether dealing with the Peoples Temple, Branch Davidians or al-Qaida.

Often with apocalyptic groups it takes something to set them down the path of violence — a “them” in the us-vs.-them struggle. With 25 years of hindsight, these experts say it is important to question whether government actions ultimately triggered what would be the apocalypse for these groups.

Pushed into acting?

Would 913 members of the Peoples Temple have ingested poison if Ryan and a group of reporters hadn’t shown up in Guyana on Nov. 17, 1978, at the behest of the highly critical Concerned Relatives group?

Would 80 members of the Branch Davidian sect died in Waco, Texas, if federal agents hadn’t raided their compound with guns drawn? Likely not, Hall says.

“One thing that people in society at large need to recognize is that dealing with people in these groups is a very delicate matter,” he said.

While it’s hard to say what might have happened had Ryan’s group not demanded to visit Jonestown, what is clear is that external factors did have an impact on both the Peoples Temple and Branch Davidians — and currently plays into the war on terrorism.

“‘Before Jonestown and Waco, there was a sense that cults operated in a vacuum,” said Rebecca Moore, a San Diego State University religion professor who has studied new religious movements for the last decade.

Now, particularly after Waco, it became clear “that there are a lot of things happening on the outside that the group is responding to,” Moore said.

In the case of Jonestown, federal officials from Customs, Social Security, the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies were investigating the organization and individual members. News articles chronicled the fears of former Peoples Temple members. It was this public pressure that led Jones to relocate to the South American jungle.

While those stories and government investigations alone did not provoke the massacre, they likely gave credence to Jim Jones’ paranoid rantings and the supposed need for suicide drills.

“What we’ve learned in the intervening years and through academic study is that religious violence is interactive,” said Catherine Wessinger, a professor of religious studies at Loyola University in New Orleans.

“It’s not just these crazy people doing something violent.”

Most of those who died had decided they were willing to take their own lives rather than see their community destroyed, she said. Jim Jones Jr. was at a basketball tournament in Georgetown when his father, the founder of the Peoples Temple, told his followers back at Jonestown they had to die.

While his parents, friends and neighbors died, the then-teenager and his brother who was with him at the tournament lived. The Pacifica resident doesn’t want to dwell on the end of the Peoples Temple. Instead, Jones focuses on why a thousand people followed his father and took up residence in the hostile climate of Guyana.

They wanted racial and gender equality, Jones explained. They were political idealists who were hungry for his father’s utopian message.

“I don’t know if you could create a Jonestown now,” he said. “We’re 40 years out of the 1960s and people are not looking for a vessel to help their fellow man.”

Indeed, Jonestown residents “were good people trying to create a better world,” said Janja Lalich, assistant professor of sociology at California State University, Chico.

“The idea was great,” she said. “I think we can also use it as a model for what not to do.”

The question then is what to do when a group appears to be violating the law or threatening public safety.

“If it’s suspected that a religious group is engaging in criminal behavior, then certainly it has to be investigated,” Wessinger said.

Yet it’s also important to study what they’re saying and what they believe.

“You want to communicate with them constructively and not make them feel like they’re boxed into a corner,” she said. “You need to go in with kid gloves and investigate very carefully.”

No more kid gloves

But in a post-Sept. 11 world, kid gloves and constructive communication aren’t part of the Patriot Act.

And for some, Jonestown and al-Qaida are two very different animals.

“I can say that I see no relationship between the reaction of nutty extremists who pose no threat to others, and the reactions of organizations formed to attack us,” Abraham Sofaer, senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, said in an e-mail on the issue. “We need to indulge the former and destroy the latter.”

Yet others see parallels in the war on terror and what happened in Jonestown 25 years ago.

“What we’ve seen — and Jonestown was a harbinger for this — what we’ve seen since that time and especially with al-Qaida, is that religion is a powerful force for mobilizing people both for and against political initiatives,” said UC Davis professor Hall. “Religion is the wild card and it hasn’t found a very comfortable place in the deck.”

Both Jonestown and al-Qaida include apocalyptic messages — an us-vs.-them struggle in which the options are either prevail or die. To aggressively interact with or pursue such groups fuels the fire, academic experts say.

“It’s quite clear for al-Qaida it’s an apocalyptic struggle,” Hall said. “We have every interest in making them believe it isn’t apocalyptic.”

With Jonestown, the group was isolated in the Guyanan jungle, seemingly a non-threat to society at-large.

Al-Qaida is a much different story. Putting on those kid gloves to combat suicide bombers doesn’t seem realistic.

The question to ask, however, is whether reciprocal bombings create security or create more suicide terrorists.

“I’m all in favor of maintaining security and protection,” Loyola professor Wessinger said. “But bombing the heck out of people and putting pressure on them breeds more terrorists.”

Lessons of Jonestown

After Jonestown and the murder of her father on the Port Kaituma airstrip, one of Erin Ryan’s sisters joined a cult. Her other sister became the president of an anti-cult network.

Erin Ryan went to law school, then worked for the CIA and generally kept to herself about her father’s death. Until now.

She decided to speak out for the 25th anniversary because she wants a new generation of people to learn from the Jonestown tragedy.

She also wants to see more investigation, more attention focused on cults violating the law or threatening violence.

“Obviously, we’re a free and open society and people can believe and do whatever they want,” she said. “On the other hand, there’s a point at which state interest and safety come into play.”

She advocates a by-the-book look at such groups — focusing on greater scrutiny of tax and finance laws for religious groups.

“Religious deduction for taxes, Social Security fraud and welfare, that’s what we need to look at,” she said.

It is a less confrontational approach that can be applied to a Jonestown-like group or to the international stage to cut finan- cing to terrorists. In the meantime, Ryan said, she simply feels it’s important to remember what happened 25 years ago. Important to never repeat it.

“I feel there’s a whole generation who doesn’t know anything about it,” she said. “About what happened, why it happened and how it happened.”

Contact Jill Tucker at jtucker@angnewspapers.com and Jason Dearen at jdearen@angnewspapers.com . Staff writer Melissa Evans contributed to this story.