Dude,
I dated a girl for 10 months that was in a well-known cult in NYC. It was run by one Fredrick Lenz, and was supposedly Buddhist. Now, this girl was a third degree blackbelt (Shotokan), meditated 2-3 hours a day, and was an IT professional on Wall St. A number of well-known IT professionals happened to belong to this cult, including someone that wrote for PC World on a regular basis and was eventually outed and fired.
Turns out what this guy had done was recruit people that were nominally Buddhist, and formed a money-making IT cult out of them. It didn't matter if you had no IT skills, or any college education in it - another member would teach you enough jargon so that you could get through some interviews, and they would like up 3-5 cult members to be your "references", and send you on interviews and soon enough you would have a job, usually as a data modeler or programming analysist that didn't have to know deep IT skills. If you were new they usually tried to get you a job contracting with someone else in the cult, so they could train you on the job. It started wtih less than 20 people, and grew, and grew. Of course, bad people are bad people, and Wall St. developed a black list of them over time - so the cult expanded to Chicago and later San Fran. At it's peak, it was 300 people.
Now here's the best part - a HUGE chunk of all the money they made went to him. He, at last count, had 4 Bentleys, a raft of MBs, etc. He had a huge compound on Long Island, and another one in San Fran.
What differentiated this guy from a normal IT contracting company? Well, probably the fact that he was claimed (bear with me) to walk around with a literal halo above his head during cult meetings, and claims that he could levitate. I kid you not. In general, most staffing companies do not levitate or have halos. Oh, and he also slept with I think nearly all of the female recruits at one time - I only suspect this, don't know for sure, as my gf would not talk about her prior life before me at all (and we dated for nearly a year).
Lenz killed himself, or was killed, a few years ago at his Long Island home. Details are fuzzy - he was found in the surf near his house, naked, while a female cult member was found in a drugged state in his estate, wandering the halls naked. His cult had been under constant attack by the "Cult Awareness Network", which normally fought the Moonies and the Christian Scientists, but had taken an interest in his little scheme as well. I personally was LONG gone from that girl when this happened - I had always turned down invites to cult meetings, and was very distant from her friends in the cult, but one day walked into work to find a magazine with a 6 page article on Lenz's cult just sitting on my desk opened to the article - at 8AM. In a secure building. Where I was certain no one knew that I was dating this girl. A cool girl in many ways, but no worth getting hunted down at work. (to be fair, we had other issues, like that fact that the cult WAS the #1 thing in her life, and children were not an option). So I ended it and ran like hell.
Anyway - I hope that I have made your choice easier. Lesson: cults exist to enrich/empower those at the top. Do not make any mistake about this. Don't ask me to compare them to religions, because I won't be drawn into that battle here.
Future Shock
I dated a girl for 10 months that was in a well-known cult in NYC. It was run by one Fredrick Lenz, and was supposedly Buddhist. Now, this girl was a third degree blackbelt (Shotokan), meditated 2-3 hours a day, and was an IT professional on Wall St. A number of well-known IT professionals happened to belong to this cult, including someone that wrote for PC World on a regular basis and was eventually outed and fired.
Turns out what this guy had done was recruit people that were nominally Buddhist, and formed a money-making IT cult out of them. It didn't matter if you had no IT skills, or any college education in it - another member would teach you enough jargon so that you could get through some interviews, and they would like up 3-5 cult members to be your "references", and send you on interviews and soon enough you would have a job, usually as a data modeler or programming analysist that didn't have to know deep IT skills. If you were new they usually tried to get you a job contracting with someone else in the cult, so they could train you on the job. It started wtih less than 20 people, and grew, and grew. Of course, bad people are bad people, and Wall St. developed a black list of them over time - so the cult expanded to Chicago and later San Fran. At it's peak, it was 300 people.
Now here's the best part - a HUGE chunk of all the money they made went to him. He, at last count, had 4 Bentleys, a raft of MBs, etc. He had a huge compound on Long Island, and another one in San Fran.
What differentiated this guy from a normal IT contracting company? Well, probably the fact that he was claimed (bear with me) to walk around with a literal halo above his head during cult meetings, and claims that he could levitate. I kid you not. In general, most staffing companies do not levitate or have halos. Oh, and he also slept with I think nearly all of the female recruits at one time - I only suspect this, don't know for sure, as my gf would not talk about her prior life before me at all (and we dated for nearly a year).
Lenz killed himself, or was killed, a few years ago at his Long Island home. Details are fuzzy - he was found in the surf near his house, naked, while a female cult member was found in a drugged state in his estate, wandering the halls naked. His cult had been under constant attack by the "Cult Awareness Network", which normally fought the Moonies and the Christian Scientists, but had taken an interest in his little scheme as well. I personally was LONG gone from that girl when this happened - I had always turned down invites to cult meetings, and was very distant from her friends in the cult, but one day walked into work to find a magazine with a 6 page article on Lenz's cult just sitting on my desk opened to the article - at 8AM. In a secure building. Where I was certain no one knew that I was dating this girl. A cool girl in many ways, but no worth getting hunted down at work. (to be fair, we had other issues, like that fact that the cult WAS the #1 thing in her life, and children were not an option). So I ended it and ran like hell.
Anyway - I hope that I have made your choice easier. Lesson: cults exist to enrich/empower those at the top. Do not make any mistake about this. Don't ask me to compare them to religions, because I won't be drawn into that battle here.
Future Shock
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