It's a sweltering hot Sunday afternoon, and I'm driving down WA-512 towards Yelm, WA. In the passenger seat is Colby Harper, a longtime friend and former IT-industry colleague. Colby's been a mentor for years, ever since I worked for him at Inteliant/AT&T in 2000. Once again I'm relying on his guidance, but this time the job is finding a street address. "Wait a sec, Tim -- I think that we just passed it." Colby's right -- I'd driven past the black wrought-iron gate that I was looking for along a long, moss-covered wall that signified we'd reached our destination.
 
As you might have guessed, there's a back story here -- and in this case its definitely one of the strangest that I've seen to date. I guess you could say that we're traveling to church on Sunday, but this isn't a social occasion -- nor is it really a church. In fact, the building that we're pulling up at is unlike any other .... its the "Ramtha School of Enlightenment" -- a Mecca for spirituality and psychic powers that the editor of one of the world's most prestigious magazines is about to give a speech at.
 
Through the Black Gate
 
The Ramtha school was a bit different that what I'd expected -- I must admit that I didn't have much foreknowledge of what the place was like, but I was somewhat familiar with their leadership. At 12 years old I'd seen JZ Knight engage in what she's claimed was the channeling of a 40,000 year old deity named "Ramtha" on Channel 4's "Town Meeting". It was a daytime show that I'd seen as a result of being home from school sick. The vague recollection that I had from the show was Ken Schram hosting it, and the audience laughing and booing JZ nearly off the stage while she performed her channeling demonstration. My memory revolves not even around JZ or Ramtha, but around the audience -- if you can visualize in your mind the kind of response that the guests often get on Jerry Springer, then you're probably thinking about the same thing that I saw on TV that day.
 
Looking back on things, I can only assume that having an audience reaction like that must really hurt a person to have happen -- I'd always assumed that JZ had faded into obscurity after being treated so poorly by that audience, but I'd apparently assumed wrong -- she was alive and well, living in Yelm, WA...and she wasn't alone -- in the 16 years since I'd seen her on TV, she'd developed a following and turned it her home in Yelm into a one-stop shopping center for spirituality and psychic phenomenon.
 
My understanding of the Ramtha School was that it was a cult -- and after the disasters first the Branch Davidian compound in 1993 and later with Heaven's Gate in San Diego I was very resistant to even learning more about this organization. However, I'd been obligated to drive down and learn more about this organization after friend and antigravity-journalist Bruce Smith told me about an event at which Nick Cook would be speaking. Cook, after all, is the aviation editor for Jane’s Defense Review, and at the very least I owed him attendance after having my Lifter research featured in the July 2002 edition of Jane’s Weekly.
 
Cultlike Objects
 
How do you define a cult? Colby and I had talked about this during our one-and-a-half hour drive down from Seattle, and we'd had difficulty really pinning down the definition to determine one way or the other what the Ramtha School of Enlightenment really was. The problem is that while cults are easy for most people to define, that's because most people are analyzing them from the perspective of an established belief system. When I was 12, the minister at the Baptist Church my mother was attending had a good definition of exactly what a cult was, and at the time it seemed quite logical....the problem arises from the fact that in hindsight the Baptist Church is a bit cultlike itself.
 
I guess that there are different types of cults, and if the Ramtha School qualifies it would probably fit into what is generally known as a "personality cult". It's a scary word, but realistically this type of organization is all around us. Cult, after all, comes from the word "micro culture", which is literally a small culture formed by a group of people with a common bond that sets them apart from the rest of the world. Personality cults are a bit tough to pin down -- does musician Leif Garrett's following of teenage girls in the 1970's qualify? What about the Grateful Dead followers? Or more importantly, what Jesus and the 12-disciples, which effectively defines Christianity as being the same thing that it accused other followings of being. Even UFOlogy has cult-followings, and these micro cultures all share many of the same characteristics that the Ramtha School does.
 
A personality cult is generally defined around a single person -- usually a charismatic and well-spoken leader that preaches a gospel and leads followers to abandon their old lives in search of new meaning in the organization.
 
I read a book on cult organizations a while back that described a number of well-known cults. One of the obvious problems is that with organizations like this, they suck people in and drain their finances dry. Does the Ramtha School do this? Offhand, I don't know if they tithe (a common practice with most major religions), but they do have a bookstore, which sells a collection of volumes either written by JZ Knight or transcribed from lectures that she's given at the school. In terms of sucking people dry, though, I doubt that the bookstore would qualify -- I spend more money on physics journals than it would cost to buy her entire library of materials.
 
Some of the well-known cult practices that are generally considered to be 'dangerous' seem to be absent from the Ramtha School. Most cults try to isolate new members from their friends and families, and try to get people to leave their old lives behind to start fresh in a new cult society....add in lots of brainwashing, and you can take a normal person and gradually remove their identity. The idea is that the members of this organization would be obviously brainwashed to spout off catch-phrases from the leader, but I didn't see this happening. In fact, from the two books that Bruce Smith had sent me beforehand, one of the central ideas of RSE is to set aside preconceived notions from all sources (including Ramtha), and to find the truth for oneself. This puts the Ramtha School into more of a Buddhist setting than that of a Christian cult, which would tend to dominate its followers and condition them with a dogmatic approach to beliefs.
 
Trying to figure out the RSE is an interesting mental challenge, but probably one that isn't very fruitful -- after all, I'm not part of the organization, merely intellectually interested in the way that they've structured their own approach to spirituality. Cult or not, Colby and I had come to see Nick Cook deliver a lecture on Antigravity. We'd been invited very graciously as guests to an otherwise private event, and I was happy for the opportunity to visit and hear him speak.
 
Social Introductions
 
Mike Wright is a tall man, and was dressed in a loose-fitting but stylish white shirt befitting the awful heat that we were enduring -- despite his rather abrupt phone manner, he's quite friendly and congenial in person, and met Colby and myself in the gravel parking lot at RSE to shepherd us into his office to meet with Nick before the presentation. If I wasn't feeling schizophrenic enough beforehand, being escorted into the converted Ranch-house that now served as an office-complex was definitely increasing that crazy feeling in the back of my head. The problem is that because I had cults on the brain, everything that I saw seemed to make me wonder about what was a 'normal behavior' and what might be a 'cultlike control technique'.
 
Colby and I followed Mike about a hundred feet down the narrow hall, in an uneasy silence occasionally punctuated by small talk. The problem wasn't that Mike was being rude -- in fact, he was quite pleasant, but incredibly busy. This particular Sunday was a very busy occasion for RSE, as they were in the middle of a 10-day retreat that involved pilgrims from all over the world traveling to Yelm to listen to JZ speak and learn a bit more about the school.
 
Mike was especially busy because his specialty is science & technology. To give the guy credit, he has an incredible grasp on science and technology -- especially with regard to Quantum Information Systems, which is probably the last thing you'd expect to find at RSE. However, the reality is that as Quantum Mechanics progresses, it moves from being a hard-science into the realm of metaphor -- one of the things that Mike later mentioned was his interest in Quantum Computers and how they add support to the "Many-Worlds" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
 
After our walk down the hall, Mike stopped at a small office door and ushered us in. I'm not sure what I expected to see, but in terms of organizational layout for the school it was a pretty mundane office -- shelves overflowing with papers, two PC's running Microsoft Outlook, and a few papers stacked on the desk directly in front of me. The paper on top was a description of a recent successful experiment to teleport an atom across a lab -- I quickly lost interest because I'd read the same article earlier in the week online.
 
It took a while for Nick to enter the room -- as it turns out, while my paranoia ran towards my vain attempt to categorize the Ramtha School into a "cult / no-cult" strategy, Nick's paranoia seems to have been towards finalizing his speaking notes to make sure that he didn't get lost on stage. I immediately understood from his expression that he was feeling uneasy -- Bruce had told me earlier in the week that this event would have nearly 2,000 attendees, and I knew that Nick's experience with publicity had mainly involved small groups at media-venues, such as filming for television, etc.
 
Seeing Nick was a bit of a relief, though -- and seeing that he was focused on something other than our rather strange location was even more relieving. For me, this is what really began to help me to relax -- after all, this is the first time that I'd met him in person, despite a few hours of phone conversations that we'd had over the last two years.