A Sea of Legitimization: How A High Demand Group Gained My Trust

Have you ever tried a new yoga class, checked out a new-to-you church, or signed up for a retreat — after someone you already know and trust encouraged you to do so?

That’s leveraged trust in action. I was intrigued by this term, which I don’t remember coming across before in my readings on coercive persuasion. It popped up in the just-out book A Little Bit Culty: Navigating Cults, Control and Coercion by Sarah Edmondson and Nippy Ames. Edmondson & Ames host the A Little Bit Culty podcast and are themselves survivors — and whistleblowers — of the NXIVM self-help group.

As they explain, “leveraged trust itself isn’t inherently bad — it simply means using existing trust, credibility, or authority to influence others.” I’ve been influenced positively through leveraged trust many times, including by the friend who introduced me to the tradition that has been my spiritual home for three decades.

But when such credibility is borrowed and exploited deceptively for control or profit, that’s when leveraged trust morphs into a means of manipulation. 

Since “most of us are naturally skeptical,” Edmondson & Ames observe, “cult leaders and other manipulators use leveraged trust to lower that skepticism and fast-track their influence.”

Someone who has legit credentials and is sincere in their intentions can be used by a smooth operator to gain others’ trust. Like how filmmaker Mark Vicente was used by NXIVM guru Keith Raniere to cut through actress Sarah Edmonson’s skepticism, that might otherwise have kept her from signing up for a NXIVM program. And how Nippy Ames was eventually lured in through his ex-girlfriend.
This got me thinking about all the different ways the credibility of my own one-time meditation teacher was boosted when I first encountered his program, and as I got more involved.

For me, it started when I was in Kerala in 2000, learning about how that state in southwest India put into practice Gandhian-style community development. Another person in my learning group, ‘Linda,’ was an enthusiastic student of a particular meditation teacher. (She may well have gone on that trip because the teacher was originally from Kerala.)
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She had come prepared with a small book to share, and on the very first day of the trip made conversation that included inquiries about spiritual interests. It didn’t take Linda long to discover I was a prime candidate, already interested in meditation but without a practice. She gave me this book from her teacher. (It draws its title from an exchange Mahatma Gandhi is said to have had with a reporter. His answer to the query of whether he had a message to give to his people was that his life — the way he lived — was his message.)

the book “Linda” gave me in Kerala

Meeting Linda and getting that book was the first step of a journey that would, years later, see me relocate from the Midwest to the San Francisco Bay Area to work for that teacher’s meditation center. I don’t hold it against Linda that she recruited me to what I now regard as a high control group. In time, I would go on to give away my own share of books from the teacher’s press to people I knew that might find them of interest.

“Most cult recruiters … have been indoctrinated to believe that they’re truly helping those they recruit” (Edmondson & Ames).

Indeed, people who stay on the outer perimeter of a high control group may get nothing but genuine benefits.

Though I had just met Linda, as I got to know her, she lent credibility to this meditation teacher. She was (is) an accomplished person who came across as grounded, generous, and caring. She espoused progressive social ideals, like me. A generation older than me, she was from cosmopolitan San Francisco and made a career in Silicon Valley. She volunteered with the SF-based non-profit that put together our program in Kerala, serving as their representative on the trip.

While my acquaintance with Linda never got that deep, the connection between her meditation teacher and Gandhi continued to be prominent in the story of his work — and it continued to be a hook for idealistic young me. A few years later I would lead a book study group in my church using the biography on Gandhi put out by the meditation group’s press.

And my first close connection with the meditation center was a scholar of Gandhi who was one of the teacher’s students going back to the 60s. He led the regional meditation retreats in Chicago — the first retreats I went to — and had written on Gandhian nonviolence and its relevance to solving contemporary social problems. I brought the study of that book to my local community, too.

​Linda and Gandhi were just the beginning. There was a whole sea of legitimization for the meditation teacher, supplied by people and traditions that engendered trust.

The teacher’s books had blurbs on the back from the likes of Huston Smith, renowned scholar and premier teacher of world religions, and Henri Nouwen, mainstream religious leader and prolific spiritual writer. I admired Smith’s work, which I had read during college; his support encouraged me to regard this meditation teacher as an authentic one.

NXIVM’s Keith Raniere didn’t publish books, that I know of, but he managed a similar feat. Raniere and his worker bees engineered a visit to their headquarters in Albany, NY, by the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibetan Buddhism. Raniere elicited a positive exchange with His Holiness, burnishing his own image as trustworthy by association.

In my old group, the teacher’s books, articles and talks (which in time I saw via DVDs) draw from scriptures of all the world’s religions, and from mystics and interpreters of every major tradition too. The mantrams he promoted draw from hallowed traditions East and West. As do the passages suggested for use in his method of meditation. Implicitly that meditation center builds on the legitimacy of all those established traditions and voices.

As I got onto the meditation center’s mailing list, I received periodic journals and newsletters that featured not only words of the meditation teacher, but stories of everyday people following the program of spiritual practices his center promoted. They always testified to meaningful benefits resulting from those efforts.

Later I started going to retreats at the center, in the Bay Area. Then I met more of the teacher’s long-time students. The teacher died in 1999, the year before I encountered his work. So I knew him only through these other people, and what they and their press shared of him.

I worked my way through the many, many books that press had put out over the decades, while establishing a regular meditation practice, and in time, trying meditation retreats. The Gandhi scholar was not the only student of the teacher to write on adjacent topics. Several ashram dwellers had written a bestselling vegetarian cookbook, which I happily added to my kitchen shelf.

Another of the long-timers took a particular interest in women mystics; her books piqued my curiosity too. She tussled with questions around women in religion, with the sensibilities of a hippie-era S.F.-area woman. Many of the other women who lived at the ashram worked there too, and played more traditional female roles, providing administrative support for the center, and preparing food for the residents. Among the women of the group, it was the writer’s support of the teacher that lent a veneer of feminist credibility.

​Meeting long-time students of the teacher in person, at their retreat center in Marin County, provided a more human, firsthand impression than one can get from books. At the time of my involvement in the early 2000s, the retreat presenters were all long-time students who lived at the ashram. Other residents would sometimes join us at mealtime, when more informal stories might be shared of life with the teacher.

“[Acolytes] are trained to be expert love bombers.” They know how to “roll out the red carpet — smiles, warm vibes, compliments — to make newcomers feel welcome.” (Edmondson & Ames)

The warm fellowship of mealtimes at retreats was conducive to trust-building. The long-time students functioned as character witnesses. They testified to not only the promise of the spiritual practices they taught, but the authenticity of the teacher.

Edmondson & Ames describe the function of the inner circle of devotees in several ways. They “amplify and reinforce the leader’s authority and agenda.” They are “trained to sing the leader’s praises and affirm the leader’s words and actions, creating an echo chamber that amplifies the leader’s authority.” Additionally, they act “as intermediaries between the leader and regular members, controlling access and information flow; this enhances the leader’s mystique.”

By the time I turned up at the retreat house and ashram, the mystique was being transferred to the teacher’s wife, who was his named successor in leadership. Access to her was controlled, bestowed as an honor on retreat-goers — though nothing seemed particularly special about her, on the face of it. I think group photos may have been a longstanding practice; those became in no small part about getting a photo of the group with the cherished mother-figure.

And let’s not forget the most mythical mother-figure of this group, the teacher’s grandmother. Said to be a spontaneously illumined figure in their village, she is quoted as beseeching her grandson to become like a character from Indian scripture — to become enlightened and inspire others. I don’t doubt there was a Granny, and some of the stories about her are probably true. Whether she purposely planted the seeds for her grandson to become a guru is (conveniently) unverifiable.

Granny also fits into the story-line that the group’s teacher not only grew up in “Gandhi’s India” (c’mon, he only met Gandhi like once?, probably among a huge throng) — but that his society was a matriarchal one. The teacher’s students use that language, matriarchal. But as a trained social scientist and one who learned specifically about Kerala, it’s actually matrilineal — tracing ancestry through the mother-line — which is not precisely the same thing. (People hear matriarchy and think it’s the opposite of patriarchy, with women in a superior position and men in an inferior position, power-wise; but that’s incorrect.)

In Kerala, matrilineal practices were ended by the British starting in 1925, and likely began eroding culturally far earlier than that, with the arrival of Christian missionaries (who came quite early to Kerala… the tour Linda and I went on included time in Cochin, which St. Thomas is said to have visited). Increased contact with other, patriarchal parts of India would also have diluted the egalitarian aspects of Kerala culture prior to colonization.

​Stories I heard about Granny, the head of the guru’s elite family, have her spending her time sweeping the veranda, cooking, and caring for the family; she comes off as content to toil in relative obscurity, despite being a supposedly illumined person, while her grandson’s destiny was to become a spiritual teacher touching untold lives. To me the way the teacher was pitched as coming from a matriarchal society — and implicitly, above the sexism and objectification of women present in our own, Western culture — was never terribly convincing.

From my collection of books *about* the teacher (published by his press)

There was a special subset of books put out by the group’s press that were about the teacher, rather than the teachings. I don’t think I acquired any of them until I had worked my way through most of the dozens of spiritual books ostensibly by the meditation teacher.

Through this hagiography, the meditation center could tell the story of the teacher and group in the best possible light, controlling the narrative: including what they wanted to include, omitting what they preferred to omit, and crafting it to serve their goals. These were the books I came to last.
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Close associates of a teacher of this sort typically play not only a proactive role, but a defensive one. As Edmondson & Ames put it,

“The most ardent … devotees will quickly defend the leader against any criticism or questioning, maintaining the leader’s infallible image.”

I look back in hindsight, and see how they got ahead of information that might have led newer meditators to question the teacher’s legitimacy. This may account in part for the emphasis on the “matriarchal” society, explaining away the wife and child(ren?) abandoned in India. (I believe it’s true that in Kerala of old, the role of uncle, not husband, would be the more important one. But not the Kerala of the mid- to late 1900s… and almost certainly not the parts of India the teacher went to after he finished his education and became a university professor in a different region of India. The University of Nagpur, for example, is in an area that was long patrilineal.)

The inner circle folks in my group were also ready for questions about the long-time student whose criminal behavior could undermine the credibility of the group or its teacher. He did not follow the teacher’s example or teachings, they assured us. He was a bad apple. Naturally, he was ejected from the ashram, never to return — distancing the community and teacher from his tainted reputation, and the damage he might do by association.

In recent years, multiple allegations have resurfaced of sexual abuse of females, both adults and minors, at the ashram, by the teacher himself. (The allegations are not new, though I didn’t know about them previously — as by design few later meditators did.) Blanket denial and spiritual bypassing have loomed large in the official response.

​For me, this broken trust can never be repaired. For the teacher is not who he said he was. And the group is not the safe haven it presents itself to be. Which explains why they need a sea of legitimization to buoy them up.