This same process was adhered to at the start of every session, but after that first night, the procedure had a little addition: when the music played, we were ordered to raise our hands slowly towards the sky with our eyes closed and, as the notes ascended, we were to stretch up as if we were high-fiving god.
The first session started at 6 p.m. Once we walked in and a few hours had passed, we had no sense of time. It was taken from us. No clocks hung from the walls and the front desk always kept our watches and phones before we began. Anyone who did not follow this protocol got thrown out. Oh, and shouted at. The name of the game was humiliation, and it was only when you exited and the session ended that you realised it was 3 a.m. During that time, we did not eat and we did not sleep and there were four days left to go. There were four days with Royee Banai left to go.
When you grow up in a culture where mental illness is not recognised, the secret of your disease eats away at you more than the disease itself. That’s exactly what I felt like at that point in my life. There were few places I could turn to. I was told several times to pray myself out of it. In this way, among others, religion is a cult as well. It is a system that shuns anyone or anything that challenges its claims to truth. In many cultures and religions – including my own – mental illness is not a truth. It cannot exist if your faith does. This is no different from coercing people the way lost prophets do in actual cults.
It’s kind of funny: a lot of people enter cults because they find religion and the norms of society too restrictive and they’re scared of feeling alienated. In their search for something better, they end up being a part of something just as restrictive and potentially alienating for a whole host of other reasons.
The threat of being alienated from my culture by my personal demons left me with two options:
1. Allow myself to be coerced into praying away those demons.
2. Keep the demons a secret and pretend to be coerced into a certain way of thinking regardless.
I went with option two for a long time. But then, my demons became so life-threatening that I signed up for a workshop that promised to help me out.
A desperate, broken human will do and believe anything that promises to make them feel better. I needed to feel better. Besides, it was easy to publicly announce my forthcoming participation at Turning Point because the course was about ‘making better decisions in life’. I could frame it as a professional investment instead of the therapy I needed for my mental breakdown.
Now. Let me tell you about Royee Banai.
Royee Banai was our trainer for the duration of the course. His bio on the website today says: ‘For the last 20 years Royee Banai has been involved in the sphere of Personal Transformation, facilitating self-development and self-discovery workshops at the Insight Training Centre with well over 10 000 individuals since the year 2000 at the Centre of Light, situated 9km from Fourways.’
During our lengthy sessions with Royee, he could not stop telling us about his own transformation as a selling point. We needed to trust him because his life was awesome. He told us that it was because he operated on a different plane of consciousness and behaviour that he was a top martial-arts competitor who received eight distinctions in matric with a pass mark of 97.67 per cent and two degrees – an undergrad and honours degree in psychology. This information formed part of his more ‘friendly’ soliloquies. Other themes that featured in the short, heart-warming and inspirational portions of his motivational talks were aspects like money and love.
Royee Banai did not need money, apparently, because he knew how to love. He knew how to love everyone. He operated above the plane of money and so love fed him. One night during a short break, however, I took a walk through the massive property, wandered too far from the main building and into a field, and saw a bunch of high-end German cars parked on one of the unoccupied portions of land. Big German cars have big German boots. Was that where they kept the money we paid them to tell us that money and material things don’t matter?
Royee Banai’s multiple accomplishments in martial arts had come in handy one night when he apparently physically attacked one of the Turning Point participants. In 2014, a woman called Ntoli phoned into Radio 702 during an interview with Royee Banai to tell listeners about the assault. At the time of the broadcast, Ntoli was just over fifty years old. When she’d done the workshop, she stood up during the session where Royee and his minions force people to kneel down and pound pillows on the floor in anger. This pounding went on for about an hour, she said. I have a bad grasp of time and can’t really confirm the duration, but when I did it, it definitely felt like an exceptionally long period of screaming and pillow beating.
When Ntoli rose to her feet in the middle of this drill, she said, Royee slapped her face. She fell back and he proceeded to kick her while she was down and force her back into the kneeling position.
Displaying fear or incompetence is frowned upon in that place. According to the teaching, fear is a state of unawareness of the conscious mind and is not to be obeyed. Reacting to fear is considered a weakness and treated with aggression, humiliation and punishment. Over and above that, no one is allowed to ask another participant if they are okay when these things happen. That is a weakness in itself and all Turners – so to speak – must rise above it. All physical attacks are therefore justified according to the Turning Point philosophy: Don’t be scared. Fear is subjective. If you’re not scared, it’s not abuse.
During the radio show, Royee Banai responded to Ntoli and basically victim-blamed her. Aubrey Masango, the radio show host, openly stated that in the past he had received plenty of worrying tweets and texts from other ‘graduates’ reporting similar cases of physical abuse. But then the programme continued down an obtusely un-objective path with little investigation and a lot of chitchat about all the supporters (read: cult-followers).
I believe Ntoli. I was witness to a lot of this torment during my own sittings. When we disobeyed orders, questioned Royee or didn’t quite perform as expected, we were screamed at and insulted. Made to feel like lesser human beings.
We were once given an exercise in the early hours of the morning where we had to break our backs by sitting cross-legged on the floor hunched over a couple of matchsticks and some putty to solve a brainteaser. I couldn’t do it. Each participant got one of Royee’s assistants to help. Helping entailed the assistant sitting next to me and shouting into my left ear. He yelled that I was useless and couldn’t do it. Then Royee came over and did the same in my other ear. He called me pathetic until I cried hot tears. No one asked me if I was okay during the break. They couldn’t. They were scared and brainwashed by that point. But still, I stayed.
A tired person who is deprived of sleep and food in the middle of the night and has no emotional faculties left will always try to rise above breaking point to prove they are better than they’re being told they are. It takes a lot of courage to not care what people think. A lot of energy. When you’re hungry and sleep-deprived, you have none of that.
Someone in my workshop also got slapped in the face. Another person was threatened with being kicked out because they challenged Royee on something. Nevertheless, Royee always manipulated us into believing him and believing in the positive effects of his madness. He promised a full refund if we chose to leave. That’s how much he believed in the programme, he said. None of us left.
On an online cult forum, a participant said that he ended up walking. He said Royee screamed at his group for eight hours minimum per session. I can testify to this. It happens. This guy couldn’t take it any more. He left.
The whole approach of Turning Point is ‘break them down to build them up’. First, Royee convinces you that you are a strong human being capable of anything. You are not your experiences. Then he uses the answers you submit on your ‘confidential’ questionnaire to ‘out’ you in front of everyone. He offers you opportunities to prove your strength and brainwashes the scepticism out of your system by offering you praise when yo
u ‘overcome’. By the end, you’re too tired to think critically. You’re too tired to think at all. You have become a robot who obeys the master and willingly gives him permission to humiliate you by using your personal experiences against you.
The guy who left did not get his money back. Contrary to the original promise, he was told that the refund was only valid if he had remained in the ‘training’ for all five days and then decided that it hadn’t worked. This reasoning is pretty airtight. By the time five days have passed, most people have followed Royee too far.
I had my third Turning Point breakdown at 4 a.m. one morning when I finally retired to bed after a couple of hours of crawling on my hands and knees from the one end of the hall to the other. I convinced myself that I would have the courage to at least ask for my money back at the end of my five days. I did not.
We ended the workshop the way we participated throughout: with enthusiasm. Because without enthusiasm, we are made to believe, all we have is a self so useless that it is worthy only of death. And we don’t want death. Wanting death is what brought us here. We want this amazing, refreshing journey. We want this to work. We want a ‘new way of life’. We don’t want to continue being people so affected by our emotions that we cannot function. So we willingly subject ourselves to the punishment of Turning Point to prove that we are no longer the victims of our experiences, however traumatic, and we can withstand anything. But we can’t.
Another caller on the 2014 radio show dialled in to make it clear that we can’t withstand just anything. Dr Cathy was her name. She said she had a PhD in clinical psychology. She expressed deep concern about the ‘break them down to build them up’ technique of Turning Point. Dr Cathy argued that in the face of humiliation, sleep deprivation and physical abuse, defences are down – people break easily and when they do, defences often pop back up in the wrong ways or not at all. That’s what I said, Dr Cath!
In a few of the exercises, we were forced to deal with childhood issues because dealing with cellular memory is a key factor in the coursework. Dr Cathy warned that these kinds of problems, once released – especially under duress – are traumatic and cannot be stitched back together in a healthy way. Not in a few days. And definitely not in a group setting. All accurate.
The ‘cellular-memory’ portions of the programme were the most destructive to me. In a nutshell, they were emotionally abusive. Or more so than a lot of the other stuff. Each of us would have to sit in the dimly lit hall, again in the wee hours of the morning. An assistant would join us, always dressed in white. They were made to sit and stare at us in silence while we were forced to pretend they were a parent (or both parents, in turns). We had to share all our thoughts about our childhood experiences and upbringing with them. And be honest with them about the destructive role they played in shaping us. If we weren’t saying stuff that Royee found satisfactory, he would shout at us again. When I was done, I thought only one thing: this robot in front of me has listened to all my childhood trauma, but I am the one who actually heard it. Heard it. I was not ready to hear it. What was I going to do with those memories?
There are many horrific tales out there that far surpass my own experience of that place. A lot of people on forums have shared how they were made to take off their clothes. In fact, on the night of the 2014 radio show, followers started pitching up to the studio in the middle of the night, all of them women in their pyjamas, to support and praise Royee. The host said they were taking their clothes off there as well – in submission. I’m not sure if he was joking or not.
No one took clothes off during my five days. But the ‘self-exploration’ did leave one feeling naked. And while I am on the subject of nudity, let me point out that many of the themes in Royee’s talks were sexual. Sex, infidelity, the way a woman’s body (specifically) works, all these things featured. There was a thirteen-year-old girl who was told that if she admitted she was ‘wet’, she could go up to the stage and Royee would give her a rose. She did. He dismissed the sexual and frankly rapey nature of this with some philosophical gibberish and then complimented her with a full-body hug.
Then, there’s the ‘cocktail party’ where you are reborn after screaming bloody murder and swearing and shouting loud, ‘honest’ expressions at one another for like two hours to the point of feeling ill. Vomit bags are made available, as are tissues and the like. You can’t leave the room. Ever. When you are in there, you are in there. When you are done with the shouting part, it’s time for ‘rebirth’ to the sound of gentle music. The screaming evolves into a sedate saturnalia. Participants are urged to engage in ‘cradling’. Everyone admires everyone, everyone is beaming, and some people rock each other back and forth like actual babies.
We were told that everyone who went through this process, including all the other graduates and the drone-like assistants, were now our family. They loved us unconditionally. And there was no way to doubt that, because in the course of those five days, all our dark revelations and vulnerabilities were revealed to them and there they were, cradling us still.
And then, when people were high and hypnotised, everyone participated in the ‘gift of giving’. Euphoria is generous. Many cheques with many zeroes were written that night, as donations to the centre. Drugged with persuasion, many participants signed up for the next two courses – Joyspring and The Mile.
This drug of persuasion has many dealers. During my time there I came into contact with a whole bunch of people from all over the world. Some were evangelists and others were proper recruiters. Those who completed The Mile (the last phase) were marked by their white linen clothing. They accepted the training centre’s methodology as a way of life and left their home countries to reside in South Africa and live the rest of their lives on the Insight Training Centre property. Why?
When I went to Turning Point, the immune system of my mind was fractured. My culture had no bandage for me. Instead I found refuge in a cult. But cults are the memes of the mental immune system, and memes are viral. When your defences are down, you get infected.
A mind that compromises its mental health in the name of culture is a welcome mat for a pathologically terrible idea.
My anti-establishment hero, or, Grandad, what are you doing?
A lot of things happened in 2004.
At the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia 251 people were trampled to death and 244 injured in a stampede.
Kanye West released his debut album, The College Dropout. He did not disrupt Taylor Swift on the Grammy stage. ‘I’mma let you finish’ did not exist yet. He was still of sound mind.
The New Yorker published a story with shocking pictures revealing the torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, proving that American soldiers had brutalised Iraqis.
Maria Sharapova defeated Serena Williams at Wimbledon – the last time that would ever happen. It was also the only time Sharapova won the ladies’ final at the lawn tennis club. We have since learnt that she is the most average player ever and confirmed what we always knew: Serena is the greatest of everything ever.
Roger Federer took his second Wimbledon title. And has since claimed a few more, breaking many records along the way.
Thabo Mbeki was re-elected president of South Africa with an increased majority.
While all this was happening, my grandfather asked that I submit a piece of writing to him (creative or other) on a weekly basis so he could crit it and give me feedback.
It all started when I got bronchitis that same year. I was on antibiotics the size of horse suppositories and a range of cough syrups. Delirious from fever and drifting in and out of sleep, I heard the bubbles in the Coke Zero on my pedestal start to speak to me. Not in a direct ‘Hey Haji, save us, we’re trapped in this can’ kind of way, but in an indirect narrative kind of way. I started to imagine all sorts of things. At one stage I was in a bubble, floating around in the molasses liquid, trapped but happy. The noise of the story in my head made me jolt out of bed and head for the computer on my desk. Everything I imagined landed u
p on that page.
For some reason, I printed it out and handed it to my grandfather. He loved it. He told me I was talented and that he wanted me to submit writing to him once a week. Obviously my writing skills faded with the medicated high. The chunk of drivel I submitted next was about culture and reinventing the wheel. He hated it and asked me why I didn’t try hard enough. I wanted to tell him it was because the cough syrup was finished and the wheel wasn’t at my bedside. When I think about it now, that little tale about a fizzy drink is probably the most embarrassing thing I have ever written.
He was an honest guy, my grandfather. A bit left-field with his thoughts, but always honest. His support of my creativity started when I was really young. I spent a lot of time with him at our old house in Laudium. Before I realised I liked writing, I sketched. All the time. He supplied pencils and paper, and I replicated Secret Seven book covers.
SABC News was always on in the background and compliments for the Indian news presenters spilt out of him. They were all Hindu and he never failed to voice his disappointment and, well, disgust for the Muslim community, who he said never did anything with their lives. ‘Baby-making machines,’ he called them. ‘Will never amount to anything,’ he said. He admired women journalists and was frustrated that none of those he saw were Muslim. Subconsciously, I think this played a massive role in my becoming a journalist.
He was a writer too. He wrote poems. Lots and lots of poems. When he wasn’t reading them, he was writing them. They were really short, but he took ages to type them because he wasn’t used to a computer. He punched each letter in with two fingers and sometimes got the upper- and lower-case letters wrong, resulting in an e.e cummings aesthetic. I assisted with formatting when asked.
Sorry, Not Sorry Page 15