"Personally, I had two to three years of counseling after being in the cult for only a year, and my situation was pretty tame," Ruth said. "At the time of involvement, I was still living in my apartment. I still had my job, and I was still going to school.

"There are a lot more extreme cases of what can happen to someone in a cult ... disappearing for 10 years, going on the road, begging ... but still, I too, had been subjected to deceptive recruiting," he said.

Ruth said his involvement in the destructive organization began in May of 1986, when he was approached as a graduate student by a trusted faculty member who was involved with the group.

"In hindsight I didn't do enough checking," Ruth said. "I was trusting because I trusted the person who told me about it.

"At the time I couldn't find anyone saying anything really bad about the group," he said. "The fact that it was a destructive group using unethical, coercive persuasion to achieve their goals didn't cross my mind. I thought if there was really something wrong with this group, someone would blow the whistle on it."

The group sponsored a contact party in a university room that could be rented out for functions, Ruth said.

Soon after this, he said he attended his first of three major training sessions in what he thought was supposed to be a self-help organization.

"I had been in grad school for six years, and it was time to take stock of where I was and where I wanted to go in both my personal and professional life," Ruth said. "I was not looking for answers. I was looking for questions to ask myself to determine what I thought was important in life.

"The first of the large group awareness training sessions was me and 200 of my closest friends that I just met together, for five days, in a room," Ruth said. "The first trainings were held on a Western state's state fairgrounds in the education hall.

"But this was not at all about education," he said. "This was about mental conditioning right up the alley with Pavlov and his dogs. I was being trained how I should respond to certain situations and in retrospect believing some pretty crazy stuff.

"The second night of the training I drove home, sat down on the edge of my bed, looked at a small stack of pennies sitting on my desk and seriously tried to get that stack of pennies to jump two inches to the right," Ruth said.

"Six years of grad school in experimental physics, which looks at how nature comes and doesn't try to manipulate things, and in two days they were able to flush all that," Ruth said. "In just two days I was seriously entertaining the idea of telekinesis - just jumping sideways.

"You would have to say I was being sucked in," he said. "By Saturday, the fourth day, I was in. I thought this was great stuff."

Ruth said he took the second training level two weeks later. This was followed up by an intense three-month program where group members' main objective was getting new recruits to go through the training.

"There were days in the third level of programming when I would wake up in the morning and just lay in bed and not move," Ruth said. "I was like 'Oh God I'm failing.'

"There was a lot of pressure involved to meet your recruitment goals with an escalating commitment, because without a challenge you were told you couldn't grow," he said. "Instead of doing this recruiting to make our lives better, we were out there trying to sell the group and improve it.

"All that the organization is concerned about is asses in the seats," Ruth said. "You do the training. You go through it and don't make a stink about it. They keep the money they got from you, and they win.

"Looking back on it, I now realize they destabilized me," Ruth said. "They created this atmosphere totally isolated from the outside world, cut off from family, friends, the TV, the radio and separated from my reference base on how to make decisions in life.

"Totally disconnected and forced into this experience, I didn't know which way was up or what was right and wrong," he said. "We were kept so off balance that we never had a chance to ask questions."

After a year with this destructive organization, Ruth said his parents heard about his involvement, felt he was in jeopardy and gave him the opportunity to get out.

"My parents arranged for me to meet with some individuals who knew about the organization, thought reform and the course of persuasion I had been subjected to," Ruth said.

"Over the next few days we spoke and I came to realize the process I had been subjected to. From that information I made the decision, myself, that I no longer wanted to associate with the organization.

"I needed to get on with my life and get counseling," Ruth said. "Mentally I went through a blender twice in a year because the key element of any destructive organization (or cult) is that they use deceptive recruitment and indoctrination processes."

Aside from $2,000, Ruth said his involvement with this destructive group cost him his time.

"I was a highly motivated unpaid volunteer working for this for-profit organization," he said. "Let's face it, I was trusting. I didn't think they would use psychological manipulation just to get money."