Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2805253 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
(From Chapter 2, Inside Look at a Moonie Training Session):

Never have I felt so loved and loving -- in a trans-personal or all-personal sense -- as in a Moonie training session. These words, these descriptions, cannot get the flavor of it right, the sense not only of unity, but of being taken out of the mundane world of ordinary life, into a higher, deeper, more real world, that cannot help but elicit from us a gigantic Yes! -- as if in our heart of hearts we know that this new world is our birthright. A world that existed perhaps before the Fall of Man.

It is Sunday morning. Some idiot walks cheerfully into the Chicken Palace, creaking the wooden floorboards, playing a guitar, and singing, When the Red Red Robin Comes Hop Hop Hopping Along.... He passes down one alley and up another between the rows of sleeping bags. You bestir yourself and glance around, looking for something to throw at this singing idiot, this rude interrupter of your delicious slumber -- but -- wait a minute. You are suddenly awake, and, come to think of it, you feel refreshed, and -- you catch yourself just in time from starting to sing along, to join in with this infantile ditty. Next, you think, he will sing, You Are My Sunshine. He does.

You get out of your sleeping bag and stumble over to the door of the Chicken Palace, vaguely thinking about finding a place to urinate. As you walk out into the bright and oddly happy sunlight -- who is standing there to meet you with a joyfully insipid smile on her face but your spiritual parent! Ahhhhh -- nuts. You mumble something about having to take a leak and try to wave her away but she takes you by the hand and walks you up the hill to the outhouse, and stands outside (standing outside listening to you, you think) and then when you come out she takes you by the hand again and leads you to the shower stalls, and you think, Oh Christ, it's happening again.

Later I find, through turning the tables on this pretty girl and pumping her for information, that she has been strung out from Minneapolis to Timbuktu, addicted to heroin, raped by Arabs in the Sahara desert, meditated in the Himalayas, had been on LSD, peyote, hashish and methedrine; she had bounced and been bounced all over the world, and she has landed in a Moonie training camp being nice to me.

Customer Reviews

Ex-Cultist Opens Window to Moonie-Land
Thomas W. Case dropped his book on my desk at Data Recognition Corporation and I cheerfuly paid the entry fee into the Moonie World. I have known Mr. Case personally for several years, and was curious as to what I might find in his writings. I can tell you from personal observation that the book did not dissapoint; The Thomas Case I know and the Thomas Case of the book are clearly the same character!

Having said that, knowing that in my case my curiosity was piqued by the fact that I knew him, I did not then know what to expect from the book. What I found was a window into Moonie-Land, both the good and the bad. And there was good that brought Case into the fold. The spirit of comraderie, the idealism, the desire to change the world was a strong incentive of the cult. Unfortunately, the over riding desire to build the "material foundation" which included a rather lavish lifestyle for the leaders at the expense of bleary eyed, exhausted kids selling flowers in a Michigan winter played a stark and disturbing counterpoint to the idealism and bliss. Thomas Case saw this, and yet he also felt the strong "family" bond with other individuals at the grass roots level. The exploitition of the slave labor by the ruling class caused Case to wish to leave while the "family" and comraderie caused him to want to stay or come back. This was his dilemna for many years. He has woven the narrative very skillfully, and from the points of view of both himself as individual and as representative of his generation...as he said in his writings, "I lived in the Haight before it was the Haight."

Thomas Case experienced every echelon of the Moonies, from the lowest levels all the way up to their attempts to recruit or groom him for the upper echelons. He tells the story skillfully and sustains the reader's interest throughout the entire narrative. The only critique would be, while dwelling upon and giving good account of the Moonie experience, the remainder of the volume is rather slim. He wishes to round out his spiritual journey and it's ultimate destination...Catholicism...but does not provide the same level of detail as he does for his Moonie encounters. However this does not in any way distract from his compelling narrative regarding the Moonies.

For a window into Moonie-Land and, in a way, into a bygone era, "Moonie Buddhist Catholic."