On October 14, 2026 , Jaya Mangalan Gibson, a former Falun Gong practitioner and former global marketing director of The Epoch Times (a Falun Gong-affiliated newspaper) , published an article on her personal blog. Drawing on her fourteen years of experience within the organization, she profoundly exposes how cults use cult rhetoric such as "cultivation," "karma," and "saving sentient beings" to whitewash unpaid labor, excessive exploitation, and physical and mental exhaustion as so-called "perfection." The article points out that the organization continuously reinforces members' sense of guilt and social isolation by attributing management failures to members' "karma," stigmatizing family concerns as "demon interference," and extremely demonizing secular society, gradually eroding their ability to make independent judgments. The author also reflects on the impact of her childhood experience in a "fourth way" group, emphasizing that to break free from thought control and rebuild personal autonomy, one must re-examine reality and restore independent thinking and a sense of responsibility.

 

▲Former Falun Gong practitioner and former global marketing director of The Epoch Times

Jaya Mangaran Gibson

At three in the morning, in a makeshift media production studio, the monitors hummed, emitting a distinctive, sharp, high-frequency buzzing sound. After listening for a while, it felt as if even one's inner monologue would be replaced by this sound . At that point, I hadn't slept for almost forty-eight hours, sustained only by adrenaline, cheap instant coffee, and a chilling sense of certainty: if I missed the deadline for delivering the print copy , the entire history of the universe seemed to come to a standstill. Advertising revenue had plummeted, half of Sydney's distribution routes were paralyzed, and my body was silently and methodically collapsing .

When I reported this chaotic work situation to the local manager, I thought we could discuss the work process or request more manpower. But in reality , this idea was too naive . The response I received was a calm and expressionless smile that only a true "enlightened one" would show.

They told me there was nothing wrong with the workflow. It was perfectly acceptable to let people work themselves to the bone without pay, even to the point of heart disease. The problem lay in my mindset. My thoughts weren't aligned with the requirements; my frustration was merely the surface of my own karmic impurities , while my physical exhaustion was a moral failure. If I had truly freed myself from attachment to comfort and personal gain, then working eighty hours a week, living in fear of unpaid hardship, should be as easy as floating on a lotus leaf. In the cosmic ledger of saving all beings, questioning the work schedule is almost tantamount to apostasy .

This conversation essentially transplanted the entire concept of " spiritual bypassing " verbatim into a management meeting. ( Editor's note: "Spiritual bypassing" was coined by American psychologist John Welwood in 1984, referring to using spiritual practices to avoid addressing deep-seated psychological trauma . ) For someone using meditation to escape divorce issues, this is indeed a rather apt diagnosis. However, within highly controlled groups, "spiritual bypassing" is not an individual coping strategy, but rather a brainwashing weapon used to maintain the organization's survival.

Cults require a massive amount of free labor to operate. To keep people working until they are physically and mentally exhausted without instilling any desire to resist , the organization must hijack everyday language and distort reality. Words such as " karma ," " purity ," " compassion , " and " sacred mission " become blunt, heavy-handed tools of attack. The organization systematically uses these terms to whitewash institutional exploitation, evade external oversight, and even brazenly package its own severe mismanagement as so-called "divine will."

Coercive control doesn't rely on locked doors or physical intimidation. Its most destructive effect occurs on the linguistic and psychological levels: unpaid physical labor is portrayed as "cultivation to a higher level ," exhaustion as " spiritual perseverance , " and legitimate dissent as " moral depravity . " I was immersed in the esoteric practices of the Fourth Way from a young age, and later spent fourteen years in Falun Gong. I witnessed firsthand how many intelligent and capable adults, simply because their suffering was given cosmic significance, abandoned all capacity for critical judgment . ( Editor's note: The Fourth Way is an esoteric spiritual system founded by G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Uspensky. ) When exploitation is successfully packaged as " perfection ," suffering ceases to be a warning sign and becomes the very purpose of " cultivation . "

I. Redefining exploitation as " cultivation "

Within highly controlled organizations, wage labor in the conventional sense simply does not exist. Once daily work is dragged into the " sacred realm , " seemingly ordinary concepts of secular society — fair pay, reasonable scheduling, and weekend rest — vanish into thin air. In their place lies a sophisticated " smokescreen " : the complete repackaging of labor as a path to personal salvation.

In Falun Gong , this tactic revolves entirely around the concept of "cultivation. " This term originates from China's centuries-old tradition of asceticism, sounding noble, serene, and somewhat ancient. Falun Gong tells you that cultivation means eliminating impure human attachments , enduring moral trials, and continuously elevating consciousness until reaching " perfection" in cultivation . However, at the true core of this organization's operation, " cultivation " becomes a perpetually boundless work order.

When an organization decides to launch a global media business, operate an international television network , and host large-scale stage performances around the world , the most difficult expense on the budget is always human resources . If journalists, graphic designers, typists, and advertising sales representatives are all required to be paid according to market standards, the global campaign will go bankrupt by the second quarter.

By simply redefining the heavy daily work as " cultivating higher levels ," the leadership can solve this budget problem overnight.

This system operates through three distinct yet equally insidious levers .

(a) Eliminating personal boundaries

If laying out newspaper pages or making sales calls to local businesses is no longer a job, but a private ladder to paradise, then drawing personal boundaries will be seen as a moral failing. In a typical office, demanding overtime pay or a reduction in unreasonable working hours is basic self-protection. But in this movement, demanding compensation implies a continued attachment to material wealth; demanding eight hours of sleep every night shows that you value your own physical comfort more than the eternal fate of humanity. Pointing out that the scheduling violates the most basic physiological limits of the human body only makes you appear self-aggrandizing and attention-seeking. Faced with an impossible task, your only permitted reaction is to nod , suppress your resentment, and then dedicate yourself even more.

(ii) Repackaging job burnout as "purification"

When the human body is subjected to relentless physical and mental stress, its functions will eventually break down. In a rational world, palpitations, chronic migraines, and sudden dizziness are clear signals that one should go home and rest . But in highly controlled groups, these signs of physical collapse are elevated to a higher cosmic level. Pain is no longer seen as the result of working thirteen-hour shifts in a dilapidated swivel chair, but rather as the cleansing of negative "karma" from your cells. Mental exhaustion is no longer clinical burnout, but is described as an illusion created by demonic interference, designed to prevent you from achieving mental victory. Collapsing at the keyboard is no longer an organizational scandal, but rather evidence that the cosmic furnace is purifying. Anyone who complains about this is considered to lack proper taste.

(iii) The Trap of Cumulative Sacrifice

The longer this kind of life continues, the harder it becomes to stop and re-examine the gains and losses. Every relationship you give up, every career opportunity you miss, and every sleepless night spent in front of a glowing monitor is an irrecoverable " psychological expense . " If you admit that the newspaper is nothing more than a poorly managed ideological megaphone, supported by a group of exhausted volunteers and kept running by paranoid thinking, then you have to face an unbearable fact: you have handed over the most precious years of your adult life to a bureaucratic machine, which treats your physical and mental exhaustion as a cheap operating cost.

Rather than facing this truth, it's better to convince yourself that the greater the suffering endured, the more it proves its " cosmic value . "

I didn't fall into this trap out of naivety. My mindset had already been shaped before I even joined Falun Gong. Growing up in the Fourth Way community at Sherborne House, my standards for what " normal life should be like " were completely distorted from a young age. From childhood , I was instilled with the idea that pain, conflict, and harsh inner struggles were the only tools to awaken the soul.

Decades later , I entered Falun Gong 's media system. The harsh working hours and endless self-criticism didn't alarm me. Instead, they felt familiar, like putting on an old, rough coat again. This organization simply stepped into the mental trenches that had long been formed within me . It demanded my complete surrender, used esoteric terminology to mask the failures of corporate management, and even offered its approval when I had exhausted myself.

this kind of brainwashing , employers don't need to use physical coercion at all . Employees will actively supervise themselves and fall into a distorted competition: to see who sacrifices the most, sleeps the least, and can let their personal lives be completely ruined with the calmest and most uncomplaining smile .

II. The Weaponization of Karma and Guilt

Every business eventually faces a quarter when it discovers its accounts don't match up. In a typical company, a sudden drop in revenue can trigger unsettling meetings, meticulous audits, or even the quiet dismissal of an incompetent marketing executive.

But inside the highly controlled propaganda machine, reality is quite different.

When our print advertising revenues collapsed, or when thousands of freshly printed newspapers piled up in boxes to mold due to administrative chaos in the voluntary distribution network, no one audited the books. Instead of reassessing market viability and acknowledging that printing hundreds of thousands of unsubscribed newspapers might be a bizarre business model, the higher-ups crammed financial losses into a universal currency exchange machine.

Their response was " impeccably solemn " : the problem lay in "karma."

Specifically, it's the " collective karma " of all of us . The reason advertising sales representatives can't sign contracts with local car dealerships is because their spiritual state isn't " pure . " Unanswered calls are because salespeople harbor impure thoughts about their rent, allowing interference from the darker realms to poison the minds of potential clients. If a delivery truck breaks down on the highway, the reason isn't an overdue oil change, but rather the driver's resentment towards a coordinator from last Tuesday.

This is the psychological engine that allows highly controlled groups to persist so tenaciously: a complete and continuous reversal of accountability. Actual operational failures caused by upper management are transformed into " psychological sins " committed by ordinary members .

In traditional religious contexts, " karma " is a grand metaphysical system used to explain causal relationships across different life stages. However, within a modern, highly controlled organization that operates a global media machine, " karma " has become a brutal corporate management tool , like a cosmic credit line that only allows one-way flow.

If the project succeeds, the credit proves both the " superior wisdom " of the higher-ups and the miraculous intervention of the universe; if the project fails, the failure is used as evidence that you are still tainted.

The most ingenious aspect of this arrangement is that it establishes a self-monitoring cycle.

To survive in this machine, you must learn to suppress your critical abilities in advance. If, after working twenty hours a day for three consecutive days, you feel utterly exhausted, you can't simply say, "I'm tired; this schedule is simply not working." Saying that is tantamount to admitting your attachment to the physical body. Worse, it also implies that you don't believe in the universal mission of saving all beings.

So you immediately internalize the fatigue as a character flaw, blaming yourself for not being persistent enough. You sit cross-legged on the floor, trying to burn away that invisible debt through spiritual practice so that you can stop feeling drowsy.

Questioning actual operational strategies is utterly unthinkable. If you discover that an editorial policy is biased or that a publicity budget is flowing into opaque private accounts, pointing these issues out will not be seen as a well-intentioned whistleblower act, but will immediately be considered as a manifestation of demonic interference.

The organization will tell you that your doubts are not your own thoughts at all, but a kind of mental virus, that some external entity is spreading malice in your ear, trying to sabotage your salvation.

You are thus caught in an inescapable dilemma, much like "Catch-22" : if you agree with the higher-ups , you gain a sense of security, and despite being exhausted, you will be praised for your obedience . If you oppose the higher-ups , then your opposition itself will be taken as irrefutable " clinical evidence " that your mind has been contaminated by evil deeds.

The more outrageous the organization's management failures, the more effort you need to put into erasing the cognitive dissonance in your mind. You stop demanding improvement in management and start demanding more suffering from yourself. You double your working hours, cut your sleep to four hours, and then apologize to the universe for noticing that the ship was sinking.

The organization turns guilt into a circulating currency within its ranks, making each member their own full-time guardian. Leadership doesn't need to monitor your thoughts at all. At four in the morning, you're already sitting alone at your desk, crying over an empty coffee cup, begging for forgiveness, and you might even ask: Why can't this newspaper even afford the electricity bill?

Third, implementing social isolation in the name of " purity " .

To keep a team that is poorly paid , or even unpaid , and driven by the terrifying rhetoric of a cult working tirelessly, a thorny environmental problem must first be solved: how to deal with the external world.

If exhausted members take a break on Sunday afternoons, visit family and old friends , have a beer, or read books not authorized by the organization, then a sense of normal reality may return to their minds.

A rational mother might look at her emaciated son, who has lost twelve kilograms in order to make free calls to carpet cleaning companies to promote their services, and say to him, “Honey, you look terrible. These people are exploiting you.”

For highly controlled groups, this single sentence is enough to pose an existential threat.

To eliminate this threat, organizations don't need to build walls, confiscate passports, or deploy watchdogs. Physical barriers are crude, expensive, and would attract unnecessary attention from local councils and immigration authorities.

Instead, leadership creates a more sophisticated isolation zone in the minds of its members. They sanctify isolation, repackage social alienation as " spiritual purity , " and then disguise it as a " sacred requirement of cleanliness . "

In Falun Gong 's cosmic hierarchy, the secular world is no longer just an ordinary place where people work, pay taxes, and mow lawns , but is portrayed as a collapsing, morally bankrupt haven of filth. They teach you that modern society has fallen into irreversible moral decay, that ordinary people are indulging in base desires, living blindly in ignorance, and covered in " karma . "

Against this backdrop of apocalypticism, the organization portrays itself as the only " ark " capable of saving all beings . Within the organization lies a pure realm of " righteous Dharma , " while the outside is a sea of spiritual pollution.

Once this premise is accepted, systematically cutting off various connections in one's personal life no longer feels like an administrative purge, but rather seems natural.

IV. Ideological Separation: Delineating the Boundary Between "Ordinary People" and " Members "

begins with adjusting a subtle yet condescending thought : to see all acquaintances in a different light.

who do not join the organization are given a specific label: "ordinary person." This term may sound harmless on the surface, but within the organization's culture, it carries a cold, unspoken contempt.

members of the organization view " ordinary people , " they often do so with a mixture of condescending pity and morbid rejection. On one hand, the organization tells you that you must exhaust yourself to save them; if you fail to hand them a leaflet or persuade them to watch the stage performance promoted by the organization, they will be eliminated in the impending cosmic purge. On the other hand, the organization considers their thoughts to be toxic sources of pollution.

They were talking about the worries of ordinary people: weekend plans, office politics, mortgages, movies, and heartbreak in relationships. In the eyes of the organization, these weren't harmless pastimes, but rather low-level spatial traps. If you listen to your sister complain about her husband, or your roommate talk about work, you're allowing their heavy karmic impurities to seep into your pure energy field.

Gradually, a silent sense of aversion begins to take root. You sit at the family dinner table, feeling like an outcast. You smile politely, but inwardly you repel their jokes, their persistence, and their trivial, worldly ambitions.

You tell yourself that you have surpassed them; you convince yourself that the growing sense of disgust proves that your spiritual level is rising, rather than acknowledging the truth: you have been artificially transformed into someone who cannot connect with normal human life.

Fifth, distorting the love and care of relatives and friends into "demonic interference".

The most insidious trick of psychological isolation lies in how it deals with the care of those who genuinely love you and try to intervene to persuade you to change your life.

In the real world, when parents, partners, or longtime friends express concern about your lifestyle, they are showing the most natural human concern. They see you sleeping only four hours a night, handing over your savings, and sacrificing your health for a newspaper that no one buys, so they try to pull you back from the brink.

But within the organization, a simple doctrinal shift reverses this care : family members who oppose your commitment to cultivation are no longer considered relatives, but rather become objects of manipulation, controlled by negative cosmic forces, and used as tools to test your resolve. If your mother cries and begs you to leave the Sydney warehouse and come home for Christmas, then she is no longer simply weeping for her children. According to the organization, her tears will be reclassified as " demonic interference . "

The logic is that the beings in the dark space know that you are about to attain a higher level of ascension, so they are stimulating your emotions, using your earthly mother as a convenient tool, and trying to drag you back into the mire.

This simple doctrinal operation simultaneously achieved several objectives:

First, it makes you immune to sympathy. The more genuinely heartbroken your family members appear, the more you believe that a cosmic enemy is doing everything in its power to destroy your resolve.

Secondly, cruelty is repackaged as a spiritual responsibility. Being cold, indifferent, or even completely unresponsive to family is no longer seen as rudeness, but rather as bravely defending the laws of the universe. You force yourself to become cold and hard, telling your family in a flat and detached tone that they cannot understand higher truths , and then turn away.

Third, they shift the blame to the victims. If the family becomes anxious and threatens legal action or contacts the media, the organization will pat you on the shoulder and say, "Look how much trouble your uncultivated worldly emotions have caused. It's your lack of steadfastness that has attracted evil."

Ultimately, you fall into complete psychological isolation, surrounded only by a group of people. They praise you, but in doing so, you sever your emotional connection with your loved ones.

VI. Enclosed "Man-Made Villages" and Mental Prisons

Once the external world has been thoroughly pathologicalized, the resulting void must be filled. At this point, an institutional mechanism that comprehensively controls the lives of its members will completely take over everything.

You move into a communal house, sharing a room with six other practitioners. You sleep on thin mattresses in a drafty room, share large bags of rice, and wake up before dawn to go to the city park for group activities. You work unpaid or below-minimum-wage jobs in the organization's printing plant, television studio, or sales office, working seventy, eighty , or even ninety hours a week.

When you're not busy making sales calls to advertisers or creating newspaper layout templates, you must attend group learning courses and repeatedly read the exact same statements until the leader's language structure permanently replaces your own way of expressing yourself.

You no longer watch movies, listen to mainstream music, or read outside news, except to search for stories that corroborate the organization's doomsday prophecies. Your entire social, professional, economic, and moral world shrinks until it can eventually be covered by the conference table in the media studio.

The ingenuity of this closed loop lies in its disguise as a form of liberation. You don't feel imprisoned; instead, you feel protected . You look at the chaotic, commercialized scene outside the city and secretly rejoice that you've been chosen to live in a pure place, untouched by the corruption of this morally corrupt era.

But what you've actually entered is an airtight " echo chamber . " Reality is carefully stifled and buried beneath mountains of metaphysical terminology .

When everyone around you nods solemnly, agreeing that UFOs are harvesting human organs, that natural disasters are punishments tailor-made for politicians who refuse to support a certain leaflet, or that lost advertising contracts are the result of a dark space war , you nod along. No one else in your life will frown and ask, "Listen to what you're saying?"

Once the quarantine is completely over, the organization won't even need to tell you what to think anymore. You've already voluntarily severed your ties with other humans, and you'll still desperately defend the cage that imprisoned you, because someone taught you to call it "heaven."

VII. Breaking Through the Delusion: Rebuilding Independent Thinking and Realistic Understanding

Waking up from a state of ideological confusion is not like a movie plot, accompanied by a dazzling epiphany. There is no gradually rising background music, nor a dramatic moment when the clouds suddenly disperse and common sense descends like white doves.

On the contrary, awakening begins with an unbearable, constant sense of friction.

For years, you've been relentlessly smoothing out the sharp edges of reality, just so they can fit into the organization's cosmic doctrine. When the printing press malfunctions, you blame your own thoughts; when the editor has a mental breakdown, you blame the other person's " karma " ; when an international dance tour devours your allowance to the point where you can't even afford the electricity bill, you close your eyes and meditate until the panic subsides.

To prevent the " myth " from shattering, you trained yourself to force yourself to maintain logical consistency in your mind . You constantly performed logical reversals in your head, seeking rational explanations for illogical things.

When the turning point arrived, there were no grand philosophical debates. It was simply that absurdity accumulated to a certain degree, eventually crushing the entire belief system.

For me, the crack in my belief did not come from a great intellectual debate, but from a simple yet infuriating discovery: the so-called "Emperor of the Universe" was naked, and his only insatiable desire was to obtain unpaid labor.

As I looked at the senior coordinator across the conference table, blaming an administrative disaster on evil spirits, I suddenly realized: this person was simply incompetent.

Once this thread is removed, the entire cosmic tapestry will unravel at an astonishing speed.

If an advertising contract is lost simply because of poor sales skills, then the time you spend confessing on your meditation mat is meaningless. If physical fatigue is merely the body's physiological response to the need for rest, then your chronic illness is not a form of purification, but rather the consequence of neglect. If an organization can lie on its balance sheet, it is equally capable of lying about cosmic matters.

providing unpaid propaganda for a cult for fourteen years was unpleasant. It felt like stepping off the edge of a tall building. For over a decade, the organization had been instilling in me the idea that beyond its boundaries lay spiritual destruction, a moral vacuum where a corrupted soul would gradually perish.

To leave, one must voluntarily step into that world described as nothingness and be mentally prepared to be completely erased.

However, when you actually reach the other side, what you find is not destruction, but the quiet, chaotic yet incredibly magnificent aspect of ordinary life.

Rebuilding oneself is not a neat, linear process. After more than a decade of being shaped by a highly controlled environment, regaining personal autonomy requires a slow and meticulous psychological reconstruction. You must rebuild your identity from the ground up, gradually dismantling the cult-like language structures implanted in your brain, and learning to stop asking the universe for permission for everything.

You must learn to stop feeling guilty when you're exhausted, stop fearing cosmic retribution when you make mistakes, and learn to face human vulnerability instead of immediately seeking some kind of placebo to cover up the problems.

"Spiritual escapism" promises that as long as you surrender your critical thinking at the door, you can take an elevator straight to heaven. It creates an intoxicating illusion that makes you believe you can transcend suffering simply by ignoring reality.

True autonomy, however, exists in the opposite direction. It lies in the soil beneath our feet, in this chaotic, unstructured world, and in doubt, responsibility, and independent thought.

Leaving this group was not the moment of falling from grace , but the moment I finally woke up and began to truly live.