July 16, 1999
To my friends at the Aquarian Concepts Community,
The following pages are an open letter giving my reasons why I cannot move in to join your community.
I have thought long and hard about sending this letter and have decided to do so after my access to one of my closest friends was cut off, thus confirming to me how the ACC undermines and destroys any relationship which isn't to it's advantage. I also fear that you may have been given mistruths about me, and I want to provide an explanation to you all.
I received a personal transmission supposedly from Paladin through Gabriel.
I paid $1,000 cash for what was promised as the highest knowledge available on the planet. I was told that it was impossible for "Paladin" to ever say a falsehood. Well, Gabriel it seems (or should I say Tony Delevin) is doing a version of an old gypsy con game by claiming Paladin is from "Celestial Overcontrol". All it takes to succeed is to have blind faith by ignoring first-hand negative experiences. Well, it didn’t work with me.
Before committing myself to accepting Gabriel's spiritual authority, I decided to put him to the test. I decided to give a number of false "statements" before the ''transmission .'' I figured that it would be easy for a being of higher spiritual awareness to see through the deceptions. Every single falsehood was given spiritual significance by Gabriel. Because it was so easy to fool him, I must conclude that Paladin is either a fabrication of Gabriel or a very ignorant evil spirit. He is certainly no angelic or divine being.In this letter, you will find my concerns about:
1. My recent "transmission" which prove fraud by Gabriel:
o Debbie was told she would give birth to boy. Debbie is not even pregnant.
o The supposed "friend" Ethel Goodman living with us in London doesn’t exist.
o The story of Jonathan Shapiro dying in front of my eyes as a child of twelve was totally made up.
o Debbie and I had G-d forbid lost our first child, a boy, and I was told soul that this was the same soul in my son, Mendy. We, thank G-d have never lost a child.
o My grandparents died in Holocaust -- not true.
o The most obvious, but still not picked up on by the supposed "spirit of Truth," was that I was adopted and my mother wasn’t Jewish.
2. Spiritual elitism and my concern about the misuse of spiritual authority.
3. Break-ups in marriages and relationships of members.
4. Heavy emphasis on money, rather than love and truth. Pressure to turn over money and assets to be used by leadership while the rank and file live in places like a garage.
5. Control of people’s minds and bodies. Extreme phobias of leaving the group or questioning the leadership. Control of information -- letters, phone calls are monitored. Access to critical information (and former members) is forbidden or discouraged.
6. I found a web site dedicated to exposing Gabriel. It is on the Internet for all to see and read. It is at:
http://www.citilink.com/~mjfitz/aquarian.htmI am writing this letter in the hope that you will sit down and read what I have written and reflect about your involvement. I am sure many of you were very disappointed when I decided not to move in. Please understand that deciding to test Gabriel might seem extreme. But deciding about such a major commitment required me to do my best to put him to the test.
G-d is great and He wants everyone to be free to think for themselves, rather than be enslaved by a man who merely claims to be spiritually superior. It will take strength and courage to pack your bags and leave -- but if you are truly dedicated to following G-d, then you have no other option. I pray that you will talk with each other and stand up to the leadership hierarchy of the ACC and find your way back to your families and loved ones and to true spiritual communities.
I am your friend and will be happy to be there to encourage your new life. My phone number, address and email in England are on the last page. There is help for you if you want to leave and need a place to stay.May G-d bless you always.
Shmuley
*****
July 1999
To my friends at the Aquarian Concepts Community
As you know, over the last twelve months I have come to visit the community on at least eight occasions. I even brought my wife Debbie and three of our children to meet the community. I have come to respect and befriend many of you deeply. I therefore write this letter with a heavy heart, but with the solid conviction and responsibility to share with you my thoughts.
As you know, I am a Rabbi at Oxford University and director of the L’Chaim Society. I have tried hard to dedicate my life to G-d, truth, and healing the world. I do not hold myself out as a model of perfection, which I am not. But neither can I turn a blind eye to gross injustice and a racket of deception. I am writing this because I want to communicate to you what I have learned in the course of this ten month journey which culminated in my having recently received a personal "transmission". I have prayed and prayed about whether I should write this letter, but I felt you all deserved to have an explanation for why Debbie and I will not join the group.
I predict that you will be told many false things about me and the reasons I cannot join the community: that I am Caligastia; that I am swayed by the fame of being seen in the last few months by millions of people while promoting my book, Kosher Sex; that I am not willing to give everything up for G-d. Other nonsensical things.
I am not an "enemy". I am a friend to all of you. I hope and pray that you will still think of me as your friend.
To be sure, I have seen some beautiful and admirable things in the community. I have come to love and respect the sense of closeness and camaraderie, as well as the sincere desire to do what you believe to be G-d's highest will. Still, this could never excuse the simple fact that
I have concrete proof that all of you are being misled. I believe that your idealism and spiritual hunger is being tragically manipulated and exploited.
First, there is the issue of the systematic destruction of families at the ACC. I have witnessed husbands and wives who have been systematically forced to separate, their children dispersed around the community to be raised by people other than their parents. In fact, every single family and married couple that has arrived at the ACC has been separated, with the notable exception of Gabriel and Niann. I guess since they make the rules, they don’t see a need to apply the same rules to themselves. Gabriel and Niann have truly beautiful children, and those children are given the unique privilege of living with and being raised by their parents. Why is this basic right and need being denied to all the other children?[/b]
I have also seen the pain that this forced separation has caused.
I remember speaking to Anyan -- a man of great compassion and humility -- when I first visited the community, and how he cried to me that giving up Shantalee as his wife and breaking up his family was never his idea. Rather, he was told that he and she could not grow unless they separated. Many others have told me the same thing. They wanted to remain with their spouse, but Gabriel told them that they couldn’t grow if they did. That it wasn’t G-d’s will as revealed through Gabriel.
I have also seen how you have been indoctrinated to detach yourselves from members of your real families. I was utterly disgusted to hear that Lanesis was permitted to be with her dying mother for only 48 hours, but was then told that she must return to the community. And I doubt whether or not BenDameaan (Daniel) would ever have been allowed to visit his dying grandfather if I had not made efforts to encourage it to happen. The whole notion of family is one treated with other [utter] derision and contempt by Gabriel, because he finds it far easier to manipulate and control all of you when you are separated from your loved ones.
I have also become fairly sickened to find out how centrally important money is in the Aquarian Concepts Community. At first I was prepared to see the beauty of the community and even made several financial contributions to the community, most notably, to the needs of the children. I felt that the ACC was a charity and needed my support. But
I now see that its central purpose is to extort as much money as possible from unsuspecting souls. Forcing people with tremendous influence techniques to turn over money, property, clothing, jewelry and anything else of value is not spiritual. Blackmailing parents to turn over money or else suffer the consequences is not "love of G-d", it is simply love of money. I have never been asked anywhere in the world to pay for a weekly prayer service. But in the ACC, everything has a price, and I have been asked to pay for everything, including a hefty $1,000 in cash for a transmission -- with the promise that I would have "the" definitive experience with the spirit of truth.
Furthermore, the repulsive spiritual elitism, in which one person is declared to be higher and loftier than the next, is a subversion of everything which the Bible stands for. Genesis clearly teaches that G-d created all of mankind in His own image, and we in this country believe all people to be created equal, based on that Biblical teaching. Yet, the ACC operates on false presumptions of spiritual supremacy which suits the leadership’s obsession with controlling people’s lives. For instance, I know that Kasarian and Mycenay wished to be a couple, but were prevented from doing so because of Mycenay’s spiritual superiority. I have always found Kasarian to be an incredibly special young man who has so impressed me. I wonder to myself why he would accept such nonsense that suggests that he is on a lower spiritual order than anyone else. Enslavement is not natural and should always be resisted.
Likewise, everyone‘s life is controlled to the most minute detail, allowing for virtually no personal volition. All major decisions have to be made by the "elders" or at least cleared by them. All information is controlled: people are not allowed to discuss their thoughts, feelings and experiences openly with each other for fear of being told on, punished or expelled.Of course, control is always justified in spiritual terms, like the danger inherent in leaving the five-mile radius.
The five-mile radius thing is a good example of the phobias implanted hypnotically to keep everyone dependent. The level of fear and paranoia that so inhibits the community is indicative of a community that desperately has so much to hide. What comes immediately to mind is how many times Maritaseen has attempted to prevent me from even taking photographs of my friends at the community. But the purpose, of course, is control -- to make willing slaves. But mind control doesn’t erase people’s true selves nor their conscience. It merely suppresses them. Over time, people’s true selves eventually see through the hypocrisies - the prophecies which don’t come true - the promises which are broken. Spirit triumphs over mind control!
Then there is the issue of the emptiness of Gabriel’s teachings. Whereas I could usually discern a message in Niann’s weekly Sunday teaching -- Niann can be very eloquent -- Gabriel, supposedly the greatest teacher on the planet, is virtually incoherent. Invariably, his teachings consist of some obvious platitudes strung together with the mandatory story about himself thrown in for good effect (usually about how impoverished he and Niann were and how he had to build the community from scratch). But he does have significant theatrical ability. I will give him that which leads us to the next point.
Of course, all this would be justified if indeed Gabriel represented the will of G-d. I thought I could overlook everything I had written above if indeed I could be given a sign that Gabriel is everything he claims to be. Gabriel is fond of saying that either he is what he says he is or he is a madman, a point he made to all of America on
the Dateline tape, and a point made to me by Gabriel on several occasions. He claims to be not only the repersonalization of the greatest figures throughout history but also the mandate of the Bright and Morning Star (basically G-d’s personal representative on earth).
I think that there are two other possibilities that should be considered: that Gabriel is being controlled by a lying and malevolent spirit or that Gabriel is a con-man, using hypnosis and mind control to run a cult for his personal power, money and fame.I decided to reserve final judgment about all that I had seen until I could know definitively for myself. It was for this reason that I agreed to have a personal transmission, notwithstanding the exorbitant $1,000 cost. There was still a part of me that was hoping that indeed I was mistaken. Having discussed the entire situation with my wife, we decided that, as the transmission would no doubt advise that I was to pack up everything and come and join in the community in Sedona (which later turned out to be exactly what happened),
I had to test Gabriel’s authenticity by simply planting a number of false facts about myself, hoping that Gabriel would pick up on them. To be sure, I found this incredibly distasteful. But the salient fact about all of Gabriel’s transmissions is that they can never be refuted. He always delivers facts about previous lives that anyone can invent. It became important, therefore, to pin him down with events in this life that he could only know if indeed he was in contact with a true, celestial spirit. And Gabriel himself has taught that it is OK to use deception in order to advance G-d’s purpose and that one should always investigate and search out the truth.I have learned that the surest way to expose a phony psychic or medium is to present false facts, and see if they are identified as false (thereby proving the ability to discern truth) or accepted as true and used by the phony in the "reading". I thought this would be the only way to definitively prove things one way or another. I presented Gabriel with a letter which we both discussed with everyone present (Niann, Santeen, Jeru, BenDameaan, Rafeel, and Marayeh) just prior to the transmission. The letter contained four major fabrications about my life and upbringing, easily verifiable to be false. I further introduced a fifth fabrication, orally, just prior to the transmission. I am sorry to report that not once did "Paladin" pick up on these falsehoods, he went on and interpreted each of them. I even gave the absurd idea that I was adopted and was not born Jewish but was instead born to an Irish Catholic mother. Even this Paladin commented on.
When I told him that Debbie is five months pregnant, he said that we would be having a boy and even said that he was about to divulge the origin of the soul.
Debbie is not pregnant.
Paladin told me that a woman named Ethel Goodman, whom I had said is currently living with us in London, was Debbie’s sister in a previous life, which is why she and I do not get along. Yet, no such woman exists. I invented her out of thin air.
I told Gabriel that my friend Jonathan Shapiro died in front of my eyes as a child of twelve. Gabriel proceeded to tell me that his soul had already repersonalized, and he was about to reveal his identity. Yet, no such person ever existed.
And when I finally told Paladin that Debbie and I had lost our first child, a boy, and wanted to know where his soul was today, the response I got was that our little boy Mendy has the same soul. Yet, thank G-d, we have never lost a child and have only ever had one boy. G-d has been immensely kind to us and our children are healthy, for which I offer Him my eternal praise, may His name be blessed.
Finally, I told Paladin that I am haunted by a vision of my grandfather in the Holocaust. He proceeded to comment on my grandfather, who of course, did not die in the Holocaust. One of my grandfathers died in Israel, the other in Miami Beach just before my Bar Mitzvah.
These are just some of the major things which Gabriel did not pick up on, and I urge you to read the full transmission. If you would like to see a copy of the transmission, please ask your elders to view it. Or contact me and I am happy to provide the full text, but please note that it has been somewhat edited by the community from the original experience which was recorded. In fact, I dare Gabriel to play a recording of the transmission for all of you to hear.
The only conclusion to draw is that Gabriel is nothing but a fraud, a common shyster, eager to enslave people to his meglo-maniacal will and take their money from them. I am sorry to be so forward, but I have a loathing for people who have the audacity to enslave others and rob them of their families and freedom. My parents divorced when I was eight years old and it caused me immeasurable pain and grief. Who is this evil man who uproots whole families at will? I have read Gabriel’s autobiography and I can believe that there might actually have been a time, long ago, when Tony Delevin (Gabrlel’s real name or is it Delavin -- he has used both spellings) was sincere about doing G-d’s work.
Unfortunately, whatever goodness has now apparently been consumed by ego. Like so many others who have made the simple mistake of not being able to distinguish between G-d and themselves, Gabriel has now set himself up as a mini-god. Sure, he justifies controlling all of your lives, having you bow down to him literally, uprooting you from your families, taking your assets into a communal pool (who has the actual access to the bank accounts, do you know?), and having grown men live together in a rotting garage while he lives in an impressive estate, by saying that this is all from Paladin and is the will of G-d. But as I have shown you above, I now know Paladin to be nothing but Gabriel’s fabrication created to make you obey him and Niann.I want you all to know that I do not judge you for having been taken in by Gabriel. In these crazy and confusing times, we all live with so much pain that it is seductive to think we are the "special ones" -- that we do not have to face difficult personal and family relationships -- and struggle for clarity for G-d’s Will for us personally. There are so many false Messiahs eager for your devotion.
But real solutions require great effort and responsibility whereas shortcuts and extreme positions are quick and easy at first -- but are empty and sometimes even potentially dangerous. Just look at the 39 deaths of members in Heaven’s Gate, or the followers of David Koresh, or the sarin gassing in Japan by followers of Shoko Asahara (supposedly Jesus and Buddha rolled up into one).I have been amazingly impressed with all of you and your true love for G-d and humanity. Everyone, from Kamon to Jeru, has made immense personal sacrifices in pursuing what they were lead to believe is the will of G-d. You are all incredibly special people.
But I must advise you to leave the ACC as soon as possible. Return either to your families, or, if that is not possible, find an honest job in a community that has a sincere religious dimension. If you are Jewish, reattach yourself to the Jewish religion. If you were raised Christian, then there are so many beautiful Christian communities where the teachings of Jesus have not been co-opted by godless people like Gabriel for their own personal uses.
If you decide to linger in the ACC, you will be living a lie. In the Bible, there is no greater sin than idolatry. The reason is that whereas other sins involve a spiritual defect or flaw, idolatry involves having one’s whole life devoted to a false cause. Whereas other sins are about making detours on the highway of life, idolatry is about being on the wrong highway altogether. Though you have been innocently misled, now that you know about my experience, you will be responsible from this day forward.
For many of you, overcoming your programmed fears will be a challenge that you will be able to overcome. As a member, you have been conditioned to believe that all kinds of bad things will befall you if you leave the community. But recognize these for what they are: irrational fears with no basis in reality. The only thing that will happen if you leave is that you will be free. Many have left before you and they are much, much happier as a result, I am sure. They are now taking responsibility for their own lives and living in G-d’s highest will, as free individuals. They bow to no man. So, you must put your trust in G-d and let Him deliver you.My sincere hope is that all of you have the fortitude and courage to get out, notwithstanding how attached you may have become with the ACC. The G-dly path is usually never easy. Sometimes it requires a complete realignment from what we have grown accustomed to. But I know that all of you can do it. Now is the time, therefore, to leave the ACC and reattach yourself to the true and living G-d in all those places where He can be found.
May I also tell you that you are not alone. There are many people who have left the community, and I have begun to search them out. I have discovered a web site (
http://www.citilink.com/~mjfitz/aquarian.htm) which has been immensely useful to me in understanding the true nature of the ACC put up by Mark Fitzpatrick dedicated to exposing the ACC out of his sincere desire to reunite with his father, step mother and step brothers who he loves so much. Your loved ones would probably love for you to come to them and start anew.
I want you to know that I will be here for you. If any of you wish to contact me, you can reach me in England at 011-44-181-830-5533 or by email on shmuley@lchaim.org. I will handle all of your inquiries confidentially. I will even try and raise funds for those of you who wish to come and meet with me to discuss your future and how you can move forward after your involvement with the ACC.With all my love,
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
L'Chaim Society
Britannia Business Centre - Ground floor
Cricklewood Lane
London NW2 1EZ
England