Mind Control at the Academy for Psychic Studies

To those who never saw the bowels and inner sanctum of the Academy for Psychic Studies and the Spiritual Rights Foundation, the concept that mind control is practiced there just doesn't make sense.

After all, the Academy/SRF shows such a quiet and happy exterior.  The people there are oh-so-helpful, caring and generous individuals.

The classes there are so relaxing, positive and fun.

How could a group so happy and helpful corrupt your thinking, your being, your soul?

It revolves around the mean spirit behind the curtain.  The founder, Rev. William (Bill) Duby.

His own personal emptiness and deep hatred of himself radiated out to the people he knew he could bully.  He got away with it - for a while, anyway.  Bill died suddenly while plying his demented craft in front of a class of Clairvoyant Training Program students.  I know this.  I saw it.

Today, his two wives continue his perverse legacy continuing to open deep spiritual wounds only their organization can heal.  But that healing isn't easy, free or even cheap.  Hell, it doesn't even work.  You'll carry those wounds for a long time.  Even a lifetime.

SRF is very certainly a pay-to-play organization.  You pay, they play with you, your money, your family, your soul and everything valuable to you.

And pay you will.  Not a lot at once but more like a drop of blood at a time.

That long, slow drain of your self-worth takes a long time to get over.  My wife and I paid the price with not only our self-worth but our confidence to go on with our lives.

Many people who were with the Academy for Psychic Studies/Spiritual Rights Foundation thought about or attempted suicide.  One gentleman carried it out with a shotgun.

This emotional pain and struggle continued long after the Founder, Reverend William Duby, suddenly dropped dead right in front of his followers.  Amazingly, the disdain for an individual's efforts to be, you know, an individual, the endless and unrelenting pressure to follow the perverse and bizarre philosophies of the Spiritual Rights Foundation continued long after the founder's ashes were sprinkled in a farmyard for the animals to use as their toilet (hey, don't blame me - it was his sister wive's idea)

This amazing control over one's self-worth and value as an individual was perpetuated by the founder's sister wives on the followers and by the followers among each other.  But without the founder being alive to conduct mischief, the current leader's did it to line their pockets and the followers did it just for fun.

Here's an example of what the remaining faithful few conducted on one of their own - with the implicit endorsement of the current leaders:

For my wife, her struggle to remain an individual began soon after we were a committed couple (but not yet married).  She made the decision to go to college.

From the day she enrolled, the day she first set foot in class, the disparagement, the disdain and overall disapproval of her quest to achieve a great education in a well-regarded college began.  It was a daily barrage of insults and nasty comments.

Most said she was wasting her time at college.  Oddly, one man who held a Phd was most vocal with me about his opinions.  He called her college career a waste of time and that she would be better off spending more time at the Academy.

Despite that daily battle, Joy graduated from Berkeley City College Magna Cum Laude (with high honors).  We invited all the SRF members to her graduation.  None attended.  Some didn't want to be associated with the worldly pursuit of true self-improvement.  The rest were called in to attend a last-minute, emergency meeting called by the leaders at precisely the moment of her graduation.  The topic was a discussion of great importance like keeping animals away from the leader's flower garden.

Soon after graduation, my wife enrolled in Sonoma State University - a well-regarded college in Northern California and part of the California State University system.  Every day, it was a struggle to maintain her education as well as the demands of the Academy.

But did anyone at the Academy care?  No.  In fact, none would recognize her.  One man with a PhD railed against it.  The majority who barely got past the 10th grade booed and hissed.  The few who were college-educated wisely kept their mouths shut.

That and other issues combined for a devastating loss of confidence.  Despite her amazing academics, she had a hard time with living: thinking she was so behind in school, she would never graduate, finding loss and inadequacy in everything she did and all around her.  It was a difficult time.

Even so, in a short time, Joy graduated from Sonoma State Cum Laude (with honors).

A tremendous achievement!  Of all of us who are college educated, few graduate with honors.  Fewer still do it twice.

But that daily disdain of Joy's quest to bring herself up to become the full, enriched individual we all have the right to become plagued her daily for years.

Withdrawal from society, unnecessary involvement in petty issues between people, emotional turmoil over transitory, temporary issues lasted for some number of years after she pulled herself away from the cult.

Is there a happy ending?  Yes.

Since leaving, Joy has become far more social, founding a women's activity group that is thriving.  She also has people over almost weekly to play board games and socialize.  Her health, which deteriorated in the cult (gee, didn't everyone's health decline while at the Academy?) is on the way up.

And most of all, her emotional and psychological health is mending.  As many have experienced, Joy developed PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) as a result of the cult experience.  That, thankfully, has improved to the point where treatment is no longer an acute need.

I have noticed she is able to handle the potholes in the road of life with more confidence and objectivity.

Is life perfect for her now?  No.  Who's life is perfect anyway?

But life is a lot better without the Academy for Psychic Studies than it was with it.

Without that daily struggle, without that daily fight to overcome the "invalidation", the lack of support, the ever-present transparent sneer from your peers, and the leaders, she has found her way back to life without having to endure more emotional pain and inner struggle.

It's mind control.

It's the mind control that only a cult can create.  And only by freeing yourself from the influence of a cult, can you begin your own path to freedom.

Better yet, if you aren't there yet, don't do it.

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This article appears on Steve Sanchez's blog.  I think it is a great description of the practices used at the Academy for Psychic Studies.

Some of the ways Bill practiced mind control

I will give you some idea here of how Bill Duby used his mind control.

As an enlightened or ‘X-ray’ clairvoyant he claimed to be able to see all the foreign entities in a person’s space. Knowing this gave him free license to berate, insult, and abuse a person to no end and afterward say he was talking to, and cleaning out the foreign entities in that persons space for their own good. He claimed he was giving tough love for the sake of healing - like sand paper smoothes wood. He claimed this was his personal commission from God. Along with many other abuses, he claimed to be able to “see” who a person’s soul mate was. He even claimed to be able to channel Jesus Christ at times.

Bill Duby made himself the central hub of all relationships in his church. He had to have the primary loyalty of everyone. Couples were manipulated into crisis, and out of bonding with each other, so that he would be in the position of primary loyalty with each. If two people were to bond with each other that would be a force out of his control, and he didn’t want that. He opportunistically used problems in people’s lives - or more often, manufactured crisis - so that he could council, berate, heal, and finally save them. In this way “his superior psychic abilities” were demonstrated again and again. His member’s dire need for him was solidified over and over.

After years of establishing this kind of authority our lives when some of us began having kids he was able to influence the decisions we made with our kids. He defined - on his ‘enlightened’ terms - how all of us should be raising our kids. He worked hard at getting the primary loyalty of all the kids toward himself and his two wives. He did this by having the absolute loyalty and love of the mothers. He gave them as he did everyone ‘tough love’. For years he publicly shamed the mothers. On a weekly basis one or all were embroiled in crisis, berated on the hot seat, and then healed. The woman received the light from Bill, but not the men. Every time we were berated we worked ever harder to win back his approval.

The fathers or men in general were considered below the women. He often made a joke that ‘first come the children, then women, then dogs, then snakes, and last - men’. He controlled the relationships of the men by controlling the woman. He always said the men were beasts, and sneaky and that ‘if they breathe - don’t trust them’. This was accepted as profound streetwise wisdom. The men were kept in a tense state always yearning to be with their woman, if they were lucky enough to be with one. We were held at arm’s length because of our beastliness and unworthiness. Every single man that was in a relationship was banished to live alone in a mobile home for months or years at a time.

Bill set everyone up to be in competition with himself and at the same time to know that they would lose to him. He constantly claimed he could psychically and mentally run circles around anyone. He claimed that most people on the street were empty pods who, if he chose to, he could easily make act out his will. These notions devalued ‘the other’ and fed the sense of our elitist superiority. He would say that his Aura was so powerful that anyone who competes, or ‘F---’ with him would take on his ‘past-time’ aura.

In other words he was super powerful and if you competed with him you would suffer the ultimate humiliation of living the dregs of his personal past. Then he would give inviolable examples of how this was happening to certain disfavored members. He often pounded us with the idea that if Christ came into the room all the women would instantly fall in love with him and all the men would go into competition with him. Then, at the right moment, he would follow up by saying, with super intense emotion, that he was the closest thing to Christ we would ever see; that he carried the Christ consciousness within him.

This and other such manipulations caused his members to feel they had no rights in relation to him and his teaching. We gave up much of our normal instinct for self interest and self protection. In this way he compounded his control on level after level, because his subjects had no self esteem, no rights; we felt that everything bad that was happening to us was our fault, and especially because we had no idea that we felt this way.

We could justify everything because we were close to him.  We were the elite, part of the .01% of the enlightened population that could ‘have it’.

There was a pretense of normal relations on the social surface which Bill fostered for his members and especially for beginners. No-one knew how to look underneath even though it was right in front of our face. Our minds were blocked from it. This played right into his hands because he lived underneath; he had a field day there.

A great example of the intensity of his control is in the sexual arena. He kept the men and women at odds and distrustful of each other. Men were beasts, sneaky, selfish liars; and women were the source of evil, full of ‘female insanity’. He claimed that to satisfy a woman, or to sweep her off her feet you had to give her ‘the light’. But only he could do it.
The men were set up to try, and set up to fail.

He berated individuals, couples and groups for hours without a break, deeply insulting and demeaning them for problems that didn’t exist.  He called it “spiritual counseling”. Bill’s “spiritual counseling” only created problems. Crisis always arose and relationships always failed under his counsel.

There were men and women there who didn’t have sex for fifteen to twenty years. Eventually he called the men confirmed bachelors or eunuchs. This gives you some idea and feel for the cult.


As in all cults, Bill Duby controlled and manipulated with elements of the truth. Children were held as being the most important and special. Bill claimed that because he was enlightened the children loved being close to him. He said that he was like the children because he had never been shut down, and that they loved him because he spent the most time with them and had innocence like them.

Some of us adults were said to have innocence - this was said when one of us happened to be lucky enough to take our turn in the position of the “golden boy or girl” - but Bill always intimated that his innocence and enlightenment ran circles around the rest of us. The kids, including my daughter, spent a lot of time with Bill and his wives, especially at the cult farm.


In the inner circle was Bill his two wives, four children and the mother of two of the children named Rev. Debi. Everyone wished they were in the inner circle. The children felt very special to be there. It took no effort on their part, Bill chose them. If the children didn’t act in a way that pleased him or that he didn’t approve he claimed that their vibration slipping under the control of their parents, or dark forces, and that they were losing their place in the inner circle.

Bill, of course, controlled the children by the safety and prestige of being in the inner circle and conversely by the devastation of not being in it. Once, when my ex-wife and daughter lived on the main cult property where Bill was, Bill’s daughter came into their room and wanted to play with my daughter. My daughter said she would play later but wanted to have breakfast with her mom first. Bill’s daughter went back home, but then she and Bill showed up a few minutes later and Bill asked my daughter to come play.

Thinking it was okay my daughter said the same thing. Bill was incensed and said that my daughter had a cruel streak. He brought all involved upstairs and in front of the other members shamed my daughter by saying the anger and dark forces from her parents were shutting down her innocence and clairvoyant abilities. He said she was being cruel and that this was causing her vibration to sink. He said she was leaving the inner circle.  My daughter cried bitterly and fought for days to make up for it so she could get back into the inner circle. This, along with other manipulations, caused her to shun her parents especially me.

Bill Duby did a lot of this kind of public shaming to his members. There were a few kids of long time members who he couldn’t control, usually because one of the parents was not completely under his control. In the SRF cult there was a supposed air of normalcy, and for those things which were beyond normal there was total justification by enlightenment. Most of the women in the cult “confessed” to loving Bill and to being very attracted to him.

One woman named Carol did not feel this way because it was her innate belief that she shouldn’t be involved with her teacher and she didn’t find him attractive. Bill could not control her son even though his father was utterly dedicated. Carol was under the spell but remained on the outskirts and was eventually shunned for the above reasons.

Because he couldn’t control her son, Bill said her child was spiritually retarded. He was considered lesser and therefore semi-shunned by the other members and kids. Because the parents believed in Bill’s authority they believed what he said about Carol’s child. They worried terribly about him and tried to get him to be more accepted. Her child was treated this way for years, but once he left the cult and joined a regular school he thrived because of his natural intelligence and enthusiasm.

When Carol left, Bill told her she was an unfit mother and that he would have his whole congregation testify to that effect (at her divorce hearing). The debilitating fear Bill created left her under his spell for years after she left.


posted by Steve at 10:54 PM 0 comments