If you take a look at the latest crap posted on the Academy for Psychic Studies' web site, you might notice something. Apart from the dearth of classes offered and the usual collection of useless garbage, it's the forced smiles and happy expressions on the withered countenances of the remaining staff members.
On the surface, they look like a happy bunch. They would have to. If they didn't, Angela Silva will throw another of her inconsolable tantrums while Robin Dumolin begins to grease up a baseball bat for a little internal spiritual healing.
So if the remaining few are so happy on the outside, what is happening on the inside?
Here's something you need to consider before you hook up with this psychotic crew: how many of them are really living the kind of life they say you would have when you are also ensnared in their web?
Well, look at one of the staff members posing so happily on the web site. You know who that is - the one who looks like Yoda.
This person used to have a fairly normal life. Good work, good relationships and was otherwise getting by in life. As we all do, this person wound up hitting a couple of speed bumps in life. No worries. Since there are things we all face in life, that isn't unexpected. It's a sad thing, though, to see what really happened - it isn't all the Academy for Psychic Studies wants you to believe.
Making a great start as an independent person with some business experience, she fell into a bad crowd. That crowd was lurking behind the gate at the Academy for Psychic Studies.
Once drawn in after an easy, breezy meditation class, a warm and nourishing healing class and class after other class and even more classes she reached the pinnacle of the Academy for Psychic Studies - ministerial ordination.
So you would think such a monumental achievement would bless this person with all the universal knowledge to make her happy, healthy, wealthy and whole, right?
Yeah. We all believed in the Easter Bunny too.
Look at her current life: living alone in a ghetto apartment with other followers and scrutinized daily for any sign she may be slipping away into a life free from the Academy. Though of retirement age, retirement is only a dream. Her money is spent on more classes at the Academy for Psychic Studies. Spare time? Well, that is spent at the Academy for Psychic Studies as well. How about relationships with family, friends or just plain folks? There aren't any.
Well, isn't the Academy teachings of prosperity and fulfillment designed to aid those who can have it? Sure, and she is a great example of what happens when you can. As a chief spokeswoman for reaching health and wealth through giving away 10% to 30% of your weekly earnings as well as giving away the first two weeks of your hard-earned wages every year AND 10% to 30% of your entire asset base (including your clothes, car, home if you own one, retirement savings and even your credit lines) every year, you have to ask how many riches and how much health she has achieved.
Well, the answer is brief: not a damn thing.
She has no home, a crap car, old clothes purchased from the Salvation Army, no retirement investments, few belongings and is alone save the five other benighted followers of the Academy for Psychic Studies. As for health, a condition requiring hip replacement and other serious maladies have plagued her for a while now.
Whatever she did have is long gone. Much of it spent to support the Witches of Ellsworth Street and the psychotic founder of the Academy for Psychic Studies.
But that is only one story, you say! Well how about a few more:
There is a large fellow who is a Navy vet who spends time fooling around with networks, breaking them as often as repairing them and dabbles with essential oils for who-knows-what. He had been a talented glass artist and is basically an OK person when not engaged in the psychotic delusions concocted by the Academy for Psychic Studies.
However, those delusions as well as his oils are all he has.
Yep. No wife, no home, an old van to drive and not much else. He does have a room at psychotic HQ and fills his spare time teaching classes on psychosis for the Academy, so I guess he's doing quite well.
As for the walking corpulent turd, one cheeseburger away from a heart attack, a career as a chef, musical talent, a great relationship with a beautiful woman and some prospect of a good life all flew out the window when he joined up. So did a much lighter body.
Today's turd gripes about paying child support while getting in the face of those who aren't paying what the Witches of Ellsworth Street believe they are owed, keeping a watchful eye on the inmates of the residential confinement facility the Academy operates, struggles from day to day to keep afloat while battling health issues. As he has a child about to enter adulthood and make that leap toward a bright, promising future, you might believe the child support payments would be turned into assistance for college fees and living expenses, right?
Sure.
If history is any guide, that money will go to the fees and expenses imposed by the Witches of Ellsworth Street for their own living assistance - like their overused American Express card.
But one couple remaining at the Academy does have a comfortable home, a retirement, nice car and is by all appearances has a normal life.
Being of retirement age, Social Security and a pension does help somewhat and having purchased a home decades ago, long before the Academy reared up and consumed them helps.
However, they do operate a day care center in their home for extra income. So, that kind of throws the retirement thing out the window, I guess. I would imagine without the hundreds of dollars spent on the Academy every month, the cost of gas they burn up motoring off to wherever they Academy tells them to go, eating at greasy restaurants nightly as they drive to the next Academy-required destination means they have to bring in the extra from somewhere.
As for the one person remaining, how life has changed for the better because of the Academy for Psychic Studies is immeasurable. That means there's no goddamned way to explain it to anyone as there just isn't a way for anyone to see a change in prosperity at all - unless you want to measure spiritual awareness by way of how much of the Academy for Psychic Studies' garbage she can disgorge in your general direction.
None can truthfully say their beliefs have improved their lives in any meaningful way. Their minds have turned into Cream of Wheat, their life security has not improved in any tangible manner and whatever life they were meant to live has been usurped and corrupted by a psychotic and his witches. No amount of their proselytization, demonstration or just plain chest-thumping has made their beliefs understandable to those who would be receptive or those would find them attractive. Their daily struggle to survive in the face of the Academy's adversity has so overtaken them, their message of faith, prosperity and abundance sounds nothing more than that strange buzzing in your ear that happens sometimes.
When you have believers who can neither clearly express their beliefs, nor can they practice or manifest their beliefs, you have to ask: are those beliefs untrue or are the believers untrue? Either way, whether you hear them, see them, or try to practice them, the believers are as untrue as the beliefs.
When you closely look at the Witches of Ellsworth Street, their reversal of fortune over the last few years is all you need to know about the effectiveness of their practice. With dwindling income, evaporating interest in the Academy, an unstoppable loss of followers, their own prosperity has gone from perverse to worse.
I mean, look at the key metrics over the years:
From the mid 90's to the present, the Academy for Psychic Studies has seen an ever more rapid turnover of their elite minister staff and serious students. While the first wave of Academy pioneers remained for well over a decade, starting in the 90's the churn rate accelerated faster and faster as the Psychotic Founder and the Witches of Ellsworth Street became more and more aggressive with their followers.
At any one time, the faces you would see at the Academy would change. Some were new. Others were familiar. Some you had known were no longer there, never spoken of. Never acknowledged except for the times when they were blamed for whatever misfortunes had occurred, any bad feelings that were present or opportunities in the future no longer available.
The churn at the Academy for Psychic Studies has been high throughout its history. Students would regularly stop appearing for their weekly mind-control indoctrination and ministers would suddenly vanish and their history with the Academy erased as if they never existed.
Some left on their own, for their own reasons. Many found themselves at the receiving end of Angela Silva's Nazi jackboot or Robin Dumolin's rhinestone-studded marital aid and were unceremoniously heaved out the iron gate for unknown, incomprehensible or imaginary crimes. Whatever the reason, the churn of ministers and students was high indeed.
Since the founding of the Spiritual Rights Foundation, over a decade of incomprehensible rambling and psychotic tantrums of the founder, and the insatiable greed and unbridled despotism of the Witches of Ellsworth Street, the ranks of the devoted began to thin.
From a high of nearly 20 devoted, enthusiastic ministers and many more young and enthusiastic students in the mid-90's, the Academy for Psychic Studies student population and loyal ministers slid further and further to the floor. Today, there are no students and only 6 aged and otherwise physically un-fit ministerial staff remain - too beaten and worn to make an escape.
As for the significance of this decline, except for the obvious, there is a fairly significant point to be made: there has to be at least 12 people who have entered the Academy for Psychic Studies as a "serious" Clairvoyant Training Program student, proceeded to "graduate" as a staff member or have nearly done so for every ONE person remaining.
Think about it: conservatively that is 72 staff members or advanced students GONE, QUIT, VAMOOSED, FUCKED OFF against the 6 staff members who remain. Even two of the four co-founders of the Academy have been ejected from its warm and nourishing climate into the street, rarely spoken of unless Bill Duby or the Witches needed a someone to blame.
Neither young, enthusiastic and somewhat naive students nor the grizzled, old ministers were spared the indignity of expulsion and the torture of exclusion. While the Witches demanded their followers treat them with deference, no such compassion or etiquette was afforded a follower - and no one could avoid offending the Witches. If you breathed their air, walked their ground, viewed their landscape or heard their wailing, you had all the opportunity you needed to drive Angela Silva into a rage or bring an evil grin to Robin Dumolin as they plotted your punishment and utter humiliation.
In that atmosphere, it is not surprising that 12 gone for each person remaining is conservative indeed. I haven't even included those who reached the highest level of psychotic training at the Academy for Psychic Studies and pulled the EJECT handle when they realized they were going down in enemy territory.
Those 72+ are simultaneously the lucky ones and the least fortunate ones. Luckily they got out while they still have a chance at normality. Unfortunately, they did it after the damage was done.
There's still room for true believers at the Academy for Psychic Studies - lots of it. As there is no one left who can say they have accomplished all their own perverted and cracked beliefs lead them to believe, the opportunity for believers is ripe and if you are ripe as well, you can count on being picked clean.
