Prime Time Replay:


Former Heaven's Gate member Molly Dwyer
on Her Experiences in the Cult



MsgId: *live_science(2)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:04:18 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

Good morning and welcome to Live Science. I'm your host, Omni Editor at Large, Keith Harary. My special guest tonight is Molly Dwyer, who is currently a Ph.D. student in Consciousness Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Molly joined Heaven's Gate in 1975 -- which at the time was called Human Individual Metamorphosis. She left in January of 1979 and returned to the world "as she then knew it". We'll be identifying ourselves by our initials -- KH for Keith Harary and MD for Molly Dwyer. Welcome to Omni Molly.
MsgId: *live_science(3)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:06:24 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

MD: Hello. It's nice to be here and it is really interesting to have the opportunity to talk about my experiences. It's been a pretty shocking period in my life since all of this became high profile and the members of Heaven's Gate killed themselves, or as they put it, "left their vehicles". It's caused me to do a lot of thinking about the nature of reality and what I believe.
MsgId: *live_science(4)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:07:53 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

KH: Let me mention, by the way, that we'll be opening this discussion to questions from our audience after the first half hour. So, Molly, to cover the basics -- how did you first get involved in the group that later became Heaven's Gate?
MsgId: *live_science(5)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:10:29 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

MD: It's hard to know exactly where to start, but I think my inner life is directed by dreams a great deal. In the period just before I met The Two -- which is what I call Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles -- and what we all called them, I was having a lot of very anomalous experiences in my life. I mean extraordinary, synchronistic events and I was dreaming about UFOs and contact with aliens.

I hadn't been seeking this information consciously. It just came up in my inner dream world. I was at a point in my life where following this inner trail of clues was extremely enticing. I felt I needed to do it. I felt compelled. It led me, actually, to leave my home in a kind of vagabond way -- this was the '70's -- before I ever met The Two.

Ultimately, what happened was that by following these kinds of inner promptings and sense of synchronicity, I came across one of the posters that were in the Santa Cruz area where I was staying at the time. I'd already left my belongings and friends behind in a kind of unprecedented way and wasn't sure why, but I felt I needed to do it. The sign said "UFOs -- Why They Are Here, Who They Have Come For . . ." It said if you had any curiousity about it, you might want to attend the meeting.

I thought I had seen a UFO about a month before, at a distance, up in the mountains. It was at a distance, but it was a compelling site. I had a lot ofkind of psychic processes going on at the time about UFOs and why suddenly they were in my life. So I went to the meeting. Essentially, they talked about the fact that they believed they were in contact with UFOs from another level altogether. Not the same level as humans. They called it the Level Above Human. It was an evolutionary level.

They said that this was a particular time period that the Earth was moving through, like a Spring, when phenomenal growth was possible for all consciousness, and that some people on this planet were preparing themselves to advance to another level of evolution. Essentially, to graduate out of the human condition. They said this was a particular cyclic phenomenon on the planet that had to do with the relationship between the Earth and all the other bodies in the Universe that kind of pulsed from the center. That there was nothing eclipsing that energy right now.

MsgId: *live_science(10)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:22:58 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

KH: Was there any hint, at the time, in the discussion about any suicidal tendencies? Was this a part of their belief system?
MsgId: *live_science(11)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:24:47 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

MD: On the contrary. That is part of what is so distressing to me about what has happened. Their focus at the time was on transforming the human body, taking it with you, which I know sounds equally wild, but it put a whole different emphasis on one's relationship to the body than what their ultimate emphasis became.
MsgId: *live_science(12)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:26:05 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

KH: How did you get deeply involved in the group after attending the meeting? What did you feel you were becoming involved in at the time?
MsgId: *live_science(13)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:28:19 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

MD: They talked about this information speaking to you, or resonating with you and to ask yourself if this was something you felt you were supposed to do. I was quite fascinated with what they had said. A lot of it made a lot of sense. They believed in concepts like reincarnation, that this was a long process that we humans were involved in of evolving consciously into more powerful and benevolent beings who were not limited to this planet but could move about the Universe in some way.

I went back to where I was living at the time, and that night I asked for a dream to give me some guidance about how I should respond to this information. I had a dream that 22 years later is still one of the most significant dreams of my life. I can tell it the way you would tell a memory that you lived in your waking life. The dream seemed to present me with a choice between an incredible struggle to move through what appeared to be solid stone and emerge a being of light on the other side, or the other image was myself as a very old woman, confronting the destruction of the planet in a huge earthquake. It ended with a scene -- a movie marquis -- that I identified as being on Market Street in San Francisco. The name of the movie showing was "Life or Death?" So I felt that some force inside of my own psyche was telling me to pay attention to what these people were saying and go with them. So I did.

MsgId: *live_science(16)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:33:37 PDT 1997
From: OMNI_Productions At: 38.254.181.13

The chat room is now open for audience questions. Remember, if you want to participate, you'll need to step back out of the room for a moment and reenter in order to get the dialogue box. If you want to choose a name to go by, enter through this URL: http://www.omnimag.com/iwc.html . Choose "*live_science" when you get to the chat room list. Have fun!
MsgId: *live_science(17)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:33:43 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

KH: What was it like to be in the group at that time?
MsgId: *live_science(18)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:37:29 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

MD: At that point, we were moving from campground to campground so it was very simple lifestyle. I felt immediately separated from the life I had been living. I changed my name. I used Jane a lot. For a while, I called myself Jane Dohe. I literally lost all my id -- my wallet -- the night I met them. It felt almost immediately as though I had one foot outside the normal world. It did not feel threatening. I certainly didn't feel coerced to stay. The Two, as we called them, were like teachers. They talked to us in the evenings about what they though was happening. What they thought was going on. They were eclectic. They believed in many things I thought were true. But there was nothing that I identified as pressure. They were good people.

We were holding meetings, so one of the things I did was to travel with a partner -- we always worked in partners -- and we put up posters for the next meeting. We had very little money or resources, so we asked people to help us. If we ran out of gas, we asked for help getting gas. If we were hungry, we asked for food. If our car broke down, we asked for help getting our car fixed. My understanding of this process was that I was getting the lessons that I needed in order to evolve and the people I was contacting were actually getting something they needed from me, including the opportunity to encounter this information if they sought it. We never forced who we were on anybody. We answered questions but we didn't proselytize.

MsgId: *live_science(20)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:42:34 PDT 1997
From: guest At: 207.147.100.141

Your whole narrative sounds like reason divorced from reality. How could you put faith in something for which there was no evidence whatever? Of course, as I write that, I ask, What real evidence is there for Christianity? Millions believe, on the basis of what?
MsgId: *live_science(21)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:42:51 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

MD: Our goal was to separate ourselves from the human condition in every way possible, and that stayed the same.

You asked about reason and reality. In a way you are right. The issue of how much to believe one's inner promptings is not a simple question to answer. Christianity is based on the same process, a process we call faith. We've been arguing for centuries about how to decide what constitutes "proof". For me, what's real has become fundamentally a personal question that only I can answer. I am an avid reader of new scientific material, like the information that came out in the New York Times on Friday about what the nature of the Universe is. I don't think any of us know for sure.

MsgId: *live_science(23)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:48:49 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

KH: It does sound, Molly, as though you were very deliberately and consciously altering your perception of reality in your everyday life. Do you feel that you were completely in control of that process, or do you sometimes wonder if some of it may have been somehow imposed upon you by Applewhite and Nettles?
MsgId: *live_science(24)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:51:23 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

MD: That's a good question. I don't believe that either Applewhite or Nettles had the capacity by themselves to "impose reality" on any of us. But I do believe, as a group, we created a collective truth that influenced each of us individually. The curious thing about this is that I think we do this everyday as human beings. All of us who think we are living in a "neutral reality" are also collectively creating a perception. So, no, I don't think I was totally in control. That was one of my lessons.
MsgId: *live_science(25)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:52:43 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

KH: There were some specific methods used within this group to help you change your sense of self, weren't there? For example, what do you think was the impact of changing your name? How often did you change it?
MsgId: *live_science(27)
Date: Thu Apr 24 21:00:51 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

MD: I changed my name a lot. There were no rules about how often you changed your name. You are right that it was a very interesting experience to change your name so much that name starts to be a meaningless way to identify oneself. I found myself looking for some deeper sense of identity than my name. I started to think of myself not just as someone alive in this body -- and I think this is related to why these people could decide to kill themselves -- I saw myself as someone who had lived many times, in many bodies, having many growth experiences. That changed my fundamental relationship to life and death. It was all part of a bigger process.
MsgId: *live_science(26)
Date: Thu Apr 24 20:55:20 PDT 1997
From: guest At: 207.147.100.141

You say that your goal was to separate yourself "from the human condition in every way possible." My goal is to totally encompass MY human condition as much as possible, to absorb it, to deal with it, to learn from it, to grow from it. If I were to try to eliminate what is for me "the human condition," I feel I would be less of a being, not more. Thus, I feel the human condition itself is the gateway to a higher consciousness, a higher realization. This is the exact opposite of what you seem to be saying.

How can you justify a personal approach that, in effect, denies the being that God created? Where could you hope this to lead, other than into alienated, disassociated realms of imagination and unreality, WHICH, by the way, is precisely what all those people seem to have stepped off into.

MsgId: *live_science(30)
Date: Thu Apr 24 21:05:31 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

MD: In response to the question about embracing the human condition, at this point in my life I really agree with what you are saying. I still hold to the idea that we evolving but I have felt an increasing need to be more present in my physical body and to embrace the Earth and all consciousness represented here, including humanity. For me it is almost a paradox between the truth that you are saying and some element of the truth in what I am saying that I still hold as an aspect of it.
MsgId: *live_science(31)
Date: Thu Apr 24 21:07:35 PDT 1997
From: guest At: 207.147.100.141

What I am saying is, this whole process sounds like the ultimate form of denial. Members deny EVERYTHING, and end up being totally detached from reality.
MsgId: *live_science(32)
Date: Thu Apr 24 21:07:51 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

MD: It is important to me to say that I don't hold a doctrine of truth right now. I don't claim to have some answer to what all of this is about. I am aware that understanding the human imagination, the capacity of the human mind to create and/or perceive reality, is a huge part of what I am grappling with right now.

I don't want to get into trying to defend Heaven's Gate. I'm not there. I left because I felt the same inner guidance that brought me into it bringing me back out, as if I needed to learn something from it but certainly not to end my life. I think what happened is that when The Woman died of cancer, the vision that I had responded to was fundamentally distorted. I think that Marshall Applewhite panicked or became afraid because it was so obvious at that point that something was different than he had believed it to be. Something was wrong with his picture.

MsgId: *live_science(34)
Date: Thu Apr 24 21:12:46 PDT 1997
From: guest At: 207.147.100.141

The fact that you are still here suggests that you were not totally taken in by this. And your answers are certainly reassuring. I should also add that I think the article and analysis in Omni was fascinating. By studying phenomena such as this, we can actually better understand our own minds and the dynamics of our lives.
MsgId: *live_science(35)
Date: Thu Apr 24 21:13:10 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

KH: It sounds like you feel as though you got something positive out of the experience. But I must say that knowing when to leave is an art. What do you think about what finally occurred? For example, castration, suicide, etc. I assume you find that disturbing. How does it reconcile with your own earlier experience?
MsgId: *live_science(36)
Date: Thu Apr 24 21:16:34 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

MD: First, I do think knowing when to leave is very much "an art," not a science. I don't credit myself with some kind of rational recognition that it was time to leave. I do credit myself with some kind of commitment to my own inner process. I'm still struggling to understand exactly what that was all about for me, both as a value and as a disruption. Because it did disrupt my life from this point of view. What became of the people who either stayed or joined after Bonnie Nettles died that led to things like castration, I believe is the result of what I've started calling "a wounded imagination".

I've been studying with a cosmologist named Brian Swimme, who wrote "The Universe Is A Green Dragon," and "The Universe Story". I might not have those book titles completely right. This idea of a wounding to the imagination really comes from him. It has to do with when we fixate on a vision that is incomplete or broken in a way that reflects our own pain, our own woundedness. If you are hurt and you are trying to compensate for it, you begin to create a world that supports your behavior without ever understanding and acknowledging the pain.

Experiences seem very powerful, they seem as though they are coming from a Higher Source, and they are really distorted by our own psyche and the pain we denying at a conscious level. I think when people start destroying their own bodies, that it is evidence of this kind of profound wound in the psyche. It's inorganic, going against life. It is impossible for me to believe that the way to higher life is by destroying life. I think that Marshall Applewhite was a kind of cascade effect.

I mean, I think that what happened to Marshall Applewhite was a cascade effect. By that I mean was that something that appeared to be small in the beginning got distorted and that distortion magnified itself as time went on until it became very destructive. But it happened in such a slow moving, sort of natural way that it was difficult for anyone to recognize inside the belief structure. For example, I think that his internal structure about how to let go of sexual desire might have been the real issue. By descrating his body, he was doing something like what we do when we take prozac instead of dealing with the deeper psychological issues at hand. We are trying to make the symptoms go away instead of getting to the root issue.

The tragedy is that there were so many things about him that were valuable, that for those people who cared for him it became impossible to separate out those places where his thinking was distorted. I think that the people who killed themselves with him genuinely cared for him and that's what is tragic. When we care we often give up ourselves so easily. We all do that in our own relationships. To me these people are mirrors. Their death is more dramatic, but it is reflective of a potential that is in all of us to lose ourselves completely in the surrender to the belief that someone else is either all right or all wrong. It is the way we make things black and wide that are much more complex.

MsgId: *live_science(41)
Date: Thu Apr 24 21:37:01 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

KH: Thank you, Molly, for joining us here on Omni tonight. We greatly appreciate your valuable insights. We look forward to reading your own descriptions of your experiences later this month in our Live Science section.
MsgId: *live_science(42)
Date: Thu Apr 24 21:38:18 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

MD: Thank you for inviting me. It's fascinating to communicate in this medium. It seems appropriate, given the fact that so much of what happened with Heaven's Gate was witnessed on-line.
MsgId: *live_science(43)
Date: Thu Apr 24 21:39:25 PDT 1997
From: Keith_Harary_and_Molly_Dwyer At: 152.163.205.139

KH: Thank you also to our able staff at Omni, and especially to our on-line audience for your wonderful questions. Good night for Live Science.


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