We were raised square and Catholic, but for some reason my parents had this book buried in a drawer. IIRC, the printing on the cover was an obnoxious pink and black with some vague washed out photograph in the background beneath the text. Not totally sure about that. It was definitely from the early to mid-70s, however.
I read it and got rid of it long before the advent of the Internet and the ability to learn easily what the history of this group was. Today, of course, I would jump on Wikipedia and see if there was any info. IIRC, it was not any group that is still in existence, and I don’t think it was that major. It wasn’t Est or Adi Da or or TM anything currently in my memory banks.
This wasn’t some evil or extreme cult. It was based on living totally in the moment. I remember one chapter gave the example of how someone could not be living in the moment during sex but during orgasm one would be forced to be so. I remember one chapter going over the group’s hierarchy, with the people at the top having attained liberation or something close too it.
That’s about all I remember. They were big enough to put out this fairly thick book, about the size of a short to medium-sized novel. I bet someone on the Dope can figure it out!
Moses David of The Children of God ? He was an strange duck.
Dunno about evil — he certainly seemed rather obsessed, like most cult leaders, with sex and girl members of the Family members were encouraged to form loving relationships to induce conversion, which might last a whole night — but the evilest thing I can personally recall was having a leaflet shoved in my hands with a lobster-pot helmet on the front, proclaiming the need for a new Cromwell, Oliver, not Thomas.
As an absolute monarchist with a particular veneration for King Charles I, my reaction was bleak indeed.