There is a tendency to think of all such communities as slightly odd, if not dangerously antisocial, to see their choice of environment as a flight from rather than a seeking out. And it is certainly true, many of the souls who choose to live out in the desert are damaged, even unbalanced.
However, we must guard against our assumptions. A close analysis of the Branch Davidian community in Waco in the period before the FBI and BATF entered the scene reveals it not as a tightly self-isolated group of fanatic believers, but as an independent community with regular interactions with the neighboring individuals and communities. Branch Davidians came and went, held jobs in the area, formed friendships with outsiders. With the raid and the long standoff that followed, a community with roots and branches in the outside world was abruptly truncated, stripped down to an edgy leader and his isolated followers.
The Branch Davidians might eventually have withdrawn from the world on their own decision, but as it was, before that time came they found themselves walled up away from it. They were kept from communication with anyone but the FBI, they were not allowed to come and go, they were forced into an irrevocable choice between staying and leaving, forever abandoning their home and family inside what was now a compound.
Self-chosen isolation may be a positive thing; being cut off from all contact with the outer world is not, and must in a "cult" situation be avoided at all costs,
From the notes of Professor Anne Waverly
In the days that followed, the sun grew marginally warmer, the nights fractionally shorter, and the community considerably more welcoming; slowly, Ana grew to have a deeper understanding of Change and how it functioned.
It did not take her long to verify that Change was indeed built around secret teachings, that initiates worked their way into the higher levels, moving by steps upward into greater knowledge and proximity to Steven. This was represented not only by the necklaces that certain initiates wore and the position each had in the multi-leveled meditation hall, but it extended to living quarters as well—the room Ana had been given was in a building populated almost entirely by newcomers. The only person in the building who had lived at Change for more than a few months was a young man with a vile temper, who had been demoted by Steven after getting angry at another member and hitting him. The young man stormed around furiously for a couple of weeks before he finally left, to the unvoiced relief of all.
Steven himself lived in the central building over the meditation hall, in the northern quadrant of the upper floor. The other upstairs rooms were all filled with the oldest, closest Change members. Most were men. The building to the northeast of the center was the communal dining hall with the kitchen and several offices, including Steven's, and upstairs the quarters for the youngest children. Walking around the circle counterclockwise, the next building housed older members on the ground floor and older kids above, then came a building filled with earnest but inexperienced members, and finally the recently completed building where Ana was housed.
It was a bit worrying: Ana had no intention of staying out her promised year, but in a hierarchical organization where secret doctrine is given out in slow degrees, it would not be easy to speed her trip to the inner circle. All she could do was keep her ears and eyes wide open, and hope for a chance to bypass the preliminaries.
It helped, being a teacher, particularly as she convinced the others that she was best placed with the older students where her background of history could be used and her less-complete but still broad familiarity with English literature might assist in preparing the students for the state's standardized tests. Even in an alternative community, test scores mattered.
Within a couple of weeks, Ana was well on her way to becoming an accepted member of the Change community. She taught her kids, she participated in group meditations, and she listened intently to Steven's nightly talks.
One morning when Ana went in for breakfast, small, blond Suellen was not at her usual place behind the serving tables. When she did not appear again for lunch, Ana asked casually if anyone had seen her, and received only tight lips in answer. At the very end of dinner the young woman walked in, making an entrance into the dining hall, her hair wet from the shower, her body moving as if it ached all over, a small blister on the inside of her left wrist and the light of a radiant vision in her face. Ana watched thoughtfully as Suellen made her way proudly through the room, nodding regally at the respectful greetings her passage earned. Steven came in a short time later, and over the next ten minutes, Ana noticed three high-ranking Change members approach him, exchange a few words, and then glance at the radiant Suellen with knowing smiles—expressions that were affectionate, experienced, and not the least bit lewd. Whatever test the woman had faced during the day, she had obviously passed it, and Ana would have sworn that it did not involve sleeping with the leader.
Ana added Suellen's religious glow and the smiles of the others to her growing store of Change evidence. She studied the novels in the library and the paintings on the walls, she asked questions of the older members (most of whom were younger in years than she) and listened for the hidden references and intonations behind their words. She looked at the architecture and the arrangement of the buildings, at the TRANSFORMATION mural over the kitchen and the shape of the meditation hall, at the intriguing, glittering gold sculpture that was suspended over the hall and the way Steven and the higher initiates gazed at it, and she began to have some interesting ideas.
From the first she had seized on Steven's continual references to heat and fire and the presence of the round suspended fireplace at the center of the meditation hall. Fire was not, she decided, merely one metaphor among many; as a symbol, it lay at the heart of the Change process.
That suspicion had led her to consider the phenomenon of fire worship, which was why she had talked about Agni at the crucial meeting in Steven's office, and not Shiva or Jesus or any of the other figures she found present in Steven's theological vocabulary. Steven and his three friends had spent time near Bombay, where they would easily have met Parsi thought and begun to develop a kind of neo-Zoroastrianism, fire-reverence with the Parsi tendency toward secrecy and appreciation for the metaphysics of change.
However, wouldn't she then see more tangible signs of Steven's preoccupation with fire, like a continuous flame in front of each building, or a ritual involving the meditation hall's fireplace? Still she remained convinced that fire entered the religious equation in some way.
And then one evening during Steven's talk he used a word that sent a shudder throught the ranks of the higher initiates, and it all fell into place.
The chant that night was "Great heat, great hope", which started out with four beats and ended up being little more than "heat" and "hope" with a brief pause between the words. That night Steven spoke not before the chant, but after. As usual, his subject was change, and specifically some problems the community had run into with a building inspector.
"I want you to regard the rules of the world," he said, "not as the work of an enemy out to thwart you, but as the vessel for our transformation, and from our personal and communal transformation to the transformation of the world. If the world brings pressure to bear, if it turns up the heat of tribulation, do not hate it, do not seek to escape it; welcome it as the means whereby change is effected. We are tried in the furnace of affliction, refined by the flames of daily torment. We do not turn from it—no, we enter into it freely, as the alembic of our own transformation, the power nexus of our change."