The College of Universal Medicine’s Living Sutras of the Hierarchy rort

The UniMed cult’s College of Universal Medicine operates with the alleged charitable purpose of ‘advancing education’. But where is the public benefit in curriculum courses peddling Serge Benhayon’s occult claptrap – supernatural conspiracy polemics and harmful pseudoscientific claims about health and medicine, including that mental illness is caused by spiritual possession? 

Sex and Serge Benhayon

Sex is energetic rape. (Benhayon, 2011, p.695)

The Benhayon family at work – UK event

Sexual exploitation is a hallmark of cults, and cult leader Serge Benhayon’s aberrant teachings and practices are integral to the profitability of Universal Medicine and its main recruitment arm, Esoteric Women’s Health Pty Ltd. Disturbing teachings on the disease causing ‘energy’ of normal sexuality, the karma of sexual violence and puritanical prescriptions for emotionless love making sit uneasily with in house assessments of ‘sexiness’. A culture of personal boundary transgressions, including inappropriate touching highlights the sexual confusion among devotees. The manipulation is essential to UniMed’s lucrative death drive; psychologically destabilizing followers, fracturing intimate relationships with non followers, and inducing dependency on dubious occult therapies

Esoteric Psychology & entity possession

The Psychological Well-Being Conference was just held on the Gold Coast, with a line up of insight deprived cult apologists flogging Universal Medicine cult leader Serge Benhayon’s damaged brainchild, Esoteric Psychology. Lending the thing undeserved legitimacy were registered psychologists and unabashed Serge worshippers, Marianna Masiorski and Caroline Raphael.

So while they were busy avoiding the subject of inappropriate touching of sexual abuse victims and Serge’s underaged houseguests, what psychological well-being palaver could punters expect? Emotions are the cause of all disease? Boys need the pack energy smacked out of them? Loving children emotionally has never worked? Or did Serge wheel out an old chestnut – entity possession? Or that the healing symbols have been blessed by ARCTURANS? Either way, there was bound to be some heinous balderdash the cult omitted from its publicity.

Guilt, death and the absence of grief

Heidi Yardley, ‘Cut’

Universal Medicine cult leader, Serge Benhayon, programs followers to believe disease is punishment for failing to adhere to the oppressive moral code he calls the Livingness. In the following extracts and quotes from Universal Medicine’s ‘truth’ blogs, his followers, including medical professionals, express guilt for minor infractions, and their beliefs that cancer is deserved and disease is a blessing. Responses from fellow cult members reveal Benhayon’s success in emotionally neutering his followers to the point where they believe death is nothing to mourn.

Cancer is clearing, death is a healing

Damien Hirst, ‘For the Love of God’

Universal Medicine deceptively markets its healing services as complementary medicine when they are in truth body negative and life denying practices aimed at hastening death. Serge Benhayon’s puritanical magical thinking keeps followers in a state of paranoia and dread, where they believe minor emotional infractions are the cause of their illnesses and misfortunes. Writings on Universal Medicine’s propaganda sites on followers’ experience of cancer and their attitudes to death reveal existential confusion. The conflict instilled by Benhayon’s teachings sees them veering between self flagellation and grandiosity, consoling themselves with the belief they are being cleansed in preparation for an elevated rebirth.

Serge Benhayon’s magical thinking – developing disease is a moral choice

V. R. Morrison

Universal Medicine’s specialists in pseudoscience take the meaningless premise that ‘everything is energy’ and extrapolate it into an Esoteric theory of disease causation where the human body reflects a person’s moral indiscretions, disease results from incorrect thoughts and behaviour, cancer is a blessing and the prevention of disease is secured by the ‘choice’ to join Serge Benhayon’s cult and pay big bucks to toe his puritanically perverse Livingness line.

Esoteric Healing® – health is out, death is in

Damien Hirst, ‘Anatomy of an Angel’

Serge Benhayon’s ultimate Esoteric goal is an unceremonious shuffling off of this mortal coil for a disembodied existence as a divine and ‘soul-full’ body of light. Benhayon, the health service provider, is actively expediting the demise of his followers with his perilous brand of healing, and before they ‘dump their prana’ via a lonely, emotionless death, he makes sure he gets a cut of their temporal cash and assets. The Universal Medicine cult’s pessimistic negation of human life encourages an acceptance of misery that makes death look comparatively appealing – by design. The following quotes from its leader’s writings show how he brands competing complementary medicine modalities as evil, and renders the relief of symptoms and maintenance of health redundant.

What to expect from this weekend’s Universal Medicine Couples Workshop

Heidi Yardley, Untitled

The Universal Medicine site is advertising this weekend’s couples workshop as ‘available to all’, probably because so few couples have survived cult leader Serge Benhayon’s relationship mangling teachings. A past attendee tells us what transpired at the workshop he attended and the conflict Serge’s sleazy presentation triggered between him and his partner. 

The Esoteric diet – more lethal than ever

Michael Zavros, ‘Phoebe is Dead’

As Universal Medicine cult leader Serge Benhayon continues to pound his Esoteric pulpit on the evil energy of perfectly nutritious foods, we should all be alarmed to hear he’s imposed further restrictions on the Esoteric diet – better described as self-loving starvation. Meanwhile the Huffington Post continues to pay cult apologist Sarah Cloutier to promote a dangerous eating disorder under the guise of ‘food writing’. And I’m officially a troll.

Update 2020: a more up to date post is Diet or eating disorder part 1

Esoteric Parenting Part 2 – self-loving parents and divided families

Louise Hearman, ‘Untitled 1091’

In the Universal Medicine cult children are regarded as superior beings until their intellectual capacity develops enough for them to question Serge Benhayon’s teachings. Like the rest of the cult followers, children are free to express themselves provided they do so without emotion, intellect, ideals, creativity, activity or criticism. Benhayon views familial karma as invariably bad, and he exploits painful pasts along with parental feelings of inadequacy to divide families and redirect followers’ loyalty from loved ones to the cult. Divisions are sealed when cult members adopt narcissistic self-love as their parenting ethos, ensuring children are emotionally starved. Finally, as evidenced from the behaviour of his own family, his version of parenting is not about nurturing and protecting but dominance and control.

Esoteric Parenting Part 1 – one long guilt trip

Louise Hearman, ‘Untitled 1234’

In the Universal Medicine cult, parents are portrayed as damaging influences in individuals’ lives, unless they comply with Serge Benhayon’s Esoteric ideas on raising children. Esoteric parenting is a confused affair of emotionless love, infantilized adults and hypermature children, and again, Serge’s decrees direct followers’ devotions away from loved ones to the parasitial cult. Too bad that children depend on their parents for the majority of their needs.

The Esoteric myth of the ‘loveless’ male

Cult leader, Serge Benhayon, is a fairly ordinary, not so clever bloke who can only establish himself as Universal Medicine’s alpha male by disparaging competing men via thought reform indoctrination. Based on derogatory stereotypes, his ‘occult philosophy’ demonizes so called ‘male’ traits of sexual desire, intellect and physical activity to encourage followers to reject anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the cult. Followers are then sold the remedy of ‘femaleness’ to make them more compliant and keep them dishing out the cash. In this final instalment in the Esoteric manhood series, we look at how Benhayon exploits the trope of male emotional inferiority to disempower cult men and turn women against his competitors.