Manufacturing a 'Cult' and its Leader: 'Beyond Our Ken' — Video Exposés

Narrator: Techniques used by Melissa to create a fictional documentary.

Melissa spent over 12 hours interviewing Ken, by himself or with Jan. In all that time, she did not really get the answers she wanted to demonise and attack Ken and Kenja. so she created a fictional documentary based on cutting and pasting answers from getting a question put to Ken and not showing his answer but taking an answer from a completely different question for example, Melissa begins this process at the very beginning of the documentary in 1993, Ken and Jan did an interview with Mike Willesee on a current affair. Mike Willesee put a question to Ken and Ken answered that question. Here is the Current Affair footage.

Mike Willesee: Mr Dyers, you've been described in Parliament as a seedy con man, a liar, a cheat and a bully. What do you say to that?

Ken: I said that's his privilege because he's speaking under privilege of Parliament.

Mike Willesee: But what do you say to it?

Ken: I don't think I am.

Mike Willesee: None of those things?

Ken: I'm not those things.

Narrator: As you can see, Ken is very certain in his denial of these allegations. So, she does not use Ken's answer.
She takes Mike Willesee's question and cuts and pastes an answer Ken gave to a different question in 2006.
Here is the question from Melissa that Ken answered in 2006.

Melissa: So is the number one thing you process people on, is the number one basic thing that comes up, what would that be? Would that be hate?

Ken: No, no, it goes into different levels. It goes into, first of all, the illusion that they're living under. Life's an illusion. Energy's just energy. We put significance in some of it and it creates an illusion. This is an illusion we're having here now. it's not the whole truth the truth is unattainable it's an absolute.

Narrator: Now what does Melissa do but cuts and pastes and shortens this answer of Ken to the 2006 question, to appear to be an answer to Mike Willesee's 1993 question. Here is the Beyond Our Ken footage.

Mike Willesee: Mr Dyers as you've been describing in Parliament as a seedy con man, a liar, a cheat and a bully. What do you say to that?

Ken: Life's an illusion. This is an illusion we're having here now. You know? It's not the whole truth. The truth is unattainable. It's an absolute.

Narrator: ** She is inventing Ken's answers to questions in order to demonise him, manufacture a narrative and not permit the denial to be shown to the audience. Ken is made to appear as if agreeing to Willesee's proposition. This is how Melissa manufactures a cult leader. Just to emphasise, this is a question Ken was actually answering in 2006.

Melissa: So is the number one thing you process people on, is the number one basic thing that comes up, what would that be? Would that be hate?

Ken: No, no, it goes into different levels. It goes into, first of all, the illusion that they're living under.
Life's an illusion. Energy's just energy. We put significance in some of it and it creates an illusion. This is an illusion we're having here now. It's not the whole truth. The truth is unattainable. It's an absolute. No absolutes are attainable. Beauty is not attainable. There's different varieties of beauty. Truth is simply comparative.
How close it is to a total reality which we don't understand. If we had a total reality, we could create that plant and that flower or what, you know.
We don't have that total reality. So we compare the truth with what we consider the truth.
It's closer to the glow. It's closer to it.
It's closer to where the human species survives. and less toward pain and suffering, you know, it gets closer, that's all.
Does that answer your question?

Melissa: Yeah, it does.

Narrator: Melissa attempts to invalidate Energy Conversion.

Melissa's intention was to disparage and ridicule the work and ideas that Ken had spent most of his life developing - called Energy Conversion. This is part of Melissa's attempt to portray Ken as a cult leader, no different to the tabloid press and media.

Energy conversion is an advanced form of meditation, referred to in the Tibetan Book of Great Liberation. Melissa herself did an Energy Conversion session with Jan. And in June 2006, quizzed Ken and Jan extensively about Energy Conversion. This interview went on for a number of hours. Here is a clip from part of it.

Jan: Well, you were very established when I met you. I mean, Ken's work, Kenja wasn't the beginning of Ken's work. Ken was, I mean, you had a word of mouth reputation in the whole world.

Ken: People were coming over from overseas.

Jan: Yeah, to do these Energy Conversion sessions. So he was really established and accepted and respected all around the world for that. And through Energy Conversion they would be chasing their own negativity, being able to get rid of that, therefore being able to develop more abilities. They were also being able to create a joy and a magic in life, which then would allow their human to surface. And one has the reality when you do Energy Conversion - it's not just me, I'm describing my process but I think for a lot of people it's the same - you start to validate what you can do yourself, so therefore you just say "okay, well I'm going to do a show and then I'll get together - "

Ken: Yeah but what I liked about your shows was that when you looked at the final analysis of the show, that everybody that came to see the show was happier -

Jan: yeah

Ken: and they were more informed

...

Jan: it would be impossible -

Ken: it's not a challenge if it's not impossible

Jan: and our tool is Energy Conversion because that makes the impossible possible, because this marvelous tool that I call it, a way of just handling your negativity and the negativity is just the statement that says "I can't"

Ken: you get a brick wall and then you decide how to go through the brick wall

Jan: yeah that's right

Ken: but you don't know when you hit the brick wall, and that's what excites you. Because you know before you start that you will be able to go through the brick wall but you've got to find out how.
...

Melissa: So we've been talking a bit about Energy Conversion as a tool. I just went through an Energy Conversion with Ken and then with Jan before. You used the, you said before um, it uses a similar way to meditation, I've done a bit of meditation, I found it, and I actually initially tried to approach it in the same way I did meditation um, which didn't work i found it completely the opposite of every meditation I've ever done - can you tell me how it's so completely different.

Ken: Well I can say authoritatively because I practised meditation with Maharishi, have you heard of Maharishi? The Indian that introduced and made popular meditation in Australia. They give you a mantra, my mantra was "romm". And what happens in effect that when you use the mantra you pull in attached spirits that come and answer, they respond to the mantra. That's what you do, that's what it is. I did it and I found out. Then there's another type, you can -

Melissa: so meditation makes makes things worse?

Ken: No, it depends on what you call meditation. We meditate. Meditation to me that is creative is to know what you're doing. So if we, if we are calling an attached spirit to come in, we're doing it we're saying okay you can run your bank out on our, your reactive mind out on our cells of our body. That's knowing. But when you say "romm" and you just don't know who's coming in, that's not meditation, that's setting yourself up as a victim.
...
Meditation is when you have no thought whatsoever. You have just got an expanded consciousness. Your consciousness is very highlighted.

You're aware of energy, you're aware of thought or energy or emotion outside of your own mind, and the cells of your own body, which, thoughts can be impinged on those too.

Narrator: After extensive questioning of Ken and Jan, and her own personal experience, here is Melissa's viewpoint on energy conversion. I want to really thank you for showing me Energy Conversion.

Melissa: I want to really thank you for showing me Energy Conversion. I think it was really generous and it's really, it was one thing to hear about it, but it was a different thing altogether to experience it and I think that - it's, it's not - it's something that you've been really open about and there's nothing negative that I can - I mean, you're talking about negative things, but it doesn't seem to be of itself anything worthy of getting the treatment that you've sometimes got in the mainstream media.

Narrator: In spite of this, Melissa then sought to portray Energy Conversion in a bad light. After five interviews with Melissa, Ken, with Jan, had given many hours of in-depth explanation of Energy Conversion and the principles behind his life's work, forming the basis of the Kenja training.

Melissa showed none of this.

Let's have a look at what Melissa did.

The technique she has adopted is designed to preclude the possibility of the audience forming their own view. The selective footage she has used, clearly designed to demonise Ken, is introduced at the very start of the film, directly after the Willesee interview.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: Ready to start? Start.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan speaking: Yes

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: OK, and the consideration?

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan speaking: The consideration was, I have hurt her.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: Good, and that her is who?

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan speaking: My mother.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: OK, when was that?

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan speaking: That was 1954.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: Thank you.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan giving a public lecture: It sticks with you in the cells of your body, in your energy field, all around you. It's there. Every emotion you ever have felt and not got rid of. I am perceptive about the negative thoughts that I have, and I've got rid of a lot of that stuff that says I'm less than I am. It's gone. I've got rid of it. I mean get rid of it. I don't mean think about it and theorise your way through it and talk yourself out of it. I mean literally make it disperse, because a thought has energy.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: I'll experience that energy, you in turn will experience that energy, you do not become the pain.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan speaking: Right, okay.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: that's, you are not the body and therefore you're not experiencing it yourself, it's being experienced by the cells of the body and the brain

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan speaking: Yeah

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: If you don't identify with them they belong to the past

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan speaking: yes that's right

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: to another universe

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan speaking: yes that's right

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: Are you ready to start?

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan speaking: Yes, I am.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: Got another incident there?

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan speaking: Mm-hmm.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: Start.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan giving a public lecture: What are we? Body. Are we a body? What if you lost a leg? What if you lost two legs? What are you going to say? You're less of a person? Anybody think they are a body? Put your hand up. Okay, great. We've got that in common. All right. We're not a body. Are we a mind? I don't think so.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: You're what?

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan speaking: I don't want to know the pain.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: You don't want to know the pain, of course. That sounds reasonable. Was that impinged on the cells of your body and the brain and nervous system?

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan speaking: Yes.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: Good. So that's another consideration that's gone into the past. It's gone. No longer controlling it through your unconscious.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan giving a public lecture: We put things into our mind. We program our mind. We are the programmer of the mind. We are not the mind.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Ken speaking: Got another incident? Right. Let's start.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Jan giving a public lecture: We're not a body, we're not a mind, we're not an energy field. What do you want to call it? We call it a spirit.

Narrator: Lengthy and in-depth discussions and demonstrations that Ken gave Melissa, have been replaced with sinister close-ups and small pieces of footage. Melissa omits the rational, scientific and detailed discussion Ken gave her, and replaces it with a voiceover and footage of Jan at a lecture, indicating Jan is talking about the session.

In fact, she is not. She is giving a public lecture, and the specifics Ken speaks about concerning a session are omitted.

Consequently, the audience will be very confused about Energy Conversion.

Narrator: Manufacturing of an answer regarding Cornelia Rau. Melissa wanted to portray a negative message about Cornelia Rau that blamed Kenja for her condition. This was false.

Melissa was constantly asking questions about people being asked to leave Kenja. Here are a number of very clear answers from Ken and Jan that she ignored and left out of the film.

Jan: We never say to somebody, I'm sorry we can't work with you. What we actually say is, look, you really have this problem, we can't deal with it. What we suggest is you go away and go to somebody who can deal with it.

Ken: Yeah, we never say, go and get lost.

Jan: We never say that. And they can deal with it. Then fix your body up and then come back. Then come back. Now, the people who really want to move will do that.

Ken: And they do.

Jan: And they do. So what we're doing is not -

Ken: Three months later, six months later they come back and -

Jan: So what we're doing is not rejecting people, we're giving people the chance, knowing that it would be false to take their money from them because you know they wouldn't get the wins that they could.

...

Melissa: Someone like Michael Beaver or the other, another name that's come up is Richard Leape. Would it be better though to try and keep them within Kenja? Can't Kenja help them more than the outside world?

Jan: No, you see, we have a really strict barrier, and it goes like this. If somebody was with a psychiatrist or even a counsellor, the rule would be, if you do want to do the work, please check it with your counsellor, please check it with a psychiatrist.

Ken: And if they don't OK it and write to us or ring us -

Jan: Yes, or ring us, we simply won't work with them. We are not equipped to handle cases - we do not pretend to be equipped to handle certain cases. We are not equipped to handle somebody with a drug addiction. However, if somebody has handled that drug addiction and has cleaned their body up of the liability of the drugs and -

Ken: Starting to get their body in shape

Jan: Starting to get their body into shape, then that's different. We just really do have certain parameters and barriers within which we will work.

Ken: We're limited. We're not...

Jan: We don't pretend. It's a meditation.

...

Melissa: Psychiatrists say getting kicked out of a group is the most traumatic thing that can happen to a person, it's their belief system as well, they can feel really abandoned -

Ken: Oh well, we, the way we can stop that, what we say to them is that we have a rule in here, we take it ourselves, we've got a rule in Kenja and it's written down, it's in our ethics, you've seen our ethics, that we won't take from anybody, money from anybody that we feel we can't honestly help.

Now if - and we explain to them we're not ready for that yet. We're not up to the point where we're able to be ready for that kind of a case. We're sorry about that, but we're not. Maybe we will be later on, but right now we're not. And that's how we communicate it to them. So they're not rejected at all. We take responsibility that we are not able to do it.

Narrator: So Melissa instead manufactures an answer that fits her agenda. In the film, Ken appears to be answering a question about Cornelia Rau, but in fact he was not.

Detailed notes from people present at the time of the filming make it very clear what happened.

Melissa asks a question, why does he ask people to leave Kenja? Ken is actually explaining about people who broke the ethics of Kenja. They were asked to leave, and these people make up the people who have attacked us.

This is completely different to the situation of Cornelia Rau. As an example, Ken talks about people who keep having affairs with married men with children. And if they cannot stop their destructive behaviour, he asks them to leave Kenja. These are the people he is talking about in this next clip.

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Melissa: And if you were to look back, kind of, on your time during Kenja, how would you define that period of your life?

Footage from Beyond Our Ken - Cornelia Rau: It wasn't really a good period of my life. Um.

Ken: I used to tell them to go, and that was bad.

Melissa: Do you think they'd feel betrayed?

Ken: Absolutely. Absolutely. If you haven't experienced it, you don't miss it.

Narrator: Just to repeat - Ken is not talking about Cornelia Rau at this time. But people who have either engaged in criminal activities or were unable to keep the ethics of Kenja.

Melissa's next two questions are: "Do you encourage them to go and see a therapist?" And "But if a therapist can't help them and Kenja can't help them, who can help them?"

Again, he is not referring to Cornelia Rau in this answer, but to people he has asked to leave because of criminal activities or having broken the ethics. Here is the next part of the clip from Beyond Our Ken.

Melissa: Do you encourage them to go and see a therapist?

Ken: No, I'm not going to do that. That's their life. I don't really give that kind of advice. Because whether they go and see a therapist is what they - If I was to say that to them, it wouldn't make a bit of difference. If they needed to experience degradation, they needed to experience pain, they needed to experience what they're experiencing. More than half the world calls it karma. Or words to that effect.

Melissa: But if a therapist can't help them, and if Kenja can't help them, who can help them?

Ken: No one. Only themselves. And they will go through it in time. Maybe not in this lifetime, maybe in the next one. Maybe in another ten years they'll have gone past this level. So - I've got to protect the kids against that sort of thing, so I don't handle things like that.

Narrator: Please note here, Ken is still not referring to Cornelia Rau. Then he brings in a new thing when he talks about this Rau girl.

Ken: Like this Rau girl. I don't want her in Kenja. I don't want her processing. They weren't prepared to handle bipolar disorder. They weren't prepared for that. I could, but I haven't got the time to do it.

Narrator: He says, like this Rau girl, I didn't want her in Kenja. I didn't want her processing. They weren't prepared for bipolar. They weren't prepared for that. I could, but I don't have the time to do it.

Please note, it is here and only here that Ken is talking about Cornelia Rau. His statement backs our position, which has always been, we did not allow her to do any Energy Conversion or training in Kenja. She just participated in social activities and we were continually, gently, trying to get her to leave.

Remember, up until this very last part, Ken is talking about the early people he has asked to leave who then attacked us - not Cornelia Rau.

In this same interview, Ken actually gave Melissa a detailed explanation about Cornelia Rau - which Melissa left out of her film.

Ken explained:

Cornelia came to us and asked for help. He, Ken, said no way. Jan said she could do activities. She did not process. She became fixated with a young man from Canberra, imagining that they had a relationship, which they did not. We could not help her, so we asked her to leave because she needed psychiatric help. We don't try to help everyone just those who are helping themselves.

Melissa says - Why did Kenja get blamed? Ken states - Because of her sister who had problems and was not successful in her journalism career. Cult Aware got hold of Cornelia, and then she blamed her time in Kenja, which was two years earlier. (Actually, it was six years earlier.) Ken said, The Telegraph ran with the story. The Telegraph came and banged on our lift doors and dented them. We had to call the police who told them to leave and not to harass us again.

But Melissa put none of this in the film.

Narrator: The real story of Michael Beaver, a young man who improved his life using the Kenja training.

Melissa gave neither Ken nor Jan any warning that she was about to throw questions at them about Michael Beaver. This concerns events that had taken place in 1992 and 1993, some 14 years before Melissa's interview.

The context of the questions Melissa asked clearly showed that she believed Kenja was to blame for the suicide of Michael Beaver. Melissa claimed that the only reason she was putting questions to Ken and Jan about this was to give them the opportunity to answer everything fairly.

Melissa: Because I really want to give you and Kenja the opportunity to answer everything... that's come up publicly, yeah.

Jan: What has never happened is there never has been an investigation into how these charges came about. It's a very unique situation.

Narrator: Melissa presented herself as someone who'd showed this story of the attack on Kenja fairly in her film. Jan explained in detail the facts of the Michael Beaver story, and that she had documentary evidence to back this up. Melissa said she was interested in seeing these documents.

Jan: I think if that accusation's put there, it has to be answered with the facts that we have.

Melissa: I agree, which is why I asked you about it.

Jan: That case we have a lot of documentation on. And we'll meet again and I'll run all those documents.

Melissa: Well, yeah, we'll work out a date next week. I'm out Monday, but otherwise any day next week.

Jan: What, you'll fly up or something?

Melissa: Yeah, yeah.

Jan: OK.

Melissa: Because I think this is important and it's been, um... Yeah, and we've run out of time today, so...

Jan: Yeah, yeah ok

Narrator: What was revealed to Melissa - and what did she do with this information?

The information revealed to Melissa in the interview by Ken and Jan obviously surprised her. Yet again, Melissa refused to show any of the footage that would show these facts to the viewer.

At this point, neither Jan nor Ken knew that Melissa was interviewing Annette Stephens or Wendy Beaver or the other people, all antagonistic towards Ken and Kenja - Ken and Jan could have been even more specific if Melissa had been honest about this.

Michael Beaver was a young man who used the Kenja training to rehabilitate from drugs and an unfortunate lifestyle. Melissa does not indicate in the documentary where Michael was before he did the Kenja training and how he used it to improve his situation. This confuses the story and hides the positive effect training in Kenja had on Michael.

Here is a clip from an extensive, almost three hour long interview with Ken and Jan that Melissa leaves out.

Jan: His brother particularly was involved in this area, so Michael faced a choice at that point in his life. Was he going to go down the criminal drug path of his brother, where his family was leading him, or did he want out? For a brief period of his life, he became involved with the young people in Kenja, right? As was common at that time, his father came -

Ken: How long -

Jan: It was very brief. It was under a year, okay? During that time, Michael had extreme acne all around his face. He was really what you would call a sad young man. The acne all cleared up. His whole life changed. He was a sportsman who'd let sport go, all sorts of things, he got back into that, he became a very operative young man.

Narrator: There is no indication in Beyond Our Ken of the positive effect Kenja training had on Michael. Then the pressure of Michael's brother's criminal activities put Michael in the position where he had to choose between the ethically-based activities of Kenja or joining his brother. Michael chose his brother and we had to ask him to leave.

Two years after Michael's involvement with Kenja. After Michael's involvement with drugs and criminal activities of his brother, Michael found himself in a very bad mental state. Remember, this is two years after his involvement in Kenja. And under the influence of the drug and criminal lifestyles of his brother - Michael was in such bad shape that he needed to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

In this interview, Jan clearly explains to Melissa the diagnosis by doctors of Michael's condition and his drug addiction - two years after being asked to leave Kenja because of his links with criminality via his brother. Michael was in a serious, problematic state, with serious drug addiction, and had attempted suicide. Doctors diagnosed his condition as paranoid schizophrenia.

Melissa withholds this. She does not clarify the seriousness of Michael's condition in her documentary. Here is a clip of Jan explaining it to Melissa.

Jan: Two years later, Michael re-emerged at a psychiatric hospital in Sutherland. His basic problem was drugs, he has, he was involved with kava, he'd taken speed, he was involved with marijuana, like I mean he simply was, had a full-time life problem with drugs that's very sad, but that was the choice that michael had made two years earlier. He was in and out of Sutherland psychiatric hospital, he was diagnosed as extreme uh, I think it's paranoid schizophrenia.

Narrator: So the audience is never aware how serious Michael's condition was. Melissa excludes the part of Jan's interview which reveals the doctor's diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. By withholding the facts about Michael's medical condition, Melissa intends the viewer to accept his mother Wendy Beaver's viewpoint on his condition - ignoring the actual diagnosis by Michael's doctors.

Here is a clip of Wendy Beaver on Beyond Our Ken.

Wendy Beaver: I don't think I know anybody in my age group that once at least in their life didn't try marijuana and like a few beers with one's peers, football. So I don't think that was a reason not to associate with his family.

Narrator: Who is Annette Stephens? Because at that point Annette Stephens and her agenda influenced Wendy Beaver and Michael Beaver. Melissa will leave out all of this association, and the influence on Michael, out of her documentary.

Annette Stephens was asked to leave Kenja in 1992 for ethical reasons and was refused permission to open a Kenja centre of her own. None of this is mentioned about Annette in the documentary. Melissa never told Ken and Jan the names of the people she was secretly interviewing, so Ken and Jan were not given any right of reply.

Annette was the first person to publicly attack Kenja, and a founding member of the group Cult Aware, which was formed to promote deprogramming, associated with the American hate group Cult Awareness Network that Jan mentions in the documentary. Given the seriousness of the attack on Ken and Kenja by the organisation Cult Aware and Annette Stephens' key role in Cult Aware, this information should have been included in the documentary. But Melissa never raises this to Annette Stephens or even asks her a question about it in Beyond Our Ken.

But instead she uses "shadow man" - a very suspicious character, who had been asked to leave Kenja because of his inappropriate relationship with his daughter. "Shadow man" will falsely claim that Cult Aware is a figment of Ken and Jan's imagination, and this is what Melissa leaves the audience with.

Here is the clip from Beyond Our Ken, and see the way Melissa has presented it. She has the founder of Cult Aware in her documentary and refuses to acknowledge the association of Annette Stephens with Cult Aware.

Beyond Our Ken footage - Jan speaking: They got articles in the newspaper, what you call cult articles in the newspaper, attacking us as a cult, attacking Ken as a cult leader. They simply set a plan of how they would destroy Kenja. Their plan didn't really work for about six months.

Beyond Our Ken footage - shadow man: The only way to destroy Kenja is to destroy Ken, he said, that's what these people are up to. And then they introduced the whole of this figment of imagination called Cult Aware. He said, Cult Aware is out to get us.

Beyond Our Ken footage - Jan speaking: Cult Awareness Network is basically a hate group, which means they operate on hate and the basic premise is like the Ku Klux Klan. And if you've got anything wrong with you, it's because of these people over here. Let's blame these people. And they motivate hate, they motivate anger, and they give people an excuse for what's happening to them now.

Beyond Our Ken footage - shadow man: It's a big American company that's over here and it wants to wipe out cults and then start doing counselling work with everybody and make money. So there was all this motive for why it was happening. It was a bigger game than us. The police were in on it, the judges were in on it.

Narrator: Melissa had seen documents clearly showing the formation of Cult Aware in Australia, and its association with Annette Stephens, and its intention to "deprogram" people. The fact that she never asks Annette Stephens about her involvement with Cult Aware is dishonest. The viewer is left with the impression that Cult Aware is an imaginary group - whereas Melissa was interviewing Annette Stephens, one of the founders of Cult Aware in Australia.

Back to Michael Beaver - what Melissa leaves out.

Michael Beaver was in and out of hospital over a two-year period, as doctors medicated him to handle his paranoid schizophrenia. One of the issues noted by Michael's doctors was Wendy Beavers inability to come to terms with her son's diagnosis. Under medical treatment, Michael began to improve. But Wendy Beaver saw an article in the local newspaper and got in contact with Annette Stephens, who convinced Wendy that her son did not have paranoid schizophrenia but was just in effect of the cult and needed to be deprogrammed.

Jan: And one local person who who reads that newspaper is a very disturbed lady with a past of her own called Wendy Beaver. This lady has her own problems and one of the things she's having great trouble with is this son of hers, who has been in and out of a psychiatric hospital for now about the past eight months. She has great trouble herself coming to terms with it. That's documented.

Ken: In and out of a hospital? Was that after he was in Kenja or was it before?

Jan: After, that was about, approximately two years after he left Kenja.

Narrator: Now Annette Stephens began to work on Wendy Beaver.

Jan: So these three people now get a call from Mrs Wendy Beaver saying, "I think my son might have been involved in Kenja, this is his problem, like you say Kenja is a cult, he isn't really a paranoid schizophrenic, he doesn't have any problem", by the way the doctors in hospital are beginning to put to, to help Michael, it's a very serious case, there's serious drug abuse there, it goes back to his brother, and he, they are helping him. So you see that with medication he starts to calm down, they start to help them. But she is in absolute denial that her son is a paranoid schizophrenic, they - these three people get Wendy Beaver on side, they're in in communication with her. She is in communication with them.

She now has an 'out' for her denial. The son is no longer a paranoid schizophrenic. He doesn't have a medical problem that can be handled with her help and the rest of the family's help. He is just a product of having been with this cult. She is encouraged in that belief.

Narrator: Annette Stephens pressured Wendy Beaver to talk to a newspaper reporter so they could use a story about Michael in the pursuit of the attack against Kenja.

Jan: Then we get a call from the reporter from The Leader saying, tell us about this Mr Stephen Mutch - look we have another mother, I've spoken to another mother her name is Wendy Beaver, she tells me her son has problems because of his association with Kenja, but she's also said to me, please don't let anybody know this, because I feel that if Michael knows that I am attacking Ken and Kenja, he will commit suicide.

That's what the mother had said to the reporter. I give the reporter the documented story that I'm now giving you, with memos from our area, young people who knew Michael at the time, the whole thing, and the reporter does not pursue the story of Michael Beaver, presumably because the mother has said, if Michael finds out that I'm involved with these people, he will commit suicide. Because one thing Michael never did, right up until the day of his final suicide ,he never would badmouth Kenja and he never would badmouth Ken.

Narrator: Melissa saw documents showing this to be correct and did not approach it in any way in the film.

Their pressure on Michael to badmouth Kenja became apparent. His mother, with Annette Stephens, set Michael up to be deprogrammed.

Here is more footage of Jan that Melissa left out.

Jan: Now we see a change in Michael, after this association of Wendy Beaver. Wendy Beaver now sets up for Michael to be what is called "deprogrammed". She sets him up to meet these these people, linked with Stephen Mutch and these people who are attacking Kenja, they begin to work on him. They begin to work on him to attempt to get him to realise that he's not a paranoid schizophrenic - that his problems come about because of his association with this cult, Kenja. They begin to work on him.

Narrator: Documents show that Wendy Beaver and Annette Stephens continued to work on Michael for several months.

Jan: Eventually he becomes convinced that his paranoid schizophrenia will be cured by what is called deprogramming.

Narrator: Deprogramming - an attempt to forcibly change a person's belief system from that of the 'cult' to that of those paying for the deprogramming.

Jan: I don't know whether you've investigated deprogramming, whether you're aware of it, it goes right back, goes back to its criminal origins with kidnapping, the use of drugs and sex to simply ah -

Ken: Locking them up and get groups of people onto them, bombarding them, bombarding them, bombarding them.

Jan: That's the clean version. That's the modern version of it. Before that, it went back to sex and overwhelming kidnapping and drugs.

Narrator: Melissa makes no mention of deprogramming and its effect on those attacking Kenja. Back to Michael Beaver.

Jan: His mother takes Michael out of the hospital, takes him down to Melbourne, they stay with Annette Stephens. Annette Stephens brings Michael to what Michael himself and his mother calls a deprogramming. At that deprogramming - because a deprogramming can involve people, as you said, bombarding people with realities.

...

Jan: ... trying to restrict it just to the documents that I have, all right? Now we don't know a lot so I'll tell you what we know. We know that Michael and his mother stayed at Annette Stephens' house. We know Annette Stephens brought Michael and his mother to meet Martin Katchen. Martin Katchen goes to the house of the mother, one of the mothers of the three girls who were later to charge Ken, right, she's a lady we had asked to leave Kenja, because over a year or two years very large amounts of money had gone missing and the third one happened and she didn't give her -

Ken: Two thousand dollars worth

Jan: Yeah really big time stuff, and she couldn't give a satisfactory explanation as for where it went. Okay, this woman who is associated with Annette Stephens, they're friends, and her three daughters are at her house, and Annette Stephens brings Wendy Beaver and Michael Beaver to this house, he meets these girls, you know they're young, they're his age. Martin Katchen comes to the house. We have to assume he is the deprogrammer, he's - Wendy Beaver or Michael Beaver says I'm going to melbourne to be deprogrammed by somebody doing their doctorate in the Kenja cult, he does go to melbourne, he goes to to their house, they had this meeting.

Melissa: Did he tell you he was going?

Jan: We have records where his words are quoted. They're nothing from us. And I can show you those records, which are documentation of what his mother said and what he said, right?

Ken: This came up in the court case.
Narrator: Michael was taken off his medication during this deprogramming. None of this is included or even approached by Melissa.

What happened to Michael after he was deprogrammed?

Jan: He comes back to Sydney. Again, he is admitted to hospital. I believe during the next year he again attempts quite serious suicide attempts. Only now his talk is different. He starts talking about "possession" and "spirits taking him over" and he starts talking about everything would be okay if he could just be hypnotised. That's what Michael says. "If I could just be hypnotised, I would get rid of all these demons from my association with Kenja."

Narrator: The doctor treating Michael commented that this belief by Michael and his mother, Wendy Beaver, that Michael's medical condition could be cured by deprogramming was delusional. Annette Stephens and Wendy Beaver kept pressuring Michael.

Jan: These people are still in communication with him and his mother during this period. He is admitted to hospital again and again. By the way, what also comes out is these people asked him to go off his medication when he was in Melbourne. They are encouraging him to go off his medication. But the only thing that's helping him when he's in hospital is the medication. That's when he starts to get a stability.

Narrator: Finally, they convinced Michael to go to Stephen Mutch, another key player in the attack against Kenja. After Michael goes to see Stephen Mutch, Mutch claims to have a letter written by Michael bad-mouthing Ken and Kenja, something Michael had refused to do up to this point.

Stephen Mutch produced this letter in Parliament. We felt Michael did not have the ability to string together the complex sentences in the letter.

Jan: Stephen Much reads out to Parliament a letter that this Michael Beaver is purported to have written. We've had the letter analysed. Michael Beaver, for example, was almost illiterate and quite incapable of stringing complex sentences together.

Ken: Yes, that was obvious.

Narrator: But soon after seeing Stephen Mutch, Michael Beaver committed suicide. The bad-mouthing of Ken and Kenja was something he had refused to do up to this point. Jan showed Melissa documents proving Michael's links with Annette Stephens and associated people just before his suicide.

Jan: All of this was withheld from the police. So therefore, what happened in the press is "young man commits suicide - association with Kenja cult."

So that became now, so that you ask us the question, how do you relate somebody's suicide because they've been involved in Kenja? And that's the story. That began the press interest and it became the linchpin for the laying of charges ultimately against Ken, because those three girls who met Michael Beaver on that day at that deprogramming were three girls that Mutch was later to go down and - he didn't interview the three of them, he interviewed two girls.

The charges, the initial charges of Ken came from two families, two mothers who were best friends. Both mothers left Kenja under very serious circumstances. We asked them to leave. One girl was best friends with the daughter of the second family, right?

Out of Michael Beaver's suicide grew the big press attack, spearheaded by A Current Affair, Chris Smith, by Cult Awareness Network, by these three people, and the three girls who were present at that deprogramming, three sisters, they were three sisters, join with this other girl to bring charges against Ken. So it reads as if four girls are you know, alleging molestation against Ken. No, three of them were sisters, the other one was best friend with one of the sisters, and those three girls were present at this meeting that Martin Katchen had with Michael Beaver in Melbourne, and so we get the growth of the charges.

So Michael Beaver's suicide has served Cult Awareness very well, and the feelings of compassion for that mother who will never let her grief go, because she's been she's been fed and fed and fed again, and that woman even surfaces now - that same woman Wendy Beaver is even involved in in the circle of people in this current move against Ken.

You think these people care about Wendy Beaver, or her getting rid of her grief or being able to handle it? Because they've stuck her on a lie.

Narrator: In Beyond Our Ken, Melissa refused to show the truth about what happened to Michael Beaver, even though she knew and had seen documents proving Ken and Jan's version. These facts implicate the people trying to destroy Ken and Kenja - and who are still trying to do so through Melissa's documentary.

Melissa: Jan just took me through some of the documentation about what we talked about last time.

Ken: Oh, about Beaver?.

Melissa: Yeah.

Ken: Oh yeah, and after that what?

Melissa: But I just want to talk about whether you know about the theories put forward by all of those um, anti-cult experts and just go through some of the things that they say and just give you a chance to say how you think Kenja differs from -

Ken: None of them affect the case?

Melissa: No, no, no, no. I know that you don’t want to affect the case

Ken: I don't want to say anything that I would have to...

Melissa: Do you believe in mind control?

Ken: A person having control of their own mind, yes. Not other people's minds. That's completely opposite to where I'm coming from.

Melissa: Can a group get control over a person's mind? Or can another person get control over another person's mind?

Ken: Well we fight, that's our battle, we fight against that. The whole of Kenja is designed to remedy that. So the person obtains their own mind control. Am I on at the moment?

Melissa: Yes.

Ken: All right, yes.

Melissa: Yes. That was a really good answer, Ken. Because that's the kind of answer that's really easy to use. It's like exactly what you think about…

Ken: Yeah, well, that's what it's all about. Getting the person in charge of their own life. And to do that, they have to be in charge of their own mind. And then they've got to be able to look beyond the confines of the mind. Because the mind is only a product of their experience, but if they're going into the future they need more than the past experience.

Melissa: Okay

Melissa: How do you defend Kenja against any allegations of mind control?

Ken: Well, I'm not defending Kenja at all. It's just the viewpoint Kenja has concerning mind control. Now, our viewpoint is that your mind is a product of your experience, either a learning experience academically or the experience of life in the past. That doesn't, if you're going to take control of your future, it's necessary for you to be able to be aware and to be able to apply thought outside of and beyond the mind. Because the mind has made all its evaluations in the, in the past.

Melissa: So you're encouraging people to control their own minds?

Ken: Absolutely. Without controlling their own mind, they can't have a knowing viewpoint. The spirit knows, the mind thinks. So the spirit, because it uses knowingness, it's necessarily outside of time and space. It has no wavelength, so it's not an effect of anything that's in the past. So it can think clearly about the future and decide what the person wants to have in their future.

Ken: We're opposing that, this is where our opposition is, to let the person regain their control of their own mind and be able to use it or not use it; to not use it is to use knowingness, not just thinking.

Melissa: okay

Jan: There is no membership as such in the way that you're talking about. People really genuinely do come and go as they wish. So you might have a committee that might...

Ken: But the basic theory is, that we push all the time, is that I do not belong to Kenja.

Jan: Yeah, exactly.

Ken: I hope you do not belong to Kenja. I hope you belong to yourself, and your reason for being here is for your own personal reasons and for your own personal evolvement. If, however, that the interrelation with others helps you achieve what you want, that's good.

Jan: If you do begin to substitute Kenja for your own life, then we actually ask you to take a break. Because the whole purpose of everything we do in Kenja is so that you take it into your life. What you should be seeing in your own life, outside of Kenja, is great improvement. Your job should be better, you should be getting more work, you should be getting on better with your family. That's what you should be seeing. But if you if you decide not to do that and you decide well look this is a great lovely space I'll just pour my creation into that, then we’d simply - and it's in the ethics I think it's actually written in that book there - we will say to people you back off and you get that aspect of your life together, and every so often that happens.

Ken: Yes and I’m very happy for it to happen -

Jan: And I can think of three I'm being three people at the moment that, that I and you've actually said now you go and you handle that, do one class if you want to, that's all but no more and handle that

Ken: I do the same with you.

Jan: You do the same with me.

Ken: I encourage you to stop. If Kenja is their prime universe, they're out of sync. They've got to have a number of universes, their work, their family, and they reach and withdraw to these universes. They reach and withdraw to Kenja, and they reach and withdraw to each other in Kenja. And it's the pursuance of this theory that enables them not to become entrapped on any particular one viewpoint. Many people are entrapped in, because they've got a dysfunctional family and all their attention is on their family. Or they're worried about at work because they might get sacked and they're worried about money and their attention is on that.

Ken: In the work we do, which is one-to-one, the awareness and the consciousness is in, the spiritual awareness, not human.
It's not caring about the child in them, it's caring about their evolvement and spiritual awareness.
Consequently, you can get too much into the spiritual viewpoint, and it doesn't leave room for the child in the person to come out.
And my theory is that wisdom comes from the child and I constantly tell people the only guru you ever need is the child that you have within yourself.
Listen to it, become wise.

Ken: When their children come to Kenja, they are able to observe the children and the children are in a safe situation where they are always with them and they can always see what's going on and they're in charge of what happens with the children all the time.

Melissa: What happens if someone comes to you with an alternative viewpoint on how Kenja should be run or operate or proceed further and it doesn't agree with what you have to say? Are you open to those kind of suggestions?

Jan: I can answer that

Ken: Yeah, you answer it because - that’s a very simple answer.

Jan: Ken doesn’t run Kenja. He has nothing to do with the running of it. That actually is not Ken's function. You have nothing to do with the running of it. And people -

Ken: I give data, that's all.

Jan: - constantly ah -

Ken: I don't mind whether they pick it up or not.

Jan: This is what people don't understand. Kenja has grown out of viewpoints of different people.

Ken: Or even our ethics have. I haven't got an ethic in there. All the people have put -

Jan: The ethics that are now standard in our book have come up from other people at different times when certain things happen and someone would say, hey, I don't think this is appropriate. We say, yes, OK, that's fine, so we put it in. It really has grown. The basketball teams have grown out of guys who want to play basketball and put it there.

Ken: The principle behind the selection of ethics and the acceptance of ethics is, ethics are just barriers. To find a place where people congregate and it has to be a safe place there's got to be barriers. We have barriers against gossip because that's character assassination you know? If you start to say something unkind about someone in Kenja you've got to come out publicly and say it, you know?

Melissa: But some people might say that if you have, if you allow gossip or don't make such a big, if you if you allow gossip then that's how the, people communicate being unhappy, like you could say an environment of group think or group peer pressure can can be at risk, like if you don't have people able to talk amongst themselves.

Jan: But that's not gossip, gossip is very specific.

Ken: No, that’s communication.

Jan: That's communication

Jan: Gossip is, is -

Jan: The assassination of someone's character.

Ken: Look, it's like this. A person that deals in gossip, and people are like this. Some people are like this. Some. They’ve got like a little wheelbarrow. They come and say, what's the buzz? And they get the latest gossip, and then they trade it. They tell the next person the trade in the gossip and get some more. And that's, they go through their whole life is gossip. The normal thing is if I'm displeased with you is I come up and talk to you and I'll tell you what I'm displeased about. That's the manly and the decent thing for human beings. And we discuss it.

Ken: The nervous system of the brain does influence the behaviour of the body and it does influence the thought level. So it's to do with the cells in the brain and the cells in the body. You can put - and that's what we do with cells - you can put, will somebody come in here quickly? Anyone, quick. So somebody says, somebody says...

Melissa: Just pop it in his pocket

Ken: So uh look watch my right hand, forget about my left hand. Okay i'll try it again. Watch my right hand - you don't trust either thing. Because something says, something's going to happen, is that real? They’ve been programmed.

Does that make sense? The cells themselves get programmed. So if you want to get the programs out you've got to deal with the cells of the body. You're not going to deal with the mind, the thought, the control mechanisms are all in the cells of the brain and the body. And you've got a lifetime of conditioning, reactive conditioning to get rid of.

Melissa: Is there a hypnotic element to energy conversion?

Ken: I’m sorry?

Melissa: Is there a hypnosis in energy conversion?

Ken: We won't have anything to do with anyone that's involved in hypnosis.
We won't allow them in the doors. Because this is other-determining people.
This is mind control.
Hypnosis is mind control. And it's a dreadful thing to - and we won't have anything to do with them.
And if we catch anybody using it and we know what they're doing, if they're using hypnosis, we tell them to quit it or leave.

Jan: If you are communicating to or dealing with people who are very negative towards Kenja, you want to ask them one question, when did you become negative towards Kenja? And who had you communicated to before that happened? Because I can think probably of half a dozen people that may be there. If you knew the true history of those stories, those people, each one had had profound positive changes in their life, in their experience in Kenja. For where they were when they started and where they were at the end of it. The changes in their life were quite miraculous.

And the disaster was perhaps for them, when somebody started to implant in their head that what was wrong with them now was what happened back there.

Because when you're being fed, you know, Kenja is really bad, Kenja is doing this. And then you have to ask these people, hey, what sort of work did you do after you left Kenja? And who did you see? Did you do any counselling work with anybody? Did you do any hypnosis with anybody? Were you in fact deprogrammed? What actually worked? And when was the point after you left Kenja when you suddenly decided that this experience in this year of your life, which prior to that you thought was very positive, had been very negative?