We begin with the School's most successful foreign operation - Holland. Here the cult is nearly as active as in Britain.

The branch in Holland is called the `School voor Filosofie' (School of Philosophy). It has acquired a portfolio of properties that rivals the SES holdings in Britain. The cult has seven buildings in Amsterdam alone and other centres in The Hague, Deventer and Driebergen. An imposing million-pound estate and mansion is rented at de Breul, not far from Utrecht: here most of the residential courses are held.
   The SVF was started in l962 by Franciscus van Oyen and his wife Toos, a wealthy banking family. They had been converts to MacLaren's ideas in London. Today Toos van Oyen is the head of the Dutch school and her son Paul is the administrative driving force. He too has spent time in London and at Waterperry learning from The Master. His sister, Doreen, has spent many years aiding MacLaren in Britain.
  No doubt Holland has always been a fertile breeding-ground for new religious movements, but the SVF's growth has not been among the hippy colonies. Its appeal has been among the well-educated and well groomed professional and executive class. Over the last twenty-two years it has enrolled over 22,000 members. It was growing quickly, unhindered until one of its more devoted followers defected.
  When Joseph Vincent left the SVF he went through the familiar withdrawal problems and verged on total mental breakdown, but he recovered to head a flourishing opposition movement to the SVF that has brought the cult into the public eye and made recruitment of new members much more difficult.
  We visited Vincent in Holland and were surprised at just how well-entrenched the SES branch there has become. There is no evidence of members dabbling directly in politics, but the Dutch secret service has been taking a keen interest in the cult.
  Certainly the SES is remarkably interested in the Dutch royal family and has published transcripts of royal speeches that in some instances seem to follow an SES line.
  Vincent's story is almost as remarkable as Frith Oliver's. He joined the cult at seventeen years of age in London, quickly moved to its branch in Malta, ran away to England again and ended up in the higher echelons of the SVF in Amsterdam and The Hague. Each time he joined a new branch it was with the hope that he would find a solution to a question that had been tormenting him. If the cult had really discovered `The Truth', why were its leaders so lacking in humanity, so flawed? By the time he arrived in Amsterdam he was tortured by the knowledge that the School was not satisfying his emotional and spiritual needs. But he could not give it up. It nearly wrecked his marriage, and his mental stability.
  It appears that Vincent, like Oliver, was something of an experiment in MacLaren's eyes. Only a few months after he joined the organization, Vincent was `converted' and enrolled in the meditation. He was invited to become a caretaker-cum-administrator at the School's house in Malta and given a twenty-four-hour regime of work duties.

I had a timetable for the whole week from 5 a.m. to 12 p.m. and told exactly what to do. Soon my whole critical faculty was blocked out. I was effectively spending my entire existence working for the School. I worked as a salesman to pay for my board, my groups, materials and books.
  I was taught that sexual energy was energy in the wrong place. Any kind of sexual growth was repressed. After two years I completely snapped. The pressure was too great. They always wanted more from me. I was going into a complete fantasy world. By meditating and eating very little, the lack of proper nutrition and the lack of sleep. you lose all sense of reality. I was a complete zombie, going into trances and finding it difficult to come out.

Vincent upped and came to England to see if somehow the School had lost its way. He joined the youth groups at Waterperry and remembers vividly being encouraged to become politically aware by joining the Young Liberals. Once again the pressures forced Vincent to escape. He started working on an oil rig, taking his vacations in Holland.
  The SES still preyed on his mind and one day he saw an advertisement for the introductory philosophy lectures in a Dutch newspaper. He was hooked again, started at the bottom of the SES pyramid, and worked his way into a senior position.

I'd tried to stop when I arrived in Amsterdam but it was still so much in my subconscious. You only need a trigger word to put you back in the same, zombie-like state of mind.

Vincent got his Dutch wife to join the groups and she attended for six months. She left and this began the process of conflict that led to Vincent leaving. The marriage was on the rocks because he was so committed to attending SVF meetings and doing his work duties. He was now a meditation-checker with an awesome power over his charges. Yet he was obliged to keep everything secret at home. He became increasingly domineering - in line with the SES view of the male's role in marriage. When he went to his tutor with his problems a stark choice was presented:

I was told I must choose between my wife and `The Truth', that is The School. When I said I would have to choose against The Truth I was immediately shown the door. I became a complete mess. I'd lost something I'd invested twelve years of my life in.

The cult warned Vincent that it would create mental problems if he left:

 They said that if you try to go back to sleep again having gained the knowledge, you can never sleep. They also said that if you try to exploit the knowledge and talk about it to outsiders then you will go crazy and end up in an asylum.

Vincent says he had a complete identity crisis.

 You can't relax or resocialize. I thought of committing suicide but stopped because the SES had taught me that I'd only come back again and repeat the whole chain of events.

Now working in the oil industry and happily married with a daughter, Vincent can look back on this episode and talk about it without any sign of upset. But he says it took him at least a year to get over the worst traumas and begin to think for himself again:

To me `Don't Think' sums up the SES's entire philosophy. Undoubtedly I was brainwashed. I only began to recover from it when I began to meet people outside the cult and test their view of reality against mine.

Vincent introduced us to other ex-SVF members who had similar stories to tell. Arij van der Stelt, an architect and planner, described the SES indoctrination process as form of brainwashing. Like Joseph he has put a lot of energy into attacking the SES and courageously being interviewed by numerous newspapers because he is against the cult's recruitment methods and secrecy.
   The Dutch press have taken a close interest in the attacks made by Vincent and van der Stelt and Paul van Oyen's attempts to portray the SVF as a harmless academic institution. A weekly news magazine De Tijd devoted five pages to the controversy under the heading The cast iron grip of the School of Philosophy, and in another issue carried no less than twenty-seven letters from readers. The article, in January 1984, caused a stir among SVF members in Holland and has led to an internal questioning of the direction the cult is following - a reaction similar to that caused by The Standard articles in Britain. It is evident the SVF has now been forced to explain itself publicly in a way that was never necessary before.
   Also in January a radio feature on the SVF, broadcast by the national VARA network, included an interview with Paul van Oyen. A translation of his remarks shows how easily the interviewer could have been talking to any of the SES leaders in London. Here is an extract:

Question  What does the SVF actually propagate?
van Oyen  . . . human development, especially in the sense of spiritual development . . .
Question  Is the SVF a religion or a religious movement?
van Oyen  No certainly not, or er, we study a philosophical system, that we have developed ourselves which originates as much from the Socratic as from the early Christian as from the Advaita Vedanta philosophy from India

Perhaps Paul van Oyen stumbled over this answer because the question was a tricky one for the SVF. In Holland it has special tax-exempt status because it is a religion. The tax authorities no doubt found van Oyen's answer rather revealing.
  In the radio programme, van Oyen went on to make predictable remarks about the SVF's secrecy:

. . . we have concluded the only real way to know what we do is to allow people to join us and to let them listen to what we have to say. . .

Van Oyen said it was very difficult to make public clear statements about what the SVF wants:

We have come to the conclusion that as little publicity as possible is the very best for us to enable people to investigate for themselves what we have to do. . .

The interviewer bluntly accused Paul van Oyen of `covering himself in darkness'. Van Oyen replied:

May I say not in darkness but in the radiant light of conscious silence.

Asked if the SVF was brainwashing people and exploiting them financially, the cult's Dutch spokesman denied it:

I don't know their meaning as I've never experienced them myself let alone applied them . .

In another revealing question van Oyen was asked why SVF students were not allowed to discuss the organization's ideas openly. Van Oyen said students were allowed to discuss what they are doing but he added:

The only restriction we have is that we have trust that they only speak about matters which they have real knowledge about and that they really understand, and for that reason in the beginning period we lay emphasis on people being careful how much they speak about what they hear in the school simply because they can't oontrol the consequences of the matters, and we want to draw their attention to the fact that they might end up in a difficult conversation which they can't get out of.

  The Dutch banker was given difficult time and the programme highlighted some of the problems faced by a covert groep prodded into the public eye. It is impossible for the SVF to lie outright because it is ostensibly devoted to `The Truth'. Many members' faith would be shattered by any such device. Instead van Oyen was faced with resorting to double-speak of which the cult has a rich vocabulary: for religion say `philosophical system', for secrecy and evasion say `radiant light of conscious silence'.
  Joseph Vincent has a clear recollection of how such terms could be used to confuse or mollify any curious outsider. Perhaps the best example of SVF or SES double-speak is the term `The Truth' itself. It can be accurately translated as `our religious beliefs'.
  The SVF is now regularly in the public eye in Holland and gets coverage whenever some new idiosyncrasy or tragedy occurs. It is the mental strain of being in the cult that receives the most attention. In Gouda the papers were full of the misfortune of a cult member found wandering suicidally down the middle of a motorway after walking out of an SVF work weekend. When we left Holland ex-SVF members were talking of a cult member who had committed suicide. They recalled how she had previously `flipped' on one of the SVF residential courses, though of course this may have had nothing to do with her death. In 1983-84 the Dutch anti-cult group `SOS' dealt with more than sixty people with SVF problems.
  Undaunted, the SVF continues to develop. It has now established its own children's school - the Plato School - which only takes cult members' children. The children have a bleak academic and spiritual existence. We have a copy of what they were expected to do at Sunday school before the day school was set up. Children aged from ten to sixteen were brought from long distances to an SVF town-house in van Eeghenlaan, an expensive street in central Amsterdam. They arrived at 7. 45 a.m. for half an hour's meditation. Sanskrit began prompt at 8.15 followed by philosophy at 9.15. After a teabreak there was compulsory boxing for boys up until the thirty-minute lunch-break, followed by fencing. Girls were taught philosophy and arithmetic, Hindu-style. Later in the afternoon came studies in rhetoric for boys while girls were taking 'ladies studies'. At 4.45 after eight hours of intensive tuition and character building, the children left for home. Sunday schools for SES children are run on similar lines in most other countries.
  In Holland the SVF bureaucracy is nearly as top heavy as in London. A list of functionaries includes several hundred names.
  SES operations are more tightly knit a few hundred kilometres south in Belgium. There are School of Philosophy centres in Brussels, Antwerp and Bruges. Some local interest had been aroused in Belgium and in Holland by the fact that the Belgian SES branch is headed by a well-known TV interviewer - Henri Schoup. An anti-cult group - The Association for the Defence of the Individual and the Family - has been gathering information about the cult's activities following complaints from people attending courses that the true objects of the organization were being kept secret. The Association estimates there are 1,000 people enrolled on courses, with a hard core of 250 long-serving followers.
  More complaints followed a recent exposé of the cult's activities by the popular Flemish weekly Humo. It accused the cult of keeping hidden the Hindu background of the teachings. It drew attention to the way Sanskrit was being taught and the spiritual influence of the Shankaracharya. Members, especially from the Bruges area, were bitter that they had not been told about these aspects of the organization. A number left their groups.

Update: the High Court of the Netherlands (Hoge Raad der Nederlanden) ruled on the 18th of September 1991 that the School voor Filosofie was not tax-exempt, because they had strived to accumulate a structural surplus in income to acquire buildings for the School. They had to pay f 464.934,- in backtaxes or in USD more than 230,000. The current tax-status is unkown to me.

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