94 International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 10, 2019
Bass was largely responsible for supplying tens
of millions of dollars to fund the Biosphere 2
project in Arizona, for example, which Allen
cofounded. Hawes mentions his encounters with
Bass while at a Synergia in Australia, where he
saw how Bass cowered around Allen. From
around age 8 through 16, Hawes labored for
meager room and board for the Institute of
Ecotechnics (a ranch) paid for by Ed Bass but
controlled by Allen. Allen was careful not to
overplay his thumb on Bass, who retained most
of the profits from Synergia enterprises. Bass
always dressed and ate well among Synergists
who struggled to live on extremely low wages
($4 a day in the early 1970s, for example). The
impoverishment was by design to help cult
members to better advance themselves and not
be attached to material wealth. Bass was an
exception, no doubt because Allen needed the
Bass money to augment his grandiose schemes.
As for education, Hawes was never taught to
read or do math, but he was forced to learn to
tend to livestock, cook and clean for “idiots”
maintain and drive tractors and ranch equipment.
Influenced by the adults, he began smoking at
age 9 and learned to use foul language. By age
19, despite not being able to read, Hawes, with a
friend, developed a tidy business for a time
reconditioning dysfunctional Land Rovers in
Australia. Hawes was driven to earn money by a
survival instinct and not by cult encouragement.
Allen mimicked Gurdjieff’s style, with a mixture
of social engineering using hypnosis or
influence-communication techniques, acting and
movement classes, theater projects, tedious
lectures, esoteric wisdom, and “necessary” abuse
[e.g., Fritz Peters wrote of Gurdjieff, “It had
been impressive, enlightening and even amusing
to watch him, at close range, when he reduced
people to a pulp, as he had done to Mr. Orage”
(Peters, p. 117)]. Gurdjieff’s tirade against A. R.
Orage most likely occurred because Orage
developed a variant of Fourth Way teaching, not
knowing that this would outrage the master.
Orage (1873–1934) was a promising, talented
literary figure when he encountered Gurdjieff,
who was a young man at the time. The point
here, as we learn in Hawes’s book, was
submission to teachers or elders (“idiots”), no
matter what, and is a feature of the Fourth Way.
When we ask what kind of person is attracted to
a Fourth Way group, Peters, as quoted in The
Harmonious Circle, by James Webb, observed:
They seemed to me to have been
attracted to his teaching for a variety of
not very good reasons—because of
loneliness, or perhaps because they
considered themselves misfits or
outcasts. Most of them had dabbled in
the arts, theosophy, the occult or
something of the sort, and had come to
Gurdjieff as if in search of another
‘cure’ for their life problems. ..(Peters,
as cited in Webb, p. 414)
Hawes’s parents fit that description. His father,
an architect, finally broke with the Synergias
years after his son did. Hawes defected when he
legally could, at age 16, and more so at age 19
after he had returned to a Synergia to work for a
time to try to reconnect with his mother, Lisa.
But she remained detached, having barely any
contact with Hawes, in compliance with Allen’s
teaching that the nuclear family is destructive to
the goal of self-remembering. Lisa to this day is
a true believer.
Despite efforts by Allen in an imploring,
flattering letter asking Hawes to stay, and
warning him that he could lose his soul in a bad
world, the broken teenager remained firm in his
decision made years before he could legally
defect. He was well beyond feeling any
sympathy for Allen and his abusive system.
Devotion had literally been beaten out of him.
Hawes takes us through chores during a typical
week at the Ranch in Australia near Fitzroy
Crossing. It is hard to fathom what he had to
do—a throwback to child labor in the Middle
Ages, perhaps. Cult members would argue that
this was for his spiritual development of
character, and that he learned things he might
never experience at proper schools. The latter
was certainly true. He would be shouted at or hit
for the least lapse in judgement or infraction by
humorless “idiots.” Once he was struck so hard
by his female manager across the side of his
head that he could not hear in that ear for more
than a week. No one took him to see a doctor.

Internatiional Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 10, 2019 95
This Synergia at Quanbun Station in Australia
was in one of the harshest climates on the planet.
Temperatures during half the year can reach
more than 100°F in humid conditions. Rainfall
was a seasonal monsoon, so windmills to pump
well water were necessary. One cow might need
hundreds of acres for grazing. During his first
years at this Synergia, Hawes lived in the most
primitive conditions in tents and shacks. He
wore second-hand clothes that he slept in for
weeks at a time on a moldy mattress. He had to
steal food such as granola and snacks from
“idiots” who would not share with children or
“people.” Hawes earned a pittance per month for
his hard labor, barely enough to buy loose
tobacco for his smoking habit.
My first encounter with Allen’s cult was in 1975
when I heard stories from people who had
attended Synergia workshops. In 1976, I met
cult members at a Synergia construction site in
Santa Fe, New Mexico. The main Synergia
Ranch was 14 miles south of the city. I recall
hearing from noncult workers on Synergia
projects, saying how strange the members were
and how no one stuck to their skill set (if they
had one), being challenged from day to day to
do jobs they had not done before. This may have
been good for therapy, but it created major
delays from mistakes and poor workmanship.
During 1971, Laurence Veysey, a history
professor, lived on the New Mexico commune
near Santa Fe as an undisguised participant–
observer. This says a lot about Allen’s ego at the
time because he believed he would win over the
researcher. Veysey published The Communal
Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter-
Cultures in America in 1973. In Chapter 5 (more
than 125 pages long), “New Mexico, 1971:
Inside a ‘New Age’ Social order,” Vesey did a
masterful job revealing the nature of Allen’s
cult. Veysey changed names (Allen is “Ezra”),
but otherwise there is no disguise of behavior
and setting. In his Australian Synergia
experience, Hawes underscores everything and
more that the scholar Veysey noted in New
Mexico, from enneagram symbols on the walls
to required theater classes, to the requirement of
sitting in silence at meals while Allen or a
subleader pontificated and criticized “idiots.”
Although attachments in relationships were
roundly repressed, sex was available on demand
by simply knocking on someone’s door and
asking, “May I come in?”
One personal anecdote regarding the Biosphere
2 project in Arizona that placed Allen and his
Synergias into world news: Hawes (then 19)
mentions the Biosphere 2:
My sister, Lavice, had grown into a fine
young lady. ..She had been sent to
Quanbun [in 1989] for failing to live
according to John Allen’s wishes while
she was working on Biosphere 2 ...a
Synergia that was a three-and-a-half-
acre self-contained system, located
...near Tucson. (p. 154)
I toured the Biosphere 2 in 1991 the day before
launch, when eight Biospherans, four men and
four women in Star Trek-like costumes, would
enter the impressively sealed ecosystem and try
to thrive in it for 2 years. The grand plan was
designed as a first step toward a self-sustaining,
sealed community on Mars. Four of the
Biospherans were devoted to Allen, thus
predictably producing tensions with the ones
who were not. I asked my guide, a Synergia
devotee, “Will data be gathered from
psychological monitoring of the Biospherans?”
No, she said, “because of privacy concerns.” I
found that answer ludicrous, if telling. It came
out later that Allen was secretly communicating
with his Biospherans all along, though the claim
was that he would have no communication.
In 1991, the parents of one of the Biospherans
hired me to fly down to Arizona with them to try
to convince their adult child that this was more
about brainwashing than science. They were
justifiably afraid that the Biospherans might die
in the experiment. I did meet with their
Biospheran for less than an hour and shared
some information, but the intervention had little
effect. We left the meeting on a positive enough
note for the family not to feel cut off in the
future. I doubt the Biospheran ever kept or read
the literature I shared.
Biosphere 2 was a failure before getting out of
the gate for a host of reasons, not the least of
which was Allen’s grandiose vision coupled
with delusional, deficient science. In the end, the