The Other Side of Enlightenment

After returning from Hawaii, Hassan attempted to reach out again to Ari, sending e-mails from his modest office in Winter Hill, trying to arrange a meeting. As he picked up where he’d left off with his Dahn research, the calls and e-mails about the group continued to come in. But none were from Ari. The case started to feel heavy to Hassan, and sad, like a weight he had to carry around. In Ari, he saw a passionate, idealistic, and talented young man who was in trouble. He saw a younger version of himself.

But if the intervention was haunting Hassan, Ari was doing his best to forget it. The experience had been just a bump, albeit a painful one, on his exciting journey with Dahn. When he got back to his friends, the questions Hassan had raised no longer seemed important. He grew more certain than ever that he was on the correct path. Four months after the intervention, in April 2005, Ari was promoted to head instructor at the Dahn center in Andover, and that fall went on to open and run a new Dahn location just off Centre Street in Jamaica Plain.

As Charles and Doreen watched from Maui, their family life crumbled. They were barely getting along, and Doreen’s health started to falter. Charles wrote dramatic haikus that he e-mailed to Ari, reflecting in sparse language on the infinite pain of losing a son. Ari responded by adding his father to his blocked-senders list.

Charles decided that if he couldn’t convince Ari to leave Dahn, he would drum up so much negative publicity for Dahn that it would simply eject Ari as a liability. Either he would get his son out of Dahn, or he’d use whatever influence he still had in town to drive the group out of Boston.

Hassan is hardly alone in his concerns about Dahn, which he now considers among the top cult threats in Boston. Yoga chat rooms are filled with posts about Dahn, which many argue doesn’t teach yoga at all. And indeed, its practice is more reminiscent of Korean Qigong and martial arts. Ari Laquidara says Dahn uses the term “yoga” in a loose sense because “it’s the closest thing to what we do that people understand.” Some former members, though, feel this is an intentional deception, the first of many they say they eventually encountered.

Dahn founder Ilchi Lee preaches loving the earth, but used to drive a Hummer. He calls himself a doctor, but holds only honorary doctorates from two colleges, one of which is unaccredited. (The other, South Baylo University in Anaheim, California, teaches acupuncture and “Oriental medicine.”) The ex-members I spoke with say they were not informed until they’d been with Dahn for some time that Lee is revered by instructors as their spiritual leader. (His given name is Seung Heun; Ilchi is an appellation, given to him by students, meaning “one finger, pointing the way.”) They were also not immediately told of Lee’s call for his followers to recruit 100 million “New Humans” for an enlightenment revolution. And they were surprised to learn about the jail time Lee did in Korea on fraud charges. (Dahn’s spokesperson, Charlotte Connors, says Lee’s only crime was misunderstanding the laws governing the licensing of the herbal supplements the group was selling, and that his beliefs are hardly kept hidden, as they’re made clear in books and videos sold at Dahn centers.)