Gods’ fusion and disillusion
They met in the teeming Indian city of Mumbai before moving to New Zealand and starting a spiritual movement. In the second of a two-part series, Steve Kilgallon and Tony Wall trace the back story of a couple whose followers believe they are reincarnated
Theirs is an unusual love story. Kaveeta Bhavsaar grew up in a wealthy family in the teeming city of Mumbai. Sunil Kumar Porumamilla was from Hyderabad, some 700km to the southeast.
They had never met, but he claims he would dream of her and draw sketches of her face. He even knew her name, he says, and had it tattooed on his body.
Then one day in 2003, they crossed paths in a florist’s shop in Mumbai. Porumamilla touched her on the shoulder and said: ‘‘I’m supposed to meet you here today at this time.’’
Bhavsaar, who says she always knew she had a special connection to the spiritual realm, says: ‘‘This was a stranger to me. Of course I knew energetically, there was a time I was told when this would happen to me.’’
A decade later the couple had established a spiritual movement called Kosmic Fusion, based in Auckland, with about 400 adherents around the world. They changed their names to Sree Maa and Shri Ji and, according to some former followers, said they were reincarnations of a Hindu religious leader.
Bhavsaar claims to be a ‘‘guardian’’ of an energy force she calls the Quantum Vortex Scalar Wave Proton Pulse (QVSWPP).
Experts say it has all the hallmarks of a cult and two former members have described a harrowing experience inside an ashram where the gurus and their followers lived for a short time.
Bhavsaar originally trained as a fashion designer and ran her own boutiques, but left that behind when she, Porumamilla and her daughter from an earlier relationship migrated first to the UK, then Singapore, before settling in New Zealand in 2010.
A year later, Kosmic Fusion began, offering free meditation centres in community halls and running stalls at spirituality expos in Wellington, Auckland and around Australia.
Those who signed up were initially invited to one-hour classes, then three-day residential retreats, each phase taking them slowly up the hierarchy. Payments for this were often called ‘‘energy exchanges’’ and were up to $800.
Bhavsaar describes herself as a teacher. But what is apparent from hundreds of pages of WhatsApp chat logs with her followers is how demanding she was. In one posting, she gives a ‘‘strict warning to not even for one second think that any decisions will be made by anyone other than the Guardians’’.
Trainees are warned that one lapsed member is to be ‘‘quarantined’’ to ‘‘stop any contamination’’.
Cult experts say one technique used by such groups to strengthen their leaders’ power is to encourage members to inform on each other.
One 13-page ‘‘observation’’ of Joy Kuo, a Kosmic Fusion volunteer for five years before she left and was blacklisted by the group, criticises her for such high crimes as using too many paper towels, buying expensive brands of peanut butter and stretching her neck in a way that copied Sree Maa so she could feel ‘‘special’’.
Another Australian-based former member says she received emails from the couple criticising Kuo after she left Kosmic Fusion. ‘‘I couldn’t read it by the end, because I know Joy, and I know she is an honest person and wanted to spread the technique: she was a million per cent devoted. I can’t believe they want to trash her.’’
Another former member, Iphigenie Amoutsias, also fielded lengthy written criticisms describing her as intent on seizing control of the group.
Both Kuo and Amoutsias lived in an ashram set up by the group in St Johns, east Auckland, in 2016.
According to the women, the ashram worked as a physical representation of your standing in the organisation. If you were favoured, you got a bedroom. Amoutsias and Kuo both had one, but were later moved out.
Kuo got the choice of a sofa, or a blanket on the floor of the games room. Amoutsias was dispatched to a bed in an open garage space. The couple say everyone who stayed at the ashram had suitable accommodation.
Despite all this, Amoutsias stayed, because she wanted to ‘‘get rid of my dark ego . . . to clear that selfish part of me’’ – right up to the point that she was given three days’ notice to leave and take all her belongings.
She says she had given all her money to the group (and spent up on her credit cards). One text message shows Bhavsaar suggesting Amoutsias donate a month’s salary to the ashram to improve her spiritual standing.
So with no money and nowhere to go, she slept that first night in the car park of the McDonald’s in Greenlane.
The group then lent her $300 to rent a room at the YMCA hostel in the city before she slowly put her life back together.
Documents handed to us by Porumamilla include pages of translated diatribes attacking Amoutsias. One writes: ‘‘I didn’t have this capacity to spot this traitor sitting amongst us and pretending to be a sheep in the wolf’s clothing. It is only SreeMaaShriJi’s Supreme Grace and Love that protected us from Dallia [Amoutsias].’’
Kuo says she had a breakdown because of the pressurecooker environment of the ashram. ‘‘There was a period of time I was totally shut down, I couldn’t function. At the end of the [confession] session I was extremely stressed and anxious.
‘‘I said ‘I want to die’ and they said I was into emotional drama.
‘‘I didn’t know what was right or wrong because they twisted everything so much I couldn’t even recognise if that was me any more.’’
The process of leaving a cult can be difficult, says Peter Lineham, professor of religious history at Massey University.
‘‘Often people in very powerful groups like these really struggle to reintegrate their lives and there is a strong pattern of suicides.’’
Of course, both women were free to leave at any time. But any successful cult movement, says Lineham, persuades members to subjugate their will completely to that of the leader.
Mark Vrankovich of Cultwatch has studied how cults operate and the techniques they use on members. He says many appear in Kosmic Fusion’s
structure, particularly around control of followers.
Kosmic Fusion appeared to have a heavy influence on its followers, he says, including their diet, lots of scheduled group activities, extensive rules, sleep deprivation and supervision of group communications.
For example, Kuo says Bhavsaar would ‘‘scan’’ their body energy every day to monitor them and know what they were doing, a kind of surveillance.
As if to prove this, Porumamilla provides us with extensive logs of WhatsApp chats between Kuo and Amoutsias, as well as Facebook postings by Kuo and pages of trainees criticising the pair.
One former member, Katie (not her real name), says she’s now certain Kosmic Fusion is a cult. ‘‘And a dangerous one at that.’’
Lineham agrees. ‘‘I know the word ‘cult’ is thrown around far too regularly, and people have the right to believe whatever crazy thing they want to, but they don’t have a right to abuse others in so doing.’’
They are absolutely a cult, says Vrankovich. ‘‘You can read their beliefs with a lot of interest, but the reality is what really makes them a cult is how they manipulate and control their members.
‘‘If what they’ve [Kuo and Amoutsias] said is true, I don’t think that anyone would say what has happened is OK.’’
Katie left because she felt she couldn’t trust Bhavsaar and because she says course fees were beginning to be demanded in cash, in US dollars (testimonies from other followers say some payments were in USD, but others were by PayPal, NZ dollars or on payment plans).
‘‘In the beginning, I do think she had good intentions but I think her ego got the better of her and she got worse and worse and more controlling.’’
But there are still plenty of believers. Sheree McRae, who used to run Kosmic Fusion’s social media, describes Bhavsaar as ‘‘an extremely special person who obviously has a gift to offer people. She’s an extremely selfless person’’.
McRae says she stepped away because she became irritated by other members jockeying for status. She says Kosmic Fusion is ‘‘so far from a cult . . . I hope a few bad eggs don’t ruin their reputation’’.
Renu Ryder, formerly a close friend of Amoutsias, claims she was ‘‘manipulated’’ by her in an ‘‘unhealthy friendship’’.
‘‘She admitted to being a malignant narcissist and treated a number of us poorly.’’
Yes, Amoutsias admits, she was a bully, and was encouraged to be. She regrets it.
To Bhavsaar, Kuo and Amoutsias are ‘‘snakes’’. She believes they wanted to steal her intellectual property and use the teachings of Kosmic Fusion for their own financial gain. (Both women deny this and say they were simply helping take Bhavsaar’s teachings to a wider audience.)
A ‘‘blacklist’’ notice on the Kosmic Fusion website – and 10 affiliated sites – delivers a lengthy excoriation of the pair.
Kuo is accused of printing out fliers and brochures describing herself as a ‘‘master practitioner’’ of the QVSWPP without permission.
‘‘The materials all glorify herself rather than honour and pay homage to Sree Maa Shri Ji, without whom no-one can receive the All-Knowing and most benevolent Quantum Vortex Scalar Wave Photon Pulse,’’ the notice says.
Both women have received legal letters, with Porumamilla threatening to sue for $750,000.
In an email he sends after we meet, Porumamilla says the women feel rejected by the group and we are ‘‘enabling individuals with NPD [narcissistic personality disorder] in their revenge. They have no conscience and will go to any length to play the victim card’’.
According to Lineham, all this is not unusual. Expelling former senior figures is often a key strategy to promote loyalty among other members. ‘‘In every movement,’’ he says, ‘‘there is always a Judas. And no step is too serious to take against the traitor.’’
Kuo estimates that Kosmic Fusion cost her $100,000 in time, money and the loss of income from quitting her job as a university librarian in Sydney to volunteer full-time.
Bhavsaar and Porumamilla laugh at that and say it’s they who’ve lost out. They’ve cancelled all online healing sessions, stopped recruiting and say membership is down to just two.
They deny Kosmic Fusion is a cult. ‘‘If it is a cult I was running, then it has to be an absolutely unsuccessful and a horrendous one – because the only victim in this cult is me,’’ Bhavsaar says.
Amoutsias and Kuo would dispute that. ‘‘I want to believe they started with the best intentions,’’ reflects Amoutsias. ‘‘But something went wrong. I really hope they can find their way back, and have the courage to look at what they are doing.’’
For Kuo, the final straw was when she was back in Sydney and a Kosmic Fusion representative visited her home to tell her husband the ‘‘truth’’ about her and her supposed transgressions. ‘‘I said you’re intruding on my family life, that’s it. If I go to hell, I go to hell, I don’t care now.
‘‘I felt so free after I left – I felt I could be myself.’’
‘‘People have the right to believe whatever crazy thing they want to, but they don’t have a right to abuse others in so doing.’’
Peter Lineham, professor of religious history at Massey University