Statement for Dr. Devra West, Surya Ma

To All Who Value the Truth,

My name is Jack West and as a previous board member of the non-profit Divine Unity and Sacred Arts Institute, I offer my statements to refute the despicable and unfounded accusations that John Watson has made about Dr. Devra West-Surya Ma.  Even though I am her ex-husband, I am stepping forward because I am outraged that he has orchestrated an implausible raft of tabloid-style allegations, based solely on his own malicious scripting of trumped-up gossip and calculated deception. There is nothing in his account of Dr. West’s circumstances that bears any resemblance to the truth of her situation. She remains as utterly free of wrongdoing and as ethically virtuous as any human being can be.

The Truth of Watson’s Malevolence

Watson’s entire psychotic slander campaign smacks of a modern day, Salem Witch Hunt that has been deliberately plastered all over the Internet. He understands extremely well the power of a calculating, character assassination, combined with small town prejudice and well-crafted, malicious gossip. For years now, he has lied to state and federal authorities. He has also lied to Dr. West-Surya Ma’s entire constituency of students, supporters and allied organizations. Despite his scheme to line-up his entirely fabricated  “sources,” whose accounts he has personally orchestrated and even authored, he will fail in his demented charade. He can readily incite a vigilante attack amongst those who have been grossly prejudiced by his twisted manipulation of reality by calling her a “cult leader”, but he cannot change the truth of his underlying agenda. Extortion is extortion. I assure you, that he is nobody’s savior or champion. He’s in it for the money and his sick need for self-aggrandizement. The consensus stands that he is a money-mongering cad and egomaniac. His accusations of Dr. West are solely projections of his own reflection, himself.

Mr. Watson, a former consultant to the non-profit that sponsored Dr. West’s work, attempted to quickly position himself in control of the organization, her assets and her capacity of talent and genius. From the moment he saw her prolific potential for large financial support, he set his course to execute what was literally a hostile take-over. Hired solely as a consultant and nothing more, his arrogance drove his immediate scheme to assign himself a virtual swath of unauthorized privileges, entitlements, as well as unauthorized job positions and titles, entirely outside of normal procedure and absolutely outside of Dr. West’s knowledge and legal authority. He scammed everyone present, until the criminality of his agenda was found out. He has also since falsely assigned his cohorts titles and positions that never existed and were never held, to make his character assassination sound credible.

Because Dr. West was out of the country for the majority of his six-month consultancy, he was able to get away with it. We regret failing to immediately expose and expel him, at the first signs of unethical, abuse of professional boundaries. There are many among Dr. West’s supporters, including myself, who now deeply regret that she has taken the full brunt of our neglect to recognize his debauchery far sooner and have him arrested. Many of her long term supporters distanced themselves, due to the gossip and slander that Watson perpetrated at first behind the scenes and later in a full scale rape and plunder of her reputation. He first plants the seeds of mistrust via gossip and suspicion and then fans them into the bonfire of full-scale accusations, as if his self-authored fabrications are true. If anyone is the victim of this situation, it is Dr. West. Anyone who thinks otherwise has been grossly misled and used as a pawn in his game.

The Truth of the Financial Accusations
It is Dr. West, who worked seven days a week for a pittance of a salary that was often not paid at all, solely to uplift and improve the lives of others. I will add that her meager salary and alleged “lavish life style” that Watson claims was ill-gained, came directly from her own personally generated finances and enormous generosity to the Divine Unity/Sacred Arts Institute organization in the first place. What Watson refers to as “the charity,” is in fact an organization that was founded solely to advance and further her work. It was run primarily on her own money.

I was involved from the very beginning of the non-profit, when her work was first recognized internationally as being of major significance. Far from living high on the hog on the charity as Watson has claimed, her personal belongings outfitted the entire Montana retreat center from top to bottom. She gave over 80% of her self-earned livelihood from her teaching activities to the non-profit and its projects for over ten years. She was the driving force, financial backbone and sole viability of the non-profit, despite the organizations professed mission statement to finance and administrate her work. The non-profit was founded solely to advance her work. That was our sole mission statement. We were her sponsor and it was our job not hers to run the non-profit. We were not the owner of her intellectual material, nor can we take credit for the profound nature of her seminars and retreats. If anything, we did not even begin to do justice to the success and significance of her work.

Watson fails to mention that the cost of running the programs, many of which were student projects, was far more than the donations that were received. His claim that Dr. West pocketed donations earmarked for projects is a pathetic lie. The exact opposite is true. She personally took up the slack over and over again when donations were far less than project costs. Proceeds form her teaching seminars should not have been expected to cover the costs of other projects. Conversely, her teaching monies should have been earmarked by the non-profit solely for her teaching activities.

Instead of providing the active financial and administrative support that she deserved, the non-profit ended up sucking her dry and mismanaging her hard earned money, as well as its operations from A-Z.  More than anyone, I regret that the high demand and rapid growth of her work, quickly outmatched our business expertise. She gave the organization many millions of dollars via proceeds from her teaching activities and resigned in January 2003 with a large debt being owed to her in unpaid wages and loans. She resigned absolutely empty-handed.

The Truth of the Montana Retreat Center
Dr. West did not “steal the retreat center from the charity” as Watson so vapidly proclaims. The non-profit BOD transferred the ownership of the retreat center to her by unanimous vote, of its own free-will volition, in part to repay our enormous debts to her and in part because we were in default on our mortgage after she resigned, because we had never bothered to generate any income in order to finance and maintain the property. I assure you, she did not want or ask for the transfer. Due to our stupidity and ineptitude, the non-profit ran the property into ill-repair and substantial debt, defaulted on mortgage and loan payments after she departed, failed to pay property taxes, and neglected to maintain the land and buildings. She had already moved to her new location and had no intention of ever living at the retreat center in the future. Due to her largeness of dedication, she stepped in and was willing to shoulder the property at her own expense as a last resort. She did this altruistically, because of her desire to see the retreat center returned to its original condition and mission statement. I might also add that the center was originally purchased solely for her work and her seminars in any case.

I know for a fact that she did all that she could to steer all of us in the right direction to no avail. She advised for years that it was essential that the non-profit become financially sovereign and income producing through related enterprise. However, no one amongst us engaged adequate fiscal responsibility, including myself. She was never expected to be involved in daily operations. She was a meditation teacher, not a financial manager.  I am not proud of the fact that we as individuals and as a group were simply not willing to take responsibility for creating a workable framework that made her relationship with the non-profit legitimate, balanced or beneficial to her expressed and assigned purpose. Despite our pathetic failures and short-sightedness, she since has set an example of grace and dignity through out this degrading circus act orchestrated by Watson, which he has hypocritically posed as a legitimate dispute.

The Truth of Watson’s Greed Driven Scam
Although the non-profit hired Watson as a consultant, he never operated in the ethical capacity of a consultant. He took advantage of our trust, quickly becoming greed-minded and opportunistic after witnessing Dr. West’s prolific success and financial capacity. He cunningly seeded dark-minded gossip far and wide to create a faction amongst us and to due our dismal lack of responsibility to our own mission statement, many fell prey to his scam. The gossip is now so over-the-top that it depicts her life as a low-life circus act, rather than the profound life and teachings of a Master Teacher, which is the prevailing and indisputable fact, where anyone to actually be a witness to the TRUTH.

He can trot out all the gossiping, hearsay, bull  “sources and attackers ” he wants. All of his proposals including those relating to the Millennia Mind project were flat-out declined, all of which assigned himself great wealth entitlement for investing not a cent. Not only did Dr. West decline his shady scheme, so did all of the benefactors who considered the proposal. She told me that she had no intention of signing the literally wacko documents he had drawn up, the night she reviewed them. He brought absolutely nothing to the table in the way of relevant expertise or seed capitol. We suspected that his mental instability went far beyond his obvious obsession with self-aggrandizement within a few months.

Now, he has made a full time job of making threats, fabricating slander and demanding money each step of the way, along with his cohorts for whom joining his attack campaign offers an easy monetary windfall. He has consistently falsified testimony to legal authorities and newspapers, by crafting a calculated attack that bears no resemblance to Dr. West’s circumstances. With each attack, he sends profane e-mails demanding to be paid off. This is an extortion scam plain and simple. He has threatened Dr. West’s life and threatened any one who gets in his way, from family members to employees, to personal and professional constituents. He boasts that he has the right to take justice into his own hands and met out punishment as he sees fit. His website is now his legendary legacy to manic, delusional ranting and is nothing more than his platform as an internet-stocker. He obsession with Dr. West is demented and malevolent. Anyone who takes the time to look beyond the headlines of his tabloid-style website pages, can see how implausible and far-fetched it is.

Mr. Watson’s greed-based mentality was the antithesis of Dr. West’s altruistic focus. Watson saw Dr. West’s genius, as only a cash cow waiting to be milked. Fortunately for all concerned, she immediately said a polite, ”no-thank you,” removing herself from all contact with him, with remarkable lady-like dignity.

Cult Accusations- No cult exists:
The statements that Mr. Watson offers here are so far fetched; I hardly know where to begin.  He screams “cult leader” with glee, full well knowing the power of attention-getting, sensationalist branding. I assure you, that after one of Dr. West’s conferences was over, everyone departed and took their flight back home. If a seminar or workshop ended at 5:00 PM, attendees are expected to vacate the property by 5:30 PM. There has never been any cult, absolutely no cult members or cult compound. Dr. West would never tolerate anything like that. No one would have ever attended our programs, if it had any resemblance to being a cult. From the start of his sordid extortion scheme, he threatened that he would use the “cult branding” tactic to get a pay off. The cult story has no basis what so ever, moreover Watson knows he is lying.

Assault Accusations- The Remarkable TRUTH:
Dr. West has maintained incredible focus in order to continue to move the profound significance of her life’s work forward, despite the distraction of having to answer the barrage of bogus charges that have been hurled at her by Mr. Watson’s vigilante, “cult-bashing” brigade. He has fraudulently framed her up time and time again. Dr. West has never pleaded guilty nor has she been found guilty of assault. The claim was part of the scam and it was dismissed by authorities, period. The absurd claims trotted-out by Dr. Pat Cole is a perfect example of one of Watson’s orchestrated entrapments. We all know that Pat was trying to cover-up her host of criminal malpractice misdeeds and the hefty debts she had racked up, not to mention out-right theft and misappropriations of large sums of money. Pat has made a very big mistake, by over-lording her medical license to discredit Dr. West, or that she could continue to hide her more than tarnished MD title. Even the county officials, who carefully reviewed the case, saw enough holes in her implausible story to dismiss it. Pat Cole has allot to answer for, as do the others who have sought to cover up their sordid vices.  That anyone would join in on the gang-bang by giving credibility to the immoral and criminal conduct of Pat Cole is unconscionable.

© 2008 Master Teacher Devra Patton West, "Surya Ma" ...All rights reserved.