Munkanon offered participants the opportunity to take part in a life-changing ‘self-help’ training programme, run by a clandestine hierarchical organisation, and staffed by appealing chipmunk-like characters. They operated a friendly yet persuasive public front, encouraging recruits to sign up and take part. Once ‘on board’ participants progressed through a gradated program of activity with the organisation’s claims of improved (perhaps superhuman) personal abilities as their goal.

Within Munkanon participants were required to take part in a variety of tasks and activities, from group games and physical exercises, to mental training and tests. Initially these activities – and the terminology that surrounded them – might have seemed incomprehensible or absurd, but as participants progressed, the internal logic of the system was revealed and their investment rewarded as they began to feel like ‘insiders’. In order to facilitate this shift in perspective, participants were required to take an active part in recruiting and training others upon reaching a particular level within a given activity. Their commitment to Munkanon confirmed, they were then charged with the task of going back into the outside world ‘on tour’, recruiting additional participants for Munkanon. Aiming at self-perpetuation Munkanon drew participants further and further in, the promise of enlightenment always just around the next corner.

“We seem to have the hang of this Munkanon experience. The question now is how far should we go along with it. Though not one individual seems to know exactly where we are going in the labyrinth of rooms and corridors created in this temporary holding pen. I'm musing on this question – of just how far we're all expected to go – playing with belief and faith, with mindgames and tasks.”

Charlie Fox, review ‘Becoming Munkanite’