Brainwashing

Bada Hari das, barefoot and dressed in colorless monk garb, an India-imported clay drum tied round his neck, moved alone to the front of the polished temple floor of black-and-white tiles. Slowly, he began the chant, the internationally recognized Hare Krishna mantra. But the high priest would not be alone for long, nor would the mantra remain at a soft cadence. This was the regular Sunday night feast, the chance for the devotees and other followers to kick up their heels.

Apparently, Mike Downey is so driven to prove himself a pseudo-liberated male that he found it convenient to ignore the numerous polls conducted on the Lisa Olson case that found women saying that Olson and her female associates did not belong in a male locker room. I'm certain, though, that Downey would blame this finding on centuries of male brainwashing or some other phony reasoning designed to renew his NOW membership. JEFF WEINSTOCK West Hollywood

A San Diego man who specializes in deprogramming cult followers has admitted that he had tried to change the religious beliefs of an Amish woman. Theodore Patrick Jr. of San Diego is being sought by police in the kidnaping of Elma Miller, who was taken from her parents' home Oct. 31 and held for 20 days while Patrick tried to sway her away from a religious splinter group.

Talk about locking the barn door after the horse is out. Can Josephson really be as surprised as all that? Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of history could have predicted the inevitable result to come from the brainwashing of two generations of spoiled children with relativistic ethics and the belief that their every subjective whim is divinely inspired. From the Republican Congress' override of President Truman's veto of the McCarran-Walter Act to the me-first greed of Reaganism is a logical progression in which it is John Kennedy's Pollyanna "Camelot" that is the aberration and not Richard Nixon's completely amoral "success-at-any- cost ethic."

A new study of Hare Krishna devotees in the United States indicates that they tend to be compulsive personalities--meticulous people at ease with demanding rituals--but their mental health is otherwise comparable to people in traditional American religions. Contrary to some anti-cult literature, "no evidence of deleterious psychological effects was generally found" in longtime members of the Hindu sect, two Southern California psychologists concluded. Clinical psychologist Arnold S.

The long-playing, woe-filled ballad of Beach Boy Brian Wilson's return from mental illness and substance abuse took a bizarre turn on Monday as Wilson's cousin filed a court petition claiming that the rock singer has been "brainwashed" by a former psychologist who has taken control of Wilson's recording enterprises.

Even in this city that swears by its diversity, the Hare Krishna have not always blended easily into the community's patchwork. Over the years, members of the Hare Krishna temple here have annoyed residents with late-night chanting and squared off against the city over the right to hold celebrations on crowded Main Beach. There was a drug scandal that rocked the temple in the late 1970s and a lawsuit by a Cypress teen-ager who alleged that she was brainwashed into joining the sect.

Former child star Gary Coleman's life these days is reading like a script. It is a complicated and emotional story line in which the principal players on both sides are making allegations which would keep any soap opera in material for months: sidelined careers, failing mental health, parental greed, questionable friendships, stolen money.

A Superior Court judge Friday freed a Santa Cruz couple accused of kidnaping and falsely imprisoning their adult daughter in an attempt to "deprogram" her religious beliefs. Judge David B. Moon Jr. dismissed all charges against Earle and Dorothy Brown, both 58. They had been charged with illegally abducting their daughter, Ginger, in an unsuccessful attempt to get her to disavow her allegiance to a group known as Great Among the Nations.

The state Supreme Court, acting in a bitter, 12-year battle over religious practices, on Thursday let stand an appellate ruling that sharply reduced a multimillion-dollar award against the Hare Krishnas and rejected charges that the group had "brainwashed" an Orange County girl when she was a teen-ager.