r/santacruz

This cat has been visiting us in the Branciforte area over the past week

She’s very affectionate and has a collar but no tag. She’s very vocal and loving and seems like she may be hungry

My coworkers and I will take her to the shelter tomorrow to see if she has a chip but she has been so gentle and loving we figured she must have a family somewhere who could be missing her

EDIT: thank you all for your help! sounds like she has a family around who’s taking care of her.

Just to clarify myself or my coworkers would never “steal” someone’s cat, we have seen her in the area before but became a bit concerned the owners may have moved and left her behind as the past few weeks she’s been waiting outside of the doors of our preschool and been wanting to spend a lot of time with us and vocalizing a lot. Maybe shelter wasn’t the right word, but I have a co-worker who mentioned taking her in to get her chip scanned so we could contact the owners. I’ve never done that before so I don’t know where the best place would be to do it but I remember my coworker said shelter, perhaps I misunderstood.

Anyways we love having her visit and just wanted to make sure her family knew where she was. Thanks again :)

For years, I helped to run workshops through the student org named Self-Discovery & Meditation at Cal club. Years before the official student group, I helped poster around campus for my meditation teacher. You may have seen posters for Meditation & Enlightenment, etc. Here’s an example of a poster.

I was recruited by this group at 18 years old, my very first semester as a Cal student. I’ve just left the group after 10 years, and finally realized that the organization I was a part of was a controlling cult group. The workshops on & around campus were harmless, but they were a pipeline to become the student of a woman (Sunyata) who convinces you to distance from family and friends, change your career (get into tech), pay her money (I gave her tens of thousands of dollars over the years), and devote many aspects of your life to the group. There was a lot of brainwashing that occurred, and all members used the same lingo around enlightenment, self discovery and realization, inaccessibility (the key was keeping the energy a secret). The group specifically targets young college students.

Sunyata (Lelia Morrill) was the student of Rama (Frederick Lenz), a cult leader from the 90s who recruited thousands of students, profited off of computer science programs and student $, had numerous sexual allegations against him, and committed suicide in ’98. The framework of his cult lives on by his followers. (Look him up if you want to read more about it…)

I used to help book workshops at the faculty club, the YWCA, and helped get the student org established. After 10 years of being involved and helping people find the group, I’m finally out and coming to the realizations of harm as I’m recovering from the coercion and manipulation I was living inside of for years.

I want to share the truth with people on campus so they can be weary of this behavior or help their friends who they may know who got involved. I still have many friends involved in the group who I care a lot about and hope to help them start to question what they are involved in, although I know it’s a very personal journey to leave a group like this. All I can do is share the truth of my own experience, and the truth of the challenging recovery process that I am going through after leaving.

I’m posting more about this story to continue exposing details here: https://www.instagram.com/milo_ellington?utm_source=qr

If anyone wants to talk about or share their experience with me, please reach out.

I never thought I would get involved with a cult, and it was a slow honeymoon process of getting more and more involved. Thanks to my sudden departure, I was able to learn about the red flags of cult tactics and realize that this group uses a lot of those traditional frameworks.

For reference, here is an article published from Wesleyan that showed the same recruiting tactics that were used by the original teacher, Rama, in the 90s: https://wesleyanargus.com/2025/10/24/from-the-argives-campus-workshops-serve-as-cult-pipeline/

These booklets (left) and fliers (right) were dropped off at my work. To me it appears that the flier has been run through an ai. When I looked into it online I found information saying that they run a yearly contest for the art and do not use ai.

There are a lot of bad ai fliers this season (my hometown county faire in Santa Clara is a real offender and I’m not going to go to the internet to complain about that)

I have two big issues with what seems to have happened here. They make a point to talk about the contest and how the art is original and personal, so presenting it altered in this way without acknowledging it feels very disingenuous. Also the message this sends to artists, especially young artists, that this kind of fake thing is better and more appealing than their artistry.

I commented on the cover photo of the event page for the fair on Facebook inquiring if this was what had happened and a few hours later they removed commenting from the picture.

Running them through an ai detector got me a 3% likeliness the original picture is generative ai and 58% that the other could be.

I’m not looking to drag them for this but to appeal to them to maybe consider these things going forward.

Do you agree that this is very unnecessary, would you have been fine if they had just used the original submission?