I just encountered this "School of Practical Philosophy" outfit lately. They'd been offering 14 classes for just €10 so I gave it a whirl. From the outset it was clear that it was not going to be a philosophy course. At class 1 - after tea and chocolate biscuits - our "tutor" told us we'd be following a path to self-enlightenment which was described as advaita - a kind of non-dualist thing that some Indian guru came up with. There was a lot of talk about finding our innate peace from self-contemplation and so on. We had been told to contribute to the discussion freely. I looked round and saw some passive faces then thought it was high time to put in a hard tackle on this subjectivity nonsense. (Having sat in on some philosophy lectures at TCD, I knew that philosophy was not actually a vague airy-fairy subject. If anything it was one of the most rigorous courses and lecturers really challenged students' ideas hard on both how they hung within their own definitions and how they squared up with the real human world.) I expressed the view that subjective approaches could never lead one towards a meaningful truth that was shareable with others - indeed the very idea of a follow-my-leader class was the contradiction of what philosophy study really was. The "tutor" only offered that this was the way things were done in this "School" and most people find it gets easier too accept as they follow along. He then invited us on a "purely voluntary" mantra with eyes closed and focussing on how relaxed the body was on the chair, the air soft on the face, etc. The class broke up with his advice to us to ask ourselves what a wise man would do in any challenging situation we found ourselves in.
Instead that night I began to check up on the School Of Philosophy & Economic Science. They'd begun in the 1930s as a UK offshoot of the ideas of Henry George, the man whose writings engendered the Progressive Movement in America, and were founded the the son of a Labour MP, Leon McLaren. Initially more concerned with socialised economics, SOPES became more involved with philosophy after WW2 and contact with the ideas of Ouspensky, Gurdjieff and Indian mystics. The Ireland branch of SOPES dates from the 1980s when they bought Townley Hall (a manor house on a small demesne near Drogheda) off a Trinity College professor who owned it since it ceased to operate as TCD's School of Agriculture in 1967.
The evolution of SOPES in Ireland is something I'm not clear on. But I have gleaned some details on the organization's leaders in Ireland and how it operates. Today it is a registered officially as a charity with 3 trustees, one of whom is an anesthetist at a major Dublin hospital and another who has been involved on the peripheries of social work and psychotherapy for around 30 years. It has a very small number of employees - likely less than 5 - and has a turnover on recent times of circa €800,000. Apart from the Townley Hall property that is used as a retreat centre, SOPES leases classrooms (often in office buildings) in various towns in Ireland where it runs its day and evening courses. The organization derives a lot of its operational viability from the large number of volunteer workers drawn from its students who are ranked into various levels based on their time and "standing" in SOPES. I suspect that the "tutors" are, at least in part, on the SOPES payroll. Looking through the past careers of some of them I see a common association with the major drugs companies operating in Ireland, in middle management sales or technical roles. The "tutor" of the class I attended could easily be imagined mannerizing and playing his way by ear into the trust of some exhausted practitioner.
There is no doubt in my mind that this organization is a cult, albeit a smoothly mannered and very middle-class one. In essence, they trade on ordinary people's ignorance of what the study of philosophy really is about: many people think that it is something that will give them some answers to help them find their way in life, relieve their anxieties, help them recover from recent heartbreak, bereavement, disappointment and so on. Of course, it is nothing of the sort. Many members of this forum may know men and women who are now very successful in careers like law, accounting and business but whose primary degree was in philosophy. For my own part, I have met ex-philosophy students whose logical aptitude was useful in debugging software. From what I can see, philosophy is mainly about disciplined and coherent thinking - and the various 'mystics' and fads we see going about would offer little more than weak demolition targets for a true philosopher.
SOPES is a cult because it intentionally seeks out these temporarily vulnerable people, coaxes them into suspending their critical faculties, uses gentle manners and a variety of passivity practices (mantra, relaxation, yoga) to get them to accepting assertions and ideas they likely would not otherwise - all in aid of acquiring their submission to the will of the organization's leaders. What else would you call an organization which advocates adherence to the principle of some innate wisdom independent of both our own and others' experience ? In its worst moments the catholic church accepted the need to earn one's bread, feeds one's dependents, having some bit of leisure and getting along with people of other persuasions. But SOPES will have none of that.
Brendan mentioned the comparable antics of Opus Dei - to my mind, another cult. I recall their old student hall of residence at Nullamore off Dartry Road and the day I was "interviewed" for a room there. "Mass is purely voluntary", etc ! But the Opus Dei lads were well known about - which professor in UCD was a member, their connections to Franco's ministers, their dismissive attitude to women's talents and so on - and people knew what their game was: entice aspiring members of the professional elite, then call in their favour later on in their professional life - a job for such and such or an administrative/political decision in such a way.
By contrast SOPES shows its true nature in how it tries to brainwash the weak and emotionally vulnerable. Anyone doubting their cult nature should scan the web for the reports of SOPES in the UK in the 1980s.