Scam or spirituality? The power and sex games at the heart of Access Consciousness
Former members of a group that has offered high-priced enlightenment since the 1990s reveal the sex and power games at the heart of Access Consciousness: ‘They f..k with your mind’.
Dain Heer is being driven through the streets of Prague en route to the biggest event of his year. The former chiropractor from California is dressed in signature florid style: a vermilion zebra-striped suit and vest, and collared shirt of royal blue.
Heer is the co-creator of Access Consciousness, an organisation variously described as a “spiritual group”, a “Scientology knock-off”, a purveyor of “alternative medicine”, a “personal development system” – or by many who spoke with The Weekend Australian Magazine for this story, a “cult”, which the group rejects.
He opens the camera on his phone and records a short, unscripted video: “It’s Day Three of Foundation, but it feels like a billion years has gone by,” Heer says.
“It does,” agrees his companion in the back seat of the luxury saloon. The octogenarian founder of Access Consciousness and one-time Scientologist Gary Douglas enters the picture. Douglas is more subdued in demeanour than Heer but his outfit is almost as over-the-top: a black suit embossed with the geometric outline of stars, over a silk, cobalt and white Versace shirt. The livery gets Heer’s approval: “Boy’s looking goooood!” he exclaims in support of his older friend. On this day in early May, Heer and Douglas are in Prague to host Access Consciousness’ annual three-and-a-half day Global Foundation course at Forum Karlin, a venue more often used for pop concerts. Advertised at €3000 ($4900) a ticket, about 600 participants attended.
Heer enthusiastically signs off his video, which will soon be posted to the two men’s combined Instagram audience of about 200,000 people. “If you’re out there wondering, ‘What’s going on?’, maybe just ask, ‘What else is possible [that] I’ve never considered? What doors are now open?’ Woooooooo!”
What is Access Consciousness?
Gary Douglas used to sell houses. Now he sells self-improvement. He founded the Access Consciousness system – a confusing mix of the spiritual, the pragmatic and the impossible – in the early 1990s from his base in Santa Barbara, California. It was there that the former realtor began to forge a lucrative career peddling a form of energy therapy he said he learned by “channelling” – of all people – the Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin. Today, according to Access Consciousness, the group is active in 170 countries worldwide, with major centres in America, Ireland and Australia. Its local base is at Queensland’s Coolum Beach on the Sunshine Coast.
It was Rasputin, Douglas said, who had introduced him to what would become Access Consciousness’s signature physical treatment, known as “bars therapy” – a trademark “hands-on energy healing process” which involves touching 32 points on a person’s head to release stress, anxiety and other “blockages”. In the hall at Forum Karlin, dozens of beds are laid out ready for Accessories (as Access Consciousness participants are called) to administer – or receive – the treatment.
Douglas has also declared he can channel a group of non-human beings called “Novian”. In a recording captured at one of his classes held in Houston, Texas, in 2016, he talks about an extraterrestrial experience that occurred in his youth. He describes how, at the age of six, he was taken to an alien ship and had a chip implanted. “They made sure they could protect me. All of the people taken up were taken to protect them from the insanity of this reality,” he tells his Advanced Body class.
In 2001 Douglas was joined at the helm of Access Consciousness by Heer, and in 2003 they recruited Australian Simone Milasas, a former bottled water saleswoman, who quickly rose to become the third most influential figure in the organisation. Today, she’s the worldwide business coordinator of Access Consciousness.
Fuelled by the internet and despite Douglas’ fanciful origin story, the popularity of his system of self-help grew. A quick search of the Access Consciousness universe today reveals a YouTube channel with 150,000 subscribers and a library of 870 videos posted in dozens of languages. Dain Heer’s channel boasts a further 155,000 subscribers and 960 videos. Official Access Consciousness pages have attracted 133,000 followers on Facebook, and another 132,000 on Instagram. The sophisticated network of multimedia resources also includes podcasts, available on Apple – there are 200 episodes of Simone Milasas’ The Choice, Change & Action podcast and 140 episodes of her second podcast creation, The Art & Industry of Business & Living; both are updated weekly.
This month, Access Consciousness’ leaders launched their latest business venture – a streaming platform available on devices and smart TVs to be known as Access.me. A free version will be made available, but a full subscription gives users access to a library of videos, films and courses, for $US250 per month.
What do Access Bars do?
In the physical world, Access Consciousness flourishes via a tightly-held hierarchical structure that places power in what it estimates as 3000 “licensed facilitators” trained to deliver a seemingly unlimited variety of courses across business, wellbeing and relationship counselling; it claims to deliver better finances, health, confidence, love lives, or beauty. Only accredited facilitators, who spend thousands of dollars attaining and then maintaining this certification, are allowed to deliver “bars therapy”.
Around the world, there are hundreds of courses available in the coming weeks alone – with facilitators across Australia offering classes and treatments live and over video.
In Queens Park, Perth, one woman is offering a three-day in-person Foundation course advertised on the Access Consciousness website at $2500 – Log in! A price advantage may apply – while a Stress Relief Introductory Workshop video class costs just $35. In Sydney’s Neutral Bay, the Access Bars Gifting & Receiving session (from $15) will run from a yoga studio; in Mooroolbark, Victoria, a $100 session titled An Introduction to Right Body for You – What if change with your body is possible? What if your body has a consciousness of its own? – will be given at a private residence; and in Strathfield, Sydney, an introductory Clarity Night ($60) is also on the calendar.
Or you could attend an Access Bars in the Park session in Pomona, Queensland, or take part in the two-day Talk to the Entities “beginners course” at a private home in Doonan on the Sunshine Coast ($2150). And so on. All offer to fundamentally improve your life.
Money, power, control, and sex
Indeed, for 30 years, Access Consciousness has prospered with its expensive courses and promises of healing and money for the searching and the vulnerable. There have been occasional reports of impropriety against the leaders (who declined to be interviewed for this article), ranging from crude and lewd remarks to accusations of sexual harassment in the touchy-feely environment that is an Access Consciousness class. But for the most part those who leave the organisation unfulfilled – or worse, potentially abused – have stayed silent about their experiences. In recent years, however, distraught former Accessories have begun to air grievances between themselves, even sharing stories on podcasts.
Margaret Braunack spent 20 years as an Access Consciousness facilitator and quit the organisation two years ago. Braunack travelled the world espousing the teachings of Douglas to eager recruits, and spent what she supposes must be millions to undertake hundreds of courses herself each year. In February 2022, after a protracted and painful falling out with the leaders of the group, she opted not to renew her facilitators “licence” (which she claims would have cost $17,000) and left Access Consciousness forever. Her insights into the organisation are startling.
“The first couple of years it was rewarding, and I believed the tools and techniques were life-changing for people,” Braunack tells The Weekend Australian Magazine. But, she adds, as “I watched the organisation grow and change [over two decades], the more money they were making and the more control they wanted to have.” As a devoted facilitator, she’d vowed to give Accessories the tools and techniques to become “empowered”, to unlock their “consciousness”, manifest their own financial and spiritual wellbeing, and change the world – just as she had been promised. “It is nothing more than the opposite of that,” she says now with quiet outrage. Access Consciousness, she says, is about four things: money, power, control, and sex.
Facilitators
Perth businesswoman Kerry Purcell wasdeeplyinvolved with Access Consciousness for 12 years. Her Facebook page “Kerry Purcell: Access Energy to Transform Your Body and Life” has been inactive since 2019, but it once faithfully parroted quotes from the organisation’s leaders, and promoted courses. At the peak of her involvement, Purcell says she spent $60,000 a year travelling the world taking classes with her toddlers in tow.
In 2010, she agreed to invest $150,000 towards Milasas’ bottled water business, Good Vibes For You. However, Purcell alleges she discovered that instead of putting the money into the business Milasas used it to pay off personal debts. Purcell claims she also invested $20,000 into a fund so the group could make a documentary. Douglas promised he’d pay it back. She plunged $50,000 into a book titled Prosperity Consciousness and then another $10,000 to help the founders buy the El Lugar resort in Costa Rica. At the time, she says she understood El Lugar to be registered as a not-for-profit entity. It has since been turned into a business that Access Consciousness has called on investment to support.
“It was typical of Gary to get up in class and start crying about how beautiful the land [at El Lugar] was and how much he wanted to change the world, and all sorts of people – even those deeply vulnerable and with little to spare – would get up and hand him money,” Purcell says. “He did the same when he was hit with a tax bill.”
In 2017 an excerpt from Milasas’ self-help financial book Getting Out of Debt Joyfully was published online at Mamamia.com. In it, she describes how the power of positive financial “energy” helped her pay off $187,000 of debt. The book attracted criticism for telling readers they should not prioritise paying bills because it indicated to the universe they would like to receive more bills.
“When I met [Douglas and Milasas] 20 years ago, none of them had anything,” Braunack says. “Milasas is now a multi-millionaire claiming to have used these tools to get there. People are desperate to have what she has. She fails to tell them her father gave her $50,000 which bailed her out of the debt she was in. Gary [Douglas] has lavished her with gifts and … money.”
Once a mainstay at spiritual expos around the nation, Milasas spent years developing and selling her Good Vibes bottled water. She joined Access in 2003 and built out its portfolio of courses. From July 31 to August 3 this year, Milasas will host Joy of Business facilitator training, advertised at a cost of $6200. According to the Access Consciousness website she is also conducting an Advanced Body Class from November 1 to 3 at the Mantra in Mooloolaba at a cost of $4750.
Access Consciousness leaders certainly appear to have become very wealthy. At every turn followers are asked to dip into their pockets for retreats, bars therapy classes, teleconferences, books and other resources. A regulation Access Bars class, recommended to be undertaken at least once every three weeks, costs participants about $450 a session. Becoming a facilitator has become even more costly. In February, a five-day qualifying course held at the Peppers Resort in Noosa cost attendees $7500. Participants also had to have paid for and completed no less than 12 previous courses and nine teleseries events hosted by Douglas to qualify – the cumulative cost of which is more than $30,000. Braunack recalled classes in which Heer discussed plans to buy a Ferrari; The Weekend Australian Magazine has since obtained a photograph showing Heer climbing out of a blue Ferrari 296 GTS.
She believes Douglas boasts a property portfolio that includes a fully restored castle – Castello di Casalborgone – in northern Italy, as well as El Lugar, which was at least partly financed via contributions from Access Consciousness supporters. Other property includes a waterfront address at Noosa Heads which can be booked for $1000-$2000 a night. In the two decades Braunack was involved in the organisation, she said she watched as the founders “have gone from renting a house that they shared in Santa Barbara and travelling in coach class to now flying by private jets and owning numerous properties around the world”.
Sonia, another long-time Access Consciousness participant, who asked that we don’t use her real name, says the vast amounts of cash leaders received from followers was used to buy gold and silver bullion, and kept in a safe in Milasas’ Sunshine Coast home. “There was a class she brought a whole heap of bricks of silver and gold out to. She uses a silver block as a doorstop,” Sonia says. She says she can recall the day – October 6, 2020 – when Milasas walked into Isabella’s Fine and Antique Jewellery store at Noosa Heads and dropped $30,000 on antique gold earrings.
Braunack alleges the leaders of Access Consciousness boasted about methods to minimise paying tax, while also instructing followers on how to do the same, and says Douglas admitted creating multiple businesses that confused America’s Internal Revenue Service after being hit with a $US2 million tax bill.
Milasas declined to participate in an interview about her work with Access Consciousness or answer questions for this article. However, in a video seen by The Weekend Australian Magazine, understood to have been sent to facilitators after receiving detailed questions from the authors of this piece, Milasas says: “I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve chosen, I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done. I’ve stumbled and fallen, I’ve got back up, and I keep choosing and I keep choosing.”
The perfect family
Sonia and her husband left the organisation almost two years ago. “We were the poster family of Access Consciousness,” she says. “My husband and I had met inside it and brought the kids up inside it. They used our good looks and family dynamics, saying, ‘Look, this is what you can be like if you join our little group’.”
To free herself from the organisation, which had been Sonia’s whole life, took several intensely stressful months. She says she saw the leaders as her family. Douglas had officiated their wedding and her children were in Milasas’ will. In the event the couple were to die unexpectedly, they had planned to make Milasas their children’s legal guardian.
Sonia, who is from the US, met her Australian husband at a class in Costa Rica. When she came to Australia to visit him she fell pregnant with twins. “The first call we each made separately was to Gary [Douglas]. It scares me to admit that if he told me not to have the babies, I wouldn’t have had them,” she says.
As her children run around playing in their suburban backyard, she breaks down recounting the devotion she had to the organisation she spent 12 years inside.
It took just one session of Access Consciousness’ bars class, and a $US1200 four-day course, to become utterly hooked. “I caught the bug,” she says. “I wanted to know what else they had.” For a time Sonia ran Access Consciousness’ membership program. Milasas referred to Sonia as her “creative producer”.
But when the pandemic hit, making travel to classes impossible, Sonia says the control Access Consciousness had on her suddenly loosened. She and her husband began to question everything they’d been told. “You are always adding things that don’t sit right on the shelf, and eventually the whole thing comes crashing down,” she explains. With the help of a friend she connected with international cult expert Janja Lalich, and realised she’d lost herself and her identity inside the group. She sought Lalich’s advice on devising an exit strategy.
That wasn’t easy. “All of my and my husband’s income was connected to their network as we worked for them as contractors,” Sonia says. “I ran my own business too, although many of my clients were members of Access.”
“We were completely financially reliant on them.”
As Sonia pulled back from Access Consciousness, she made excuses not to see the leaders socially or attend live events and looked for a way to replace her family income.
Soon after, she claims, the leadership began discrediting her. In a recording obtained by The Weekend Australian Magazine at a facilitator training class in America in September 2022, Douglas told attendees: “I personally curse her; may she die in hell.” Milasas said: “You can f. king die, bitch”, while the class laughed and applauded.
In an article published online, a former Access Consciousness follower brands the organisation a “scam cooked up … to rinse the vulnerable of their savings … [it] programs its members to think like robots. It is very clever how it is done … it is mind control”.
Sonia says during her time in Access Consciousness, followers were instructed not to tell anybody outside the group what they were told in classes. “When [the nuclear accident at] Fukushima happened, we’d have to get to work on fixing the problem which would mean coming to more classes and giving more money,” she says. “Then when something good would happen, [they’d] take credit for it.”
If somebody who had left the group suffered an accident, they’d claim they had a hand in that, too. “They are f. king with your brain,” Sonia says.
Unwelcome relationships
In her early years at Access Consciousness, Braunack said Douglas attempted to pressure her into a relationship “with an older man in the group, but I said no”. She put the incident out of her mind and forged on, moving deeper into the Access world, focusing on what she wanted to achieve: to give people the tools to help themselves. In a YouTube video from 2014, Braunack appears to be fully entrenched. In truth, “the wheels started falling off” years earlier, as she saw much that disturbed her. “I was watching Dain [Heer] start doing his own … classes, manipulating women to have sex with him,” she claimed. Braunack says she consoled women after sexual encounters with Dain.
One such woman is a 40-year-old Queenslander who we’ll call Rose (she asked for her real name not to be published). Rose says she initially sought the help of Access Consciousness to recover from childhood abuse. She describes a sexual encounter she had with Dain Heer as “the worst experience of my life”.
“Dain groomed me for sex. When you are new, he flirts with you. There was always sexual energy coming from him,” Rose says. “He knows exactly what to say and how to get vulnerable women into bed. They think they’re the chosen one,” she claims. After allegedly sleeping with Heer, she says, “I realised it wasn’t what it had been made out to be – a beautiful caring experience. [The leaders] have a saying – ‘Just for me, just for fun, never tell anyone.’ They endorse cheating on your partner. If it’s fun for you it’s OK.” Purcell also recalls incidences of alleged sexual misconduct. At a seven-day retreat in New Zealand she alleges several women reported to her they had been touched inappropriately by massage therapists, including being “digitally penetrated”.
“I had learned enough to consider I had a reasonable complaint, and that it should be addressed,” Purcell says. She says that when she put the claims to the organisation her concerns were turned back on her – it was suggested that she was the “pervert”. Purcell dropped the matter.
British police officer Tracy Howlett, 49, first encountered Heer in 2016 in Vienna at a “Choice of Possibilities” class. Despite her role in law enforcement, working with the public prosecutions team and dealing with the most vulnerable victims of serious abuse, Howlett was drawn into Access Consciousness.
“I’m embarrassed I got pulled into it so much. I wasn’t vulnerable when I had my uniform on, but at home I was,” she says. Going to Austria was the first time she’d travelled alone after separating from her husband of 20 years.
“I spent £1800 for the class, plus travel and accommodation. It was an extra £300 for a healing session with Dain. He was watching me constantly. If I moved anywhere in the room, he was watching me. Even trying to hug me in the corridor when I went to the toilet.
“He put his hand on my chest and held my hand with his face so close to me I could smell mint on his breath and asked me, ‘When was the first time that you were made to feel wrong for feeling sexual?’”
Howlett alleged that despite feeling no initial attraction towards Heer, she found herself becoming drawn to him with every further encounter, text or WhatsApp message, and spent thousands on credit and the money left from the sale of her house from her divorce to attend every class he ran in Europe.
When she experienced recurrent symptoms of PTSD, Heer told her she was “shaving off the layers of anti-consciousness” and getting down to the “rawness” of herself.
Howlett accused Heer of manipulating vulnerable women, and “that went down like a ton of bricks”, she says, adding: “He told me: ‘If you are refusing to receive my contribution to you then you are refusing to receive in other areas of your life’.” Before the pandemic hit in February 2020, Howlett attended a three-day class in Brazil hosted by Heer. He invited her to his suite, where he allegedly kissed her before she said she had to leave. Upon her return to London, he asked her to send nude pictures.
By this stage, Howlett felt she needed to get away from Heer and deleted his numbers, but she remained under the spell of Access Consciousness and bars therapy. “Bars had become an addiction. I felt I couldn’t go without having my bars run for a week. But during Covid I couldn’t. I thought it was interesting that I didn’t fall down and die without having my bars run, and that was the turning point.”
“Dain is the greatest showman on Earth, and [he and Douglas] are very clever, intelligent men, but [they’re] using it in a way that is manipulative, that can be disguised easily, and they talk their way out of it. They are charlatans and have a good racket going,” she claims.
‘Mr Golden Dick’
Men, too, found themselves being groomedandlove-bombed by the leadership. Byron Bay carpenter Andrew Ferriman claims he was groomed to become a “foot soldier” and enter into the inner fold with Douglas and Heer. “Gary said I had to be aware of energy. He said: ‘I could look around the room and tell you all the women who want to have sex with you’ [including] Gary’s daughter, Grace,” Ferriman claims. Douglas then allegedly said to him: “If you have to f. k them into consciousness that’s what you have to do.”
“When they are offering you women it’s very seductive. [Douglas] would pitch Dain as Mr Golden Dick, as the greatest man who ever walked on the Earth and any woman who gets to be with him is going to be enlightened.”
A lifelong search for meaning
Those who spoke with The WeekendAustralian Magazine for this story all say they encountered Access Consciousness just as their lives had entered a time of flux, whether it be divorce, illness, the unexpected death of a loved one, trauma at work, or sexual trauma.
Braunack became entwined with its teachings during a lifelong search for meaning – she had been raised a Catholic, but as an adult came to look for guidance outside the Church. She got cancer. She trained as a naturopath and hypnotherapist. She says she wanted to help people. In 2003, at the age of 48, twice divorced and struggling with the grief of her father’s death, a friend invited her to an Access Consciousness introduction night in the bayside suburb of Wynnum in Brisbane’s north. She says she found the whole thing weird – “It was stuff I’d never come across. I went home thinking it wasn’t for me” – but “a force” compelled her to sign up for another course. Within three months she had completed a four-day “Foundation Level One” course and attended a conference that dealt with sex and relationships, held in Sydney and hosted by Douglas. “I knew I had to meet him,” she says.
She heard Douglas talk of “Humanoids” (a kind of hyper-aware human being who can bend the universe to their will and survive on sugar and water) and implore Accessories like her to simply “choose to create their own reality”. She knew it was wild but “there was something about him. An Energy that I’d never felt before. He was coming from a space I truly believed was from a space of consciousness”.
Days later she was doing Level 2 and 3 on the Gold Coast; the following week, when Douglas offered to teach participants how to become facilitators, she jumped at the chance, paying to travel to New Zealand to complete her training.
Within a year of starting on the Access Consciousness path, Braunack gave up all other work to become one of what was then a handful of Access Consciousness facilitators in Australia. She says she is “haunted” by what she witnessed during her time within the organisation. “Gary is a chameleon. One minute friendly and unassuming, the next screaming profanities. Many find him intimidating and [are] too scared to approach or ask a question … if he didn’t like what you asked, the intensity of energy that he would deliver would be enough to blow your hair off your face. It was not easy to wear the abuse.”
Braunack says that as soon as she found it difficult to hide her discontent, the group began to view her as difficult. “I was always in trouble. The leaders set up people to report back to them. My licence was always being threatened and I got to a point where I was living on eggshells.” Questioning the leaders resulted in “verbal, and even physical” punishment, she claims. In summing up the organisation she spent decades serving, she says, in her opinion it was “physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and financially – torture”.
According to Dr Steven Hassan, a mental health professional and an expert on cults and undue influence, one of the appeals of a group such as Access Consciousness is that the leader talks with certainty. “You [feel you] can trust them, and the other people around are intelligent and believe it. [These groups] are everywhere because people are worried about the planet, global warming, or economic uncertainty. In these environments, cults proliferate because people want certainty and assurance.”
At Access Consciousness, more people than ever are seeking the organisation’s assurances. According to its website, more than 1600 classes will be held globally between now and August 2025. Along with the regulation Access Bars Class, myriad bespoke courses of seemingly endless variety include the Access Energetic Facelift ($560), which purports to lift the breasts and buttocks of participants. The Access X-Men course held in locations in Europe (€1500, or $2440) poses the question, what if life-threatening diseases we’ve termed fatal can be changed? In June, the Conscious Horse, Conscious Rider horseriding course will be held in Cooloolabin, Queensland ($688). Multiple facilitators attached to these courses did not respond to questions from The Weekend Australian Magazine. Gary Douglas, Dain Heer and Simone Milasas also did not respond to detailed questions including allegations of abuse.
The weekend after Access Consciousness’s big celebration in Prague, Heer took to social media once more. This time he recorded his message from the lavishly restored 18th-century castle-turned-hotel Castello Di Casalborgone in Italy.
“This place is wow,” says Heer, and for once he is not overstating. His five-minute video starts in the grounds of the castle and captures a beautiful spring day in picturesque Piedmont. He then moves inside and records a lilting performance by a female string duo, before viewers are treated to a tour of his suite. The room is guarded by a bronze sculpture of a woman peering out a window – “She’s checking out the view,” he jokes before panning back and revealing the sculpture’s bare bottom. “My goodness!” he shrieks in faux-shock.
Inside, the opulence is breathtaking. The room is furnished with antique treasures and sports a floor-to-ceiling fresco. Heer is silent for dramatic effect. “For today I’m just gonna bask in this view with a glass of Champagne,” he tells his followers. “I know it should be Prosecco, but somebody poured the Champagne.”