To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.
—Henrik Ibsen
The most excruciating difficulty I experienced in the cult was in my psyche, in the war between My Good Side and My Bad Side. If John played on this divisiveness in my psychology for the sake of his own mad desires that is his to atone for—or not— because it may be impossible for him to overcome what has taken possession of him. That larger than life Thing that all of us put onto him, and that he took for his own, a cloak of grandiosity. Like an unforgettable Twilight Zone episode of persons putting on masks and when the clock struck midnight, the masks woudlnt come off.
Its possible Ive escaped his possession of me by now, escaped wearing the eternal mask of spiritual materialism. What comes next is redirecting my misplaced longing to live a true life, a spiritual life. How will I manifest an authentic way of living without help from a teacher? What was provided by Johns group think no longer holds any answers except as it exemplifies what not to do. My compass is yet pointing away from and not fully toward a new north.
Establishing a whole new relationship to the luminous and sacred realms feels somewhat imminent. Im unwilling to divorce the beatific even though I was taken by a charlatan who employed those energies to deceive me. It was a seductive ideology Im doing my level best to sort through here. All the while, there is something in those realms of unseen spirit that remains vital and necessary to humanity. There is power in those places, a transcendent force, undeniably capable of being used for good or evil. I imagine my choices, moment by moment, make or break any beneficent communion with those energies. Furthermore, it appears to me that those invisible territories gain more ungodly power when they are actively ignored or kept hidden. The less aware we become of what we cannot see but know is there, the more untamed the movements of what we cannot see become.
That may be what I learned in Johns world. He was the only one considered privy to the magical matters of the unseen. As for myself, much as I tried to keep my awareness levelled on my transcendent being, the more my lower self was pressurized and afraid. I will never get this. I will never heal. I will never transcend. All the conspiracies of a bullied ego, suppressed by a Master of the Grandiose. Actually, I bullied myself with his ideology. I transferred my own grandiose notions of what The Good Life means directly onto him.
Older cultures, traditional cultures, once upon a time embraced the unseen wonders of existence. The sacred was given credence and it could be communicated with. It could be projected onto without undue harm. In turn, as I have heard, it communicated with the mundane world as well. There was conversation between the sacred and the profane, exchanging energies between the transcendent and the worldly, as two sides of a whole. It sounds like it was pretty clean. No middle man, no single leader with all the power, and no one pulling strings behind a stage show. Very much unlike our modern magic shows, where the mysterious parts of our world have gotten so infinitesimally tiny that only a select elite is able to perceive such minuscule elementals. Knowing they are the only ones able to reach into that material depth, knowing they are the select few with way more information than the masses, the populace who are virtually blind at those depths of materialism, they imagine themselves gods. Worse than that, many of the people believe those men and women are gods, blithely feeding their pathological grandiosity. We cant look away from these beasts of materialism and seriously believe they will go away. If we look away, they grow stronger, insidious and pernicious. Our first measure should be to look them in the eye and take stock of what they are and what they have done. Even then they will never go away but they will be visible, not lurking in the unseen, pulling strings on guileless peoples.
To the mundane world that is imperfect and messy, filled with imperfect and messy humans, desecrating nature at every turn, I must return. I arrive with a different understanding, the result of a unique course correction. From the netherworld of a tricksters power grab to the real world and what ho!? Same but different. It feels really different because it is only me out here. The cult was an ongoing ritual in turning our backs on the worlds mess and destruction as one conglomerate being. Easy to do with many of us together. No thought required focusing on Johns mystical screen of light and love and goodness that transcends any personal self, while we were all part of his spiritual army.
Unlike the quick view shoppers, we were too old for tiktok. That wasnt going to capture us. Besides we were serious seekers. We were looking for an ideology and the backcountry guru had one. Nowadays, that pay no attention to the dark side ideology he provided is no longer containing the fragments of my psyche. Bits of darkness arise unfiltered, while the object of my transference, the holder of all I deemed highest and finest, the container of what I loved as golden and god-like, that guy is long gone. What to do with my God love? Who will be my Love God? What God of Love balances the light and the dark?
Gees it was so much easier following a leaders narrative than paying attention to the dark normalization of human sacrifice of this world, the endless war of Orwells unholy vision, the world wide clinical trial. I look through the crack between the seats on an airplane and see it on a phone screen, the passenger watching Netflix, a body, the blood, the death. We turned away from what is evil, and in so doing became more vulnerable to it. Youre either love or food for the agents, John said, referring to the agents of Neos matrix. Of course we were meant to be love, but somewhere inside where doubt was ingrained, we were liable to be food. Our best response was to pour more love into John while the worst was grounds for fearing what food we might be.
Although the containment of cult secrets was applauded, there was no containment of the grandiose energies that would see the Messiah in him, the second coming, the truth and the way. Those energies were given free rein. We all became narcissistic alongside him. It was not spiritual. It was an artificial substitute for the myths and rituals of an earlier time in human history, when the numinous was allowed into the every day and it answered the dark, excluded parts of the self. In the everyday the sacred is able to lift us up. In a cult, anything sacred is entrusted to the one ordained leader and loses ability to lift anyone up, except for the leader. Form follows energy. We gave it all to him, just like billions gave it up to the experts conducting their human experiments of 2020 and beyond.
Evil has superior spiritual powers and it leads us astray. It makes us believe it is God and that we may become god-like if we commit to servicing its dark agenda. In serving the herd, immunity will be achieved. Goodness can be enlisted, possessed and driven by dark forces. There are believers, good people, still believing. They wont be argued with either. We are so vaxxed we are sterile. Theres nothing to discuss here.
When I dream of the cult nowadays, my subconscious still unraveling the times and scenes, there is no relationship to a higher nature, but an experience of enslavement to what is low and unformed. Things are eaten, chewed and spewed, exposed and defiled, beauty becomes ugly. I wake up feeling particularly grossed out.
I may be making up for so many years of avoiding the dark, even while my psyche was warring inside. Darkness abides. It has significant power, especially when it is ignored.
Looking back, I hear one of the voices of Tibets diaspora, that the mind cannot be altered or changed, only somewhat clarified. You have to come back to what you are, rather than reform yourself to something else. Johns artificial world, just like the psyops of the real world, was always about reforming what we were to make more of what edified him, giving evermore to his grandiose psychopathy. He did alter our minds. It changed our physiology, no less than the shots have altered the health of the whole of humanity. Well, yes, we allowed it. We didnt know better. We werent informed of what was in Johns ideological concoction, no more than we knew what was/is in those shots. Something too tiny to be perceived by anything less than the The Mind. Something invisible and unseen to anyone but a Master Mind.
What God holds the light and the dark and remains sane and pure? What God carries the weight of the worlds and realms and is not possessed by its resplendence? What other than God is available to project what is good and bad of my psyche onto so I can see it clearly, and come back to what I am?
Hi Jessica,
Well written and discerned!
We did not know what evil ‘soup’ the cult leader was cooking behind the invisible curtain. I still don’t know. Some person who is skilled in hypnosis can convince someone, who has stripped away his critical mind, of the magical world inside making believe that what he is seeing is true.
This is copying the real. This speaks true for the outside world as well as we see it .
I enjoy your insides, Jess.