Its important for you to know that these short reads are especially the unraveling of my own experience in a cult, as well as the projections and emotions that have been stirred by my experience. I would like to be able to convince people to leave the motorhead guru but I know thats impossible. If the current situation isnt convincing enough there is no convincing from the outside in. These essays are not meant to be revelatory of any information or evidence or expertise. I was tempted by Write Club, along with the desire to know my own thoughts, to hear my own voice as it speaks plainly out of my own life.
These essays have taken me into places within myself that have been shut up and closeted for the entire length of time I was in the cult. Making it public is my only editor and the regulator of what would otherwise flow fluidly into an internal wonderland where I cannot find any imperative to make my experience understandable. Ive been in a cult after all. I could more easily disassociate from the experience, instead of writing it down. After Write Club, there is inspiration from James Baldwin who said, When youre writing, youre trying to find out something you dont know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you dont want to know, what you dont want to find out. But something forces you anyway.
I am easily led around by Metaverse feeds, scrolling and searching, scrolling then stopping to watch a video of a paddle boarder in the company of two whales. After a couple repeated views, I scroll on, wondering if it had even been real, that reel, a metaphor for my own internal questioning. What was real?
A friend sent a kind text, and I felt her arm slip around me virtually as I read her words. When a quote came up on my feed from her page I stopped to read When you understand every opinion is a vision loaded with personal history, you will start to understand that all judgment is a confession. I put the phone down then. My will deflated. The rebel anger intensity I had felt in writing Mother Superior while my nervous system buzzed like a high-tension wire, it all completely collapsed. Now Im on the floor, combing through the judgments for my own confession.
There were so many judgments implanted in me by the motorhead. I repeatedly catch myself still speaking from beliefs I no longer believe. I am beginning to catalogue the insertions in my psyche from his distorted views that were impressed upon us again and again until we stopped asking questions and simply stayed rapt. We believed him. We trusted him. How did he arouse that in us? How is that aroused in anyone, or during the covidcrisis, everyone? This may be valuable research. When the chips come in we may want to know the difference between our own thoughts and the implants.
To a young woman on the verge of returning to meet her father, a man who had molested her when she was a child, the motorhead leaned in to her request for advice and said Move your sexuality toward him. This statement is lifted out of the context of our languaging in the cult, so it may stand out as extremely strange. What I understood him to mean at the time is no less strange: she was to marshal her sexual energies and project those energies into her father. It is difficult to garner any further understanding because the woman nodded as if she knew what he meant and there was no more said about it.
There was a manner of communion in the cult where a certain energy of awareness becomes heightened and it begins to hum inside the body. Everything else blurs. The energy begins to vibrate, and can be directed at someone else. The motorhead did this with ease and intent to one degree or another in most every situation I witnessed. Directing energy could activate similar or empathic frequencies in others. Someone especially sensitive could pick up the vibration even without it being directed at them. These energies or wave frequencies may be gathered up in the sexual centre or gathered together in the heart, or the head, or any energy centre in the body. Seemingly reaching a critical mass, that energy may be projected outwards from the body. When the energy accumulated in the sexual centre, arousal could occur. Women sometimes had orgasms while sitting in a meeting.
Since stepping out of the cult, there have been chance meetings with continuing cult members, and this energy vibration reinstates itself. The atmosphere surrounding the conversation shifts like a Marvel movie effect, sending waves in between and all around. Where those energies have been implanted or activated, it is difficult not to respond to them, especially meeting with those of the high-powered inner circle adepts. Either I leave my body altogether or I focus all my awareness on my feet, my knees, my trembling thighs, and concentrate on standing upright in the midst of an energetic maelstrom coming at me. Continuing in conversation requires another degree of close attention.
Because of our belief in him, we took to understanding many things we had no actual knowledge of. The moving of energy, going in and out of him, or each other, was a frequent past time. He would say we had no idea what we are doing. Then he would say, if you are ever murdered, move right into the murderer. That idea quieted a long time fear of mine, but did I have any idea what that actually meant, or any first principle of how to do that? Nonetheless a fear was quieted and if I had the chance I would have gone into my murderer with all my energy centres blazing. Then what? Turn us both in?
It was his weird insinuations impressed upon us again and again in multiple different ways that changed our brains, changed the way we thought, but gave us no real instruction or follow through. Looking back it is difficult to believe anything he ever said.
A friend met with a fellow after he had come directly from a cult campout. My friend experienced a ball of energy coming out of him and in to her. Any unusual occurrences like that were reported to the motorhead. His response was, I put that in him and then he put it in you. Right. Report all unusual events to the boss so he can claim credit for all of it. Our world was awash with the intangibles of unseen fields of [add word soup here] and it was all to his credit. We created beliefs without substance, and he never corrected us. He healed my cat. He can heal my cancer.
We asked for his insight after someone in the group had a psychotic break. That is her own choice, said he. She could have chosen differently. Yes, we nodded, as if we understood how any psychological state could be instantly dispelled with a subtle will and mere choice.
As I understand it, a person who is ill doesnt recognize their choice in the matter. If they did, they would not be ill. I know that, then and now, but listening to him speak from his elevated seat, I must admit that in the moment I believed, and her suffering was suddenly dismissible because after all, it was her choice. What a stupid choice she made.
This can be associated with the danger-zone, described by Lobaczewski in About Reality. With thanks to Dr. Malone for posting Danger-zone Psychopathy from Political Ponerology.
The danger-zone syndrome is very common among people in positions of wealth, power, and leadership, particularly those who confuse their own lack of moral inhibition with intelligence. Psychopaths and sociopaths tend to be ethically uninhibited, as it conduces to the acquisition of wealth and power at the expense of others… Foolishly equating morality to stupidity, they come to believe that ethically inhibited people are their intellectual inferiors—after all, have the morally inhibited not let morality tie their hands, thus showing themselves to be “losers” and therefore “stupid”?—and fall into a spiral of excessive self-esteem which the approval and adulation of others can only reinforce. (FAQs About Reality, p. 98)
This is an interesting insight along the path of discovery. However, Im exhausted with attempts at understanding his psychology. What about me? What remains in me of his mind altering obfuscations to be dispelled and cleaned out? Where do I continue to move energies or dismiss reality based on belief in an overblown egoistic philosophy?
On the bright side, in light of Lobaczewski, I know my conscience finally got the better of me. My stupid, loser, ethical inhibitions finally woke up and started breathing fire.
Spot on, as always !!
Bravo.