After escaping from a trickster motor-head, dressed up in silk suits as a glam spiritual teacher, I have worked my way out of one scam cult into a larger world wide web of power-fuelled deception and secrecy. The grand scale of the world wide cult substantially dwarfs the charismatic Youtubing teacher of Truth and his dominion, while at the same time reveals parallels that are earth shattering. There is an invisible matrix that becomes visible.
Invisibility is an essential requirement for any system of control. If we know we are being controlled, we aren’t going to like it, are we? We aren’t going to mindlessly go along because someone is telling us what they want us to do, are we?
Once we become believers in a control system, then almost anything goes within that system. Once we become believers, the leash holders within the control system begin to outright tell us what we they want us to believe. Actions and behaviours we would never have accepted before become normal and validated, even virtuous and enlightened. We are wooed. We are reeled in. We are purposefully mesmerized to see differently. Then, for example, we might figure that giving money to someone who has loads more money than we do is a good thing. Or perhaps the suggestion gets mixed with a whack of fear, so it seems prudent to let large corporations put a new technology inside our bodies because large corporations told us it is the best thing we can do for others.
Slowly but surely, one purposeful hook, into our natural human longing for more, makes way for extreme behaviours that obviously cause harm. Even fanatical and destructive behaviours can be made to look different, if only you can see differently. And you will see differently when you are a believer.
I wanted to believe. It is my only excuse.
There was a seed of need and desire, planted from childhood. It grew into a longing for spiritual guidance, not from books or religions, but from the magical mystery of a spiritual friend. Someone all-knowing, benevolently kind, a superhuman who was evolved, divine and beyond the smear of the mundane. I see a small girl in a small chair at a small table with a large woman telling her about Jesus. The child listens. Jesus could heal the sick and raise the dead and walk on water and turn fishes into loaves, or so she heard it. And she was wide-eyed. There was talk of God, another high and mighty imaginary superhero who finds out who is naughty or nice, a being who never lives or dies but will make a substantial difference in your life if you believe in him, and his only strangely-begotten son. The girl writes everything down in a small notebook and treasures it, the magic of this man-made myth.
Among other things, it was this longing, a wishful desire sparked from a young child’s treasured storybook, that became a craving and a need for a lofty ideal from which I fell for an everyday, run of the mill, back country cult leader. Does this movement of desire, this reach for something beyond what is available, does it not move in every single human life? Is there not a hook in everyone that one day, each to their own, a person will be taken by, sooner or later, but never never?
Soon after it became clear to me that the teacher of Core-Splitting Honesty was Svengali incarnate, someone spoke to me of psychopaths. It was completely out of the blue and unsolicited, a message from a deeper reality than the shiny surface of everyday interactions, and it led to a startling realization. A psychiatrist, experienced in working with incarcerated criminals, abruptly told me meeting an actual psychopath is a rare encounter. You will recognize them by their good looks, an irresistible charisma, and an above average intelligence. And they will exhibit no fear or anxiety. That was a crisp description of the man I had called my spiritual teacher. Her conclusion was there is no cure for a psychopath. All that may occur during treatment is to find some tiny little bit of anxiety that can be encouraged and developed and only rarely will it reunite the psychopath with a natural human feeling for others.
Maybe she is right. And maybe due to the trickle down effect there are more psychopaths in the world today, born of the overarching “pathological pursuit of profit and power,” as told by Joel Bakan, and the movie, The Corporation. All that’s necessary is the right ticket, the right hook, that many, if not millions will reach for, advertised as a golden ring and in reality is the enslavement of humanity.
When it turns out that I fell for an everyday run of the mill back country psychopath, and way too much later realized he had been riding me for years, taking my money, taking my friends to a bed in the basement of his wife’s house, and enticing me to work as a slave on his properties, it’s a lot easier to see that on world wide levels, the same thing is occurring.
Being raised by control, makes an easy mark for those who would take advantage. I was trained to perform in particular ways as a child. My ever-present childhood concern was that any move I made would be pleasing, or at the very least tolerated.
There is a peculiar sensation in the body that comes with the feeling of one’s self being tolerated, the feeling of barely being allowed, or only marginally permitted to exist, or openly endured. Within the lower energy centres, a dark form takes shape and attempts ascension into higher centres, regions within still bound to spirit and love despite the circumstance. Finding all the upper gates closed to its rising fury, it lumbers back down into damp places, light-less and heavy. It stays there. It waits.
There are moments in childhood remembered that are actually real. They live as few, and far between the endless time keeping tik-tok of parents or teachers, with their insisting and criticizing. There are real moments squeezed between the authoritarian demands for more and more loyalty to the wants and needs of adults, needs of a privileged kind. It wasn’t shoes or books that were lacking. It was love. It was connection. It was the gaze of care that humans depend on to stay human.
Without that, an artifice is put in place, an artifice of transactional love, what isn’t love at all. With relationships conditioned by what a person can get rather than give, there comes a longing for something known deep down inside, known but not manifested. It is something that would fit into a hole that has opened up inside somewhere, an empty place that grows bigger as the child grows, a hole for love where there isn’t any, a space meant to be filled with wonder and curiosity, a verdant realm for blooming, a heavenly world made of earthly joys and sacred joys. No consumer goods will ever satisfy this waiting gap, this entryway to what is authentic, and where the keys to where we came from are hidden.
There are moments of childhood that are very real. They eclipse a televised Family Life.They are remembered and re-lived into old age because they were so stunningly gorgeous, so vast in the reach of the mind, so far to the east and to the west and to the other side of the planet. Moments of beauty, when the body relaxes, or perhaps remains balanced in an exquisite way to maintain the sensation of grandeur, or greatness, what is stretched far and above the small stature of a child, into a cosmic blue sky, into the thick smell of an animal or the garden. In! and in! and further in! in to being part of a fantastic eternal expanding space and time where no one is ever alone.
Of course, I did drugs, only occasionally, to refresh myself from the mind-numbing needs and creeds of other people with more power than I. The states of awareness that opened under the influence were probably a pre-requisite to becoming a cult follower. Being susceptible to altered states of consciousness, it’s a no brainer I would be susceptible to hypnosis. There is the double sharp edge of consciousness expanding drugs. Once you’re in, it’s hard to see your way out, like being in a cult. Once I experienced states of awareness that resonated with childhood experiences of awe and wonder, I cherished those drug-induced states, engendered them, and kept them glowing and growing, until one day I met a man who appeared to know more about those states than I, who seemed to reach right into that empty hole, grown evermore wide, ever more empty, and fill it with something that seemed like the perfect fit. Emptiness disappeared. I was full of wonder and awe, smiling through my tears. Signed, sealed, delivered. I was in.
But tonight, one year to the day of ending all participation in the cult, all I wanted to do was sit on the sofa and watch reels on my phone when my husband came close, spoke loudly in my ear saying They are programming you. You are now under their control. You are in the metaverse and it will tell you what to do and you will not even notice. It was at that moment I remembered Write Club, and a note on my calendar: start a Substack.
Well written Jess.
I particularly liked this sentence:
“Moments of beauty, when the body relaxes, or perhaps remains balanced in an exquisite way to maintain the sensation of grandeur, or greatness, what is stretched far and above the small stature of a child, into a cosmic blue sky, into the thick smell of an animal or the garden.”
I could deeply relate.
It is so good to explore what and who we are in this lifetime. I enjoy your well-written posting with such honest introspection.