Hanging out with the courageous who have turned against the backcountry motorhead guru. Hanging out around the light of a fire in the Rockies, a short distance into the backcountry, enough to lose track of time, enough to stretch my hearing further than the norm into a far reaching silence, enough to know the world still opens freely to misty skies from the roots of tall pines that feather mountain sides and cradle small beings in a moist valley. Just three miles from the rushing river of motor traffic. We cant hear it. The ridge between has buffered us from the outside world and we are camping in the natural world. So quiet and clean.
We expected bears and found only a couple old piles of scat. But the hike in was noisy with Hey Bear! repeated often and the hike out just the same. I was knackered loading out, my pack heavy with wet gear and a physical lack of fuel. So while my body laboured my imagination joined in, seeing the bear, replaying scenes from Alpha, and watching for what could come out of nowhere, surrounded as I was by nowhere.
There was only greenery in magnificent and multiple shades. There was greenery in contrast to dark openings— Hey Bear! And strands of branch and root entangled underfoot or by the way. It was said to be a beginners hike and that wasnt entirely true. But we made it and never saw a bear, only in my imagination, how it must have been for my brother taken unawares, how it could be for me, but wasnt. We survived. We are surviving.
We god-sipped a lot. About the people still duped and daring to continue with an eightfold-assault-indicted sex guru. A penismind who sells himself as a paragon of honesty while secreting his real life away in underground chambers. He calls the invitation to his underground an opportunity. There are only a few we still think of to miss. We have forgotten peoples names. We no longer picture most of them. After months and months of walking over the ground of his deception, the roots of our belief in him are now exposed, and his followers implicated as well. However, on unseen levels we remain entwined, and the separation demanded by the penismind, see The Magicians Wall, is a mirage.
We sit in a circle in the backcountry and feel embraced by a greater power. We celebrate each other, sensing a natural freedom in the twilight mist, in the unending quiet. Laying claim to a higher allegiance, we have survived the kneeling will and harrowed ego that surrendered us to a guru.
Oh surrender, how sweet it is! but a razors edge to trek, poisonous if not pure.
Who do you miss the most, Jess?
No one, I say and then an ache inside starts to speak. I miss what I believed the guru to be and what he most definitely is not. I miss the illusion that wrapped me in a mist of mystery, never meant to be solved. I miss his enticement, so alluring, that led me into a sense of safety and specialness where only a god can see and know, and I could only trust. The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. I miss the exquisite sensation of surrender that removed me from myself, as I gave heart and soul to someone outside my lonely interior. I miss the alertness that bent to his every move, watching as if the whole world might move in response to him. I miss the illusion of a benefactor, a spiritual benefactor, who might ensure my salvation and carry me home. I miss the illusion, the most difficult thing to let go of. Theres been no pleasure in surrendering my illusion of a guru, a teacher, a spiritual friend. Only in the beginning, when an internal spark was suddenly awakened to lots of fresh air. It fired up new thinking and untethered imaginings and a new found freedom burst from a restricting narrative, the gurus profane ideology.
Now it’s like the backcountry quiet, and the strange monotonous expanse of dark trees reaching into a misty fog. Nothing defined particularly. My habit has been in surrendering to something outside my own small self and Im not acquainted with any aspect higher or wiser within my own internal aloneness. Logo rhythms in my feed assure me something is there but we have yet to meet.
For now, I see the curative response of unwittingly landing my little self in a sex cult. In my lifetime, sexuality has been the ultimate experience of surrender, the little death that spins the world away and any little tangential worlds as well. That deep vast pleasure that disrupts all the stressors of the world, and launches me into a netherworld, painless and profound.
Ive never forgotten an offhand comment from my brother who had observed me with my lover of the moment, Its not all about sex, Jess. But it could be. It certainly was all about sex in the cult. In the extreme. Here comes the cure! Always a wee bit stronger, just a tiny little bit more extreme than the sickness, and in response, vitality within wakes up and reacts. Curatively.
For sure, its not all about sex. Its about surrender. Devotional surrender to a guru can be more fascinating than sex. It feels so good! The sex guru capitalized on that.
For sure, its not all about devotional surrender either. Turn that shimmering veil aside. Its about trusting what someone says, while ignoring the results of their actions. Its about believing that someone else knows better than I what is for my own good. Greetings from Dachau. Or Lahaina, if you believed the roadblocks.
Is a cure possible in the cult-at-large? Are we waking up in the onslaught of another fabricated crisis for gaining control? Could the next round of psyops fear porn be just strong enough to spark a fire for the cure? There could be no shepherd if there are no sheep.
Many say John de Ruiter studied hypnosis and thats how he got his way with us. If so, then equally true he was hypnotized by us, our innocence and openness, our selfless surrendering to him. He hardly stood a chance against so many love charmed faces all turned towards him. We were irresistible!
My point of view is limited. I cannot see the whole picture. I have always wanted to live beyond the illusions of this world and my desire landed me smack dab in the middle of one. Now theres really nothing I actually leave behind in leaving my illusions. Instead I imagine its one hundred percent all love and… and… and the glamour of attachment, which is loves chimera. Once unmasked, it becomes loves cure. So here I am at my keyboard, convalescing in the acceptance of the way things truly are. When I get up from this sickbed, I may not be so compliant in the future.
Returning to my mates on the mountain comes this question, What would we do or say if we happened to run into the motorhead?
I feel the sensations of my dying illusion and I try to articulate a strange new feeling. If I saw him and he would listen to me, I would tell him how sorry I am for him and all he has done, that his lack has created a horror show for so many, and the life he has created is a piteous mockery. When the miracle of life is capable of creating something real and true, he used lifes creativity to blind and deceive. I would share Duncans oft repeated axiom,
You are a fool soon to meet the consequences of your folly.
Then I would ask him for my money back.
Wow Jess, that is certainly one of your best, if the not the very best. As you are often able to do so well, you weave together the experience of the John cult with the larger cult that is doing it's thing as we speak. Being in the small cult makes observing the larger one quite obvious, even if all the details are blurred by the evil brilliance of their deception. Eyes open, heart open, and clear - even when things look murky.