I dreamed of needing to go to an event in the cult. As I drove the familiar roadway, I kept asking myself why, why was I going? Its been over a year since I left. When I arrived the people of the cult met me without any fuss. I was taken in and someone massaged my head while another one gave me food. When I was thirsty I went to the kitchen to get water and there was My Teacher. He smiled from his heart directly into me and a radiance filled the room and light went a’shimmering all around. Then he looked aside in a sheepish sort of way. He lay down upon a counter top, bringing himself closer to my level, and we began talking about the difference between Deeds and Tasks and the meaning of each. Afterwards, he said there as a limit to how many times I could leave and return. I assured him I was not returning, now or ever.
I woke in the morning in a very still state, a physical sensation that extends from a tremendous depth within. Do you know this sensation? Its a blissful beingness in need of nothing. I didnt want to move, didnt want it to dissipate.
As thoughts began forming and moving, it seemed as though something had flipped at a core level inside of me. Perhaps, as the old Chinese doctors would say, one aspect reaching its extremity is forced to flip, as yang turns into yin when yang has reached its maximum. So much anger, even hatred, had been lancing through my system, a knife blade that would unexpectedly slice through my awareness. It had no emotional charge at all but a sharp straightedge of No! I thought it must be pure hatred. It was uncommonly smooth, with a cold clarity like nothing earthly, as if it could cut through anything. It was hard hearted and entirely void of human feeling.
The dream was a very different influence. The same strength of power and object but flipped into its opposite polarity. Here was the teacher I loved, a living representation of the divine. He was glorious, resplendent in a shower of lovelight and purity, a clean heart fanning out and in everyway around it. This was the emanation I showed up for in every opportunity that had been offered, believing that loved-filled glory was embodied by him.
A wise friend said, we dont recognize our own divinity. We project our own divine selves on another person so we can learn about ourselves. This is the transference required in a guru-disciple relationship. Now and next I need to turn toward the truth of that divine essence, what cannot be destroyed by injection, rejection, and data inspection. Its time to look around in the wreckage of that damned cult to find what I have learned about myself. While the western world sorts through its wreckage of corruption and misdeeds, I aim for the opposite, to sort through deeds and tasks in search of what was real gold in my relationship to The Motorhead Teacher.
Of course I opened the Wordbook to look up the words deed and task. Deed appears to have gathered around it the meaning of endeavour or covenant. Indeed, my intention in joining the cult was to discover truth, or reality, to know what is fact and what is actual in a world of kaleidescoping narratives, where theres gotta be more than the struggle for the legal tender.
Truth, reality, fact and actuality are also meanings that constellate around the word deed, as in establishing a reality, something more substantial than mere words. His deed was to establish a reality that others would believe in, for his own sake.
I feel the pull of the knife now and want to point its point at the duplicity and abuse of spiritual truths that self-appointed gurus use to entrap people. I resist. I am returning to the Wordbook.
My deed was the promise I made to myself to stay in the fires and burn through the beliefs about myself and others that plainly are not true. I was committed to being wood in the fires of love. I meant to be an awakened participant in the evolution of consciousness. I imagined that meant becoming as he was. Goodness help me where that has actually occurred, and goodness help me to see where I really have released false beliefs.
In the beginning, I saw him as being remarkably pure, far beyond any divisive strategies to get something. He seemed to be an ideal, an evolutionary outrider in consciousness. That meant something to me at the time. It was an ideal I held up to emulate and it began to take form and shape around him. Now the crux of my inquiry is this: how can we idealize something outside of ourselves that is not within us to begin with?
Remembering William Blake, we do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. Here is a genuine caratage of gold. We see in others what we cannot admit of ourselves. This is a great little compass to use when there is any disagreement, full of judgments and accusations of someone else. Write em all down and when Im finished, replace their name with mine and where it rings true, get to work on changing those unfortunate habits in myself. I am amazed at the miraculous changes I see in the other person as a result.
Could this exercise also reveal positive aspects, the parts we would rather not be accountable to in ourselves? What of the positive projections we shower on others? How is it we choose to fawn over others with love and admiration at the expense of our own heroic and individual perfection? In a cult, any adulation coupled with the tendency to doubt oneself is quickly put to use by the leashholder. As one witness in the Raniere trial said, You crippled me and used that handicap against me. This is a gut wrenching synopsis of the guru-disciple relationship gone bad.
The blades a’shimmering.
Depending on their psychology, the recipient of our excessive admiration either returns the projected belief back to its source where it belongs, where we would be called to take responsibility for our own goodness, or they lap it up and serve themselves some aggrandizement in receiving, not truth, not fact or actuality, but a projection of what we cannot hold to in ourselves. The deed to our own internal properties is handed over to the other, and believe you me, when thats done, it will be used by that other.
Slipping the knife back into its sheath now, continuing forward, reaching for inspiration from loftier realms.
As has been said by Mandela, who was a person of many great deeds, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesnt serve the world. Theres nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people wont feel insecure around you. You were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. Its not just in some of us, its in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we consciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Deeds are actions performed intentionally or consciously according to the Wordbook. I went full tilt in my commitment to being and becoming what I loved the most. In the belief that entering the teachers flock would catalyze that transformation, I was keen and sincere, absorbed in an ideal I held as divine. The Teacher became the water for my thirst, the wellspring of what I held most dear. That was a mistake.
Yet it was the act of surrender to a metaphysical ideal I imagined had been found that was the real deed. In that surrender, I let myself down from the imperious compensations of vanity, slipped down into experiencing what really lurks in the shadows of myself. Surrendering to an ideal revealed the secret parts that were afraid to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous. What looks aside in a sheepish sort of way.
Constantly measuring myself next to his presumed magnificence revealed a number of things that I did not accept in myself. That was also projected onto him, as if he could magically see into my shadows. The gaze I thought was his was actually mine, never failing to find a horrible speck or stain on me.
The polarity in cult life toggled between feeling awful shame about my failing to become what I loved the most and otherwise bedazzled by an unattainable ideal. Nothing in between really. The gap between whatever I honestly actualized, and whatever I projected on to him never disappeared.
Regardless! The deed of surrender has transformed me, not in ways I once imagined would be spiritually enlightening, somehow above and beyond the mundane, but in ways that matter in everyday ways with everyday people. Its brought me down to earth.
Of what is actually harrowing, Yahia Lababidi writes in his reflections on the Raniere trial,
Truly loving another, for example, setting aside one’s ego, being vulnerable and surrendering in good faith can serve as a portal for freedom or enlightenment—the way others help us to evolve and to see and be who we cannot become by ourselves. In that sense, surrender and trust are deeply powerful human urges at the heart of world religions, personal relationships, and part of what it is to be a member of the human family.
In the dream, The Teacher brought himself closer to my level to talk. This allowed for a natural conversation, an easy exchange between two people. This closes the gap that followed me through the years in the cult. He no longer sits enthroned above me. Elevating the motorhead to a high perch of perfection made him more idol than human. It was unnatural. It created an unevenness of exchange and reality was lost.
I believe there is a frightening light, as Mandela said, in everyone. If its true that everyone in our dreams is an expression of our own selves, then let me admit it, knowing from long ago, long before meeting the motorhead guru, of that light in me and everyone. How else could I see it? It radiates and shimmers in everyday ways wherever whenever we naturally meet. Empty of any fear or suspicious holding back, it smiles directly right into our hearts.
This is one of your best!
Authentic, clear, intelligent and a pleasure to read.
✨⭐️✨
I love the quotations in this essay. They pull on me, as do your own gems within, prompting me to return and read again the juxtapositions you present that entice me so. Here is one for you; "Imagination is always drawn to what's awkward, paradoxical, and contradictory. It is drawn to the edges of things.... where the visible and invisible coalesce." -John O'Donohue