There is a thin book I reach for when judgments arise in relationships, and when I feel the sting of criticism or rejection. Thomas Merton wrote it and titled it The Wisdom of the Desert. One inlay in this collection of unsullied teachings describes a novice seeking guidance from a desert father. Pay people to insult you came the advice. So the postulant made his rounds, paying money for and receiving insults from his brethren, day in and day out. At the end of this time, the father directed him to visit the city, to leave the clean spaciousness of the impeccable desert and go enter the city.
At the city gate he is met by someone hurling insults at everyone who passes by. Meeting this disparaging gatekeeper, the initiate begins to laugh and he cannot contain his laughter until the gatekeeper finally calls him to task. Why do you laugh?
Because I have spent years paying people to insult me and arriving at the city gate I receive insults from you free of charge!
The motorhead called it receiving injury. It is a powerful skill to have and develop. It was that very skill, rather it was his unwillingness to exemplify this skill, and his inability to receive injury that finally turned me away from his illustrious illusions. It was on a mere technicality that the scales fell from my eyes. All in a flash, I saw him clearly and accurately, as he is.
One of the vanguard in our little cult received passage into a dialogue with the motorhead on a collective zoom meeting. We all watched from our own rooms as we had throughout the scary pandemic, the only way the cult could connect during those months of isolation. My husband and I were in a hotel room up north, sussing out the territory as if we might find any place in that frozen wasteland to sustain us in the horrible future that the motorhead had insinuated. One movie night he showed us all The March of the Penguins and we deduced what to expect. Cold. Wind. Storms. Starvation. Huddling together in a pack to survive.
Why do many self-appointed spiritual teachers with any size of flock begin to predict an apocalypse in their later years? I have wondered if death and mortality to a narcissist is experientially that extreme. Ones own death from an egocentric mindset must seem world shattering. The end of his world can only be viewed as the end of all the world. Popping out momentarily into the world culture, this sort of psychopathy in world leaders might mean the end of everything.
My world with him ended on a cold winters night watching a zoom conversation on a small phone screen. A woman of power and grace was kindly calling him to task. She began by giving him sincere praise, expressing her gratitude to him, and acknowledging the love that existed in her relationship to him. It was her love, she said, that moved her to break the code of secrecy.
He quickly put her to the task of keeping it private, not public. She knew otherwise and continued.
Her words moved in waves of intimate communion, with the intention to heal a split that had been growing in the community. This was a concern for everyone, in one way or another. Many of us were wavering in the latest disclosure, yet another drama in the narcissists rigmarole.
Clearly a misuse of power, the movements of secrecy, and most striking to the counterfeit teachings, the so-called celestial openings of sexual relations with the penisminded motorhead were not that at all. In some cases, especially with the very young, real harm was occurring.
The heart splits in two disparate pieces. He is the source of what is all-love and all-true. He is the source of what functions as incest in a family system, what no one wants to see, and almost everyone wants to cover up. She grew up in the cult. He was like a father to her. Stitches burning through the heart, torn open by reality as it sears through the myth.
We have already lost one woman that has been with us. Hearing those words we all remembered her. Being reminded ignited a long smouldering coal inside of me. (see previous The Black Dragon). We are about to lose another, she continued, and the coal burst into flame. Another was so tied up in crazy making knots of secrecy and control, she was in a clinic for urgent treatment so that she might live. Probably most people in the cult had no idea of her grave predicament. Another secret only the inner circle colluders were privy to.
The woman of grace, her calm voice filling the tiny speaker of my phone with care and concern, directed her understanding to the heart of the matter. The belief that there is nothing unintegrated in you, she said, pointing directly to the belief in his spotless wholeness.
As I listened, the crystalline plainness of truth, what shines through dark shrouds of mendacity, became visible. Here is a guy who believes he can do as he likes because whatever he likes is the truth. He is surrounded by fawning believers that slowly and unwittingly are letting their hearts turn to stone as they turn a blind eye to what he is doing in his unholy darkness. That is, if any tattered fragment of what he is doing becomes visible through the thick cloak of secrecy.
It will all be revealed in the end, while the emptiness of tasks done for the sake of someone elses psychopathy and addiction are felt, then seen, then given voice, and in the end, are finally removed from our interior. Then it may be possible to open into something profoundly real and true, because the veils of fraud are removed.
In earnest love of him and in caring for the young women in our community, the woman of grace and power pressed on in her meeting, exposing what we all loved and also what many of us were questioning. How could it be true that any doubts we had of his perfection were only due to our own inadequacy and inability? The story goes like this: he is faultless and unrivalled. We are defective and spoiled.
The magnificence in the womans power and transparency as she spoke with him, was that she had admittedly taken his insults to heart. She had received what he always put back on us. She received the notion that her perceptions were off. He was continually putting us all in the mind of it being our filters and the lines in our selves that kept us from knowing his truth. She had received all of this injurious manipulation, including the misuse of her givenness to him physically, and by doing so, she realized it wasnt true. He wasnt true.
There is great power in receiving injury.
There was once a woman of his clan who created bits of mayhem here and there for me. Though we had been close for years, this minor mayhem split us apart. It was a long time after the split occurred that I saw her at a gathering and I wanted to rekindle the love I knew was there, shadowed by our unfortunate disagreement. I dont recall how I opened the conversation. Her response to me was frankly over the top as we were meant to be devoted to a commandment of love and kindness in our cult.
I hate you! she said, with the force of a lightening bolt striking down on me. She continued hurling insults, and without a thought about it, I let those insults right in and they went right through me. The only response I had was to assure her I didnt wish to be any of the things she saw in me. Then I had an unusual experience. I felt my feet planted firmly on the earth. I felt a force moving up from the earth and into my body. It was not personal in any way. It filled me up and held me there, quiet and still.
The penisminded motorhead was not so still in receiving the transparent concerns of the woman meeting him on zoom. He blinked too often. His head sank into his shoulders. It was her, in full realization of her own knowing, fully aware of her love, and of her concern for others that the truth moved to fill. Other women, especially the young, might not be able to assert what she made clear. There was one of us in dire straits, under water, and needing reclamation.
Women rarely speak up for their own sakes. They tell the truth to protect others.
Theres a difference between speaking for yourself and speaking for another, said the motorhead.
What?! All my senses lit up, alert and tensed. If you have never been gaslighted before, this is what it looks like. You might say you are hurting, you might say this is not a beautiful cult, you might say there is harm occurring and the one responsible for that harm would be wise to take better care. I was hyper-alert to see and know how he would receive injury. Instead he turned on her, avoiding the serious matter at hand, he turned the tables on her, inventing the charge of speaking out of turn.
Welcome to life in a cult. It could be a cult of three hundred. It could be a cult of just you and another. What defines a cult is the use of manipulative duplicity by the leader to distort your perception of reality. For more on the use of manipulation and coercion in the cult-at-large see Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Not an easy read.
I must reiterate the grace and kindness this woman expressed in her meeting with the penismind, because in the meeting that followed, two of his dicklicking enablers completely misrepresented her in a bizarre show of psychotic damage control. If you believed their interpretations, you would be far off the mark. The marketing team chose to publish the second meeting, but not the first, proof of a devious darkness at play.
Theres a difference between you speaking for what you know and you speaking for what another knows, said the motorhead, reiterating his offence.
That is when I left. Turned the phone off. Turned to my husband to say, hes a liar. All in a single moment, after years of quelling the split inside, of deadening the signals that pointed to his darkness, the unresolved doubts, the shelves falling down from the weight of cognitive dissonance, all in that moment, it was over. I felt strangely free.
So beautifully written and completely true. For those reading and wondering if embellished or fictitious, I can assure you all real, honest and true. Engaging and names no one. Bravo!
Once again, exquisite writing, and hitting the nail on the Motorhead !