After the first post on this new Substack site, I went to bed in the dark and saw a figure standing on the diagonal from the end of my bed. It was a big man. Perhaps an idea planted by my husband who said, now you’re up there with the Big Boys, referring to his favourite guys on Substack.
I had a different thought, seeing the figure, dark on dark and large, but relative to a different space than the room I was laying in, meaning really very big. And there were things, undefinable things, stuck to his clothing, his head, perhaps his face. Hard to tell. It was dark. The first sense was of malevolence, so I wondered if the post had conjured up this phantom and brought something into form on another plane that I may not have wanted to create.
Or perhaps it was a remote viewer, checking me out, vulnerable and naked in my bed.
There was no convincing label to put on this vision, but the sensation in my body was of being watched, of being seen by elements I may not wish to be seen by. Recently I heard someone say, exposure is the first step to becoming human. So be it.
Allow me to address that chimera.
Let it be known I am wiser for having been in a cult. Let me express my gratitude to everyone who participated and who helped create what was a single creature, made of many moving parts, cohered into a group of three or four hundred devoted souls, the numbers being dependent on the most recent disclosure of the leader’s secret life, and the lives affected by his secrets.
There is an elevated and sensational experience of being in a room with a large number of people who are one-pointedly focused on a single person for an extended period of time. Why didnt we just use a disco ball, said one wisecracking apostate. There is power and energy in conscious awareness. The transmission of passion and zeal from so many people, given to one man, fills the atmosphere in the room with a potent vibrancy. The energy transports each individual into a selfless realm of ephemeral shimmering, that is, if their lower selves don’t get the better of them. The resounding invisible vibration blots out personal sovereignty. It hoodwinks self-governing discernment. It’s like going blind in a white light brilliance so far out and away from one’s messy little self.
Evidently it is much more difficult for some of us to navigate with discernment in the world. It is a simpler slippery slope down to giving ourselves up to something external, to a projection of perfection and divinity, so beautiful! Or to an alien being, crafty and still, or to an expert, a doctor, a banker, a thief.
Meanwhile in a larger cult, influencers are paying bizarre amounts of money to do all they can to draw our awareness away from what we know in our human hearts. Who can say the numbers in dollars or yuan that are flooding the world with the intent to buy our belief? Just how easy is it for people to give authority over to what has more power and influence? Who am I in comparison to people of position and power? How could I have any understanding of matters that people of power and wealth have given their lives to?
Wilhelm Reich’s, Listen Little Man, comes to mind. And also an old Italian movie called Bread and Chocolate where, in one scene, the poor are staring out from a chicken coop into a golden realm of beautiful people, naked in the sunshine, perfect and divine. To be like them was the desire written all over their dirty lusting faces.
Inside the group mind, any skill of discrimination is overcome by a physical experience of belonging, being part of something greater, something conceivably very special and other-worldly, way out beyond the mundane separation a normal person usually navigates day to day.
Outside the perimeter of group think, it actually takes some effort to really connect with someone else, to use our eyes and ears and hearts to let them in, to forget about ourself for a moment, and relax into our human vulnerability. In that open attitude we are apt to express a thought or emotion without constraint! It might not fit the accepted narrative! In our vulnerability, our most human characteristic, something that is profoundly what we really are could just fill us up and move us, connect us easy as pie with others on a level where belonging truly exists: in this moment. Sounds scary on some days. It is so much easier to join the crowd, do what we are told, put on the mask and keep our distance from others who threaten us with their vulnerability. In that darkness, it seems beyond question that we stay focused on what we are told, as we dimly see everyone else doing, and suppress own particular discernment and purpose, bewitched by a tall tale that is patently designed to distract us from our real life connections with each other.
So back to you, my dark figure, my manifestation of stepping out into a forum of exposure. Rest assured I was present in the shimmering moments, your magnificently lit up stage time, time that spanned decades, a long fairy tale time of being under a spell. I was part of one thing, your thing. Ah ha! Have I named the darkness now? Was that specter him? The one who I gazed at for all those long years? What exquisite longing I felt! What magical thinking! What we were doing, the outpourings of desire and remarkable visions of what we imagined we really were, golden bodies in the sunshine, all of it was way more fantastic than the everyday tik tok in the simulation matrix. As if you were Neo! The One to battle the agents and create the crack in everything that this greater otherness could enter through. It only takes one, you said, never needing to utter the subtext we could hear in our heads, yes, you, you are the one!
Some days nowadays I wonder if you too are an agent, finding us mortals despicable, laughable and naive. Your biographer tells it so. A young man with no real talent or calling, finding ability in his flair for tall tales, and enjoyment in his power to pull the wool over people’s eyes. I have listened as so many seekers have asked you, why do we default to our egoist desires and patterns? Because you can, was your answer. Dear Dark Lord, why do you do what you do but because you can, one more cliché in a worldly line-up of pretense?
To me, the most memorable scene in the Matrix is of Morpheus, bound to a chair, his generous head plugged into an unknown technology. The agent is speaking to Morpheus, really in his face, words sneering and snakey, of the disdain the agent has for humanity. Without a human perspective, I suppose humans do appear ridiculous, even repulsive, to those who are unmoved by a knowledge of love and communion, unmoved by any honest belief in the nature of belonging, or the pleasures of togetherness.
Another facet comes into focus. The group mind, elevated and special, floating above the matrix, was created by people. Everyone in their own way, in their own longing for connection, were invested in this group mind, what was designed to blot out the individual. Nonetheless we were humans, not celestial beings as we imagined. We were yoked together by the endless meetings and extracurricular activities that a cult leader demands of his followers. Like the burdensome overload of the maniacal media, with its gluttony of information, fortune telling ads, and multiple platforms for capturing citizens with smoke and mirrors, but especially like the absolute inundation of influence, nonstop impact, the daily battering from a source that isn’t reporting but persuading and coercing. Some say it is a methodology brought to us by Sigmund Freud, World War 2, and a precocious nephew who was definitely an agent. Looking up Edward Bernays I get to an Academy of Ideas video: We get larger as individuals when we identify with the power and potency of a group.
Back to the little cult. A veneer of pleasantness frosted the community, a front of kindness that nonetheless was fraught with all the usual contaminants of human relationships, made more insidious because it wasn’t cool to admit of any contamination. We became two dimensional caricatures, cut off from an authentic experience of ourselves. We couldn’t really know each other even though we spent most of our time together. We were bedazzled by a higher authority. According to that Endarkened One, a relationship with oneself was a deterrent to the mythos coming in from on high. Lacking a relationship with our own sweet selves, we lost ourselves. A motionless figure, flooded with an artificial light to blind us, kept us aimed only at the darkness, illumined by artifice, all leaning in to satisfy his life purpose. He was our every other thought. Marching to his every beat and whim, we lost our own lives. It made for very entangled, knotted and bizarre links between all of us. Meanwhile the relationship with one’s own language, one’s own heartmind orientation withered away from neglect. Who has been brainwashed finds it impossible to pull up an authentic feeling or original thought from within their own interior. Once the narrative peters out, the screen goes blank.
How lucky it is to be able to see that awareness focused outwardly needs to be balanced with a discriminating inner attention. It is one key to engaging with the world in a balanced way. Annie Murphy Paul writes about what is called shuttling in her book The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Outward attention can be balanced with inward attention and is a valuable habit to get into for the sake of discriminating awareness. It gives the body a say. If I had listened to what my body told me, I would have been long gone from the cult long ago. If I listen to what a body says after two shots and two boosters, I hear what is being said, loud and clear.
Humans are mostly vulnerable, I believe. I wonder if a lot of our experiences on this planet are the result of deliberately trying to escape from that uncomfortable sensation and a feeling that there is safety in numbers? On better days, I wonder if we are capable of remaining vulnerable and connected to each other while also being fantastically creative, as well as masterfully responsive to the needs of the moment, our moments?
Here comes Freud, who said something like, human individuals are able to rise above the group mind to the extent of having a scrap of independence and originality. People! there is a real future for us in that little scrap. Who is for becoming original, regardless of being unattended by the comfort of a herd? Is that scrap not intrinsinc to being human? Is that scrap not all we have left?
My long abiding admiration for your intelligence is fluffed! Loving the comments here.
Feeling a bit of hesitancy in exposing myself as less talented, but having lived through similar circumstances of which you speak and so appropriately reflect as an ever present danger, I am drawn into this conversation.
As humans we carry the heavy weight of individuality from birth; take up the challenge to survive or not; develop and express your self; climb that living mountain and find your place on the sunshiny slopes of human expression and admiration.
The cost of failure is loneliness, addiction, imprisonment, suffering and death.
We're all goaded by pleasure and pain, love and fear, desire and repulsion.
How exhausting is all this? Whether deemed successful or less so, eventually we tier of our worldly existence and wish to surrender, rest, let go of the responsibilities of being separate individuals.
Cults and cultures arise for other reasons as well, but on this basic spiritual level of soul, we can be vulnerable to the promises of leaders, teachers, and powerful individuals who recognise and speak to this deep desire for surrender; who can manipulate and take advantage in unethical, self aggrandizing ways. Or can be sincere in their wish to help.
In the bigger picture, I believe this phenomenon of Cult/Culture to be a cosmic test/trick to have us examine our status as individuals, our reality and beliefs of what it is to surrender and to what.
Again, you have my deepest admiration for the critical thinking you are sharing with others as you do this self examination with such exquisite ability. I related to the third paragraph from the bottom as conclusive, as that is what saved me.
You are an amazing writer. Your reflections are well laid out and I enjoy the references made (ie. “We get larger as individuals when we identify with the power and potency of a group.) This is quite typical of cults: stripping away our individual beliefs, substituing them for a so-called larger, benevolent good which breeds narcissists to flourish.