I was never there while my nieces turned from girls to women.
Visiting for the celebration of my fathers life, my brother picked me up from the small town airport. My niece was in the car, the first time we had met in years. She looked out the window during the entire ride. Neither of them spoke to me. Being in a cult of special awareness where the drama of human situations was to be transcended, I looked away from my feelings. I looked out the opposite window and I felt nothing.
My friends, lost to the cult, may deny it was meant to be like that. I hear their brainwashed recitations. In transcending feeling we are not meant to deny the experience but to offer it up to something higher and finer and beyond the usual reactivity of human nature.
Ultimately this leads to spiritual bypassing. It deprives the seeker of enriching their knowledge of human experience and emotion. It deprives the innocent of ripening into adulthood. Any ability to embrace more of our lived-in experience takes a short cut, diverted into an abstract belief system. That feeble container can barely hold the trials of childhood let alone adulthood, but it can and does numb sensations and the emotions that sensation generates. It dispossesses cult members of their part in humanity as a whole, where they may naturally refine genuine compassion. Maturity is stunted within the spinning spirals of a transcendent belief system. See Writing in the Bardo.
In a spiritual cult, giving up autonomy to a self-proclaimed God, Master, or any other worldly idol, results in spiritual bypassing. In the cult-at-large the distraction of devices, media and propaganda cheats humans of the meaningfulness of a flesh and blood life, experienced in the body. It steals the connectivity that configures us with the beating hearts of others. As Victor Frankle has said in interviews, We find meaning in something beautiful in our experiences and in experiencing others, experiencing other humans in their uniqueness, their irrepeatably unique essence and the potential of that actualizing…
Where is the potential for deepening life experience in our relationships with machines? Meaning co-opted by AI will only leave us feeding on empty calories, reingesting an abbreviated summary of our past without the necessary sensate inspiration that may lead to an actualized human future. It can only end in an unrequited longing for meaning as users spin in glossy episodes of Netflix and in the automated beliefs and dictates of chatGPT, the next generations cult leader.
Ensnared in the control system of a cult, I did not give to mending the injuries in my family. I closed the door on family and denied any harm done in that, unawares of abandoning anyone by turning away from my relations. The motorhead frequently spoke of the cost to giving up our everyday existence and our relatives, intimating it would all be worth it in the end, as if the cost were actually nothing.
The cost has been tremendous. The only benefit gained is the knowledge and recognition of a narcissistic psychopath when I see one. I see them everywhere now, in an overlord of the planet, in corporations, in a Nobel prize winning performer, the president of the united states, teachers in classrooms, my brothers partner.
I left home at an early age. I moved from one crash pad to another in a university town that had opened the door to Free Love, hashish and communal living. It invited tear gas at student protests and a deadly explosion in the Army Mathematics Research Center. Those were the days, my friend. Leaving home when I did, I deserted my youngest brother who my mother had essentially turned over to me in her ever reoccurring absences. I was nine years old when that started. She was busy. He became my living doll. Just looking at him melted my heart. I adored him. As he grew up and found his way into his own identity, becoming his own little man, I felt him slipping away from an innocence we shared. I was proud of him and also filled with an unfamiliar heartache. We were slowly drifting apart. It seemed natural but sad. Mothers must know this feeling. I was fifteen. I didnt imagine what running away from home might mean to him. I assumed the invisible ground that was between us could endure anything. It was a support that unknowingly I pulled out from under him when I left. The outflow of that mistake poured for years and only a family trauma has begun to heal that divide, as like cures like. The wedge of cult life sorely delayed the cure of that wound. It has festered for an unnecessarily long time.
I am not the one to diagnosis pathology. I only want to call out from the checklists on psychopathy as they match the motorheads operations and persona. Being in his dominion of idolatry, its not too hard to see where my own psychology bent toward the same, believing our community of devotees were above mundane morality and anything commonplace, common as a kids gymnastics meet, as Thanksgiving dinner, or Christmas morning. Graduations. Weddings. Funerals. All of that seemed inconsequential when compared to the seemingly elevated awareness, all-given to the guru. My ideal of what humanity is meant to be. These have become words that sheath a dark emptiness. They are words without substance in reality. An ill-begotten belief.
I did not bond heartily with my siblings spouses. There may be consequences to that I will never know. If I had been there, perhaps my brother would not have entered a cult of one that drained him and reined him to a manipulating, despairing frump. If I had been there perhaps my niece would not have entered a family cult that stole her identity and her two children. If I had been there perhaps I could have saved them, and yet no one could have saved me from the trance struck hypnosis of the motorhead. My family knew better than to even try.
How do the tricksters win us over? Where are we susceptible? Is a deepening understanding of human experience more than some of us can handle?
Mattias Desmit, Hannah Arendt and others have written of what makes people susceptible to giving our sovereignty and personal autonomy over to a manipulating authority. Its a path of least resistance. Hang with the crowds. Shoot up DNA strands foreign to your body simply because youre told to. If you escaped that experiment, see YouTube for countless videos of how to spot a narcissist, a psychopath, a sociopath. You may actually know one or two. Jump logo-rhythms to find videos where wannabe controllers can learn the tricks of taking advantage of the unsuspecting, the naive, the guileless among us. Circle back to read the critics of the covidcrisis and learn what fooled millions of kind and caring humans.
We need to think what we are doing, Arendt wrote.
We may be susceptible to the fear of being alone. Safety of the herd is in our DNA. Maybe we want to do something good in the world. There is so much to care for nowadays and numberless leaders are pointing to countless ways we could help. We might like our life to have purpose and meaning beyond mindless consumption and are looking for an evocative focus, something to keep us from the distractions of the machine.
Are we susceptible where we are vulnerable? The motorhead encouraged vulnerability in his followers. It was an abyss to descend into and, from an unexplored depth, reveal our unspoken desires, longings so personal as to be general, needs so human that as they were expressed the whole room felt an ache. We exposed our sensitivities to him, and to each other in the process. Those confessions became his hook into us, each to their own. We revealed our most terrifying fears and shameful doubts to him, binding us together in places where we were helpless, and often wounded.
Cults of one-on-one function similarly. The narcissist finds a soft spot where an individual can be spun in circles, gaslighted and overwhelmed. Dazed and confused, isolated and alone, the narcissist becomes the only available contact, the only one allowed as an intimate relation. Friends and relatives are demonized. The manipulation persists with suspicion and unscrupulous insinuations. It is a nightmare to live in a cult of one-on-one, one moment secure in a so-called special bond, the next moment banished from the narcissists favour, bullied with negativity and criticism, trapped with minimal resources.
I dont want to armour my vulnerability. At the same time, I dont want to be susceptible. I want to be clear about who or what I am exposing myself to. I know Im going to die. I dont want to die in a global clinical trial during a genetic experiment. I dont want to die in the frozen north with a survivalist guru predicting armageddon, enlisting his devotees to surround him with protection.
I want to understand the person or the governing body that could have a hold on me. I want to know that a person or government is trustworthy and is more interested in the maturation of a relationship than in their own egocentric desires.
I want others to know they can expect the best I have to give which could mean exposing my soft spots. Is it not from these tender places that our essence can be accessed and genuinely broadened? Where else do we authentically receive human experience? Is this not a depth in each of us that is unharmed by information, disinformation, malinformation or any yet to be revealed formation? A pure place within each of us that solicits no argument and enfolds everyone into natures knowing arms.
I find myself at a desolate crossroads, seeing where the backcountry guru hooked us with a truth we all know, wheedling us toward his own ends. Proceeding to the route of truth, we could as easily arrive at the cult of a psychopath as we might discover the meaning of life. Maybe discovery is in unraveling our susceptibility to such creaturely forces.
If only I had made these discoveries before a brother and his daughter were being sweet-talked into cults of a different kind. I imagine I could have made a difference, and then my imagination turns on me with remorse and recrimination. What may I have done, knowing then what I know now? If nothing, could the simplicity of my presence and a heart free to listen been enough?
Like my mother, I was busy. Paying the cost, with the motorheads assurance it would be no cost at all in the end.
Remaining more human than machine, an imperfect and error-prone vulnerability makes ourselves and other selves super uncomfortable. Flip to the opposite, what is closer to machine than mortality. Find an unassailable defensiveness, where the cool armour of narcissism is gilded against human helplessness. To be at the mercy of anything or anyone is reprehensible to the armoured. Seeing weakness in others makes them look away and they will feel nothing.
A narcissist sees vulnerability and licks their chops.
Who doesnt have an achilles heel? Is that weak spot the very thing that unconsciously shepherds us through life, a soft spot looking for protection, acceptance, security, or a safe place? Look at the tacit cult contract Ive been in. For what was I paying the cost?
For a cloister that sheltered me from the real world. For a promise held higher and finer than is humanly accessible. For an extended adolescence. For illusory meaning.
For now, I am making my way up and out of the cults convictions and insulations, out of a forsaken autonomy and into the light of reality. I have come this far only to love what is uniquely human, fleshy, messy and mortal. Remarkably, I have discovered it is not impossible to recover the relations I deserted earlier in life. I know more now. I am no longer so certain, nor so definite. I have more space on the inside to hold what is on the outside.
It's like magic Jess, how you describe your past, your growing up, your early departure from family and relationships and your entry into, experiences and knowing within the cult scenario; your recognition of the leaders' manipulative abuse, the blind acceptance of his faithful and your ardent stepping away into a world that isn't afraid to call a spade a spade! Aside from the straight up 'magic' of your literary skill and prowess which is pretty mind blowing in itself; is your willingness and ability to ascertain what happens within these cult groups and describing it to a T, there's also the uncanny resemblance it holds and almost magical history to my own! To put it short, I feel like we're sort of 'one'! From the, if one can call it that, smallest of experiences say with a niece going aggressively incommunicado or a beloved sister and only living close family member acting 'superior', distant and aloof; all the way to what I want to call getting or 'understanding' at least something with respect to the bigger picture. I just gotta have a cuppa with you somewhere one of these fine sometimes weird days we've left! XX
Bravo Jess! ✨❤️✨