You Always Hope Your Cult is the Good One
A story about my 13 years in a Vancouver spiritual community
Silence is consent. Many years ago, one of the gentlest most Spiritual men I’ve met in this lifetime said those words to me. Silence is Consent. I can still hear his voice, the quiet, powerful, undisputed words being spoken. Each time I’d witness someone being publicly shamed and I did not stand up and protest, I’d hear him saying to me, SILENCE IS CONSENT. I am not willing to remain silent about what I see and know to be incorrect.
—[ Ex-member, name withheld ]
The Sims Online began beta testing in 2002, and since opening an account was free during that time, I signed up to try the beta.
I was living in Goshen, Indiana, my mother’s home-town, where I’d finished my college degree, and had gotten a job working for my sister at a local non-profit.
Despite being employed, having an active social/dating life, and surrounded by close friends and family, I wasn’t happy. It was a good life, but either it wasn’t the life I imagined, or the life I thought I should be having, one with more meaning or more impact. Six months earlier, without telling anyone (including my girlfriend I’d been dating for two years), I started researching online other places to live, other places unlike Indiana, a place where I could maybe be happier.
And in the meantime, I went about my life. I went to work, came home, had exceptional sex with my girlfriend, and tried not to think about not being happy. Repeat.
I wasn’t a huge gamer, but exploring a virtual world for a while was a welcome retreat. It was a world of idealized people living idealized lives. If there had been a sim of Oprah, Oprah Sim would have told the other Sims they were living their best sim life.
One day, in this computer-generated simplistic simulation of real life, I met a woman from Vancouver (or rather, my avatar met her avatar). We immediately started chatting regularly, about life, about what we did. Early on those conversations she told me about a particular spiritual group she had become a part of, and what the teachings of that group were.
I know, I know… This already sounds like the setup for what will surely turn out to be a terrifying cult story, full of shock and horror, strange practices, and manipulative minions. Yeah, I experienced bits of that, but that’s not really what I think my story is about. Or at least that’s not what I think it should be about. I’ll explain later.
The Instruction
When I heard of this organization in Vancouver, what I’ll call “The Instruction”, the important question to me was not whether or not this was a cult, and if so, whether it was a good one or not. I simply wanted to the answers to my questions. I wanted to find the meaning I hadn’t found in religion, and that I hadn’t found in science and reason. The Instruction seemed like the perfect answer, straddling somewhere in between the two. It was presented as a science-based approach to spirituality. The spiritual teachings were often referred to as “the new science”, and students were told that rigorous testing was conducted to prove that any teaching was legitimate.
(And no, this wasn’t Scientology. I discovered years later that this is actually a common approach in spiritual teachings in the Western world. You can’t introduce new ideas to a science-aware population and not reconcile it with principles of science. You either need to claim it as science, or you have to work to undermine scientific principles. Or, like many modern belief systems, a little of both.)
Like most spiritual groups that have formed since our ancestors became perplexed by their own intelligence and the nature of themselves, the focus of The Instruction was and is on healing, intuition, and meditation. Classes of the Instruction were mainly divided into levels, titled simply “Level 1”, “Level 2”, etc. (This is also a not uncommon way to organize spiritual courses.)
The woman I’d met playing the Sims Online had been a student of the first two levels. And in our conversations, I was amazed at her level of insight, and her claims of psychic ability.
“How do I meditate?” I wanted to know. She said it was not altogether difficult, and one night over a long-distance phone call, she guided me through one of the meditations of the Level 1 course, where I visualized the discovery of a “place of knowledge” and a “place of rest”.
I was thrilled with the discovery of what I could explore in the realm of a meditation. I found worlds of indescribable beauty, and felt myself immersed in a feeling of love and tranquility that I had never before experienced. And I carried that into each day, the warm glow of meditative bliss, emanating from my heart in a brilliant ball of energy.
I was hooked.
This was everything I had been looking for. I could feel it. I had to take this Level 1 course. All concerns were secondary. In the meantime, I had grown closer to this person I talked to over the phone. I was falling in love. I mean, of course I was. This was a divinely-inspired connection. This was fate. This was magic.
As I became convinced of the fateful nature of this new relationship (and its implicit promise in my mind of greater happiness and fulfillment), it wasn’t long before I wanted to end the romantic relationship I was in, which was fun but was seemingly going nowhere.
I didn’t end things with my girlfriend with a lot of grace. Which is hero-of-your-own-story code for: I was kind of an asshole about it. As an unhappy person trying desperately to find happiness, little to me mattered except where my life was now headed, towards the west coast of the continent. And that, unfortunately, included people that loved me.
After two visits to Vancouver (which were both terrible and wonderful, and maybe a story for another day) I decided to move there. The anticipation of such a big change was exciting. I could re-invent myself! Change everything! Pursue my dreams! Become world-famous! And at the same time, I would be learning the hidden knowledge, the secrets of the universe. Or, that had remained secret until one woman rediscovered them, and was now teaching them to a group of special people who would change the world. And soon, I would be one of them.
I first met the founder of The Instruction, whom I’ll call “Faith”, when I took the Level 2 course. I had been living in Vancouver for 6 or 7 months, and had already taken the first course of The Instruction, taught by a different instructor. So, I’d seen pictures of Faith, but had never met her.
I went up to the registration desk, and there she was. I remember being startled when she looked at me. My first impression was that her eyes seemed dead, like someone puppeteering a body from far away. Once I talked to her a bit, the initial shock wore off. She was charismatic and friendly, which put me more at ease, but the feeling that she was not entirely there never wore off.
But Faith was a brilliant teacher, researching and disseminating information in her courses on a huge spectrum of topics, from astral projection to Buddhist philosophy to quantum mechanics. Courses were packed with healing systems and meditation tools chopped and re-assembled (sometimes coherently, sometimes stream-of-conscious-y) from numerous spiritual, theological, and psychological practices. And many invented by Faith herself.
Every course had systems for healing and protecting oneself, battling negativity, and tools for researching the self in all of its depths, across time and dimensions.
As someone who soaks up information like a sponge, The Instruction was Candyland. One could know so many things about things; about the intent of others, about our unconscious drives, about the nature of humanity and the origins of the Universe itself. Over the years, I became so self-satisfied with the heap of knowledge I was gaining, that I paid little attention to any potential downsides of what I was learning, or the environment in which I was learning it.
If you have doubt about what is happening, there is a strong possibility that your Soul is speaking to you. Whispering, “Look, look closer at what’s happening here, is it correct, are you okay with it?” Listen to the questions doubt brings. Is your soul speaking to you of incorrectness? Is your soul crying out to you not to sit in silence about abuse? Is it screaming this isn’t right? Is doubt only there because you are afraid that you are right? And if you are right, you might have to act on it, make changes, speak up, leave and that may bring about rejection and abandonment. It is your job, your responsibility, and your God-given right to walk away from any abusive situation. Whether it’s verbal abuse, in shaming or outright physical abuse.
— [ Ex-member, name withheld ]
That Day When That Thing Happened
“Don’t you ever fucking come at me like that again!”
My spiritual teacher and mentor, Faith, was suddenly in a rage. I didn’t know why.
“That comment you made about ‘lost patience’!” she continued. “That was directed at me!”
My brain searched quickly for what she was talking about. I knew the comment, but it hadn’t been about her.
“That was not my intent,” I said, my voice shaky.
“It was directed at me!” she spat.
Dance music was playing loudly in the conference room. No one else could hear this exchange happening on stage. People were happily dancing with each other.
“Thank you,” I said. It was all I could think to say. Faith had taken the time to admonish me, so it seemed a reasonable response at the time.
“You’re welcome,” she grumbled.
I stepped away, and I went back to dancing. When I thought I had spent a reasonable amount of time acting as if nothing had happened, I left the room.
I had been with The Instruction for nearly ten years. At that time, I was attending the week-long spiritual conference of the organization, held every year for those who were Level 6 and above. We would gather and hear Faith speak, commune with inter-dimensional aliens, rescue souls, battle demons, and save the planet.
You know, typical cult stuff.
A few years prior, someone had asked if I would be willing to let people know each morning items that were in the lost and found box. Being a comedian, I decided to dress it up a bit, adding one or two minutes of jokes in good taste relating to the items in the box. A little humour to start the day. People really loved it.
That particular year, on that particular day, I heard about an incident that happened the night before. A friend was telling me that they were doing a yoga class in a room next to the conference room where Faith was teaching a late-night class (to a select group of students). He said they got a little rowdy, and Faith wasn’t happy about it. “She called us ‘naughty’,” he said with an embarrassed smile.
What I understood was that some conference attendees had gotten a bit loud, which disrupted the class. Faith was not happy, it seemed, but she was cool about it.
Before the morning conference session was to begin, an “upper level” came up to me (think of them like senior management, but for a meditation community).
“So, I guess you heard what happened last night,” she said.
I said I had. (Spoiler: I hadn’t, but I didn’t know that.)
The upper level asked me to make an announcement about activities no longer being held at night next to the conference room. I wasn’t sure why she was asking me to do it, but I said I could. She was insistent that I convey that they could not be disruptive.
I could understand asking people not to use the room, but I wasn’t sure why this upper level seemed upset about it. After all, I’d been told that Faith herself had played it off as no big deal, and yet other people were suddenly very concerned. To me, this was not a good case of follow-the-leader. I thought these upper levels needed to follow Faith’s example and just chill.
Since my job was making jokes about lost and found, I put it in the routine.
“By the way, just a reminder,” I said that morning, after I’d theorized why there were a pair of pants in the lost-and-found box, “don’t use any of the rooms next to the conference room for activities during classes. There was a little lost patience, so…that’s something we’d like to avoid.” (Okay, it wasn’t the funniest joke, but that’s what I had to work with.)
A little laughter. The end. My job was done.
At the start of class, Faith talked about Anti-Bullying Day, which was that particular day.
In the middle of that, she stopped. “Stop bullying, Matthew,” she said, looking at me.
I turned to a friend of mine, confused. “Huh?”
Class went on, and when there was a break, I went up to the stage to ask Faith about it.
“Was that ‘Stop bullying Matthew’ or ‘Stop bullying’ comma ‘Matthew’?” I asked her. I honestly wasn’t sure if maybe she was asking people not to bully me, which seemed nice.
Cue sudden onset of rage.
Cue threats if I ever “fucking came at her like that again”.
Someone losing their shit at you may seem like a small thing. People lose their shit. They’ve got their own stuff going on that has nothing to do with you. But all I can say is that it’s different when you’ve been indoctrinated into the idea that when this one very specific person loses their shit, they’re still right in what they’re saying. I mean, they’ve said so themselves, on multiple occasions. Like many cults, The Instruction is partially built upon the premise that Faith is unusually gifted in being correct in what she’s saying. And if what she’s saying sounds batshit crazy, then you just don’t get it. There’s some truth that you’re missing.
So I replayed the sequence of events multiple times in my mind, trying to understand what I’d done wrong. Where I could have made different decisions or could have been more careful. I decided at some point that being a comedian in front of this group was just much too risky; one couldn’t know at what point the jester would feel the unexpected wrath of the king. I asked someone else to take over that role in the future.
But, as much as I blamed myself, I still knew that what happened was not right, and it began to topple the idea that this person always had the answers.
I also began to reconsider the stories that I’d heard over the years, stories of inappropriate behaviour by Faith that was much, much worse than what I experienced.
I’ve learned; the Truth isn’t always what it seems to be. I’ve learned that just because something feels and looks good doesn’t mean it is good. I’ve learned that in order to discern what is good or bad for you, you must first be able to question.
— [ Ex-member, name withheld ]
The Scorned Lover
Years before I’d gotten very far in The Instruction, there was an incident. The story, as recounted by Faith every year following, as part of her class instruction, went like this:
Faith had a lover who became disgruntled. The reasons for this woman becoming disgruntled weren’t clear. But, as a result, she decided to destroy what Faith loved, which was The Instruction. This hysterical woman began to systematically attack The Instruction, and gather followers.
Faith explained that when someone misuses power, they begin to lose “vibration”. So, in an effort to regain power, they will claw at everyone on their way down to humanity’s normal vibration, vampirically sucking at the power of others in an effort to regain their former awareness.
Vampires, she explained, can be very effective at convincing you of their perspective. So, these poor victims of this scorned lover became unwitting accomplices, and all of them began attacking Faith publicly. They began to claim all manner of abuse at the hands of one person: Faith herself.
Faith explained that she had raised these people to their power, so when they misused their power and lost it, they of course weren’t going to take responsibility for it. Their only recourse then was to resent and attack the person and organization who had raised their awareness in the first place.
I mean, didn’t it seem awfully suspicious, she said, that when they left the organization full of many people, they only directed their anger and vitriol at one person at the head of it? Wasn’t it suspicious that they all did this at the same time? Wasn’t it suspicious they would all tell a similar story as the initial instigator, a scorned lover who wasn’t getting her relationship demands met? Didn’t that prove it was really the delusion and soldier-gathering of one person?
As if we needed more proof, Faith said, this woman had organized and published these attacks online. Could it be any more obvious, she said, that these attacks were personal and not legitimate, then the fact they were directed at what she loved most: this organization and the people in it?
“You shouldn’t read it,” she said. If we did, we risked being “taken out” by the same metaphysical factors that had led so many people off of their spiritual journey. That so many people had left the organization was proof of how dangerous these attacks were for us. Even reading it could make us prey to the same pathology that had taken out her ex-lover.
This message was passed on and frequently repeated by Faith’s generals, the “upper levels”. Don’t read it; don’t engage in it. Be true to your own experience. Know your own truth, and don’t be led astray by someone else’s version of the truth.
And, so, I’m embarrassed to say, for most of my years in The Instruction, I didn’t. None of what Faith said was contrary to anything else I’d learned. It corresponded neatly with everything that she’d taught about the nature of things. Her story sounded perfectly plausible.
I wish I could say that witnessing Faith becoming unhinged in front of me was enough to clue me in that something else was going on, but it was only the first thread.
The second was the downfall of a beloved Canadian icon: Jian Ghomeshi. Jian was a prominent entertainment personality on national public radio. That is, until a fateful day in October 2014 when Jian made an important post on social media, which read in part:
Today I was fired from the company where I’ve been working for almost 14 years — stripped from my show, barred from the building and separated from my colleagues. I was given the choice to walk away quietly and to publicly suggest that this was my decision. But I am not going to do that. Because that would be untrue. Because I’ve been fired. And because I’ve done nothing wrong.
I’ve been fired from the CBC because of the risk of my private sex life being made public as a result of a campaign of false allegations pursued by a jilted ex girlfriend and a freelance writer…
…Despite a strong connection between us it became clear to me that our on-and-off dating was unlikely to grow into a larger relationship and I ended things in the beginning of this year. She was upset by this and sent me messages indicating her disappointment that I would not commit to more, and her anger that I was seeing others.
After this, in the early spring there began a campaign of harassment, vengeance and demonization against me that would lead to months of anxiety.
It came to light that a woman had begun anonymously reaching out to people that I had dated (via Facebook) to tell them she had been a victim of abusive relations with me. In other words, someone was reframing what had been an ongoing consensual relationship as something nefarious. I learned — through one of my friends who got in contact with this person — that someone had rifled through my phone on one occasion and taken down the names of any woman I had seemed to have been dating in recent years. This person had begun methodically contacting them to try to build a story against me. Increasingly, female friends and ex-girlfriends of mine told me about these attempts to smear me.
I quickly reposted Jian’s Facebook post. What was happening to him sounded awful. It was also brilliant storytelling. It cast Jian as the victim of a hysterical female who was so irritated by being scorned by him that she rounded up a bunch of other women to attack and shame him. I mean, it sounds plausible, right?
Spoiler: it’s not plausible. Yet the “women are just crazy, ya know?” story persists in our culture as a pervasive meme.
As quickly as I shared Jian’s post, a friend of mine just as quickly angrily rebuked it in a Facebook comment: “Don’t just believe whatever he says just because you like his show.”
“Fuck, he’s right,” I thought right away, and amended my post. How had I been so blind? Jian was using one of the oldest tricks in the book to undermine a victim’s credibility. But I missed it because I liked him, and part of me believed that it seemed perfectly reasonable to suggest that a woman would be so distraught to not be with a particular man that they would round up many other women and convince them all (despite not knowing them) to lie with their own “made-up” stories of abuse.
As humbling as it was to know I’d been easily deceived by a common attack of misogynists, I soon realized something worse: this wasn’t the first time I’d heard this story. I’d been hearing it every year, before communing with aliens and battling demons, and believing it every time. The only distinction was that it wasn’t a man accusing a woman of making up stories of abuse and of an organized campaign to get others to tell their own lies. It was another woman.
It’s so hard to conceive of a woman, a self-proclaimed feminist, to use the tools of misogyny to discredit victims of abuse that it’s hard to wrap your brain around it. You just don’t think of liberal, feminist women as potentially being abusers, and manipulating tools of patriarchy in order to do it. Or at least I didn’t.
And at that point, I wasn’t sure. All I had was the sickening feeling of the behavioural patterns of two people I respected closely aligning. It was clear that Jian Ghomeshi was a master manipulator, and was a man who beat women and then turned on his charm and crafted a smooth story to cover for his behaviour. Yet the story he told was nearly identical to Faith’s.
I decided to do what I’d spent years not doing: reading and listening to stories of individuals’ experiences with my spiritual mentor.
Reading and listening to more stories was discouraging. It became quickly clear that there was no conspiracy there. No one had any reason to make shit up in order to help one scorned ex-lover seek revenge. For one, many of those people didn’t know each other. The only common thread was that they shared their stories after one woman went public with hers.
The stories on the web were poorly organized, mostly long pages of letters and emails posted without comment. But the accounts were disturbing. Not because they were unexpected but because they were reflective of everything I’d witnessed over the years. Stories like:
I lived in fear of being taken off my path…And when I knew I had to leave to save my life, I left…I said all the right things to avoid being called evil or told I was under attack…
Yes, the fear of being called evil if you dissent, that sounds familiar.
I have witnessed fellow students being shamed and humiliated in class and, in some instances, outright verbally attacked....
Okay sure, I’ve seen that dozens of times.
I want you to know, that I burst out laughing, hearing, that we, the ex-members of [The Instruction], are accused of sending as an attack “BLACK SORCERY WORMS” with KILLING ENERGY — and that [Faith] had to set up a specific healing technique, so that you can get rid of them. Otherwise your life is endangered.
Hang on, Black Sorcery Worms is a new one. I agree it is pretty funny though.
On the website, some had written letters summarizing different disturbing patterns of behaviour by Faith and her elders, and along with individual accounts of experienced, two of those seemed especially worrisome to me. One is that she’s accused a number of people of stealing from her, and that’s worrisome because it’s so damn odd of a thing to accuse a bunch of people of over time. I mean, does Faith think this is something that happens often, friends and acquaintances grabbing a $20 from your purse? I have no idea how someone can make that a common accusation, but apparently someone has.
The other pattern that’s more worrisome for worse reasons is that she accuses people of being pedophiles. And…this gets messy pretty quick. This is one of a parent’s worst fears, and it’s not an unfounded one. Pedophile rings have been uncovered multiple times throughout the last century. I mean, Jesus, the Catholic Church, historically, has acted as a de facto pedophile ring by enabling and covering up priest’s transgressions (if not implicitly, at times, endorsing it). And then you have independent predators, who often are people within a child’s inner circle. They are people hidden amongst the masses, who stay hidden by threatening or blaming a child into silence. It’s a real and pervasive fucking problem. And as far as social justice issues go, it’s a pretty damn important one, and raising awareness of the scope of the problem is continually important.
But…let’s get back to where one actually points to someone and says, “That person, right there, is a pedophile.” And this is where Faith’s behaviour gets messy, because of when, and who, and how she accuses someone. Like the accusations of stealing, she knows for no other reason than she knows it. She’s psychic and it’s just what she knows. Never mind if it makes logistical sense; never mind if there’s no particular reason to believe it, and certainly never mind if her knowingness has ever failed to stand up to scrutiny in the past.
This story from an ex-member I found the most chilling:
I met my husband, got married and had a baby…in those same 36 months. Three months after our son’s birth, signs of abnormality — flu that turns into pneumonia and does not respond to drugs, rampant thrush, and skin that completely peeled away from his scalp — began to appear. At first the doctors suspected AIDS. Finally, though, they had a more unusual diagnosis. My beautiful, red-haired baby Ray had been born with a rare genetic immune disorder — Severe Combined Immune Deficiency — which manifests in boys as a near total absence of T cells and B cells, the body’s defense system.
As the reality began to sink in for me of all that Ray and I were to face, I was so thankful for [The Instruction] as I needed those skills, the energy vibration, and my new, supportive spiritual family now more than ever. This was real.
I had no idea how things would unfold so differently than I expected.
It was a two or three months before Ray was admitted to Fred Hutch for a bone marrow transplant that my teacher/mentor/spiritual guru [Faith] did me a huge favor, although it took me many months, and even years, to see the Gift fully.
Ostensibly, Ray only 4 or 5 months old — and I had been invited to receive what I assumed would be a powerful healing session with the ‘upper levels’. In reality, it was to be my intervention. I sat in a circle with my sick, under-weight baby, and instead of receiving healing, I was given some…‘tough love.’
I was surprised and happy at first to see [Faith], herself, was there. And then the nightmare began. [Faith] told me I was in denial, and that there was evil occurring right under my nose to my poor, sick little guy. Even though the best high-tech immunologists in the world were telling me that I was a carrier of a known but rare X-linked genetic mutation that they’d actually identified in my DNA, that day [Faith] insisted that the true reason Ray was sick was that my husband was sexually abusing him and had been for weeks since he was born.
Science be damned was the attitude. She could ‘see’ it in their energy fields, she claimed. She added that Ray was born too soon and wasn’t ready for this.
It was like a surprise dunking in ice water to my whole nervous system. That afternoon, in my shock and horror, I broke down. I dissolved. Through my tears, I cried — how could this be? She suggested he/my husband was doing it while I was gone, and the upper levels all nodded their heads in silent agreement. But I almost never leave the baby! I cried. Next, she told me he was doing it at night while I was asleep. But we all sleep in the same room usually in the same bed! — since I’m nursing.
Finally, she told me something that even then in my shattered state sounded totally crazy, but she said it without flinching: He was probably drugging Ray and me.
Let sink in for a moment how quickly this went bat-shit insane. I mean, really let it sink in.
This woman goes to her trusted healers under the premise that they will help her baby and perform energetic healings on him. That turns out to be a deception.
Instead, she’s told the reason the baby is sick is because her husband is a pedophile. First, presuming that the mother spends sufficient time away for this to happen, Faith says it’s happening while she’s away.
When the mother rightly informs her that — uh, do you know that new moms don’t really leave their babies hardly ever? — Faith changes her accusation. It’s happening while the mother is asleep (probably presuming the baby sleeps in another room because, again, it’s apparent by this point that Faith knows fuck all about babies).
When the mother says they sleep in the same bed, Faith changes her accusation again and says, “Well isn’t it obvious? He’s drugging you then.”
Every progression of this accusation stems from a fundamental and unchangeable principle: Faith is correct. If new information invalidates the way in which she suggests she’s correct, then the story must change to accommodate the Unchangeable Principle. It’s the evidence that’s suspect, because what is made clear by Faith and everyone around her is that Faith is not wrong. So she gets a few details wrong, big deal; fundamentally, she can read the energy so obviously the truth is in there somewhere.
What bothered me about this story is that I’d witnessed this pattern so, so many times. Not around specifically accusing someone of pedophilia (although I’ve seen that too), but around a variety of other statements and beliefs. The evidence is secondary to what Faith’s final word is. If the evidence is truly overwhelming, then her story changes, but not in a way to make her wrong. No, of course not. In some way, she was still right, she says, and that’s the important thing. Details shmetails.
Alternatively, if changing the story would undermine her credibility, then Faith often takes a different tactic — question the integrity of the person who presents the evidence. Maybe even question their sanity.
While this may seem like traditional gaslighting, gaslighting is a conscious manipulation of someone else when you know the story you’re weaving is false. But, in all of these stories, I don’t believe these are deliberate conscious manipulations. I think Faith is someone who wholeheartedly believes she is correct. That she can trust her intuitions completely, and that she can help people by trusting theirs.
This was the hardest thing for me to face. I don’t think Faith is an evil person, but despite her good intentions, it doesn’t means her actions are not dangerous and damaging. Believing wholeheartedly you are telling the truth is not good enough. Deliberate or not, being sure about a thing that is false is not exactly spiritual mastery, and doing so as a self-declared spiritual leader is, at best, deeply irresponsible. One of my favourite Mark Twain quotes is, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Maybe that’s naive. Maybe she knows exactly what she’s doing. It’s difficult to see things clearly when it’s someone you love and respect, someone who has taught you invaluable lessons of self-awareness, and has helped you to recognize your own truth.
I can hear my older sister Gina in my head reading this and saying, “Matthew, that woman is a fruitcake salad.” Okay, sure, I know Faith said a lot of fruitcake salad things, and had a lot of fruitcake salad beliefs, and sometimes raged at people for seemingly little reason, and warned people about Black Sorcery Worms, but…where was I going with this?
The point is (Gina) that it wasn’t usually like that. I mean, if cults were just overwhelmingly negative experiences, it’s not like people would stick around very long. People in cults aren’t idiots. They always know cults exist. You just hope and assume (and are often told) that your cult is the good one. And, most of the time, it feels pretty good. Truth be told, the most loving, vulnerable, and open people I’ve met in my life I met in The Instruction. There are many people, if not most of the people, genuinely there to do their best, to become the best version of themselves, and treat others around them with love and kindness and compassion. Even with the fruitcake salad bits, there’s a strong compulsion to stay. It’s incredible to feel that sense of belonging.
I’ve watched a few documentaries about cults in the past year, and I’m reminded of one of the ones on Netflix, called Holy Hell about a cult in California. Even after ex-members of the group have spoken about their experiences of being severely abused by the founder and leader of their group, they’ll talk about how much they miss that community. After recounting a detailed story of abuse, a woman who was asked if she missed the group immediately broke down in tears.
Spiritual and religious communities can feel wonderful to belong to. They satisfy a deeply-held social need for meaning in our lives. We as humans don’t usually care so much if it’s healthy for us as long as it’s deeply meaningful.
And if you’re told by the leader of that community that you are one of a rare group of warriors that found each other after hundreds of thousands of years of wandering in a spiritual wasteland, lifetime after lifetime, and now you’re on a sacred mission to save the entire world and possibly the universe and possibly the multiverse, well…. that’s some pretty epic fucking meaning in one’s life. It makes you feel pretty warm and fuzzy.
When you’re experiencing that, you don’t want to think about stories of possible abuses that have happened to people. I mean, that’s, like, a downer, man. No one wants to talk about the negative effects of the community or its leader. Everyone around you is happy and grateful. Can’t you just be happy and grateful like everyone else?
If you bring it up, people take it pretty personally, because you’re threatening their sense of personal meaning. They want to know why you would possibly want to say something that could destroy a community that brings them so much joy and love. It can easily feel like a personal attack, like something malicious.
So, like Faith, the response of the Instruction has mostly been: attack the victims. Defend the community. “Protect” the new students from these stories.
For those reasons, I sat on this piece of writing for over a year, chewing on whether or not to publish it. I know what the standard response is. I know I will probably lose friends.
But fuck it. I haven’t come this far by keeping my mouth shut. And what’s been motivating is what people have privately said to me after I published other pieces of writing. After I wrote about my experiences with depression, a lot of people messaged me about their own experiences, and how what I wrote helped them. Funnily enough, many of those stories were from people in The Instruction, where they had kept their struggles hidden. Which made perfect sense to me. In The Instruction, you’re supposed to be able to overcome that shit with your special love lasers.
In fact, even with all I had come to know about problematic behaviour in The Instruction, it was my experience with depression and healing from that that finally told me it was time to leave.
One more note before I move on. Remember baby Ray and the intervention with his mother? He had some near brushes, but fully recovered, and went on to live a healthy childhood. Ray’s mother’s marriage took some time to heal, but her husband stood by her, was steadfast with what he knew to not be true, and waited for his wife to recover. Weirdly, even though Ray’s father never left, and the alleged reason Ray was sick was because he had a terrible father, Ray got better through medical treatment. I mean, who could have seen that coming? You’d have to be psychic.
The Journey of Recovery
After my strange and unpredictable bout of clinical depression, I began the arduous journey of rebuilding my damaged brain and figuring out just what the hell had gone wrong. For the rebuilding part, what was most effective was medication and cognitive-behavioural therapy. The latter was actually quite a surprise to me. After learning for a dozen years that modern psychotherapy was pretty sub-standard compared to the New Science that was The Instruction, imagine my surprise when therapy was actually highly effective, more so than any other kind of system of self-healing work I’d experienced.
Which meant yet another thread was pulled out of the tapestry of the beliefs of The Instruction.
But still it wasn’t the final thread. Maybe years from now I’ll look back and marvel at my own ignorance. But I don’t have a lot of shame being a former cult member. Partly because the world is living in a strange post-truth era right now. Every day my Facebook feed is peppered with people believing bizarre things, things that don’t even serve them to believe, but which they feel the need to believe regardless. Donald Trump, Islamophobia, fears of genetics and vaccinations, it’s exploded lately.
To coin a phrase: it ain’t the cult you know you’re in that gets you into trouble. It’s being sure you’re cult-free when it just ain’t so. (Okay, Mark Twain’s was better, but you get the point.)
And I’m not all that embarrassed about any of the practices or beliefs I engaged in. I grew up in an environment where people worshipped a zombie demi-god so that his omnipotent father wouldn’t send them to eternal fire-prison. And once in a while held a ritual to consume the flesh and drink the blood of the zombie demi-god. It’s not like inter-dimensional reincarnating space warrior is all that weird in comparison.
But anyway, part of my recovery was that I started to get way, way more strict about what unhealthy practices I’d keep in my life. If it was unhealthy for me, or stressed me out or caused anxiety, it had to go. Or at least change in some way. The more I did this, the better I got at recognizing which things were actually making me sicker.
And then one day, I realized one of those things was The Instruction.
Faith had taught a way of living that was constant vigilance. One was always on the lookout for evil, always battling, always fighting to survive. Meditations were not freedom from thought; at a minimum requirement one had checklists of energetic procedures that were prescribed. Following those checklists meant that one could preserve one’s own safety. If one didn’t follow what Faith had taught, well, then one risked that safety of course.
I had stressed about remembering all the things I was supposed to do. I had worried about all the things I hadn’t made time for. Yet, one day, I realized that all this focus on battling, and defeating negativity, it was just bringing all of that negativity front-of-mind on a constant basis. All of the freedom and mastery I had been seeking amounted to little more to me than constant busy-work, stressful busy-work at that. It was making me more depressed. Maybe it had always made me more depressed; of that, I’m not sure. If so, I know I’m not the only one. I know of one person who suicided in The Instruction, and I came close. So, if it didn’t contribute directly, it also wasn’t exactly the solution I needed, and probably kept me too long from the help I really did need.
I’d been in The Instruction for 13 years, and part of me wishes I’d had the compassion to leave when I’d witnessed the harm to others. Like many, I’d clung to sentiments like, “Everyone has their own journey” and a kind of moral relativism of everyone’s experiences being different, and “We can’t just judge what’s going on for someone else, ya know?”
But silence is consent. I couldn’t speak for anyone else, but I can do it for me.
So I left. And started a new journey. Maybe with fewer inter-dimensional battles to find ancient dimension machines, and less concern about figuring out how I was murdered 26 lives ago…and more about which Hot Wheels toy to get my son for his birthday and more talking to friends about our favourite weird Netflix shows. (OMG have you seen Son of Zorn??)
I don’t know if that’ll make me happy, but I feel like it comes closer to happiness than I’ve been for a long time.
