One-Eyed Jack

why cults attract us, heal us, and hurt us

Joe Szimhart 7/19/2025

(This is a long essay from a cult of one dedicated to self-correction…random notes with unfinished Cubist fractures.)

As long as things are perishable, justice will live as the human soul and law as the human mind. 

Silence is the only voice of God.                                                                                                – Herman Melville

Silence and noise instill awe, curiosity, comfort, entertainment, irritation, fear, or paranoia depending on the patterns we experience, assume, and interpret. Our assumptions are not in all ways our own. The patterns that we perceive map our choices. The map we experience can be a lie. We are dependent beings relying on feedback through our senses and memories conditioned by social and natural environments. We are tentative beings that struggle for continuity and certainty as time and space shift around us and through us.

We are judging beings prone to self-correct if we are to survive well. We want to trust that Mother Nature and our human nature will remain true and just, but we know from experience that natural surroundings can deceive, and that we self-deceive. We make mistakes.

Some attractive mushrooms are deadly whether we believe they are or not.

Justice lives in the human soul—not in nature. Nature is never on trial, but humans try to correct nature when she puts us on trial with water, wind, earth and fire. We build dams, strong habitats away from avalanche zones, and fire engines.

Spacetime in the flow of life can seem constant and dependable until a Black Swan event occurs.[1] The unexpected life-changing event can be a simple change in perception, orientation, or circumstance. Black Swans can lead to educated corrections: Hell, I did not know that! Or they can mean an unexpected earthquake destroying in minutes everything you worked for: Hell no, I did not deserve that.

Some prophets and seers will say you did deserve your karma because you did something to warrant it in a past incarnation though you have no way to prove it. Karma is a bitch, they say. That is easy to say. I recall one critic calling past-life memories cheap knowledge. Anybody can make up or buy anything about a past life without paying with testable evidence. Prophets taking short cuts to knowledge are fake prophets.

One prophet I knew was Mother Prophet, really: Elizabeth Clare Prophet (1939-2009) was her real, legal name. Coincidences are not always auspicious. Her minions (I was among them from 1978-1980) called her “Mother.” One of her titles was Mother of the Universe. No, I am not kidding. She managed and manipulated a cult of many thousands of chelas (devotees or literally, slaves) for decades. She suffered from epilepsy all her life. That might explain some of her fantasy prone teachings about meeting Ascended Masters on ethereal planes.  A 2024 article in Harper’s Magazine covers Mother Prophet’s story.[2]

Participation in a group may feel like a worthy mission for a while until evidence mounts in your awareness to clarify why outsiders kept calling your group a goddamned cult. Yes, some cults and sects are better than others; not all are goddamned. Cult is a four-letter word but so are hate, baby, and love. Babies are cute and cuddly until they are not. The Oh Shit effect often hits an unwary believer years before they quit the not-better group, belief, or relationship. Or they find out that their baby is severely autistic or has inoperable brain cancer. The news of such a baby changes the future. Finding out that you are in a goddamned cult will change your future. It did mine.  

Sometimes news changes perceptions of the past. It is not easy to admit the unfulfilling and perhaps sinister side of a relationship, mission, or idea after years of sincere devotion and hard work. No one simply walks away from influence games that keep swirling through their synapses after a decade of indoctrination. No one runs away from anything with a badly broken leg—or mind. Cult affiliation may seem like a worthy mission until the goals prove false or unreachable. Then the goal feels like a merry old English gaol or mental jailhouse.

Sometimes spiritual pursuits begin feeling like straitjackets.

Sometimes we impose straitjackets onto others as a means of relieving our spiritual dilemmas. If we can convince someone else that our beliefs are true, then maybe they are true. Narcissistic cult gurus readily fall into this trap: the mirror of social verification from hero hungry devotees.

Gurus and religious leaders encourage us to recruit, to missionize, to spread the good news, or to sell their books for two main reasons: To enhance the guru’s prestige and to strengthen the follower’s steadfastness. Robert J. Lifton called this the “psychology of the pawn.” In his influential study on Thought reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961), Lifton listed eight themes that he used to elaborate on what he meant by a thought reform program that leads to totalistic social tendencies in governance and human behavior.

According to Lifton, the pressures in a totalist social environment minimizes the power of the individual who has little choice other than small moves. This feeling of being manipulated from above, whether the feeling is of devotion, oppression or both, leads to social constriction and an inability to escape. The pawn’s only power is to do unto others what is done to the pawn. “This requires that he participate actively in the manipulation of others, as well as in the endless round of betrayals and self-betrayals which are required.”[3]

One influence technique used by nearly everyone including salesmen, teachers, and politicians as well as predatory con artists is first to gain rapport with the target, student, or client. Gaining rapport is a useful and often necessary human skill in all relational ventures. But gaining rapport can easily lead to gaining control, especially when the influencer has a hidden agenda. That agenda could be as simple as overselling services for routine car repair to achieving sexual dominance and complete social control.

Humans can be kind. Humans can be predatory. Human concern for another’s welfare can also be misguided, stupid, and even harmful.

When I was six years old fishing by the Manatawny Creek near my home in Pennsylvania, I saw a toad. An older boy yelled at me when I tried to catch it. “Don’t you know that toads cause warts?” I believed that toads caused warts, and I warned other kids about toads causing warts until I studied biology in high school.

At the same age, my neighborhood friends and I played in a large cemetery across my street that has an open field and a military armory with a large warehouse along its edge. An older boy told my friend and me that the armory was being torn down, so we could break all the windows. He threw a rock through a windowpane to prove it. We proceeded to throw rocks through windows until a lady down the way yelled at us from her yard. We ran home. A week later we saw a soldier replacing windowpanes.

Those two incidents were cases of submission to authority without knowing how or why to question.

If everyone you trusted in a group told you that the group’s guru was enlightened, would you know how to question the guru when he told you that you were called to serve her path? Especially after you experienced a certain golden glow about her body and felt ecstasy in her presence.  Would you know how and why your neurobiology produced that experience? Have you ever researched qualia? Do you know how a charismatic relationship occurs? Have you ever heard of collective effervescence? Or mystical manipulation? Or auto-suggestion?

Look it up.

Clarity for us in spacetime comes with the price of vigilance throughout our perishable existences. Even with vigilance enhanced with education, our lives are not immune to black swans, skilled con artists, the fickle fates or lady luck. And what is luck?

One therapist I know answered his clients who asked him why some people ended up in manipulative and deceptive relationships in two words: Bad luck.

Luck implies agents of chaos running our lives. Does coincidence need an agent?

Ask the dinosaurs after the asteroid blasted through spacetime into the Yucatan.

Planets collide seemingly at random until a planet like Earth appears with Homo sapiens on it wondering why.

Eighteen-year-old Lesley left South Africa to tour America with a warning from her mum: Do not get married and do not join a cult! Within a year she did both. She wrote a book about her decade roaming America with a bizarre, apocalyptic, nomadic Christian sect.[4] Her planet was pulled into the gravity of a group planet because she landed in New York on a day when they could cross paths. Had she landed an hour, a day or week later, who knows?

Destiny or bad luck? I am not about to play God for you here with an answer.

Blaming self or the predatory influence does not change experience. After you’ve been hacked in a phishing scam and lost your savings, you’ve lost your savings. After your will has been hacked by fishers of men, you are not likely to jump off the train to glory without enduring some pain. And after you dared to jump, healing and being better informed might change damaging experience into a learning experience. You might do better next time. You might not board a train with no known destination on this earth.

Vigilance is an acquired skill that works best with daily sharpening. Taking responsibility no matter who or what is to blame is the key to recovery.

“Neither do I condemn you. Go, sin no more.” (The words of Jesus to a harlot about to be stoned to death by Jewish men in the Gospel of John, 8:11). After making an informed choice to leave a shitty cult experience, we try hard to trespass no more, to sin no more, to choose badly no more. We can wonder if that harlot sinned again. If she was poor and taking care of her elderly mother, another trick with a John could mean a meal.

Jesus said we should forgive seventy times seven. Maybe he meant that in the eyes of God, the Harlot’s sin is eternally forgiven. That last comment is a heresy of the early church expressed eloquently by Origen. Believe it or not.

By the way, I grew up Catholic, was an altar boy prior to Vatican 2 changes, attended Catholic schools through university and received every sacrament except Extreme Unction (last rites). So, in this essay, I will drag more out of the Bible than non-Christian scriptures. Not that I am trying to sell any religion here. If I were Buddhist as a kid, I might be quoting from the Diamond Sutra.

My working assumptions for this unwieldy essay (series of notes?) arise from what I learned after a half-century of interactions with cults and the people impacted by them, including myself. I call these “working assumptions” because I have arrived at no final conclusions. My working assumptions have proved useful and valuable in most cases for me and my clients. I try to avoid settling into basic assumptions that can lead to basic assumption states or frozen mind sets. I have become wary of basic assumption states that I find in deceptive and manipulative cult behavior.

Basic assumption states (mindsets, social self-sealing) can lead to a sense of pseudo-certainty that unwittingly embraces constriction, dependency, and specialness.[5] The QAnon movement that originated in America in 2017 has been a classic case of basic assumption states gone crazy, for example.

In other words, cult members caught up in a mission to save the self and the world from evil can easily waste their access to valuable, corrective social mechanisms and their abilities to self-correct while moving with the madness of a crowd. It feels good to be in the flow, special, important, and on a worthy mission. Mania as unhinged social motivation does not turn off easily.

Where we go 1, we go all! WWG1WGA was a QAnon T-shirt sensation.

Proverbs 12:1: The person who refuses correction is stupid.

Refusal to self-correct can transcend stubbornness. Misguided dedication, loyalty, and devotion disguise stubbornness as a virtue. Dedication to something come hell or high water is not stubborn, is it? Loaded language or groupthink would call it “goal oriented.”

Language loads meaning according to context. A loaded term can become a thought terminating cliché. We have all heard “politically correct” over the decades, so often that we tend to use “P.C.” instead. P.C. has a pejorative slant today in most contexts due the conservative criticism of liberal, egalitarian ideas that the right believes the left wants to impose on the nation, but what did it mean originally? In the 1930s, politically correct applied to Nazi autocratic polices that defined social behavior and who was the right kind of person.

By the 1980s, the liberal left tended to use the term ironically, saying, “Oh, that is so P.C.!” By the 1990s, conservative pundits, Rush Limbaugh being a prime example, flipped the term against liberals. The neologism feminazi arose, for example, to label radical feminists but soon migrated to anyone who supported the Equal Rights Amendment. Over time, both sides have demeaned P.C., weaponizing it against the other.  

So, P.C. can have two meanings, and perhaps a third. In a civil society with properly enforced rules, politically correct can merely mean lawful or kind or tolerable. But when one side feels that the other is using politics to impose values they do not like, P.C. means autocracy.

Which map are you looking at when you understand P.C.? Everyone else becomes a Nazi when your map lines are drawn by hate toward you.

Who or what are the guides providing attractive maps that disguise the territory that contains the goal? Is your guide smart and good? Please do not tell me your experience tells you so. Experience is merely the first step toward verification for human beings with superior survival skills. A clever con artist knows how to manipulate your personal experience with a map. Maps can be clever words with which to reorient your personal psychology.

Astrology and homeopathy /..map your brain.

Nature patterns a tiger to avoid a deer’s notice until it is too late. Deer, like other prey for tigers, have dichromatic vision. Deer cannot see orange as humans do. Humans have trichromatic vision. A deer sees human orange as greenish or brownish on a tiger. Your brain can fool you too especially when you follow your immediate sensual input, your gut, your heart, and your intuitions without stopping to think, examine, and compare outside of the immediate influence game in you and outside you.

Deer can smell a tiger if downwind, but tigers know that. Modern humans cannot easily detect a tiger’s scent. Unlike deer, humans cannot see to the side and rear. Tigers likely know that too.

Sugar sends signals to our brains that sugar is good for you. Too much sugar can kill us. Morphine does the same thing to our brains.

“Earn $200,000 a year,” says an ad for an online opportunity to sell T-shirts or to invest in new crypto coins. “Sweet,” says your brain.  

Singlemindedness can be a virtue after the debate in doublemindedness settles for the better options. The one-eyed jack succeeds better after viewing blind-side options.

An image of one-eyed jack image emerged as I planned to describe my status among professionals who advise clients with troublesome cult problems. Over the decades, reporters and clients have referred to me as an “expert” despite my protest to refer to me as a specialist or a consultant. Nonetheless, I have testified in court as an “expert” on cult-related problems.  

“Do not rank me among the kings and queens regarded as experts in the new religious movements debate or cult game,” I said to my ego. “I have less credibility than academics with doctorates and less public engagement than activists with successful cult information and intervention businesses,” I thought. “I am but a battered, aging one-eyed jack among royalty, literally.”

That last quip came to mind as indeed I was born with right-eye amblyopia caused by optic nerve hypoplasia, most often called lazy eye. Legally blind, my unassisted right eye can identify the bold E on the top of a standard Snellen eye chart; everything else is dark smudges. My left eye remained 20/20 well into middle age. Left-eye patches applied at age eight, when I was finally diagnosed, to strengthen the weak eye were useless. By age two, the hypoplasia sets optic nerve function with no remedy.

My depth perception has been compromised all my life. Nevertheless, I managed to compete decently in many team sports. In my youth, I rarely wore my glasses and never in sports. With the magnification of my right eye, I was sensitive to being called “big eye” by my peers.

One-eyed jack functions as a symbol on a playing card. The breakfast called one-eyed jack prepared for me by my Hungarian mother was an egg fried inside the hole of a slice of bread. Mom called it a madárfészek (bird nest).  Also known as an owl-eyed egg, toad in a hole, punch out hole, and egg in a basket along with one-eyed jack.

Language about fried eggs is as flexible as language about gods and cults of gods.  

Being one-eyed has spiritual connotations. From speculative Freemasonry, the all-seeing Eye of Providence is on the Great Seal of the United States. Masons might extend the meaning to Christ’s instruction, “Let thine eye be single” in Matthew 6:22 that refers to being single-minded in morals, ethics and truth-telling. It can also mean the singular light of the divine within to some members of the Masons while others in the Craft might denigrate a one-eyed approach by saying, “Don’t be a one-eyed jack” that has no depth of vision.[6]

With words and phrases, context and intent is everything.

In ancient Egypt, we find the Eye of Horus, a symbol of sacrifice, healing, and protection.

The meaning of one-eyed jack depends on who is talking and the context.

One-eyed jack as single-minded indicates rebirth when it beckons us to leap into Wonderland following Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit. The symbology of one-eyed jack might go on for pages if we apply semiotics as developed by Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) to clarify obfuscating occult interpretations. But here we are exploring the cult of a one-eyed jack as a self-cultivated educator about cults. Is there a cult of self? Is that good or bad? Read on.

Designated cult objects, whether self or other, tend to be something transcendent that we care for with devotion and ritual. Sacred tree care and worship, for example, emerged among the earliest tribes and were referenced in the Garden of Eden myth as cult objects for Adam and Eve. Unlike the average trees in the garden, the “fruit” of these trees had power to inspire divine wisdom and sustain perceptions of eternal life. The myth indicates that the humanoid species had the opportunity to experience eternal life in the bliss of the garden like the animals as long as the humanoid refrained from judging good and evil.

In other words, lions eating lambs were not evil by lion and lamb standards. Walking around naked as a lion was naturally amoral. Lionesses do not wear bras and panties. A male lion’s testicles dangle in full view.

In Eden, time seemed eternal in the moment, perhaps even at the moment of death. Being does not die by dint of our Platonic perspectives, but a being in a material body does fade and die eventually.

Eden was both a state of being and a stage in evolution of the human species as well as a short story that explained why we humans are here at all.

The story of evolution continues to evolve, we say, as pieces of the moving puzzle fit here and there forming a coherent picture in spacetime. Evolution is not a short story crammed into scriptures.

As for Eden’s talking snake, the deus ex machina as tempter, we can surmise, as this one-eyed jack does, that the tempter was merely offering a choice: remain animal, eat only from the Tree of Life and God will not judge you; choose human by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and you will discover that you have taken the place of God as judge of your own lives and the entire creation. Because every human will now become a god like “us,” the Elohim in charge of creation, the Elohim will lose all agency and fade into myth. Suffering to survive will reign, and awareness of death will exacerbate choice. Awareness of dying means humans began as dirt and they will end as dirt as that scripture tells us:

By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat, until you return to the ground, from which you were taken; for you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return.[7]

Elohim, Elohim, wherefor art thou?

Our nature changed from humanoid to human. In other words, the emergence of the clever human with advanced neurological potential cuts the human off from the Edenic or animal state. We might call this a psycho-spiritual change. The mythic drama in Eden inserts El, a talking deity as a Deus ex machina who “cursed” enlightened mankind’s awareness of and anxiety over death and morals. The human animal began the journey to manipulate nature with technologies of social life using art, language, architecture, agriculture, costumes, stargazing, storytelling, warcraft, the Internet, cult formation, bubble gum, and so forth.

Tigers do not chew gum.

The human social drive to remedy this curse or human condition again and again appears through philosophies, religions, technologies, governments, moral codes, games, courts of law, medical interventions, and space travel. Simple Being or eternal life has fractured psychologically into minute bits and pieces of an infinitely elaborate, wondrous puzzle.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall…after the Fall (in Eden) we judged the world into pieces.

Cubism in art was an attempt to fracture the whole spacetime event (a human head or a still life, e.g.) into all visual angles on a flat or sculpted surface. Cubism was a spectacular, theoretical failure, but it made history. Pablo Picasso’s 1909 cubist painting Femme Assise sold for over sixty million dollars at auction in 2016.

Let us invent another language, we say and do with every generation to help us put the pieces back together again. The noise we make as words with meaning migrates over time. We rarely make the sound “gay” to mean we are happy anymore. Words migrate over generations. We need lexicons to interpret Shakespeare’s plays. Who would think that the Bard meant foolish or lascivious when he wrote nice?   

The whole cannot hold its center for long. The target shifts even as we cock the arrow. We strive to make us whole again by devising holistic systems of thought and governance that range from utter relativism and anarchism to totalitarianism and monarchism sometimes disguised as theocracies. Messy egalitarian democratic experiments are likely not to last as we have learned all too well throughout history. The seven deadly sins never go away.

The hope is for the advancement of the species if not for the individual who must sacrifice or be sacrificed for the species, for the community, for the cult.

God is a moving target while we live in a perishable state.

That is the answer for why we continue to have cults or new religious movements by any name. We strive to make ourselves holier and whole again on shifting sands. We call cults “movements.” How good or bad our movements are will depend on us, our judgments and our interventions as we form governances. Are the movements moving toward selfish insularity or open service to all?

We can move inside a circle and never get anywhere beyond the circle. More than one silly cult has been called a “circle of friends” or the “inner circle” as they circle a drain using and abusing every member’s resources.

Movement is a better word than cult for what I am calling a self-sealing social system. Cult can indicate a special activity or a system of worship, but it tends to indicate a rite directed toward sustaining the transcendent within us and for which we live.

The Catholic Church celebrates the cult of the Eucharist in ritualistic fashion with precise movements and words because Jesus as God is eternally there as the Unmoved Salvific Mover. We imagine a God that does not move but within whom we live and move.

Rites are formulas that repeat precisely, never changing as we imagine the ground of Being never changing.

As with laws of physics that dare put infinity up on trial to be proven again and again by science, the walls of museums portray objects that do the same. In 1966, Bob Dylan sang about that in his Visions of Johanna:  

Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial.
Voices echo, this is what salvation must be like after a while.

We can wonder, but we live with the two quotes from Melville:

As long as things are perishable, justice will live as the human soul and law as the human mind. 

Silence is the only voice of God.

That silence, that cloud of unknowing, bothers the hell out of us. Atheists pretend to embrace the divine silence as nothing, but they do not know. Atheists worry about others who believe that silence is a deity whose interpreted will can be imposed on creation and creatures through human revelations. We all worry about what others impose on us in the name of a totalist ideology or an idea like God. The battle between fundamentalist Christianity and secular Humanism in an era of Modernism has been raging for centuries, for example.

Basic Buddhism may be closest to the analogy I assume here: God is not out there or in here or anywhere. The Buddha was inclined to remain silent when groupies asked metaphysical questions like, “Who were you in a past life?” If anyone tells you who you were in a past life, including your own brain, shoot them. I did not mean that literally; but shoo them away, as the Buddha suggested. Ask a better question, like, how can I care for my cattle?

I knew five living women back in the 1980s who all knew they were St. Catherine of Sienna in their past life. I wasn’t doing a survey. I met them randomly. Imagine how many men and women make that claim if you did a proper survey globally. Yeah, Saint Cathy is quite popular among spiritual seekers. Just stop it. Justice demands it. So does humility. You were not Saint Cathy, and you have no right to steal your identity from famous or unfamous dead people

You create God when you talk about God. Humans have created millions of gods; some brilliant, some insipid, some warlike, but all ephemeral. Gods change with language about gods. Deities come and go with the cultures that design them.

Psychology and depth psychology easily drift into God talk. William James, a key figure in defining psychology, lectured in 1901-02 about The Varieties of Religious Experience. Carl Jung famously tried to rescue religion for modern man with his 1933 collection of essays, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Psychology of religion was furthered with James and Jung, but, having nothing to do with coffee, Edwin D. Starbuck influenced James with his late 19th Century book, Psychology of Religion. James wrote the introduction.

Silence is the Voice of God………………

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name. Hallowed means holy, sacred, and beyond your ability to grasp. G-d for Jews is hallowed or set apart. Not here. Nowhere in spacetime. This is not that hard. The beginning of something has always been nothing.

Sound emerges from two hands clapping though neither hand carries a sound. Did you hear that, Grasshopper? What is the sound of one hand clapping?

The color blue you see in a flower does not exist in the flower. It is a quale, a separate figment of weird brain activity fed by information through an eye. We imagine angels dancing on heads of pins. Our brains image color for us. We do not will blue onto the flower. We can say that we have a charismatic relationship with a flower that appears blue.

We can have a charismatic relationship with a guru who appears holy to us even when he is not. There is a traitor in our skulls.[8]

Am I making any sense here? If I am, you missed the point. Perish the thought. But by all means, enjoy your blue and use it for classification. A pin can pop balloons no matter how many angels dance on its head. That charismatic response in your sacred experience requires verification. Look behind the curtain.  

An old friend of mine, a retired psychologist who divides his spiritual time between a modern hybrid Hindu religion that emerged in the 19th Century and mainline Catholicism, recently asked me whether I believed in God. My immediate answer was that I was “God-soaked” after four decades of cult-related interventions and research. But I do not believe in God or a god; rather, I believe God. It’s like saying that I believe Being or existence. Ominous. We breathe existence in air. Fish breathe existence in water. Beyond my grasp why. Yet existence is all around me in my perishable life. I experience transcendence daily.

St. Paul wrote, “I die daily” (1 Corinthians 15:31) in his experience of transcendence. His faith was built on the resurrection story of Jesus that many said they experienced. It is a mystery of the Christina faith. The interpretations of that mystery are what can get you into rabbit holes of cult-think.   

Saint Luke in 17:21, quotes Jesus as saying, “I am among you” (or “in your midst”) to emphasize the existence of God. We breathe God to stay alive.

The corrupt translation of Luke 17:21 was “I am within you.” That corrupt translation has made the rounds like a neo-Gnostic, narcissistic meme among the New Age crowds and cults. It feels very special to know that you are God, even in a divine spark somewhere in your chakras.  

Too much reality but nevertheless, reality: “Go, go, said the bird. Humankind cannot bear too much reality” (The Four Quartets: Burnt Norton by T.S. Eliot). Go, go while you breathe. Until you do not.

At least leave a legacy of benefit that some people can be proud of.   

I Am That I Am or God as we commonly call That or Agnostos Theos (the Unknown God) in some languages remain in the conversation. I AM Who I Am pops up as well. That, Who, What I Am.[9] We have to call That something, that Something that we experience as transcendent and everlasting in a thousand ways individually and collectively. Nirvana? Atman/Brahman? Universe? Olam Ha-Ba (the World to Come)? The Universe is the latest stand-in for God among modernized Westerners who disdain religion but like to call themselves “spiritual.” I fail to see the difference. When we go transcendentally in religion or to spirituality, we go transcendentally. “Go, go,” said the bird.

With no That-Who-What or a caring Universe, why live? That is a bad question. To question why repeatedly is like a three-year-old into teleology and ontology. Answers only make it worse. Just shut the hell up and let it be. Satisfied Jews throughout history, kind of like Buddhists, dispense with the metaphysical questions by emphasizing ethical behavior. Live right and the Beyond, if there be one in any way, will take care of us in Itself. We must submit in the end to whatever.

Death is also salvation.

El, the ancient Semitic utterance for God, meant strong one or strongest one. Shamans and high priests around the Levant had the daunting task of hearing El, then translating El-talk into whatever language among the Canaanite tribes. One nomadic tribe created a sacred talking box. The Ark of the Covenant is in a story about how G-d talked to and through ancient Jews. The voice from the Ark was silent, save through human vocal cords linked to priests who interpreted the silence.

Sacred Buddha statues, a dead savior on a sacred crucifix and words on pages do not talk. But we talk about the experiences we have encountering iconic statues, symbolic crucifixes, and sacred words. We engage with symbols and signs impressed on our senses.

If you can gather anything from that prior sentence, you will have gathered something about what this one-eyed jack holds true about God from Melville. Icons are powerful reminders and metaphors of silence that holds still the voice of God mimicking timeless spaceless eternity. I do not know what timeless spaceless eternity is if it is anything at all. As I mentioned above, a few religious traditions believe that God created the world out of nothing. That always blows my mind. Why would anyone say something like that?

To repeat, the same Genesis scripture says that God made man out of dirt. Dirt might be contingent on nothing, but humankind is contingent on dirt in that belief system—or language game, as Ludwig Wittgenstein enjoyed saying. Dirt is our mother: Mother Earth is her name. Sounds right. Dirt, ashes, clay, stuff, subatomic particles. Or is it waves of energy?

Science as knowledge morphs into religion and cults throughout history. In my view, I would argue that atheists and humanists are wrong to believe that science arises as a corrective to instinct, superstition and religion. The opposite occurred as humans evolved from an animal nature. Animals are scientists as knowing beings that use experience and instincts to know or realize how to behave. Animals can learn through mistakes too, if they survive the mistake.

Humans invent and impose religious ideas to govern behavior. We glorify existence with our arts, architecture, music, and theater. We also confuse and mess it up using the same powers to glorify. Swords and plowshares.

Animals have an uncanny ability to repeat survival skills from generation to generation without referencing fancy books or artificial intelligence. Birds are not taught by older birds how to build nests in bird schools. The nest a bird hatches in imprints its engineering directly through senses and genetic memory, whatever that is. Nevertheless, bird nests like bee hives are miracles of engineering. The evidence continually repeats itself.

Jesus might have been referring to this idea when he taught that his Father in heaven cares for the birds of the air:

“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life.” (Matthew 6:26-27)

That last question by Jesus in Matthew 6:27 leaves me scratching my head. When we were more like apes, we likely lived more like those birds of the air. Worrying like anxiety has a healthy side to it when it is within reason and properly directed to solve problems. Yes, worry can add years to our lives if worry leads to survival skills and medical interventions that work. Of course, we are reading scripture. We have little idea what the real Jesus might have said and done in real time when he lived. Or had he lived as a man today.

Animals do not invent moral codes and religious doctrines to guide their behaviors. Humans invented techne, languages, and rules to better organize themselves and the environment. And clothes: “Who told you that you were naked?” the Elohistic God said to Eve and Adam after they covered their nakedness with fig leaves.

The gods and the polis are pious frauds or noble lies according to Plato. Humans function better within a theatrical construction that is necessary for human development and harmony. Annual parades honoring the cat goddess Bastet in ancient Egypt provided a sense of harmony with the beyond. Cats continue to enjoy special treatment in the Middle East.

We are utterly fascinated by films like The Matrix with borrowed Gnostic cosmological systems for this reason: Some people feel more trapped in a false system that others. Trans-gender males struggle with the normative system or social matrix that controls their reality. Animals have no concern for The Matrix. They take Eden at face value and do not eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

For better or for worse, we are married to our curse to make judgments about our reality.  Knowledge of the stars and planets for navigation and agriculture became stories of anthropomorphized constellations, architecture for gods, and astrology for divination. Like children, we too often project autonomous agencies into the sock puppets of metaphors, thus making it easier for clever cult leaders to manipulate perception: “This holy white handkerchief was blessed through me by a god. For twenty dollars donation, I can mail it to you to augment your healing from cancer.” Magic is in the mind for better or for worse. Melville again:  

As long as things are perishable, justice will live as the human soul and law as the human mind.

For better or for worse, we have become judges of good and evil, of true and false, and of comical and ludicrous.

Platonists, shamans, and mystics profess to have tapped the silence if only to chant Aum or report mysteries experienced and revealed. In prehistoric tribal life, the willow tree that provided a potion when chewed by animals and humans to alleviate aches and fevers soon became a totem, a Tree of Life, that required ritual devotion. The ailing deer merely chews the bark. The human adds the tree spirit as the agent of healing after chewing the bark or making tea of it. A willow-like Tree of Souls in the 2009 film Avatar served as a magical Tree of Life. Like children, we too often view these sock puppet metaphors literally as independent agents with souls of their own. Fundamentalist religion depends on that confusion as a talent among believers. We too often refuse to grow up.

Do we have to grow up?

Jesus said in Matthew 19:14 (NIV), “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

Paul said in Hebrews 5: 13,14 (KJV): “For everyone that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe.  But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.”

On this matter of growing up to grasp the word of the Lord, there seems to be some confusion in the scriptures. I know, I know: There are geniuses out there that claim to have resolved this discrepancy in scripture which is “never wrong.” It’s called rationalization, and commentaries on difficult scriptures are replete with rationalizations that say, “look at the entire context.” I have and that does not always work. My point here is that every standardized religion has interpretive variations as in Islam with Sunni, Sufi, Shia or the Traditionalism of René Guénon.

Fundamentalism in any religion is a failure and an insult to that religion or cult. The creative richness of a well-developed religion is its strength and value. Paul in Hebrews was concerned about that, about not being stupid. Jesus in Matthew was asking for humility and acceptance. Like lambs going to slaughter in the martyr tradition. There was a difference and to see that difference we invented hermeneutics, the art and science of interpretation of text. Exegesis and eisegesis do not have to be clones to be helpful. On the other hand, exegesis and eisegesis can both go horribly wrong and cause harm. How many times have we heard prophecies about the end of the world since Jesus died or ascended? Yes, too many to count. We are still here as a species. Prophets are too often delusional or mere scoundrels who revel in personal interpretation. Eisegesisists gone mad.

The science that led to nuclear energy also produced the myth of Godzilla that soon doubled as both an apex destroyer and a savior of mankind in film. Godzilla as Gojira emerged in 1954 in Japanese film productions. In 1945, Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita after observing the first nuclear bomb explosion test in New Mexico. “I am become death,” was his reaction referencing Vishnu in the form of Krishna who revealed himself in the Gita as the source of everything including time as “kala” which is Sanskrit for death.

Melville’s “as long as all things are perishable” echoes Vishnu’s divine aspect as time. But Vishnu as time is also the creator. All high gods including Siva, Zurvan, Allah, and Yahweh represent time’s function as both creator and destroyer.

“The Voice of the Silence” by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was published in 1889, two years before she died at around age sixty. HPB’s writings purporting to be “theosophy” include Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine that served as deus ex machina in text. Her tomes accelerated a popular occulture intrigued by imaginary mahatmas, ascended masters and their mysterious mountain enclaves in Shamballa, Agartha, and Mt. Shasta.

This elite hierarchy hidden in our midst guides the evolution of the human race much as do the starlike gods above according to astrology and Manichaeism.

The precocious rascal and amanuensis for godlike sources of perennial wisdom, Madame Blavatsky, claimed that her 1889 book, Voice of the Silence, was a translation from fragments from “The Book of the Golden Precepts” that she discovered in Tibet. There is no evidence that Blavatsky entered Tibet despite her vaguely insistent claims. Her Voice of the Silence has a Mahayana Buddhist flair, and some say it was her most coherent book. The simple “truth” from evidence is that she regurgitated what she learned from the Mahayana tradition. She did not need the Silence.

My spiritual search as a young man fell into several eccentric rabbit holes related to Blavatsky’s revealed theosophy. Borrowing from a book title by Mircea Eliade, I’d say my journey through Blavatskyisms was an “Ordeal by Labyrinth” (Eliade, 1978).[10] In the end, taking the occulture divined by any self-appointed magus seriously for me demanded a flight from reason beyond healthy standards of inquiry and reality. Blavatsky was merely one symptom among many of the fundamentally diseased spiritualty I pursued for approximately seven years until the early 1980s. That disease is primarily one that overvalues the powers of consciousness. Listen to Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi:

“Some people [tend to] become very mystical when talking about consciousness and expect it to accomplish miracles that at present it is not designed to perform. They would like to believe that anything is possible in what they think of as the spiritual realm. Other individuals claim the power to channel into past existences, to communicate with spiritual entities, and to perform uncanny feats of extrasensory perception. When not outright frauds, these accounts usually turn out to be self-delusions—lies that an overly receptive mind tells itself.”[11]

Unveiling secrets from above and beyond is an old game played by humans to impress an audience anxious about life’s purpose and death’s finality. We are not discounting the transcendence of life here; we are merely questioning what emerges from the Silence and how well the Silence is expressed. This one-eyed jack accepts the transcendence of existence and ponders eternity with no isms attached, if that were ever possible. Even a dyed-in-the-wool materialist admits that what we do not know about the material world seems like undyed woo now. We all hope there are advanced civilizations out there, and we all wonder whether they might be friendly, like gods, or something completely repulsive.

One-eyed jackism haunts the discussion here too. The subject gets subjective at every turn. Bias wants to lead the way like an urgent puppy. Every philosopher has a spin.

I may be stumbling badly, tripping over inept language use and comprehension, but we may get somewhere useful if you can trust me enough.  

In any case, from my one-eyed jack view, Blavatsky is a prime example before and since she died of the varying qualities of pretense to be the voice of God, the gods, the Void, ascended masters, extra-terrestrials, and past lives. As with poetry and novels, some mystics offer valuable inspiration and aesthetically enriching text, while most fall short by entertaining our lesser angels of superstition and grandiosity.  When it comes to God talking, it appears that some of us cannot shut up. The truth from the Silence becomes little more than subjectively generated noise irritating non-believers.

During the final years of her life, I tended to my mother who lived past 100 years until 2024. Her life was exemplary in many ways. Born and raised in Hungary, she met and lived with my Hungarian father in Displaced Persons camps in Germany for six years after World War 2. They emigrated with me as a toddler in 1951 to America with nine dollars to their names. Mom, a professional seamstress, was a lifelong Catholic who in her final decade repeatedly remarked that “religion is all man made.” Yet she found comfort in Catholic signs like holy communion, in Jesus and Mary as cosmic guardians in her iconic pictures, and in a small wood and silver crucifix that we’ve had in our family since 1946.

Mom’s idea of God remained deeply with her in the end and not with perishable if valued agents outside of her. She had let all that dogma go. By her reckoning, we are the demiurges of mapping the creation with religion, science, art, technology, and ideas. Our maps are often confused with the territory, especially by true believers in gurus, doctrines, and cults. Catholicism became a map for my mother; the territory was far more mysterious and personal. In the end, she trusted the territory more than the map. In the end she submitted to the God of time as all persons will.

And she did it willingly. When a priest asked her at age 99 what he could do for her, she replied, “Please pray to God to stop my heart.”

The one-eyed jack most familiar to modern American gambling casinos comes from the Bicycle Rider Deck first manufactured in 1885. The deck has two one-eyed jacks in spades and hearts and a single one-eyed king in diamonds. How the images of the jacks or the king evolved is a fascinating and twisting story that includes the multicultural origins of the Tarot that we can trace to fifteenth century Europe. We have earlier styles of cartomancy that influenced Tarot in ancient China and India. But the enigmatic Tarot we use today, purported by occultists to have ancient origins, is but a nineteenth century product with many variations.

One cryptic cartomancer published “Meditations on the Tarot” anonymously in 1980, but research revealed that a convert to Catholicism, Valentin Tomberg, finished it around 1967. Tomberg used the major arcana of the Marseilles deck that emerged several centuries ago in France. Tomberg had nothing to say about jacks, also called pages and knaves, that emerged from the minor arcana of Tarot. His basic assumptions about the occult or hidden pathways to God were grounded in the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner and the archetypes of Carl Jung as well as mystical Catholicism.

Tomberg had faith in the occult tenet “as above, so below” as a psychological guide. In other words, God or the Universe above never tires of talking to us if we would only find the time and means to listen. Those means can include entheogen induced experience, intense scholarship, and a deck of cards. There is no evidence that he used entheogens or God-drugs, but Tomberg was a one-eyed jack with his singular vision as he mined golden gnosis through 688 pages in his alchemical tryst with the Tarot.[12] We can say that his “Meditations” has a cult following today much as any text that with sacred intentions has devoted readers. Not unlike A Course In Miracles.

Our one-eyed view here is simpler than Tomberg’s. Every expert has a spin, a bias, a thesis, or a purpose that an audience can at least trust as reliable when based in rigorously researched resources and references. The latter traits define experts. Tomberg was expert with Tarot history and interpretation, but he based his interpretations on basic assumptions that some of us might disagree with. I did.[13]

Expertise, then, is not a guarantee for absolute truth or final say. It is a means to further the curse of having to judge reality as if we were gods: “Ye are gods” in the Bible (Psalm 82:6; John 10:34) translates as we humans are judges (gods) acting in the place of God in human affairs. We would have no authority to judge “had it not come from above,” said Jesus speaking to his executioners in John 19:11, or, if you prefer, had it not been funded through evolution. When we judge reality wrongly, our decisions can trap us or kill us.                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Again, Melville:

As long as things are perishable, justice will live as the human soul and law as the human mind. 

In every culture from ancient tribes through atheistic Russian Communism, the judge’s decision, the chief’s decision, is final for better or for worse, appeals included. We can only project that there is a deity, a final perfection, that rights every flawed judgment we made personally and collectively. Death remains the passage to that hope for ultimate justice and absolute gnosis. Our curse is to work this out over time and space as best we can and live with the consequences: Karma. Here in the perishable world, we live with the results of our actions and whatever the environment hands us. Adaptability, context, and luck seem to be major players in how we thrive. Luck is better understood as Lila or divine play in Sanskrit. This unnerving concept of Lila leaves us vulnerable to influencers who offer something more certain.  

My cult of the one-eyed jack seeks expert analysis and opinion to correct bias as much as possible under circumstances. “Expert analysis and opinion to correct bias” refers to the Torah’s Proverbs 12:1:

That person who rejects correction is stupid.

As with any quote, it helps to view it in more context. The New International Version offers this translation:

Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates correction is stupid. A good man obtains favor from the LORD, but the LORD condemns a crafty man. A man cannot be established through wickedness, but the righteous cannot be uprooted.

Yes, that is a divine mouthful to be parsed when applied to a person’s particular expression or behavior including one’s own. Who are we to judge whether someone’s behavior is stupid? Does not the same book of scriptures admonish us, “Judge not, lest ye be judged?”

Matthew 7: 1-3 from the quaintly archaic and sometimes misleading King James Version states:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

We are back to the meaning of judges as gods or the human authority to judge given from “above.” The warning from Matthew is not about judging as such but judging wrongly and finally, the latter belonging to the Final Judge. We are cursed or evolved to judge everything after we ate of that Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, after we evolved into the human species.

The one-eyed jack strives for good judgment by self and from others. Those judgements likely need correction along the way. Those corrections come as a result of caring for the one-eyed jack’s approach to knowledge, conduct and governance or the three pillars of philosophical investigation. We have a duty to pass on good judgment when possible. That duty, that dharma, exists in parenting, schooling, and governing. In this perishable world, we survive better when we judge better. The better our judgments are, the more we can experience eudaimonia, Aristotle’s word for well-being and the primary goal of our perishable lives.  

CULT

Caring for the one-eyed jack (for the self) is the cult addressed here. Cult or cultus from Latin origin has four declensions as a noun:

1. finery, splendor

2. neatness/order

3. style

4. personal care/maintenance/grooming

Other variations as a noun:

1. care, worship, devotion/observance

2. form of worship, cult

3. training/education

Cultus also acts as a verb conjugated three ways:

1. foster, maintain

2. live in (place), inhabit

3. till, cultivate, promote grow

The Cultus Deorum was the ancient Roman religion. In other words, to care for the gods in orderly fashion and to maintain their splendor with styles of fine art, architecture and symbolic rituals was the Roman orthopraxy. The Roman religion was not about faith or belief. It was about doing, about putting devotion into practice. Whether we view this as psychological, literal or casual is up to the capacity of the devotee or worshiper.

The Roman gods and Greek gods did not have to be real as faith objects with autonomous agency as developed in Christianity with Jesus, angels, and saints. Go through the motions whether you believe in the agency of the gods or not was the Roman way, the Greek way, the Hindu way, the Aztec way, etc. You did the ritual because the polis required it, because it felt good to be in harmony with your neighbors, or just in case it worked.

Faith in the objective truth of scripture coalesced with the advent of Christianity. The story of “doubting Thomas” who demanded to place his fingers into the wounds of the risen Christ before he would believe challenges faith. The risen Jesus appears to Thomas and challenges him to touch the wounds, but Thomas does not touch the wounds. “Seeing” them is enough. He is shamed and expressed his faith.

This story appears in the Gospel of John that was likely written toward the end of the first century, the last of the four gospels. The John Gospel responds to challenges to the nature of the Christ event, advancing the cosmology to identify Jesus the man with the power of God as the creator of the universe. All things were made through Him, the Lord Jesus.

Faith is what drives the Christ story, not scientific proof. The lesson of John, Chapter 20 is that faith depends on psychology, not hard science. The earlier Synoptic Gospels do not mention the doubting Thomas event. Was the writer of the John gospel manipulating the story to answer doubters of the resurrection of Jesus? Could the story of doubting Thomas be an effort to clarify faith? Of that we can be sure. We cannot be sure that it happened.

Interpretations ranged from fundamentalism to Platonic or Gnostic. The latter had no need of unsophisticated, nonsense stories of concrete or bodily resurrection. Gnostic orthopraxy or lifestyle as an ascetic using purification rituals mattered more than faith or orthodoxy.

Either way, orthopraxy or orthodoxy, has potential for deception, manipulation, and abuse.

Going through the motions of ritual in orthopraxy is what is important. In crude terms, if you have to fake it, fake it, or you go to jail or worse: What if the gods are real and your fate tanks because you refused to attend to Agnihotra (daily fire worship)? The early Christians refused to fake it; thus we have a history of the blood of the martyrs who died for their faith establishing the foundations of a church built more on faith than practice—Pure Land Buddhism in Japan shares this idea that we are saved by the grace of a deity, that by works salvation is impossible for naughty, bumbling humans. Nevertheless, most of Christianity has orthopraxy, not merely orthodoxy. Even without the liturgy, icons, and statues of saints, angels, and Jesus, the so-called faith-based/Bible-based denominations practice by gathering around preachers upholding the cults of faith in a book and the business of churchmanship: Tithe or go to hell.

The anointed preacher can assume godlike postures on stage, exercising judgments about what he is reading through the practice of hermeneutics which too often breaks down into eisegesis or personal interpretation. A common example is end-times speculation. The cult of performance reigns on stage when trained preachers cleverly move the emotions of the crowd with gesture, inflection, and messaging. Preacher stagecraft becomes mystical manipulation or engineered outcomes of emotion and experience. The person in the pew believes they are having a spontaneous holy spirit ecstasy while succumbing to a preacher’s performance employing powers of suggestion.

Over the decades, I have witnessed many faith-based services run by preachers who exude a feeling of transcendent power as if from above. In these charismatic relationships, congregations hear the voice of God (Jupiter, Zeus, Indra, Pachamama, Odin). Unhealthy, self-sealing autocratic cults readily arise in faith-based groups as well as practice-based groups reacting to slick and overt social pressure from above and around.

The cult bargain is this: If we care for the gods, the gods care for us. Gods stand in for gurus, life-coaches, bosses, heroes, politicians, judges, and so on. In other words, there has to be a mutually beneficial exchange for cult relationships to work. If we please God, God pleases us. Displeasing a god can hurtle our souls into Hades. Caring for the gods helps maintain order in the polis or city culture. To not care for the gods is to violate the harmony of the polis, thus be punishable by the courts or by karma.

In ancient cultures, there were a variety of gods including household gods, so the populace had freedom to choose a personal god or temple. Roman soldiers tended to prefer Mithra while others may have practiced devotion to Jupiter, Neptune, Minerva, or Diana. Not all Romans were expected to be Mithra devotees. Heresy (the freedom to choose or to choose a position) was not a major issue among pagans as compared with faith-based, doctrine-based Christianity that drove the definition of faith to ridiculous extremes of murderous inquisitions: Believe this or go to hell! Confess to the sin or we torture you until you do.

There is a tendency in cult behavior to uphold a satguru or inspired founder of a religion as singularly divine or divinely inspired. A satguru is a mystic who experiences divine realization directly through the Atman or soul, meaning directly from God or Brahman as the oversoul. The common guru learns a craft or philosophy and educates accordingly. For example, Jesus is the one-eyed king (of diamonds) in Christian circles that preach that through His eye only can we see God. That eye is the Holy Spirit that is identical with God in Trinitarian teaching. Recall that Jesus taught to “keep thine eye single” (Matthew 6:22). What he meant has been up for debate for centuries. The purported single vision of Christianity has over 40 varieties of doctrine with over 45,000 eyes or denominations. Some, perhaps thousands, of the denominations have radical and toxic features. Most tend to function tolerably for periods of time within a historical context.

Interestingly, the king of diamonds in a deck of playing cards, the only king with one eye showing, has symbolic links to Odin, the King of Asgard, who sacrificed one of his eyes for the secret wisdom of magic. Jesus more than any prophet-king before or since was a magical physician who healed by the power of the spoken word and faith, according to the Gospel tradition.

This “single eye” sign can also be traced to the Eye of Horus story in ancient Egypt. The Eye of Horus represents healing, wellness, and salvation in the afterlife. Cult leaders and metaphysical healers of all stripes have been claiming similar divine powers ad nauseum for ages. Is it possible to judge how real the powers of Jesus or Horus were?   

This one-eyed jack struggles to give clients and students the best shot for good judgement. This one-eyed jack offers relief from deception and manipulation. He offers an expanded view that can help the choice to break free from unhealthy and deceptive systems of social control that sustain bounded choice.[14] Devotion to freedom from deceptive influence, manipulation and abuse is what makes this a cult, albeit one that strives for good. Significant studies have shown that influence works on a continuum from benign to destructive.[15] The cult of the one-eyed jack as presented here opens doors to the benign end of that continuum, hopefully.

The passages ahead offer insights into how I and my peers in cult education, exit counseling, and, yes, deprogramming accomplished what they set out to do: To offer information through dialogue and presentation to individuals and groups who appear to be caught up in an autocratic self-sealing social system unwary of the deceptions and manipulations that keep them in whether through group pressure or self-driven indoctrination. In brief, the goal of any intervention is to initiate informed choice. The initiate decides what is relevant to them.  

Cult of Caring:

Caring for the gods, the soil, the plants, and for the people involves cult: Cultus Deorum, agriculture, horticulture, and human culture. Difficult means hard to care for or to do. In this chapter, we will explore the cult of caring or why we bother to care at all about ourselves, others and the environment. Survival comes to mind as the most basic reason for caring, but it goes much deeper. Caring transcends human dimensions. The animal kingdom from insects to whales demonstrates varieties of caring for the next generation of species, sometimes sacrificing life itself to protect the progeny.

Caring has ritualistic features. Repetitive acts of nurturing sustain the survival of offspring.

Evolution or a transcendent purpose sorted out ways to propagate living things, at least for a time. Scientists estimate over 95% of all species have gone extinct before the dawn of Homo sapiens millions of years ago. But we can all appreciate that life for any time at all is a wonder to be appreciated if not completely understood. We care about the good and the beauty in life.

There are many varieties of life that we do not necessarily like or easily care for. Some forms of life are annoying, parasitic, or dangerous to other forms of life. We all know about viruses, bacteria, cancerous cells, and rabid raccoons. We know about thieves, rapists, and murderers. We know about con artists, sex workers, and influencers. We know about mentally ill people and drug addicts: We try to care for them, but too often caring is difficult and unrewarding when behavior and substance use become unmanaged disorders.

The difficulty can lead to frustration and that can lead to anger. Angry reactions to what we perceive as drains and drags on the stability of the species lead to Social Darwinism, autocratic rule, and fascism. We want to quickly be rid of the perceived problem that cannot readily be fixed. We destroy that which could steal from our welfare.

When the inmates rule the asylum, we have a more serious problem. We lazily call unhealthy autocratic movements cults whether we are in a cult or not. I am reminded of schizophrenic and manic patients brought to the psych hospital where I worked for 25 years accusing staff of being the crazy ones. During my intervention career, cult members and leaders accused me and my peers of being “brainwashed” and of “brainwashing” dozens of times.  

Eugenics was a popular solution to sub-functional humans in America early in the 20th Century before more extreme racial cleansing measures became popular in Germany by the1930s. There were some socially pathological people leading the eugenics movements.

After I graduated from university in 1969, my next goal was to get through art school at the Pennsylvania Academy. To save money, I worked for two years as a Therapeutic Activities Worker and small program supervisor at a large asylum for the brain damaged and mentally retarded. At the time in 1970, there were close to 1,300 residents (labelled imbecile, insane, epileptic, or socially unmanagable) people at Pennhurst State School and Hospital.  

Opened in 1908 as Eastern Pennsylvania Institution for the Feeble Minded and Epileptic, Pennhurst was being shut down by the time I arrived after notorious exposes of abuse appeared in the Philadelphia news in the 1960s. Lawsuits prevailed. Through a slow attrition process that placed residents into community centers, Pennhurst finally closed its doors in 1992. Its original image was state of the art and a clear improvement on how low-functioning, severely problematic adults and children were treated. But crowded conditions soon emerged as Pennhurst, like similar state campuses for cognitively impaired people, became incarceration warehouses. Verbally competent Pennhurst residents told me that the only way out of the institution was “in a box” until the new changes ensued. For many, the changes did not come fast enough. They indeed left in a box.  

Caring for this population could be gratifying, humorous, tedious, disgusting and dangerous on the same day. But I am not going into that two-year experience. Bad genes as well as bad luck can deeply affect how we—brain damaged, characterologically disordered, or not—experience life. The Pennhurst residents had no choice, as they were as much cursed by flaws in their genes or damage to their brains as they were by social rejection.

That begs the question: Must highly functional folks with college degrees not cursed by bad genes take full responsibility for getting caught up in shitty cults? Yes, some of these groups we call cults stink in ideation, behavior, governance, and accountability. And yes, taking some responsibility for spending time in a bad cult is necessary if only for the struggle to break away with some dignity. In my case, I initially blamed myself—I did not blame the cult. The first paper I wrote about that experience in 1981 a year after I left was “Confessions of a Spiritual Idiot” and not “I was deceived by….” I was angry at myself for being so stupid. I stood long and hard for correction. (Proverbs 12:1 flipped: That person who loves correction is wise.)

It took me years to gather evidence of the levels of intentional and unintentional deceptions perpetrated by the Elizabeth Prophet cult system and its managers. The enlightened bitch (indeed, she could get very bitchy with her private staff behind the curtains) that we all called Mother was never in touch with ascended masters! It was always all in her head (as it has been with every channeler and spirit medium throughout history). All her decrees, thousands and thousands of them over decades, had no intended effect on reality beyond influence over the followers. It was all in her head.

Religion and new religion have no cosmological science behind them. The gods and spirits have no autonomous agency.  I later came to call the gods and ascended masters Mind Puppets. My mother, a staunch Catholic, in her late nineties decided religion is all man made. Mom never read Melville, but she was at the end an astute participant-observer.

Religion is basically psychological and sociological, not scientific. There is no “Christian science” if what we mean by science is a method that can achieve repeatable, reliable results. The occult sciences are merely rituals mixed with magical thinking about the possibility of causing desired results. To pray for or try to spiritually manifest healing or wealth without practical effort is delusional behavior.

The miracles attributed to Jesus who used the spoken word are known in stories called Gospels about Jesus. Stories are not proof. Nor are miracle stories consistent and reliable in the Gospels. The reported supernatural powers of Jesus depended on faith, not fiat or science. We read little of cases not healed by Jesus other than that unbelief might prevent a healing. The Jesus stories aside (we cannot prove he did not do miracles), Christians thereafter until today too often fail miserably to heal others in the name of Jesus, God, a saint, a force of nature, or self-power. That is all I am arguing here.

The Fascist regime in Italy before and during World War 2 attributed many miracles to the spiritual powers of Benito Mussolini. El Duce stopped the lava flow of Mt. Etna, healed a deaf boy who was at one of his speeches, and brought rain to drought-stricken Libya. I will not rehearse the miracles attributed to “Saint” Padre Pio under Mussolini’s reign. In my opinion, Pio was a fraud. Apparently, one does not have to be holy to seem to produce miracles.[16]

Religion is more aligned with psychology than cosmology.

The universe is a Rorschach test for religious behavior and spiritual perception.

Let me elaborate. Perhaps for the third time, I reread The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology by John Farrell (2005). This is one of my favorite books wherein we find one of the finest mathematical minds of the 20th Century, a Catholic priest, making perhaps the most succinct statement about the distinction between real science and the purpose of religion:

“When I was talking with Lemaître about this subject and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However, Lemaître did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closer to religion.”  Paul Dirac, “The Scientific Work of Georges Lemaître”[17]

Georges Lemaître (1894-1966) early in his career developed mathematical insight into what later came to be called the singularity of the Big Bang and the event horizon of black holes. This unsung genius contributed to modern physics and cosmology in an essential way while maintaining his deep vocation as a Catholic priest. Throughout Western history, religious thinkers have also been amazing scientists.

Pythagoras assigned spiritual and occult dimensions to numbers and music. His bizarre, elitist mix of church and state led to disastrous results when he was an influential advisor of elites or “governor” of Croton around 530 B.C. Speculative Freemasons taking their cues from ancient Egyptian mystery schools and Rosicrucian ideas, infuse architecture and sciences with sacred symbology. Both Sir Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle were pioneering giants in maths and chemistry while pursuing the occult arts of alchemy and divination.

However, especially since Charles Darwin in the mid-19th Century, the psychological separation of science from religion has marched forward with increasing modernization. In 21st Century America we still have one in five people rejecting theories of evolution in favor of fundamentalist Creationism. That’s around fifty million people whose politics tend to swing far right and lean toward theocracy as the way to govern. Another indicator of pseudo-science, one that crosses the left-right political divide, regards around 20% of Americans who believe in and use CAM or complementary and alternatives medicines like homeopathy. Added to this social ridiculousness (in my opinion) are beliefs in quantum consciousness, telepathic or mental healing, and the magic power of crystals as factually effective. Beliefs, false or true, have serious consequences for any polis in education, health, and lawmaking whether that polis is a small communal cult or a large nation state.   

The residuals of ancient beliefs and practices have never left us. The big one is that an independent agent that we call God or Logos created the universe out of nothing or “Itself.” This may or may not be true—we are not arguing atheism versus theism here! The interpretation of how or why a deity blew itself up or out to become matter, space, time, energy, and biological life is what is at stake here for scientists like Georges Lemaître. He was not applying psychology to his science and math equations.

After Lemaître became famous for his singularity  solution that influenced Einstein, Pope Pius XII in a 1951 speech “had just stepped over the line, publicly expressing the view that Lemaître’s expanding, dynamic model of the universe, his primeval atom theory, offered virtual proof that the creation story in the Book of Genesis was now substantiated by science.”[18]

Lemaître was livid with the pope’s mistaken interpretation though dignified in his response. He later in a private meeting corrected the pope who subsequently after 1951 backed away from his stupid pronouncement, but the damage had been done. The meme went viral that science, or a scientist, had proved that the Big Bang was evidence of the Creator making the world out of nothing. Lemaître’s reputation suffered among his critics who suspected that his beliefs as a Catholic biased his research as a scientist. The history of science has repaired Lemaître’s reputation, but rumors and memes about the Logos and the Big Bang continue to surface among the superstitious crowds who misunderstand history and misapply science.

The erosion of certainty in perennial wisdom appears to add to the paranoia among fundamentalists of any religious or political stripe. That paranoia finds its reflection in visons of an evil force working tirelessly throughout the cosmos to erode our belief in God, truth, objectivity, morals, and apple pie. Ahriman, the destructive spirit and lord of chaos in ancient Zoroastrianism, comes to mind.

Popular, if not always brilliant writers like C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and Ayn Rand have added to this suspicion that Satan or Socialism amount to “truth decay,” a phrase used by Douglas Groothuis in his Christian apologetic critique of relativism: Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism (2000). Lewis in his entertaining book, The Screwtape Letters, informs us how Satan as Uncle Screwtape instructs his nephew Wormwood how to undermine human morality and belief. Screwtape calls the human “the Patient” who he is treating with his psychological games.

I purposely use paranoia here to reflect on Lemaître’s contention that religion is more aligned with psychology than cosmology. Accounting for evil with an all-present, autonomous devil is paranoia. Manipulative cults love this device to posit a powerful demon, then propose rituals on how to fight it. Pray more our way, study our way, and pay for our services. The powerful demon has many names: Socialism, Fascism, Doubt, Fear, and Lucifer.

Psychology derives its meaning from psyche or soul or the animating force. Psyche is also the Greek goddess of the soul. If we read Genesis as Biblical mythology, we readily gather the value of the psychology of religion. If we understand the myth as fact, we obscure if not destroy its mature value. The story of the human soul illustrated with pictures and fairy tales about Psyche on Mt. Olympus has value for children as they mature if they mature. By age seven, most children no longer entertain Santa Claus as literal fact. However, good old Santa should have done his job to encourage moral and ethical behavior if he is to retain any value at all under the deluge of Christmas gifts. This is what Monsignor Lemaître meant when he noted that religion is more like psychology than cosmology.  

Cosmism is a Russian, neo-Slav cult that has theurgic and geopolitical aspects.[19] By cult I mean a deeply devotional movement adhered to by millions of Slavs including current Russian leader, Vladimir Putin. Nikolai Fedorov, Moscow’s 19th century librarian-philosopher known to locals as the Russian Socrates, inspired Cosmism with his attempt to modernize Orthodox theology. His basic idea was this: The resurrection is real only if we make it real. We can make it real for every biological creature that ever existed, including the Biblical Adam, if we scientifically advance to be able to reach the stars and find ways to gather the star dust that was once in physical form on Earth. You could be resurrected in the distant future whether you care to be or not.

Many subsequent Cosmists, Vladimir Vernadsky among them, became rocket scientists. The motivation may have been off the rails, but the results for rocket science were quite real. Think of building an Egyptian pyramid or Gothic cathedral. Engineering as pure science served the myth that had cosmic and social value. No one can prove that the pyramid fulfilled its function as a mechanism to transport the pharaoh into an afterlife where he would become a god. We can prove that the effort to build a pyramid or a Gothic cathedral furthered our knowledge of structural sciences and aesthetic values.  

Resurrection and ascension into heaven have been common transcendent beliefs since prehistoric times if we read the grave artifacts of stone age people correctly. The hope for an afterlife for pet dogs and cats persists among most people I know, let alone for family and friends. Whether or not it is pure projection that our lives were funded by a divine agent through our genes, the idea of an afterlife and a before life affords a wide array of theological and business options for human probability structures like religions, funeral homes, and entire cultures. The probability of life after death or life beyond our limited awareness drives us to gamble with intellectual, devotional, and social investments of our money and time.

From my singular point of view, cultic activity drives human social evolution while enriching human psychology for better or for worse. Worship of the gods and care for the gods has beneficial as well as harmful aspects. Getting caught up in devotional activity has its risks here on earth before we pass away. We know that much.

“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall never pass away.” With those strange if provocative words, Jesus in Mark 13:31 presages the John Gospel’s opening words: “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

I have no idea what “The Word” or Logos means beyond being or existence having a will in itself. To approach an answer to that riddle we invented teleology that examines the purpose or final cause of the cosmos. Why are we here? How did we get here?

For my purposes here, it does not matter what Logos means, but it does matter how we interpret it and put it to use. Do we build rocket ships to gather star dust so we can implement the resurrection and be “one” with Logos? Do we manufacture worship services that manipulate the people in the pews to experience the Logos as Spirit? Do we model meetings for substance use addicts to encourage them to seek a Higher Power?  Do we read A Course in Miracles with its daily lessons to remain in the Holy Instant? Do we cultivate supersensible powers with occultist Rudolf Steiner to approach his idea of the supersensible world of the Logos? Or do we regard it as a mystery of faith, a psychological relief project, like every sensible Catholic priest tells the kids, warning them not to overthink it?

Overthinking it can quickly lead to a flight from reason. Many schizophrenics I have worked with insisted that they experienced God, were God, or were in touch with transcendent visions.

Cosmic Narcissism

Overvaluing our experience of a god or the Logos as Self feeds self-inflation and spiritual puffery if not outright delusion. I used to call it cosmic narcissism, and I continue to. For some, self-inflation compensates for the fatigue of being a selfless, ethical human being. Self-inflation tends to lead to narcissism. Humility has its advantages. False humility is narcissism in disguise. Try not to be fooled, and by all means try not to fool yourself.

Pa, the Paramatma

After he claimed enlightenment during a meditation in Ojai, California around 1990, Fred S. liked to be called Pa. Pa was short for Paramatma or the Oversoul, the soul of the Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. Before that he was one of millions of devotees of Satya Sai Baba of India, a well-known fraud among Indian skeptics who knew how to perform Sai Baba’s miracles that amounted to magic tricks and the powers of suggestion. Before that Fred assaulted his first wife by choking her neck after threatening her many times. She left him with their ten-year-old son after that.

I met with Fred as Pa three times. Once for eight hours when he had only two disciples, both female.  I met him at his remote retreat cabin north of Mora, NM twice. The second time he agreed to allow me to videotape an interview with him. At that second meeting he had only one disciple who was also his lover. The first one decided Fred was crazy and autocratically abusive after three months with him.

Pa was quite open about his psychic powers. Some of his income came from selling small, tinted bottles of healing waters that had labels with instructions on dosage for treating everything from mood to cancer to relationships to world peace.

Homeopathic remedies and similar potions with little or no measurable value were already popular among the CAM or complimentary alternative medicine crowd for over a century. Pa merely played the same game. The bottles contained distilled water. Pa infused the bottles with “energy” from his mind. He could not send liquids to distributors out of the country. No problem. He shipped labels for bottles to Australia where a distributor would slap them on appropriate distilled water bottles for sale at a New Age shop in Byron Bay. I asked Pa how he transferred the energy to the water in Byron Bay. He said, “The labels carried my intent; thus, the waters are energized by the labels.” He was dead serious.  

Pa claimed that he did not have to read books, that he could grasp the content by merely reading the title or hearing it. I ran a few titles by him of books that I read that he knew nothing about, metaphysics books like The Reign of Quantity by René Guénon. I let Fred think he was correct with his assessments of the contents. He looked very pleased.

One year after our second meeting, I met Pa once more outside of Los Angeles. This last time was after a family hired me and a colleague to intervene with Pa’s partner who was their daughter. Her friends tricked her into going out to eat, then brought her to a house where we attempted an intervention. She was free to leave but agreed to talk. Her father, who was present the entire time, was an attorney. He was very careful not to violate his daughter’s rights. She had already met me twice, so she trusted me.

Things seemed to go well until one of her friends called Pa to tell him where we were. Her friend grew up as a Theosophist. She was concerned after hearing me mention that I had rejected Theosophy in1982. Pa called the police, telling them that his “wife” had been kidnapped. I quote “wife” because the marriage was never officially registered. Fred as Pa did the ceremony with no witnesses at his cabin.

The police knocked on the door to our surprise. I let them in. The father engaged the officers immediately to no effect. They wanted to speak with Pa’s “wife” Barbara alone. Whatever they said to her changed her mind.

They directed my colleague, me, the parents and two supportive friends to follow them to the police station. The daughter/wife went with the police. The daughter did not wish to file charges despite what Fred told the police. Pa showed up at the police station after an hour. His “wife” ran to him. Fred glared at me, then shouted, “You’re a Nazi.” They drove away. We were released.

The father had ties to the local Jewish community. He was quite upset with the police who recognized him.  He told them they had made a huge mistake. The police did not seem to care.

Later that evening, Pa and Barbara came to our hotel to try to make peace with the parents and to try to convince my colleague and me that he was legit. We spent several hours talking with him on couches in the lobby, round and around in tiresome circles as he would evade every sensible argument. In common street lingo, Pa was batshit crazy. Talking with batshit crazy is exhausting. The conversation ended—rather, it merely faded to nothing. We retired to our rooms. Pa retained his prize devotee.

Barbara, it appeared to me had a mental breakdown in college when she sought out Fred Saylor who led a small Sai Baba meditation group in Ojai. During her first meditation, she had a spiritual awakening, she said, and there and then bonded with Fred who soon became Pa, the Paramatma.

I. M. Lewis in his seminal study on shamanism, Ecstatic Religion, states: “…every transcendental encounter is unique and can be apprehended only by direct, personal experience. At an individual level this of course is always true. But it does not alter the fact that mystical experience, like any other experience, is grounded in and must relate to the social environment in which it is achieved. It thus inevitably bears the stamp of the culture [or cult] and society in which it arises.”[20]

In other words, naïve Barbara was cooked into Fred’s world view in the heat of dopamine increases in her brain precipitated by an altered state of consciousness during meditation. He took advantage of it as would any psychological predator. Of course, Fred saw this as the spirit bringing them together. I am not arguing which view, biological or spiritual, is correct. I am questioning the result. By their fruits shall you know them: Matthew 7:16.  

Years later, in 1992, I discovered that Pa had gathered over thirty followers and moved the entire crew to California. His goal he told me at our second, recorded meeting was to attract 108 wives, like Lord Krishna. He would be the sacred father/lover for the women while his wife would be the sacred mother/lover for all the men. This sexual behavior was confirmed to me in 1992 by a man, Hari Singh, in Santa Fe who was a long-time devotee of the hybrid Sikh 3HO (Happy Healthy Holy) cult led by Yogi Bhajan. Hari asked to meet with me despite knowing that I was a deprogrammer who had helped some 3HO members choose to leave his cult.  

Hari read about me in the local papers after I had been arrested for allegedly kidnapping a cult member in Idaho. I was out on bail awaiting trial in 1993. (I was acquitted by a jury). We met at my home for over four hours.

Hari arrived wearing soiled work clothes topped by an ochre turban. He drove white panel truck that he used as a construction worker for a 3HO member’s remodeling company. Hari told me of his best friend in the 3HO who had met with Pa at the Mora cabin after reading a brochure about Pa’s teaching. 3HO had a history of defectors who tired of Yogi Bhajan’s autocratic rule and scandals regarding his financial and sexual misconduct.

Hari did not like Bhajan’s behavior, but he felt deeply connected to the Sikh principles taught by Bhajan. Hari’s friend decided to join Pa’s group called Samala. The friend convinced his wife to defect to Samala with their two pre-school children. The wife had to sneak away with her kids from a 3HO commune in the dead of night due to group members pressuring her not to join her heretical husband. The 3HO guard at her house had fallen asleep in his car.

Hari drove out alone to visit them in Mora. After Hari learned about the weird (to him) sexual rituals and how his friends came to believe in Pa’s fake miracle powers, he wanted to try to help them leave Pa. To Hari, Pa was worse than Bhajan who at least held to a viable tradition.

Cult totalism with malignant features is a matter of degree. Some cults are quite benign. Opinions vary with basic assumptions and preferred definitions. I agreed that at this stage, Pa’s group was more extremist and isolating.

There was nothing I could do, I told Hari, unless his friends agreed to talk to me. He asked to pay me for my time, but I refused his offer. As we stood by his panel truck to say goodbye, he remarked, “Now I know why someone would want to kidnap cult members to help them.” The social irony was not lost on either of us. I wished him well.

The following year on April 19, 1993, I was acquitted of all charges by a jury in Boise after a month-long, expensive trial. That very day, the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas went up in flames after a 51 days siege by government officials. The timing to me was uncanny. The evidence proved that I was unaware of any coercion before I arrived on the intervention scene and that the alleged victim had agreed to speak with me and two other deprogrammers for three days. The police knew about the arrangement with the alleged victim’s mother and sister before I arrived. I never participated in a case that began with coercion again. Without the support of a fundraising team for my expenses, my wife and I would have been bankrupt.

Sometime around 1995, a woman deputy in the Orange County, CA sheriff’s office called me for information about Pa’s group after a local family had complained that their twenty-one-year-old daughter was being sexually abused by Pa in the group. I sent some files and a video to the sheriff’s department. I heard nothing more about the case. Pa’s group of thirty relocated to Hawaii after that incident. Hearing nothing thereafter about the group for years, I closed my file on Pa and Samala.

There is much more to this story. I’ll add one feature that occurred the first time I met Pa. Barbara, Pa’s first cult wife, dropped out of a California college in her third year to join Pa in New Mexico. She may have been struggling with a mild mental disorder as her grades were falling. Barbara’s family were naturally alarmed by her radical departure. The parents met me at a conference on cults. They learned that I knew of Samala from a brochure I read in Santa Fe. We planned to attempt contact with Barbara, who had cut them off completely. The father, the lawyer, contacted a Mora deputy sheriff who agreed to guide us to the cabin and hang around in case there was any problem.

Mora was/is a small village with a population of several hundred at the time. News among locals traveled fast by word of mouth. The sheriff knew of the odd skinny bearded guru with long stringy brown hair who rented the hunting cabin, a half-hour bumpy drive along a winding dirt road. The deputy positioned a sniper with a rifle along the bank of a stream forty yards from the cabin. After all, this was a “cult” as Barbara’s dad convinced them. After all, he was a lawyer. Maybe he knew.

An armed deputy in uniform and Barbara’s mother knocked on the cabin door. The father remained out of sight. The father-daughter relationship after the parents divorced was strained. Pa reacted with scorn and anger, yelling at the police officer and the mother until Barbara calmed him down, telling him to go back into the cabin. The sniper had Pa’s head in his gunsight. Pa noticed him. After a half-hour of negotiation with the cult couple, and with Pa finally apologizing for his outburst, we reached a deal. Pa morphed into a peace-loving sadhu. He invited the mother and me inside. Pa’s mood shift was a power move to indicate that he was in charge.

We talked civilly for an hour. Mom and I sat on the floor. Pa and Barbara sat on their sleeping pads on the floor. The sparse furnishings included no chairs. I informed the deputies that it was safe for them to leave. The father went with them. Mom and I stayed for four more hours. Our goal was to re-establish communication with Barbara while assessing how dangerous or crazy this odd cult was. We parted amicably. Pa believed that I was a religion researcher (partially true), he was impressed that I knew so much about Hinduism and his former guru, Satya Sai Baba, and he agreed to allow me to video-tape him for an interview the following week. Appealing to Pa’s grandiosity was tedious but effective.

The foregoing story about my encounter with Pa and his Samala cult is a small sample of what this one-eyed jack experienced as an interventionist. Every case among hundreds was unique, some more fraught with adventure than others. Another interventionist would have handled Pa differently, perhaps. We all have our points of view and opportunities to exploit. We live with the results and learn, hopefully.

There are too many stories, but I wanted to get across that interventions do not always result in a cult member’s defection. Maybe half do, if you are lucky. Most cult interventionists have taken on the motto of not trying to get the cult member to quit the cult. Intervention consultants since the 1990s in America tend to help the family cope with the situation more than strive for a confrontation, as we did with Barbara above. Fees are all over the map.

There are no regulatory agencies for cult intervention or coaching families impacted by radical cult influence on someone they love. Dedicated cult intervention consultants are few. The Internet has proliferated with ex-cult member support sites. Most people who leave cults do it on their own, like I did, and often get support for free from ex-members. Recovery therapy is not necessary but always useful if the ex-member desires to accelerate their recovery.

Cult leaders like Pa are shamans in the broadest, most general use of shaman. Cult members like Barbara have shamanic experiences. Those experiences, whether by the cult leader or followers, are what I call the Transcendent Attraction that functions as the first or primary impetus for cult formation. Experiences of transcendence are at the root of every religion, cult, and scientific vision. Homo sapiens have been wired, perhaps for millions of years, to experience transcendence. The stimulus that releases a transcendent experience varies from psychotropic substance use to illness with near death experience to techniques of meditation, breathing, dancing, drumming and physical exertion. We need not mention orgasm, but we did.

The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams (2002) argues headily that biological and neurological functions stimulate the origins of artistic expression in ancient, stone age cave art and rock art. All humans are potentially shamans. Cultural contexts determine the outward forms of basic inner stimulus. The neurological tunnel or tube experience finds expression in stories of mystic flight, falling down rabbit holes, the sipapu or sacred navel in the earth in a kiva, the whirlpool sucking us deep into the ocean, the doorway to a magical world, Santa coming down a chimney, and the deliverance of every human from the womb. Jagged patterns and random sparks caused by migraines or epileptic fits could shape designs imposed on cave walls. Fasting, chanting, and dancing before viewing the cave images in the flickering lights of torches might excite visions and waking dreams.

The drawings and images come to life.

Over the epochs of changes in human civilization we have continued to access trance and transcendent experience through countless private and cultural rituals. Our personal spiritual experiences continue to be shaped by our cultural surroundings and cultic influences. Lewis-Williams calls this the “domestication of trance,” citing (p 131) William Wedenoja’s 1990 paper.[21] Lewis-Williams goes on from page 131 to discuss neurotheology or the biological basis of religious experience that has made significant progress in recent decades. Whatever the biological basis, the life effect of domesticating trance has had both beneficial and harmful effects. I mean, what would a 1990s disco experience be without hours of loud electronic music?

Fred domesticated Barbara’s moment of elation during meditation with him. She moved into his domicile and submitted to his (Pa’s) ideas. Buddhist temple priests leading mantra chanting sessions domesticate boys boarded there by Tibetan parents for an education and indoctrination. We entice wild animals with offerings of food and affection, then effectively hold them hostage as entranced pets. Of course, with animals, we are stretching the definition of trance beyond common usage, unless we accept that trance or the state of hypnosis is basically focused attention with peripheral attention diminished. Cats are entranced by prey. Our focus could be on a guru’s charismatic behavior on stage and a pet’s focus could be on our signals at feeding time.

Keep your attention on the wizard above you. Focused awareness requires that we do not look at the man behind the curtain.

Let thine eye be single.

Gaze at a Buddhist mandala long enough and the self disappears.

Meditation can be boring. Yogis often fall asleep.

A good point guard dribbles a basketball while reading the movements of nine players on the court and ignoring the loud noise in the stands.

The trademarked Transcendental Meditation (TM) millions of people paid for and practice is a scam.[22] Are there benefits to meditation? Of course, on an individual level we experience states of calm, relaxation, sleep, flashes of insight, and in a minority of cases contact with transcendent stages of awareness and perhaps entities, sounds, and lights. The question is who or what (map) determines your interpretation of your meditation experience? How good is the map? Is it realistic to believe that you can become a “better” meditator with supersensible powers of awareness? When does supersensible become psychosis or schizophrenia? How would you know?

TM is only an example of an array of meditations from an array of cults and religions that promote contemplation and meditation techniques. Consider that a one-size-fits-all technique is likely to overlook individual traits that may not respond well to a style of meditation. The exclusive cult will blame the victim in those cases, say, when anxiety increases with meditation practice.

Where and who are you when you are under general anesthesia?

One way to wake up is to get out of bed.

The resurrection is real for only those who resurrect. The earliest recurrent theme of resurrection was recorded in ancient Egyptian and Canaanite stories.

If you think this essay is going sideways, it is.

The theme here is about cult behavior.

If a Las Vegas casino poker dealer dealt you five jacks, the universe in your head would explode. Nobody does that. You would have to fold and walk away quietly or face accusations of cheating. Caught red-handed? No way. Of course, you could be honest, show your hand, and risk exploding the universes of everyone at the table and everyone watching. The cult of poker in that house or casino would come under suspicion. Who else got an extra card and hid it? How long has the dealer been cheating?

“To live outside the law you must be honest” is a line from Absolutely Sweet Marie by Bob Dylan (1966).

Yes, in my world Transcendental Meditation IS a scam. TM is not an honest business. It is not honest science. It is a new religion masked with pseudo-science. Do not teach it in public schools. There are no short cuts to wisdom or knowledge of the self and the cosmos. Cheating science always backfires. Your universe will explode.

TM is similar to the cult I was with in the late 1970s. The cult, like TM, taught that mantras had special power to heal, to change the weather, to defend against evil spirits, and to contact disembodied spirits and the gods. My old cult called it “the Science of the Spoken Word.”[23]

Shamanism is inappropriate today for non-tribal indigenous people. Wealthy tech geniuses cannot speak ancient native languages.

Lewis-Williams in the aforementioned “The Mind in the Cave,” pages 288-289:

“…even after Darwin’s evolution-revolution and string of breathtaking scientific advances, reason continues to doze, if not to sleep. New Age sentimentality exalts the ‘spiritual’ and retreats from reason. Bizarre sects control their adherents, even to mass suicide. Reports of out-of-body experiences, some in UFOs, are not uncommon. “Urban shamanism” tries to resurrect a supposed primordial spirituality. Why should this be?” (see FN 22)

The answer is that we are neurologically hardwired, so to speak, to experience transcendence when we allow reason to doze as in meditation or while enjoying Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Transcendent experience also has its beauty and rewards.

“But the exaltation that those great creators excite in us does not justify mystical atavism. Shamanism and visions of a bizarre spirit realm may have worked in hunter-gatherer communities and even have produced great art: it does not follow that they will work in the present-day world or that we should believe in personal spirit animal guides and subterranean worlds.”[24]

Atavism is a tendency to revert to ancient or ancestral behavior. Recall the ridiculous QAnon shaman, Jacob Chansley.[25]

Pa as Fred believed that the fake shaman but powerful guru Satya Sai Baba was a living god with 100 million devotees in India alone. That Sai Baba died in 2011 at age 84—nothing remarkable about that. My mom lived to age 100. In 2025, a 13-year-old Indian boy is believed by many white westerners to be the reincarnation of the fake Sai Baba who was deemed the reincarnation of Sai Baba of Shirdi, a truly saintly man by Hindu standards. Satya Sai Baba ripped off the reputation of Shirdi Sai Baba to aggrandize himself and he mostly got away with it. By most standards, one million devotees is a success. So, this Indian kid already has a serious western cult following. He will not need a job.  

You can fool some of the people all of the time. I think Abraham Lincoln said that.

Religion is psychology, not science. We create psycho-social bonds that have little or nothing to do with science. These psychological constructs and bonds help to keep communal life afloat and to thrive—until they do not. Until they form autocratic self-sealing social systems that defy correction. The cult (now called Summit Lighthouse) that I was part of for nearly two years had right-wing fascist features. I did not see it that way until 1980—we were not fascist, I said—when I submitted to correction through research.

The person that resists correction is stupid: Proverbs, 12:1

As I mentioned above, the first paper I wrote about my cult experience was “Confessions of a Spiritual Idiot.”

It is not easy to admit how stupid you were. It takes work to continue to correct your positions for decades after defection from a totalist cult like Summit Lighthouse was in 1980. Total submission was the mission. To what? It was not just all bullshit, in so many words; it was really bad bullshit. Quasi-fascist bullshit. Ascended Masters were in the psychological wheelhouse of the leader’s brain; the leader that the devotees called the Messenger and Mother. The gods had no agency outside of her mind-puppet show.

Puppets have no agency without people pulling their strings and speaking their voices.

When I attended a Summit Lighthouse conference, I was with thousands of otherwise functional adults who believed that the mind puppets of the Messenger were independently real on the “etheric planes.” And that no one else on Planet Earth could be a Messenger for these ascended gods other that the woman they called Mother. How convenient!

One of her titles was Mother of the Universe. Imagine that. You cannot. It is an abstraction for the unfathomable like the King of Pop. But the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, commanded more talent and adulation. He had a cult following too, but no one’s salvation depended on devotion to the King of Pop. There is no equivocation here.

Circular thinking: If you do not believe me, ask me. Ignorance is no excuse. Trust us. My experience tells me it is true. It will make sense later if you stay the course. Do not allow your head to get in between your heart and God.

Divide and conquer has been the strategy of the worst cult leaders: If you love you parents more than Guru or God, you will go to hell—so, they say.

Assessing the value and health of a psycho-social bond is the intent of a cult behavior consultant, a new 2025 title I use for my new domain and website. It is not about negating a cult. It is about examining the behavior of leaders and members of a cult. Why? Because I care.

Again, Cultus comes from Latin, that basically means to care for. Thus, the title of this essay: the cult of a one-eyed jack. It is one of the things I care deeply about, that demands special devotion from me, and that repeatedly forces me to go over useful information that has faded in memory or been forgotten. The cult of this one-eyed jack has its research rituals. Too often, I may forget or mis-recall facts. I value the scholars in the field of occulture studies.

We often view bad cult leaders as predators. Ex-members of an actors’ life coaching cult I encountered were offered free group sessions at first. The struggling young actors soon were paying $200 a month for group sessions and much more for private. The leader groomed the young males in the group to trust his heroic process to the point of homosexual encounters with him. This was sold as an empowerment exercise in letting go of the ego so you could assume any acting role without fear.

“AG” was a homosexual predator within his life coaching cult. The two ex-members I worked with were not gay. The trauma cut deep into their psyches for months after they broke away. No one would expose AG for fear of damaging their social reputations. I mean, who wants publicity about that unless you think your testimony might help a few people? What if AG countersues (claiming the affairs were consensual) and the mess drags on for years? Tough choice to make. Monica Lewinsky’s life was essentially damaged for good after the rabid publicity over the oral sex she gave a president. Bill Clinton, allegedly the powerful predator, lost little prestige among his supporters over the matter. AG started a new group.

We love predators in weird ways. Our two most popular pets are dogs and cats, and we feed them meat. We kill for them. We value the predation behavior of our on-screen champions who fight our on-screen enemies: The Avengers, Black Panther, Ironman, John Wick. We identify with King Kong when our feminine wiles tame him, and he protects us from other apex predators like Mothra. Male cult leaders are notoriously managed by a woman serving them.

Does it surprise you that people join bizarre and deceptive cults with apparently powerful leaders? “Apparently” refers to occult powers, powers hidden from science to test, powers of the mind, powers of social influence, powers of chi or mystical force that can knock out an army. Powers of Superman. Italians devoted to Mussolini in the 1930s believed he was larger than life and performed miracles.

The American South after the Civil War erected heroic statues of General Robert E. Lee. He was a great general who defended private property rights. Black human beings were property then. Like any skilled predator, Robert E. Lee led troops against troops led by predator Ulysses S. Grant. Both fought for good causes.

King Kong versus Godzilla sells theater tickets and popcorn. King Kong partnering with Godzilla against other apex predators sells more tickets. Autocratic nations raise fifty-foot statues to their dictators. In a Muslim nation that does not allow graven images, they might build the tallest building. Phallic symbols of power are nonetheless like graven images as architecture.

A common mistake of newly minted ex-cult members is to believe that something should and can be done to stop cults from forming and going bad. If we remove the human brain from every human being, we will stop cults from forming. We will be left with zombies.

A crowd of humanoid zombies driven by disease to cannibalize and infect human beings does not qualify as a cult or self-sealing social system with autocratic management. No more than a rabid raccoon attacking you conforms to an ideology with a will of its own. A crowd of raging zombies is a raging crowd, not a cult.

Self-sealing cult members have choice, but it is “bounded choice” that willfully responds to management, doctrine, and feeling special.[26] Cult members in self-sealing social systems are not rabid, unmanageable raccoons. They tend to be functional humans limited by ideological boundaries and social pressures. Rabid or psychotic cult members are not manageable and are readily kicked out by cult leaders. I have visited many very confused cult members in mental hospitals after they were kicked out or left behind. Can you imagine being acutely mentally ill and being rejected by the religion that you totally believe in? “I mean, why isn’t Satya Sai Baba healing me?”

Cult members in good standing are good at rationalizing irrational ideologies and behaviors. Rabid raccoons are clueless.

Cult awareness is not cult prevention.

Our awareness of existence indicates that something eternal is going on whether or not we believe that our individual consciousness can live eternally. Our religious instincts drive us to want eternal life in its perfection. We do not want to be bipolar or autistic forever, do we? We do not want to be grandiose or greedy forever, do we? Religion is psychological. States of mind and mood react to inner drives and outer stimulus. Good cults and bad ones tap and map our inner and outer experiences. Doctrines and rituals are maps.

Cults like religious movements often tease us with answers to ultimate questions of being, politics, success, relationships, habitat, diet, health, mental health, and fun. The answers are maps that tell us how to navigate the territory, guide us to avoid danger, and follow the right path with right thinking and “right” turns only. “Left” turns are sinister.

My father grew up in Hungary. He was left-handed by nature. When he went to Catholic school at age seven in 1929, the nuns forced him to write right-handed or “jobb” (yawb) which in Hungarian is literally “good” as well as “right.” In Hungarian, left is “bal” that has a negative connotation at its root, like the Latin for left, sinestra or sinister connotes evil or deviant.

My father was an electrician and a mechanic. He favored his left hand for all tool operations, but he continued to write right-handed. The nuns succeeded. The cult of the Catholic Church preferred right-handedness in 1929. Being right was being with God because God made us that way. The devil somehow got into our genes and caused left-handedness before 1940. By 1970, forcing right-handedness in developed countries was very rare. What in hell took us so long?

Loading the language with cult-defined definitions is a means to social control.  

Literalism in religion is almost always bullshit. The Pythagorean theorem is literally true. Pythagoras taught a lot of bullshit, but he was right about many things regarding the science of music, numbers, and geometry. Pythagoras, like so many other cult leaders, tried to map social reality with his metaphysical ideas. He was like a nun that would force my father to write right-handed.

Religion is not science. Religion is psychology.

Every sane culture uses the same basics to teach maths and physics. There are 46,000 approaches to the Christian Gospels. Even under the standardization efforts in the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, Catholics worldwide vary broadly in their behavior toward and their understanding of the Gospels, saints, and the nature of sin.

Padre Pio (1887-1968) was a fake saint to me, but in the current Catholic political construct, Pio is a saint dwelling in heaven who did not fake his stigmata while living on earth. My sister appealed to Saint Padre Pio when she was suffering from advanced pancreatic cancer in 2022. She told me she believed that the appeal would “work.” Despite all attempts in medical treatments, she died at age 69 with no miraculous relief at any stage.

I do not blame the Catholic Church for misguiding my family members about left-handedness and cancer treatment. The church social body does a lot of good. My sister felt hope, a psychological state, and that may have given her some relief. In and of itself, hope is a good thing. But false hope is not good. “I hope I do not physically die,” is a false hope. “I hope I live forever,” is a conditional hope based on how we define life after life sheds a physical body.

Appeals to saints are not predictive or even probable in their outcomes. In fact, miraculous cures have a horrible, predictive track record. My mother, a lifelong Catholic until her death at age one hundred, was clear by her mid-90s that religion is man-made. In social science terms, she knew her religion was a plausibility construct. The mystery of her relationship with God was beyond the ability of the Catholic construct, the Catholic map, to fathom. And she knew it.

God gets utterly personal as we face death, whether we call THAT God or not. Atheists try not to call THAT anything, but THAT is still there, like existence itself. Ethical and sane hospice workers and caregivers attending to the end of a life do not force their biases about religion onto the client. They do not give them Reiki treatments. They do not incite them to chant Aum. They do not read to them from the letters of St. Paul if they are Muslim. Badly trained or unethical hospice workers might.

All religions and cults are maps. Territories are closer to God than maps. Maps are closer to the inventors of the maps. My mother realized that God owns or is the territory. The maps burned away as her brain faded and burned in the crematorium along with everything taught her by the Catholic Church. In my heart and soul I knew she was okay with that.

The map may not be the territory, but some maps are better than others. Here, we are examining the usefulness of maps, between deceptive and territorial appropriate maps. Maps can be very useful. And very deceptive. Like cults.

The Hopi never considered living in Arizona several hundred years ago: How did I get here? This is not my beautiful house!”[27] The Hopi are Arizona and American citizens now.

If Martians colonized earth, would we be Martians?

Geopolitics and Theo-politics both map our identities. So does astrology. How clearly will you know the territory of yourself when the astro-map tells you that you behave like a Taurus with Scorpio rising in the Tenth House and your Moon is in Cancer? Some of us imagine that the heavens know us better than we know ourselves. Guardian angels are popular guides. So are guardian star systems.

Astrology is psychology too. The stars have more important things to do than worry about little bitty people who worry about where the stars are tonight for their psychological navigation.

Knowing the universe is interconnected does little to confirm that our interpretation of interconnection is correct. “As above, so below” is a basic occult tenet. What that means is anybody’s guess, but it offers another guardian angel comfort to the occultist.

Psychology is a behavioral science if we define science as a method for understanding and managing a field of inquiry; in this case, human behavior. The physical sciences can and do inform psychology as well as religion. For example, modernized religions have had to adjust to the scientifically established age of planet Earth in the billions of years as opposed to literalist Bible believers who claim that Earth is less than 10,000 years old. The latter confuse evidence with belief.

A fundamentalist would impose his psychological map on everyone’s territory.

When anyone claims that God created Earth and the entire universe, they are stating a belief. Beyond that, the believer has no clue what they are talking about. But they point to some words in scripture and say, “There!” And they say, “Science does not have an answer, so it must be God.” This God-of-the-gaps cliché becomes a thought-stopping mechanism that might ease an anxious mind, but it cannot erase evidence.

Modernization continues to cause tension between pseudo-intellectuals, intellectuals and anti-intellectuals.

A person has a right to believe that the planet is flat. Personal experience tells them so. The flat-earther does not have a right to shut down the airline industries because airline industries are part of the conspiracy that claims that the planet is spherical.

When it came to Intelligent Design, Charles Darwin famously said: “With respect to Design, I feel more inclined to show a white flag than to fire my usual long-range shot.”

Darwin was unconvinced that a benevolent version of God could be responsible for some of the horrors he witnessed in nature: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [wasps] with the express intention of their [larva] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.”[28]

Note that Darwin was not intending an atheistic outcome nor held to one. He merely saw evidence that pointed to cruelty and chaos in nature from the human point of view. The laws or structures upon which nature operates is another matter. Why do species appear nearly unchanged for eons as they evolve?

We struggle with the problem of what we call evil. Inserting a myth about a devil, Dark Force, Black Magician, Malicious Animal Magnetism, Ahriman, Iblis, Lucifer, or Satan offers a psychological attempt to solve the problem with agents outside of human generated behaviors. The benevolent version of God is not excused other than saying God’s ways are mysterious. That says nothing at all about God’s ways. In fact, it might be better to say nothing at all about God’s ways including mysterious. Like Darwin. Wave the white flag. Be humble before the transcendence of the universe and its behavior without submitting to naïve fatalism. “It is what it is,” says nothing.

Religion is psychology, not science. What else can a cult behavior consultant say?

“Ye are Gods.” In that phrase, Jesus and the psalmist in Psalms 82:6 meant that rulers act as gods or judges when they judge, thus “ye are judges” is more appropriate in translation. Being a judge does not mean you will live eternally as a god might. Immortality has always been on the minds of some human beings, especially when being one with God enters the equation. Psychologically, this makes sense: If you are one with eternity, you are eternal.

But the cults that go bad often make metaphysical claims about divinity within the human. That divinity in us has been framed as the soul, ka, psyche, spirit, Ruh, chi, vital force, Magic Presence, The Force, Holy Instant, energy, monad, Operating Thetan, Ungrund, Higher Self, kundalini, Shekinah, Atman, eternal Buddha, Eck Ong Kar, and in Hungarian it is lélek. Of course, this list of soul terms varies in definition from culture to culture and perhaps from person to person, but the general idea is that we think or want to think that we are Home deus.  

He who controls the definition of soul controls all those who believe in that definition of soul. Many if not most white supremacists of old and currently have had a hard time accepting that black people are fully human or that they have a proper jiva or soul. My old cult Summit Lighthouse held, at least until 1968 in my recollection, that African blacks were the result of aliens or Nephilim (fallen ones) having sex with apes.

Race riots in the late 1960s were not about lawlessness. Some racist religions got the message that they were dead wrong about race theory, not only that it was a bad look.

After 1968, many racist ideas shifted in religions to accommodate black parishioners.

The “I AM” Activity cult founded in the 1930s finally opened a segregated non-white branch near Washington DC well after 1970. I met with an elderly black woman who belonged to that branch in 1994. Her sister was deeply concerned about her weird “I AM” devotion.

I first studied the “I AM” teachings in 1975 with an early “I AM” member in Santa Fe, NM. She was in her seventies at the time. She told me that black people would have to be reincarnated as white people before being allowed to join the “I AM” movement.

The Latter-Day Saints waited until 1978 to deem people of all races worthy of the Mormon priesthood.

Maxie Robinson, Jr. was the first African American news anchor in the United States in 1978.

Harris Faulkner was the first African American to anchor Fox News in 2005. Fox News has a base of viewers that are proudly slow to progress socially beyond autocratic approaches to religion, education, and politics. They have their reasons. Three are that they perceive their opponents of the “left” as progressing too quickly [partially true in a few areas], as rewriting history as the base sees it [partially true, but historians of worth are always self-correcting], and as governing without fiscal responsibility [true].

The basic assumptions of some conservatives view Liberals as autocratic in forcing Liberal and Socialist ideas on their children in public schools. The Left is unbiblical. Forget the First Amendment. In any case, progress is not always healthy. Conservatives can help us to think more deeply about some changes, right or wrong.

One nation “under God” does not mean one nation under your interpretation of God or a god. Cult-think should be avoided. Hermeneutics is a necessary interpretive science so that we do not get things too wrong all the time. The story of Noah’s Ark is a moral myth, it has value, but fundamentalists continue to rationalize it as concretely true to this day.[29] Fundamentalists destroy the value of the Noah story through crazy misinterpretations.  

Politics gets cult-like when any side collapses into basic assumption states about the political territory and autocratically imposes their maps of political reality into the discussion. I have heard pundits on major news channels use the cult-word to describe the opposition’s politics. That use of cult is cliché running your brain. It is what I am trying mightily to avoid here.

What does it mean when Siddha Yoga cult leader Swami Muktananda (1908-1982) tells devotees to beware of cults and false teachers? What does it mean when AI on a Google search just now (June 12, 2025) readily dismisses accusations that Swami Muktananda was a “cult leader” and states he was not interested in personal adulation or weird sex with unwary female disciples, but taught people to approach their spirituality individually? Take a breath. I do not have time here to expose what I know. Read this to begin your education, if you care: “Muktananda: Entrepreneurial Godman, Tantric Hero” by Andrea R. Jain.[30]

AI is very dumb sometimes.

Oh, yes! Homo deus. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow is the title of a fascinatingly informative book by Yuval Noah Harari (2017). Harari also wrote the best seller, Sapiens. Home deus or God man or man on his quest for immortality and infinite wisdom fits easily into my jagged, cubist inquiry as a one-eyed-jack. Transcendent attraction, for me, is the hallmark invitation to any cult, good or bad. It is the white rabbit that you follow down a rabbit hole.

Whether you seek self-transcendence (better yourself) in business, sport, romance, intellect, entertainment, or gambling there is a influencer out there ready to take your hand and your money. They will sell you a map: a way, a path, a workshop, an intensive, and experience in the Amazon jungle, a ropes course, a survival kit, or a gun proficiency class at a target range. If you follow the map, you will become a better, more skillful person and end up in heaven or somewhere beyond what you were. Actually or metaphorically, ou will become Homo deus!

In the late 1980s, I recall an intervention in California with “Randall,” a young man, aged 24, whose mother was very worried after he returned from a weekend retreat at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment in Yelm, WA. He could be described as a gangly incel yet living with his mother. His father had moved out after a divorce when Randall was ten. He had one concerned female friend. His passion was playing guitar and composing songs using a synthesizer. During a break from the intervention, I heard Randall perform at a local café. He was proficient but to me showed no extraordinary talent (yet) to warrant much attention outside of immediate friends and family.

The intervention (voluntary as Randall honored his mother’s request to meet with me) reached a climax when the young man parroted a Ramtha dictum, stating to us, “I am God.”

FYI, Ramtha is a spirit or ascended master that J. Z. Knight, Ramtha’s exclusive medium, said appeared to her suddenly in 1977 in her kitchen while she was experimenting with the magical power of cardboard pyramids, placing one on her head. She later trademarked her Ramtha entity or mind-puppet so that no one else could channel the spirit by that name. A significant rival cult emerged, a Ramtha knock-off in content and style, called Mafu to get around the legal issue. The Ramtha “school” swelled to one thousand dedicated students that included many Hollywood celebrities, off and on.

Randall attended a retreat with around five hundred others. The intimate social influence and new, apocalyptic teachings radicalized him, his mother noted. Prior to the retreat he would spend time listening to Ramtha’s audio-taped lectures and reading the printed material without group participation. Now Randall was planning to move to Yelm to be closer to the cult leader who revealed that the Yelm area would be safe from a Chinese Communist invasion about to occur. “Ramtha” in possession of Knight’s body and voice, asserted that there were one million Chinese troops ready to march on America from Mexico, Randall told us.

Ramtha repeatedly told “his” students, “You are the god within you.” This was nothing extraordinary as the saying reflected a common New Age and neo-Gnostic perception.

Religion is psychology.

Saying “I am God” did nothing to change a Ramtha student’s frailty, flaws, or floundering. In fact, the self-inflation may have made all that worse. That is what bothered Randall’s mom.

This was on the second day of intervention when Randall asserted, “I am God.” His diminutive mom, who was around sixty years old, stood in front of her standing son, slapped him soundly with her right hand across his left cheek, then in a commanding voice said, “You are not God!”

The slapping scene could have ended the intervention, but it worked to enhance it. My supportive partner and I were able to calm the tension between mother and son who both admitted some responsibility. We explored what was meant by “I am God” as opposed to “You are not God.” Hours later, Randall agreed to watch a few educational videos with us. I showed him Mafu, channeled by Penny Torres-Rubin. He was perplexed and visibly shaken. He saw himself mirrored in devotees fawning over the words of Mafu as Penny, who weirdly resembled J. Z./Ramtha in speech, style, and content. Ramtha students at the retreat told him that Mafu was a fake.

It dawned on Randall that the same criteria we used to critique the validity of Mafu could be applied to Ramtha. Maybe, just maybe, Ramtha was fake too; fake, meaning that Ramtha had no autonomous agency outside of J. Z. Knight. Ramtha was J. Z. Knight’s mind puppet. With that obvious fact established, the divine gloss over the Ramtha teachings disappeared, thus enabling us to penetrate and expose plagiarisms and weaknesses. Randall’s pompous smirks and passive aggressive posture disappeared. He engaged us with relevant dialogue. His attitude from that point forward was curious and self-directed. His agency as a man began to transcend group influence. By the end of the next day he chose to leave the Ramtha cult for good. And he confidently knew why. Randall discarded everything he bought from Ramtha to trash before my partner and I departed.

So, why is Harari writing about Homo deus? Is this God complex we have at all relevant?

We are attracted to transcendence—even as atheists.

Transcendent attraction is my first principle for examining cult behavior. Heroes are transcendent human beings who offer iconic lives for us to emulate. One person’s hero can be another person’s villain. The utter beauty and transcendence of the universe for an atheist-scientist can be the source of major anxiety and paranoia for an apocalyptic fundamentalist and an enlightened Gnostic who both seek salvation and escape from this “fallen” world. Be in in the world but not of the world is paraphrasing Jesus.

Transcendent attractions can be beneficial, but they have a way of getting ourselves out of our minds into irrational experiences and desires to repeat the transcendence—to trap it, so to speak. Some rabbit holes, like dreams, offer insight and ennoble while others become treadmills going nowhere or worse. How to tap your muse workshops for wannabe famous authors are legion. (That is not how muses work, btw.) Ecstasy, endorphins, excitement, promise, romance, bliss, passion, joy, empathy, success, luck, and survival all feed a sense of transcendence. We can have a transcendent relationship with an object, idea, creature, or mission: Sacred tree, nirvana, tribal wolf totem, or colonization are a short list of examples.

A transcendent attraction does not have to be a belief system, but it can be. Orthopraxy is not about belief. It is about performance. You do not have to believe that the hammer you slam into a nail will pound it into a plank of wood. It just does it as you do it. The same with orthopraxy. When an ancient Greek citizen made a sacrifice to Athena, there was no faith involved.

 The Panathenaea festival included animal sacrifices on a large scale dedicated to Athena. 

The action was all that was needed. Results were up to Athena, her wise if fickle will, and the temple priests.

You drove the nail into the board while building a house. If a tornado rips the house apart the next day, well you did all you could. The gods were not pleased with something even though you did the right thing. Bad luck. Make repairs or start over. Sacrifice you best bull to Athena, just in case.  

Heroes and authority figures or gurus have the power to help us interpret and harness transcendence using a wide variety of strategies from self-help workshops, business models, metaphysical teachings, doctrines, rituals, diets, games, missions, and obedience. The authoritative manager is my second principle to examine for cult behavior. The authority does not have to be a person or persons. The cult of astrology using a book or an online course can be the authority managing your transcendent knowledge of self in the stars. Cannabis intoxication daily can become your authority on managing anxiety with drug-induced transcendence. Use your “medical” marijuana card liberally. But the common authority for bad cults is an autocratic human being.

Third on my list of four principles is simply called orbiting. Planets and people orbit what they are most attracted by and to, but with people this is a psychological activity.

Despite Manichaean insistence, I do not see that planets have souls or a psyche. In myth, planetary archons are living souls that have authority over human destiny, to a point.

An authority figure can direct a seeker into an orbit or circle of friends with required, repetitive rituals and persuasion if you want to progress. “If you want to ascend into heaven, follow me and do this.” Orbiting gives a seeker something to do all day, something to focus on, and a future determined by the present path. Going around and around feels like progress. Avoid straying too far out of orbit into ignorance and darkness.

To some extent, nearly every group activity or mission has elements of devotional activity with a leader and a feeling of transcendence. Consider the Girl Scouts or the Red Cross. Or a nunnery. Think of this as a matter of degree and ask, when is it too much? An apprentice plumber seeks to transcend his limits through certification as a master plumber. We see no problem there. We see accomplishment and skill that serves the community. An “I AM” Activity student feels group pressure to “decree” (rapid prayer chanting) to reach the goal of ascension from this life into heaven. In other words, the cult leaders offer total transcendence from this life into an ascended beyond as if they had proof.

Are hours of decreeing a day too much? Is the goal at all realistic? There is no proof. The “I AM” game is psychological.

Nunneries can drift into totalistic cult behaviors depending on how autocratic the Mother Superior is and how rigidly imposed the doctrinal ideas are. I knew of a nunnery in Texas that was dissolved by the local bishop due to the abusive, autocratic rule of the Mother Superior. Nunnery and cult are not pejoratives, but the behavior and influence of whoever manages the nunnery can turn things sour in short order. An abusive, psychopathic leader can easily take advantage of strict vows of obedience. It happens in militaries and governments as well. The exaggeration of power tightens control over the orbit of a believer.

The fourth principle to examine is exit perils. One of my favorite sociologists of religion, Professor Ben Zablocki (1941-2020) of Rutgers University established a hypothesis for what constitutes “brainwashing.” Zablocki noted that most of his academic peers dismissed the notion of brainwashing by arguing that no such thing occurs during the recruiting process in cults. As arguable as that is, Zablocki pointed to the retaining process, what keeps a member in the cult orbit, as the true occurrence of brainwashing. What happens when a seeker feels too confined, feels intellectual and social constriction, feels too much time and money is going to the group effort, and feels deep in their gut that something just isn’t right? What is it going to cost the seeker to take time out or defect? Zablocki called these pressures to stay in the group the exit costs. Exit costs apply pressure to choice and freedom to defect. The cost of defection can be your life.

Think of it this way: Joining a sophisticated gang doing illegal business might be risky, but when the risks seem too great, suddenly leaving the fold is not so easy. Defection could cost you your life. When I merged deeper into Summit Lighthouse, I was not brainwashed. I made choices based on faulty reasoning on my part and a host of deceptions on the cult’s part. I was an idiot, and I was tricked, perhaps. But when I thought about leaving, I had already absorbed the teaching that to defect after promising to follow the path I would have to suffer 10,000 lifetimes of reincarnations before the opportunity to ascend would come my way again.

I experienced social pressure personality disorder at the time.[31] The internal battle to choose in or out was intense. I had panic attacks at night, waking with abdominal cramps for two months during the summer of 1980. I felt the indoctrination. Social pressure was not overtly applied. I knew what other members would say to me. No one knew what I was going through but me. My “brain” was in turmoil. One dream I had while sleeping overnight at the group’s Albuquerque teaching center—a four-bedroom house—in August of 1980 was a powerful mirror of my inner state. I asked to stay there to see how I felt connected to Summit Lighthouse after not participating for two months. I had driven down from Santa Fe to work at the state fair as a portrait artist.

In the dream I was standing at night by the shore of a great lake. An angelic spirit behind me said one word, “Watch,” several times throughout the dream. A huge leviathan burst through the surface of the lake. “Watch.” Another similar sea serpent emerged. “Watch.” They engaged in a ferocious battle. The angel froze the action several times so I could study torn sinews and missing flesh as the monsters ripped into each other mercilessly. “Watch.” Both creatures slipped back below the surface. The lake was inky black and calm. I sat up suddenly at 2 a.m. in a cold sweat.

My process to totally defect began in earnest after that psychological warning. I quietly packed my bags, drove back to the state fairgrounds, and slept in my truck for the rest of the week. There was another radical event that sealed my defection one month later. Briefly, deeper issues that we tend to call spiritual lingered. I had not talked with anyone about my turmoil. Instinctively, I sought the advice of an elderly nun I knew who worked in the reception area of a Catholic cloister below St. John’s College in Santa Fe. She invited me to sit down, she listened patiently to my story for fifteen minutes, then stood by me with her left hand on my shoulder and right hand raised. She offered a simple invocation for her Lord to heal me. As a reaction to her kind gesture, tears welled up in my eyes and I wept.

As I drove home, my chest area felt acutely heated for over an hour, even during a long cold shower in my attempt to cool down. I felt energized for a week with clarity of approach to my recovery. Doubt was no longer my enemy as was drummed into me by New Thought aspects of the doctrinal ideas I had absorbed. New Thought ideology overvalues the art and psychology of positive thinking. In New Thought-inspired cults (name it and claim it Christianity, for example), doubt becomes a thought-terminating cliché about inviting failure if you doubt the outcome of a positive thought or prayer. For me, proper evaluation of doubt became a tool for useful skepticism that drove me to learn more about cult behavior problems to this day, forty-five years later.

I have listened to countless distress stories told by former cult members about their struggles to defect. Rarely did anyone merely “walk away.” Commonly, I heard, “I decided to quit the group two years before I actually left.” Or “It was the hardest decision I made in my life.”

Benjamin Zablocki was onto something real with his “brainwashing hypothesis.”

Sociology professors struggle mightily with the psychology of religion. Sociologists I have spoken to want to avoid what they call the “medicalizing” of religion, which is mostly what I am doing here because I look at how religion influences individual human behavior. Is it healthy or unhealthy? Sociologists tends to examine group behaviors, structures, and cultures. Psychology and psychiatry are commonly called behavioral medicine. Social psychology studies how groups influence individuals as well as how interpersonal relationships operate and influence individuals.  Of the three disciplines, social psychology comes closest to my approach. But I cannot ignore behavioral health when evidence of delusion, paranoia, grandiosity, pathology, narcissism and other behavioral indicators drive social interactions.    

Religious enthusiasm without guardrails is religious mania or manic behavior on a cohesive group scale—the madness of crowds. The behavior of crowds and social groups concerns sociology too, but less so about the impact on the induvial psyche.

We are used to medical terms like satanic panic, the witch craze, and the measured hysteria toward heretics during the height of the Spanish Inquisition.

Entheogens are a class of drugs that stimulate transcendent experiences.

Epilepsy has long been associated with visionary experiences, especially the epileptic aura. The Summit Lighthouse cult was led and shaped primarily by Elizabeth Clare Prophet who experienced epileptic episodes from an early age and throughout her life.

It is impossible to separate medical conditions, brain disorders, and substance-induced transcendence from the religious experiences that they stimulate. Indigenous shamans often began their careers during or after a severe illness that stimulated visions and dreams, if not with an entheogen like Amanita muscaria or mescaline.

Religious ideas are psychological ideas. The study of religious governance and social behavior is sociology. Philosophy examines the quality of religious ideas.

Brainwashing is the price you will pay when you decide to defect from an exclusive, high-demand and deceptive group.

Obfuscation is not brainwashing. Confusing you is not brainwashing. Overwhelming you is not brainwashing. Redirecting your will to an appealing or challenging self-sealing social system that costs you a lot to leave is brainwashing. Domineering husbands have a history of beating and killing wives who dare to defect. The high cost of defection with cause a devotee or spouse to think twice or think a hundred times. That process of having to think twice or a hundred times is brainwashing in action. The mind polices itself when someone is brainwashed. That little cop in your brain directs you to stay in the relationship or group to feel safe, to be saved, and to survive.   

In Homo Deus, Yuval Harari observes that censorship in the past “worked by blocking the flow of information. In the 21st Century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information” (p 402). I would add, also with toxic information. “Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality.” (www.nytimes.com, June 13, 2025).

If you succumb to strong belief in wild, conspiratorial, mystical belief systems and refuse to doubt them for fear of defying the “truth,” you are brainwashed.

The key according to Zablocki’s brainwashing hypothesis is the fear of defying the perceived truth due to having to admit you made a mistake. One exit cost is losing the benefits of certainty.  Another is shunning and worse, public defamation by the group.

After confessing I was a “spiritual idiot,” that fear of loss of certainty dissolved. The truth that I did not belong in the group absolved me of all loss. I “lost” nothing. Rather, I gained sanity to go forward. Almost all former members of exclusive cults report the same relief during recovery; relief from feeling deceived, abused, and stupid.

The person that refuses correction is stupid: Proverbs 12:1.

With recently opened Soviet archives, Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the heart of Asia by Andrei Znamenski (2011) exposes how Communists of the soviet sought geopolitical power over Tibet, Mongolia, and indigenous culture through mystics, occultists, and spies in the early 20th Century. One of those mystics was painter Nicholas Roerich who with his wife Helena Roerich attempted to convince world leaders that Nicholas was destined to be the “king of the world.”[32] My primary impetus into cult-world was through the Agni Yoga books or The Teachings of Living Ethics channeled by an other-worldly entity, Morya, through medium and psychic Helena Roerich.

I began absorbing Agni Yoga in 1975. Absorbing and not reading, because the act of reading requires comprehension. Most of the mystical revelation in Agni Yoga is logically incomprehensible, so the student must pretend, as I did, to be absorbing the wisdom at some deep inner level. Or as New Age mystics used to say, with my “higher self.”

The Agni Yoga books were taught at the highest level at Summit Lighthouse’s Summit University. My friends who recruited me into the Summit Lighthouse cult were intrigued and excited when I revealed in 1978 that I was studying Agni Yoga. I knew them for three years from 1975 to 1978 before they mentioned their deep commitment to the cult. It is not unusual for members of esoteric groups like Theosophy, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Ku Klux Klan, Mafia, Yakuza, or other tentatively secret societies to not reveal their affiliation. Occultism is rife with secrets not to be cast like pearls before swine.

When the disciple is ready, the master will appear.  

Being secretive also protects the occultist or mystic from ridicule and exposure as kooky or fraudulent. The occultist’s inner circle, however, feels special knowing things that the outsider cannot comprehend.

In Znamenski’s book, Red Shambala, we read: “In 1922, after establishing his Master School of United Arts in New York, [Nicholas] Roerich reminded his inner circle, ‘There are two sides of our school: the pretend illusory one, which exists for all surrounding people, for many things must not be mentioned, and the real one—those wonderful events and miracles known only to us.’” That quote on page 165 references published journal notes by one of the Roerichs’ most loyal disciples, Zinaida Fosdick. I met “Sina” (the common American spelling) Fosdick in New York in 1976. We exchanged several letters before her death around 1982. She was always gracious if brief and formal with me, never pressuring me to pursue Agni Yoga.

Agni Yoga according to Helena Roerich cultivated a relationship with “psychic energy” or the vital forces that pervade the universe. Psychic energy could be a stand in for everything from prana to God to the Holy Spirit to grace to chi to shekinah to siddhis to Voudon to Buddhi (higher mind). Think of psychic energy as a life force mysteriously guiding the entire realm of being as an ontological intelligence beyond our rational comprehension, nevertheless accessible and storable like gas.

A student of the occult arts can “accumulate” psychic energy by living around pine trees, for example, according to Morya through Helena Roerich. The occultist as an Agni Yogi claims to direct psychic energy not unlike a Wiccan claims to cast spells.

The Ascended Masters are embodiments that mastered psychic energy.

This concept of sending arrows of healing rays and destroying rays is as common as dirt among human cultures in fables and myth. Zeus tosses thunderbolts for us and against us. I mean, anyone can make a weapon out of clay and hurl it. We can also use clay to heal. Think of mud baths at spas and Jesus bringing sight to a man born bind by rubbing clay on his eyes (John 9:1-12).

Within the worlds of the occultist all this is “true,” but those worlds are psychological worlds, not natural worlds studied by science. By this definition of “true” we would have to include the spectrum of schizophrenic symptoms claimed as powers by those diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Allow me to offer a concrete example. I may have mentioned that I worked as a behavioral health professional in a psychiatric hospital for over a quarter century. That job shaped my responses to what people claim are spiritual powers. Police brought a tall young man, aged twenty, into our intake area for an evaluation. He was cooperative and friendly, at first, though elevated in mood. He was got out of control at his parents’ home ineptly attempting to rewire a circuit that he said was bugged by the government. He also claimed that he could read minds. The worried parents called the mobile crisis team who filed an involuntary commitment warrant after unsuccessfully trying to reason with the son. This was his first major break with reality.

I performed the intake interview for the psychiatrist on duty and informed him that our client was not cooperative and demanded to leave. The doctor ordered a trilogy of meds—Haldol, Ativan, and Benadryl—stat that a nurse would offer in pill form first. The young man refused to take pills, so the injectable dose was ordered. He refused the shot too.

Policy demanded that staff use minimal force when administering any drug. Persuasion was preferable. By that time in my career I had interacted with thousands of patients, most cooperative, some violent. Verbal de-escalation of a violent or angry patient is an art that comes through practice. Training goes only so far as every encounter is unique.

So, I bargained with the client/patient that if he could prove to us that he could read minds, we would allow him to leave the hospital. If he could not, he would agree to the injection. Someone having their first psychotic break is usually naïve about demonstrating their power. They will cast their pearls before swine. Covertly, I wrote down a word on a piece of paper that I folded, then in sight of everyone, placed it in the pocket of the nurse with the needle. I meditated on the word and challenged the client to read my mind. He tried a few words that were all wrong. The nurse showed him the word on the paper: Haldol.

The young man was injected, then admitted. He was released a week later with diminished psychotic symptoms.

Had we been able to test the psychic powers of Helena Roerich or Nicholas Roerich in the same way, what do think would have happened?

Several psychics and channelers, successful ones with followings, have allowed me to test their power of extrasensory perception. The success rate of proof was nil. Most psychics are wary and will not submit to testing, using the childish excuse that “negative” energy interfered with their powers.

All that skepticism aside, the rich and enduring occulture among human cultures remains a potent driver of behaviors, beliefs, and commerce, for better and for worse. Many people made a good profit from working on Harry Potter movies. Catholic Churches run soup kitchens, schools, and tourist sites. Wiccans campaign to protect national forests. Yoga teachers help people to unstress. Gambling gives people hope, if only temporarily. Yes, gambling is an occult art. Gamblers pretend to try to predict the future.

The pretense is the game, as Sina Fosdick reported above about Agni Yoga’s inner circle who hid the real game from the ignorant.

The irony is obvious: Those you claim to know, do not. Neither Roerich nor his psychic wife were in touch with a hierarchy of ethereal masters in this world. They were in touch with their inner psychology that told them that the fairy tale was the true story. In the end, they paid with their legacies, untarnished only among the true believers—millions of them today.

Adam Weishaupt, the commonly accepted founder of the Illuminati in the 1770s:

In concealment lies a great part of our strength. For this reason we must cover ourselves in the name of another society. Do you realize sufficiently what it means to rule—to rule in a secret society? Not only over the more important of the populace, but over the best of men, over men of all races, nations and religions.[33]

The version of the Illuminati founded by Adam Weishaupt (1748-1830) mimicked similar clandestine men-led cults that pretended to guide rulers of the world toward ultimate wealth, peace and stability. In the Illuminati model, the Illuminati, of course, would be the rulers of the world had they succeeded. This self-aggrandizing principle drove the cult surrounding Charles Manson as well: When Helter Skelter or Chaos reigns, the world will turn to us (the Manson Family) to lead because we are enlightened.

Agni Yoga pretended and pretends to represent the same king of the world complex as Manson and Weishaupt did.

In practice and in reality, Agni Yoga students like Illuminati occultists would deny that they are monarchists or elitists. “We only want to serve mankind,” I can hear them insisting.

This model surrounds both the Buddha and Jesus stories. The hero emerges as the self-sacrificing servant to all, but in practice the followers create kings and seek kingdoms led by their heavenly heroes. We find fifty-foot statues and taller temples and mosques erected in the honor of their teachings if not their person.

When I was in China in 1998, I saw a fifty-foot statue of Chairman Mao.

Democratically elected presidents sometimes want to be czars and kings. And some people want them to be kings because of the narcissistic drive in insecure human beings who want to believe that fairy tales hide the reality they crave and deserve. The mirror hungry leader reflects the wishes of the hero hungry fanatic who prefers to rule by fiat through their king.

This model drives the formation of autocratic self-sealing social systems: CULTS, by one definition.

It helps to have a fairy tale to inspire the potential utopia hero hungry people crave. The history of Cosmism in Russia is such a fairy tale that began in the 19th Century. Cosmism has one remarkable theme: Resurrection of every creature that ever lived including Adam and Eve.[34] Seriously. In decades past around 1989, Russian leaders Gorbechev, Putin and their wives believed in Agni Yoga as THE spiritual path for Slavs and the world. Over three million Russian elites did too. In recent decades, Putin has switched allegiance to Cosmism with its geopolitical dream to create the Third Rome in Moscow and a pan-Slavic union in Asia. Cosmists believe in advancing the science and technology of space travel because space dust that emanates from Earth is the stuff of which our decayed bodies will be rejuvenated. How to identify particles that belonged to Confucius among particles that belonged to your dead grandmother or a dead frog from ancient Egypt has yet to be revealed. But the Russian spirit behind Cosmism has no doubt. The Russian Cosmist spirit asks what can be done, not quibble for decades over how should we do it.

Immortality has gripped the souls of tech billionaires who seem to think that more money means more years living on earth.[35] Unlimited funds can lead to unlimited years. Screw the homeless. Karma has rules. Peter Thiel is a case in point. Elon Musk is not. Musk stated that old ideas must die with old, ossified people for new ideas to emerge.

Ancient myths tell us that death is the ultimate remedy for sin. Some people do not believe in sin; therefore, they want to live forever. “Death “is the next problem waiting to be solved,” ... “Rather than finding something that is going to give us eternal life, [these billionaires] believe” that unlocking this gift for humanity will “provide glory to those who deliver it.””[36]  

The moral question seems to carry no weight with immortalists.

Writing about occultists in the early 20th Century, Andrei Znamenski stated:” Why should [anyone] care about ideological alchemists who tried to engineer noble human beings and build a perfect society in which all problems would be solved once and for all—a quest that to them, along with millions of their contemporaries, on a path of self-destruction.”[37]

Comte de Saint-Germain, an inspiration to Freemasonry, the Theosophical Society and the I AM Activity cult was known among his 18th Century peers as “the wonder man of Europe” and “the man who would not die.” His ageless appearance was likely a result of heavy makeup and wigs popular among high society men at the time. Voltaire knew and mocked him as a talented charlatan. Saint-Germain was not his name, nor was he a count. His nom-de-plume was taken from a French city. He was not a saint. His birth circumstances were mysterious. He died around 1784 at around age 60 or 70. Dozens of cults claim that he ascended and is now an Ascended Master in the Great White Brotherhood.

Immortality is a psychological maneuver that avoids the wages of mismanaging life.

Can we accuse God of mismanaging life?

Is that why the Creator had to die on a cross eternally?

Or can we admit that there is a greater God (Pleroma) beyond the Creator that rescues the worthy? As in Gnosticism?

The unworthy in ancient Gnosticism were called hylics or mud people. The hylic had no spark of God to save. Mud went back to mud, as stated in the old Jewish scripture.

What about unworthy folks? And who chooses who is unworthy?

The “I AM” cult leaders in Santa Fe would not let me participate as a group member in chanting sessions because I admitted that I had used LSD a couple of times. The “I AM” leader told me that LSD creates a “hole in your aura,” therefore I would have to wait another lifetime to join the “I AM” Activity.

If I had a fucking hole in my aura, the Summit Lighthouse that used the same chanted decrees and represented the same Ascended Masters as the “I AM” group did not seem to care. The decrees, especially the Violet Flame decrees, would heal my aura of any damage, Summit Lighthouse leaders told me.

Religion is psychological. I decided that I never had a hole in my aura because I had no aura. Those who see auras see qualia at best and have poor vision at worst. Both states are psychological.

Or do we stop asking questions that have no value in practical life? Questions like: Who was I in a past life? Ask the Buddha. “Stupid question, Grasshopper.”

Or do we stop asking questions of no practical value and submit to the ineffable? Islam.

When religion is psychological, we create and have individual options.

And you ask: Why are there so many goddamned cults?

One obvious answer is that we are like the Creator we created to mirror our creativity.

The task at hand is to create wisely, beautifully, experimentally, kindly, appropriately, usefully, enjoyably, and correctively.

The person that refuses correction is stupid: Proverbs 12:1

Some goddamned cults need correction.

I am among the repair crews.

How do we correct controversial cult behavior that has gone rogue?

Again, this is a psychological game with sociological parameters.

There are laws that might vary from culture to culture. In North Korea under a totalitarian regime, heretical, non-government approved cults likely will not survive for long. In democratic republics with freedom of religious expression we have a proliferation of religious and cultural experiments, some of which violate laws of the land and some of which pose a danger to members and to outsiders.

This one-eyed-jack is less concerned about heresy that bad behaviors. He uses a democratic republic framework that tolerates social experimentation up to a point. That point, that line to cross, is about deception, destruction, and delusion. When is too far too far? Too far for one person in a cult might not be too far for another person in the same cult.

An American circuit judge once said that he could not define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it.  

In 1946, in a landmark decision about the “I AM” cult in US versus Ballard, “Justice Jackson was for a flat reversal of the conviction and dismissal of the cause upon the ground that neither the truth of a religion nor the genuineness of a professed belief in a religion can be the subject of a court inquiry.”[38]

We are back to the realm of human psychology to determine what is healthy and what is unhealthy.

Game on!

Argue amongst yourselves.

Some sociologists of religion regard any form of cult intervention, including non-coercive confrontation, as a “violent” act, therefore not recommended. In other words, the many hundreds of times I was introduced by a family to a cult member with the caveat that the cult member could refuse to talk to me at any time and leave would be considered an unethical “violation” of rights by Professor Anson Shupe (1948-2015). I debated with Anson on a panel at the Association for Sociology of Religion conference in the 1990s about these very issues. God rest his oppositional soul.[39]

What about the duty to inform?

That duty to inform someone led to hundreds of cases of informed choice to leave a cultic group and deep appreciation that the family hired me to help them intervene.

“If you see something, say something.” Who said that? Yes, Homeland Security encourages reports of suspicious activity. If I have evidence of a guru lying about his lineage, misusing funds and coercing behavior with manipulative techniques, I am willing to say something.

You do not have to like it, professor.

People informing people “legally” might be illegal in North Korea under the current regime.

No one in North Korea has hired me yet.

The long debate among philosophers considers whether it is wiser to debate or do the “Gallic shrug,” and drink wine.[40] Quietism has its benefits for people hyper-stressed over politics, relationships, finances—life!

“At its core, quietism means retreating from the active pursuit of truth or intellectual engagement, promoting instead a kind of serene acceptance of the world as it is. Quietism walks the thin line between apathy and calm.”[41]

The same might apply for people stressed about a loved one caught up in a controversial cult. “We have to get them out,” is a common gut reaction. No, you do not have to get them out. You can do nothing and wait to see whether they get themselves out. Most do, eventually. Some within a year or two, like me; others in a decade or two. Some, never. Trying to help someone choose out of a cult (choose out is the proper attitude; not get them out) can cause more stress than it is worth. In extreme cases, I know of a few wealthy families that spent well over $200,000 on intervention attempts using “experts” with no success.

Assessing the readiness for change of a cult member or anyone with a bad habit is key to trying an intervention.

There are five or six stages of change to consider: Precontemplation, Contemplation, Determination/Preparation, Action, Maintenance, Termination/Relapse.[42] Yes, some people will leave a cult (terminate a habit), feel anxious about life away from the cult, then return—like substance users or gamblers. The “stages of change” cycle starts over and can start or terminate at any stage.

Basically, if you determine that someone is in a firm state of pre-contemplation or stuck in a basic assumption state as a fanatic or true believer, it is best to avoid intervention while sustaining a neutral relationship if at all possible. Neutral communication may feel hypocritical, but it is essential to determine when someone begins to show ambivalence toward or dissatisfaction with cult affiliation before attempting intervention.

You do not have to intervene. My wife and I were flying across country on a three-hour leg of our trip when I had an encounter with a Scientologist in the seat next to my middle seat. He sat by the window. We will call him Greg. After we got settled and buckled into our seats, I pulled out a classic 1951 book on Buddhism by Edward Conze to read. Within minutes, Greg interrupted me to tell me that he belonged to a religion that was based on Buddhism.

Greg was a middle-aged man, perhaps forty, with a plain short haircut parted on the left. He wore plain horn-rimmed glasses and a rumpled gray suit with a white shirt and a dark tie. He was politely insistent when he asked if I were a Buddhist? Clearly, this guy wanted to talk, and I did not. But I entertained him carefully.

“I study world religions and right now I have an interest in Buddhism.” I said without making eye contact. I had my eyes on an open page.

Greg then told me that the founder of his religion studied Buddhism and used many of its concepts. He mentioned that the founder also created a new, advanced therapy called Dianetics. I told Greg I had heard of it. I glanced at my wife who rolled her eyes. I could hear her thoughts: “Do not cause a scene, Joe!”

For nearly three hours, with me asking simple leading questions, Greg described his ten-years journey into Scientology and how wonderful it was. The only push back I offered (gently) was to clarify what Buddhism teaches as opposed to what Greg insisted was Buddhism in Scientology. The entire conversation felt like a recruitment attempt. We parted with a handshake after the plane landed. He had no clue that his cult had targeted me for years as a “deprogrammer” and a “criminal.”

Greg was in precontemplation mode with no ambivalence toward his “habit.”

Habits are hard to break even if we want to. Orders of nuns still wore distinctive habits when I was schooled in the Catholic system before the late 1960s. Like wearing your religion on your sleeves, so to speak. Greg, my annoying flight companion, “wore” Scientology 24/7 at the time obliviously. In precontemplation mode, he was oblivious to the value of a way out of it. You could only tell it by talking to him, not by what he wore. His was a psychological habit. Greg did experienced criticism. He mentioned that only ignorant people criticize his religion. He was not altogether wrong. Scientology is an elaborate psychological construction envisioned and established over time by L. Ron Hubbard. Critics often get details about Greg’s church wrong.

Make one mistake and they (24/7 cult members) have you by the balls. See, you do not know what you are talking about!   

Overall, we like Greg can easily slip into an “argument from incredulity, also known as argument from personal incredulity, appeal to common sense, or the divine fallacy, it asserts that a proposition must be false because it contradicts one's personal expectations or beliefs or is difficult to imagine.

Arguments from incredulity can take the form:

1. I cannot imagine how F could be true; therefore F must be false.

2. I cannot imagine how F could be false; therefore F must be true.”[43]

The divine fallacy argues that something must be true because it is supernatural in origin. The divine fallacy drives skeptics nuts.

Take a breath. Breathe. Allow the history of religions to bathe your consciousness with all its glory and wonder. Think of Greg and nuns as happy members of human expression on a spectrum of variability. Try not to think of a point in time when an Inquisitor in Spain would have arrested Greg for professing that the Inquisitor and all his cronies were infected with Body Thetans that controlled everything evil that the inquisitorial cronies were going to do to Greg.

“Burn him!”

Alchemy operates on the premise, that metaphorically we can through specific rituals “burn” the dross of raven black materiality to refine ourselves into the “gold” of immortality.

The crude alchemist took the metaphors literally as he played with lead in furnaces hoping for AU (real gold) to emerge. In today’s world, the crude alchemist who failed miserably to create real gold from lead is vindicated. Gold can be synthesized in physics labs through nuclear reactions, but it is complex and prohibitively expensive—for now. We humans are on the verge of replicating how God makes gold. Imagine that.

AUH2O was a campaign slogan for Arizona candidate Barry Goldwater.

A literal metaphor for Barry.

A literal metaphor for the Inquisitor that would burn Greg. Does burning Greg help to purify the human race? Eugenicists literally think that way.

Is this what cult intervention folks like me do? Are we attempting to purify the human being and the human race of “dross” behaviors?

You may as well accuse every valuable educational system of eugenics if you think that way.

Religious fundamentalists claim that modern public educational systems are trying to “burn” or purge them with their ideas of Creationism at the stake of a godless regime. To stop this “evil,” we vote for candidates that would denigrate higher education and promote charter schools and home-schooling with tax dollars. “Home schooling protects the truth,” said the pastor.

Burn them back! Burn them back!

My old cult Summit Lighthouse (aka Church Universal and Triumphant for a while) chants decrees that invoke sacred fires like the Violet Flame and the Blue Flame to burn the impurities from self and others and the world.

Fight fire with fire.

Schizophrenia?

How crazy can we get? We slaughter millions in the name of purifying the planet of bad ideas embodied as people.

We also create hospitals and spas to heal without harm, if possible. If we survive them, chemotherapies and radiation can “burn” evil cancers from the body.

Healing is not about killing one person to save another, although organ transplant remedies depend on dead people for a harvest.

My colleagues in cult education strive to heal clients from sick ideas and manipulated behavior, not purge the world of cults. Back in 1978, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman in their landmark if flawed study on cults, Snapping, coined “information disease” as a core problem with disingenuous cults.[44] Snapping was one of the few popular books available on the topic when I read it at the end of 1980. Healing myself of information disease through education led to helping others heal through the same process.

Perhaps it is time to revisit the concept of “information disease” in an out-of-control social media era. Censorship of reason is no longer about taking away. We censor our finer sensibilities by adding too much without removing toxins. The liberal demon giggles as soft as the conservative devil guffaws. In the world of too much information everyone in information silos thinks they are winning. The toothpaste is squeezed from the tube. The center cannot hold, to borrow a famous phrase from “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats. Civil war between north and south was bloody hell. Civil war with a million sides shooting at one another is bloody chaos.

All are punish’d. (Last words from the closing scene in Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare)

There is a bright side. We can enjoy the beauty we create even though it’s a noble lie according to Plato. Picasso painted truth about war in his 1937 lie called Guernica. “Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth,” said Picasso.

Simple enjoyments resolve our deepest questions without introspection or explanation. The scent of a horse, seeing ferns emerging from a lava bed, and an orca diving under my kayak are personal examples of transcendent life connections that may not appeal to you. I was in awe when an orca dove under my kayak north of Vancouver. You might freak out. Orcas are huge. They might eat you if they are a pod that prefers mammals as opposed to fish eating orca pods.

Religious experience is rooted in human psychology. The human psyche is malleable. It can adapt and it can be manipulated. Anyone born into a family path will adapt to that path as a minor, for better or for worse.

Someone on death row allowed to keep a pet cat cherishes his relationship with that animal. That love surpasses knowledge and experience. The hum of purring on the man’s lap hovers in the cell block like ambrosia in the air shared by all within range. Inmates are happy for the man and appreciate the sacrifice imposed on the cat as a “service animal,” a title typically reserved for dogs. Is that enjoyment reciprocal? I do not know, but cats cared for tend to be contented cats. The context creates a cat with a holier purpose (in our minds, at least) than the cat in your home. We appreciate when good transforms evil without killing it.

Transcendence.

Not all humans with nutty behavior are nutty. Cult members who are not natively nutty adapt to the oddball teachings and behavior management style of a cult leader who is nutty. Marshall Applewhite who led the Heaven’s Gate cult to suicide was nutty/eccentric most of his life, but in a pathological sense on hindsight after we learned that he led his cult members to commit suicide with him.

To quote Forrest Gump’s mother, “Stupid is, as stupid does.” So, if we act nutty or say nutty things, others will view us as nutty.

Nutty can mean a lot of things beyond pecans. We use nutty as an idiom for eccentric, foolish, or insane. It’s like saying someone is a little bit culty. Or indicate that someone acts schizophrenic—seems to live in a separate reality with delusional beliefs. Like a conspiracy theorist truck driver who believes that all moon landings are a hoax perpetrated by a shadow government. Nutty people live among us, they are our neighbors and co-workers, and the vast majority have never experienced psychiatric treatment. And sometimes for some reason, we all act nutty. We can all get a little bit culty.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), known commonly among Theosophists as HPB, was eccentric and hard to manage as a child. She was worse as a teenager. The precocious, disagreeable brat, who at age seventeen on a challenge that no man would marry her, “agreed” to wed forty-two-year-old Nikifor Blavatsky. The union, blessed in a Russian Orthodox Church, was likely never consummated before Helena ran away from Nikifor within three weeks. As I read in several biographies on HPB, Helena’s mother on her death bed said, what is to become of poor Helena?

HPB’s colorful, esoteric adventures are steeped in a mix of truth and fiction that we cannot recount here. She helped found the Theosophical Society in 1875. Her primary function was amanuensis or medium for mysterious Mahatmas who appeared to have read from the same one-hundred books on religion and occultism that she traveled with. Her influence on modern esotericism, New Age cults, and the common occulture is hard to overestimate—it is pervasive. Yet, in my estimation, nothing she produced can be trusted. Her writings reflect her personality; a woman who could tell the truth, make shit up, and outright lie, all in the same sentence.

If I am right about HPB, and I think I am, she fits a prototype of narcissistic cult leaders that tend to shape and map self-sealing social systems around their autocratic styles.

All social studies indicate that narcissism is on the rise, especially among young adults, half of whom yearn to be influencers on social media with followings large enough to support them and their services. And you ask, are cults on the rise?  

HPB did it without a mobile device. She was very persuasive among her inner circle, and she sent Mahatma letters—her more credulous followers believed that these letters “precipitated” from the ethers magically. Is it possible that an accomplice surreptitiously slipped a letter to their desk? In any case, HPB had accomplices. Another case of “divine fallacy,” as mentioned above, for those who believe in precipitated letters.

No, HPB was not anticipating email or texting with her Mahatma letters.

Today, we have millions of HPB’s worldwide with mobile devices for self-promotion. Today, HPB’s family could have sent her to a high-priced, poorly staffed troubled teen camp. According to biographies I read, HPB was addicted to nicotine from an early age and later to marijuana use. My hunch is that she would have been one of those teens that escapes from teen boot camp.

Teen boot camps have a checkered reputation, mostly bad in my opinion due to that problematic self-sealing social system I mentioned. So-called “evidence based” treatments at boot camps are not scientifically vetted. Evidence based can mean anything from anecdotal evidence, the most common, to equivocal evidence, the kind that states our model is like the military model and the military model works. Advertising for these treatment camps like most advertising…well, you should know what I mean. The reality is psychologically based, not evidence based. One kid will say the program saved her life while another at the same program at the same time felt nothing but deprivation and abuse.

Frustrated families say, what else could we have done? She tried to kill herself.

Frustrated families who hired deprogrammers in the 1970s and 1980s to kidnap a cult member for intervention used to say what else could we have done? Her mind was kidnapped by a cult.

As in boot camps, forced deprogramming sessions had mixed results with some giving thanks that their families took the risk to educate them, while others curse their deprogrammers to this day for abusing their rights. Some deprogrammers spent time in prison.

Welcome to my world. The last of relatively few forced deprogrammings I participated in from 1986 through 1992 turned out great. The young lady, nineteen at the time, called me twenty years later to thank me again for taking the risk in her behalf. She was under the control of her music professor in his sixties who introduced her to a bogus therapy called Applied Kinesiology. Kinky sex was part of the spiritual education he provided. After discovering what was going on while she was supposed to be studying music in college, her parents and brother tried to reason with her unsuccessfully. Thus, the abduction to get things started.  

Psychology has made considerable valuable advances since the era of HPB, but it is far from effective overall. We seem to be producing more humans in need of therapy than we can accommodate. Is the world going crazy?

We cannot answer that. It is merely a question we all ask from time to time. The answer might be in the proposition that the more disorders we identify, the more we find.

To a Gnostic, incarnation IS a disorder.  The Creator is crazy.

Definitions matter.

Everyone can use an adjustment for preventative care, says you chiropractor. Bring your back back twelve times in six weeks and you will feel better.

How many people feel better after six weeks without seeing a chiropractor? Or a homeopath? Or a Reiki Master? Or a Christian Science practitioner? Or a holy shrine?

We are psychological beings in need of psychological remedies like religion, metaphysical healing, hope for an afterlife, or divining the future. Some of us seem to need psychological remedies more than others. Remedies can be overvalued and addictive. The salesmen of the remedies overvalue their remedies because that is what salesmen do. They hope you will buy more than you need.

How many times to you need to receive communion to benefit from the blessing of Jesus? Once, I believe. Jesus is eternal and operates eternally through spacetime. If you understand that once, you have done it always. Reminders can be useful: Do this in remembrance of me. He did not say how many times. We made that up. Repeated rituals mimic eternal time. Same as it ever was. Other sacraments have effect once and for all if done right: Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Orders, Last Rights. Only Eucharist (thanks) and Reconciliation (penance) tend to repeat, prn. But thanks and penance for a good Christian is a 24/7 reality.

What are cults for? They are for people who hesitate to believe that life is fulfilled without devotion to something special. Cults might also serve as aggrandizement for an unscrupulous leader.

God blesses the person who finds a good cult that manages their time and thoughts well.

Or, if you are spiritual and not religious, the universe does it.

Sacred words. Fillers for the unknown, the mysterious, the ineffable, the transcendent.

What would poetry and love songs be without them?

What does deeper than the deepest ocean mean? Or higher than the highest mountain?  For poets, none of that has to mean anything. If a phrase evokes awe, dread, yearning, joy—the poet has done the job well.

When a large group awareness training plays the theme from Chariots of the Gods on high volume as participants are signing in for a weekend session, the purpose is both to elevate mood and to manipulate experience: If this feels good, that will be good. If I do not think it is good, that is my fault. Some people seem to be getting a lot out of this mayhem. Maybe it’s just me. I don’t get IT.

Note the equivocation. Note the blame the victim.

HADD is a hyperactive agency detection device or “a mental mechanism designed to identify agents, or intentional beings, even when they are not there.”[45] The article I am quoting from by Massimo Polidoro states that “we are designed for self-deception.”[46]

HADD was proposed by cognitive psychologist Justin Barret of Oxford in his book, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (2004). Barret’s notion of HADD has proven to be unproveable.[47] This is a case of a skeptic Kat Ford allegorically (in my mind) arguing with skeptic Massimo Polidoro. That is what skepticism is for: Correction when correction is useful or needed. But Polidoro may not have been altogether wrong.

Evolution may or may have not “designed” HADD. It is better said scientifically that humans adapted to survival by developing compensating anthropomorphic deities to better grasp natural forces. HADD is not a proven hypothesis or theory and is easily dismissed due to the “devise” term. There is no such devise in the brain.

HADD is a stand-in for what some cruder skeptics call a shit detector or others call a god belief complex.

However, we can imagine such a devise as a psychological motif. Justin Barret was doing psychology more than science. We imagine agents out there when agents are not out there, just in case. We noted before that tiger stripes work as camouflage to deer more than to humans. When we hike through tiger country, our HADD is on alert. When I sense movement and footsteps behind me on a dark night on a lonely street, my inner alert button gets pushed. Adrenalin is ready. Pushed by what? By my imagined HADD, whether or not the follower is a child, a harmless elderly lady or a tall man in a hoody.

That same HADD operates when we wonder if there is a final judge for our earthly actions in heaven when we die, according to Barret.

HADD is a psychological device that we apply to weird phenomena like ghosts and Sasquatch. We cannot help it even though he devise in not in the flesh brain.

The unexpected death of our dog in 2024 was an emotional blow my wife and me. We had eleven years with her. The liver cancer symptoms when they appeared indicated advanced illness. There was nothing to do but comfort her. After we buried her in the back garden, I turned to look at her grave thirty yards away. She appeared in a vivid vision, as if she popped out of the ground looking fully healthy and happily panting while acknowledging me. The vision was not her, but it felt so good to see her again, even for a few seconds.

Mystical events like this with my dog account for resurrection stories as well as ghosts. They are psychologically compelling and real at a subjective level. They have value. The vision reminded me of a life shared and cared for. The reminder came with pain and tears. That much was very real. I had a distinct feeling that she was still with me on walks, in the car, and in bed for months. Her spirit in me has faded after a year, but I still miss her. Grief does not fade in stages. It fades in time that varies from person to person depending on that person’s psychological health and social circumstances.

Some peoples have traditional rituals that accompany and assuage grief beautifully. Most of us in the modern, skeptical world do not. So we are vulnerable and needy for comfort. We see seers who claim to have extrasensory perception and can contact the dead. We donate money to their causes when they contact our dear departed dead fathers who send messages that they are doing okay in the spirit world. Often, I heard customers of psychics tell me that “she told me things that no one else knew but me.”

When I question what that was, I surmise that my friend has been the victim of a cold reading. But comfort is the thing paid for and felt. Psychology of seership can work and is useful for that reason. In fact, seership as divination thrives worldwide and throughout history for that reason. Every Dalai Lama consults a psychic shaman. Further questioning of the seer, in my experience, shows that the seer is clever but not in touch with an independent agent called my friend’s father.

Lookup “cold reading.” 

People might be able to read me, but people—shaman, psychic, magus, saint—cannot read my mind like an open book. If they cannot read my mind, then the seer cannot communicate with any dead spirit-mind. If objectively reading minds or contacting spirits as autonomous agents were ever possible, the Internet would not exist. We would all be able to do it to some degree as a species feature. Judges would be unnecessary in court. The confessional would collapse. The intention of the murderer would be instantly thwarted. No one would be able to lie. The creative adventure we call life would freeze. There would be no reason for sensual life to exist. Fini!

The gods may be able to read our minds and surmise our intents, but gods cannot predict what we will do, how we will choose in time. The Greeks perceived one trait in the species, the trait of reason that allows freedom to choose within natural laws. Human reason can confound the Fates who nevertheless control the overall laws that run the universe. Fate cuts human life off by age 100 in 99% of persons. The oldest human verified by science was Jeanne Calment who died in 1997 at age 122.  

We know this, yet we believe or want to believe that there is more in the beyond. That desire, as noted by the Buddha, causes suffering. Scrupulous religions with good management as well as unscrupulous gurus with their eccentric cults tap this desire to relieve our suffering. How the group or leader manages our desires is the question explored here.

Immortality is an obsession with some billionaires, as mentioned above. If artificial intelligence survives the human race as humanoid robots, the human race is dead.

AI will atrophy over time in a silo of solipsism. AI cannot defeat the entropic principle.

If you have read this essay this far, I want to reflect on style. Cubism fascinated me when I first switched to a fine arts major my junior year in college. I was an engineering major, doing okay in grades, but for some reason I went down the art rabbit hole instead. Pre-college tests, my university counselor told me, indicated that I had only one major interest or passion, namely art. He could not understand why I chose engineering and was surprised that I was doing better than average.

Of course, I wanted to please my parents and have a reliable career. I used LSD for the first time in 1967 months before I saw the counselor. The LSD experience was transformative. Whether or not LSD, my passion, or the “do you own thing” motto of the Sixties influenced me, begs the question. I could have pursued an art career and been an engineer. Guilt, guilt, guilt. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa. Sorry, Dad.

Modern physics, psychology, and cosmology after 1900 influenced Cubism and other movements in the arts. Discoveries in physics, particularly the theories of Albert Einstein, had a deep impact on Cubist theory. Picasso and Braque attempted to represent multiple points of view in spacetime on a flat canvas by introducing planes, script, shading, and composition with some objective, non-abstract references to landscape, violins, vases, buildings, portraits, and animals.

The immediate impact on the viewer was a fractured image or theme tending toward monochrome in the early works. The best Cubist works make elegant use of design within the rectangular canvas, although some experiments occurred on ovals. Cubism in sculpture emerged at the same time with forms fragmented by planes, facets and curves.

My science courses in physics, chemistry and calculus prepared me to appreciate the cubist experiments. The head of the art department at the time, Dr. Bernard Plogman, employed Cubist theory into his art. Cubism was a natural fit for me out of the gate as a student at the University of Dayton’s modest (at the time) art department.

My fragmented approach to this essay borrows from Cubist theory. Hopefully, the final product delivers the theme of cult well enough to satisfy taste.

Not everyone likes Cubism. I took my four-year-old daughter to a Cubist exhibit at a museum in Philadelphia once. Her immediate remark was, “But dad, these paintings aren’t any good.”

That’s like saying your religion or cult are not good.

For some serious devotees of any religion it is a matter of taste, of cultural satisfaction, of daily rituals that make them happy, or aesthetics.

Austrian by heritage, Swami Agehananda Bharati (born Leopold Fischer, 1923-1991) taught anthropology at the University of Syracuse towards the latter half of his life. He was an academic Sanskritist and an ordained Hindu monk in the Goswami or Dasanami Sannyasi order. His autobiography, The Ochre Robe (1980) has been a useful reference text for many former members of Hindu-based cuts. Bharati offers an elegant, practical path within that tradition without establishing a cult around himself. If a student asked to be his disciple, he had every right to initiate devotees—he would tell them to study Sanskrit for three years, then come back to him.

Bharati spoke four major Indian dialects fluently without accent. As a young monk he traveled around India teaching at villages, never handling money. His tradition would not allow payment, but donations for travel and food were allowed. Of course when he worked as a professor in New Delhi, Bangkok and Syracuse, he had a salary like any other professor. He converted to Hinduism in Austria at age fourteen. He served among Indians as a soldier during World War 2. His reason for converting was that he liked the aesthetics.

Professor Bharati testified in court about the proper us of Sankirtan that the Hare Krishna movement at the time interpreted as fundraising or selling books for the founder. Thirty years ago I wrote an essay, perhaps a prequel to this one, titled "Gurus Up the Ladder,” In which I quoted Bharati:

Bharati contends that the path he took was ethically neutral.

"[I]t was neither good nor bad, because choice of this nature is aesthetic [my emphasis] and not ethical."[48] As a Hindu, Bharati could be both a secular humanist and a monk. The Vedic tradition allows for a host of derivative positions within the Sanatana Dharma (the eternal, imperishable tradition) of Hinduism. Polytheists, atheists, and theists strive together under the same banner, unlike under the strict orthodoxy of the three great monotheistic religions. Bharati distinguished between "value" and "truth:" "....value in the ethical or aesthetic sense does not mean truth or validity."[49]

Logical by most religious standards, Bharati valued belief, but he had a harsh standard for truth that would please most skeptics:

"Truth must be obtained by other means: by investigation, by discursive thought, by comparison, by an exchange of ideas, by strict and uncompromising tests with objective criteria by logical, experimental or documentary proof.”[50]

My use of “psychological” mimics Bharati’s use of aesthetic in describing how value applies to religion while a rigorous standard for testable evidence applies to truth in science.

Tibetan Buddhists value prayer wheels that come in various sizes from handheld to huge, fixed cylinders assembled near temples and spun by hand. Prayer wheels are powered to spin using wind, water, and fire. Prayer wheels emanate mantras when spun. They accumulate merit and send spiritual energy according to intent.

I recall an amusing scene in 1981 in Darjeeling where I watched a Tibetan monk spinning a prayer wheel in front of a small liquor store. The Nepali owner looked disgusted in the doorway because no one would enter the store as long as the teetotalling monk was casting his spell. One translation of mantra is to cast a spell. For all intents, the ritual “worked” due to its aesthetic value and psychological impact, not due to its science or truth. Such is religion everywhere. Thank you, Professor Swami Bharati.  

Another quote from my essay, Gurus Up the Ladder:

“Viewing a belief system as necessarily aesthetic removes the pressure of absolutism and the potential evil of totalism as an option for the believer. It allows for more lateral thinking and testing, and it avoids the manipulative relationship with [unassailable] "sacred science" from "above."” It avoids the psychological trap of the divine fallacy.

Weird, now that I look back at what I wrote three decades ago, I have not changed my positions on cults all that much!

To underscore Professor Bharati’s insight as both secularist and a Swami, I highly recommend studying How To Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age by Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn.[51] If you are recovering from toxic occultism and magical thinking in your brain, this book has proven to be an excellent remedy for many of my clients.

Magical thinking gets toxic when value is confused with truth.

Occultism gets toxic when psychological perception is confused with scientifically testable truth.

Your relationship with a gem gets toxic when you see or feel energy emanating from it.

Pathologically narcissistic cult leader Frederick von Meiers (1946-1990) made a small fortune by selling spiritually charged gems at inflated prices to credulous, attractive followers in his group, Eternal Values. They claimed to be trans-human, or alien spirts from an advanced race on Arcturus now inhabiting human bodies. Popular author and discredited psychic Ruth Montgomery vetted the group as authentic in her book, Aliens Among Us.[52]  

Frederick was sexually promiscuous with followers who did not know he was infected with HIV/AIDs. Most of his followers were professional models and from better colleges. Frederick claimed that the gems he sold in jewelry would protect his cult members from dark energies. They were very, very special people. Smart, pretty people join cults of delusion too.

Psychologically, there are a thousand ways to escape from the bonds and sufferings of physical life. Mistaken notions of evolution, enhanced by flawed Hegelian and Marxist theories and driven by the Alpha-Omega myth developed by Teilhard de Chardin influence a host of crazy ideas about human’s evolving into supersensible, immortal beings. Darwin never entertained such nonsense. New Agers and occultists do.

Leaps in consciousness when the planets auspiciously align have never occurred en masse among the human race over thousands of auspicious alignments during the past millions of years. There is no testable evidence. The slow, tedious and tentative grind of speciation has more grit and reliability as a theory. Hegel, Marx, and Teilhard de Chardin imposed psychological shortcuts or maps onto the territory of human development and change. The results were comical as well as misleading and destructive. The results were cults of ideas based more on devotion, faith and force than proof.

Existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard famously called out Hegel with this quip:

“If Hegel had written the whole of his logic and then said, in the preface or some other place, that it was merely an experiment in thought in which he had even begged the question in many places, then he would certainly have been the greatest thinker who had ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic.”[53]

Kierkegaard’s harsh observation reflects his “either/or,” no holds barred dictum when it comes to the leap of faith as a Christian. Hegel’s grand vision of history was either right as a thought experiment or totally wrong as a governing model for human politics. With Existentialism, that Kierkegaard helped to launch, choice is key. We are “condemned to be free” in Jean Paul Sartre’s phrase.

Man is responsible for his passion and should never let passion sweep up choice. Sartre would puke at Joseph Campbell’s popular, myth-driven notion that you should “follow your bliss.” The artist’s muse is only as good as the artist at her best. Do not blame your muse if you cannot succeed. The muse like a patron saint is a psychological comfort that may feel helpful and add beauty and wonder to your life, but do not take your muse too seriously, as if it had independent agency. If you do, you will be, in Kierkegaard’s view, merely comic.

Manipulative cult leaders encourage you to not let skepticism and doubt rule your heart, your passion, which is your connection to God. Not your head. This distinction between heart and head is a canard used to divide and conquer. There is no distinction. We are distinctly integrated neurobiological life forms. The division between heart and head is a linguistic and useful poetic convention that unscrupulous cult leaders easily exploit.

Are gut responses from your stomach? Does your stomach have intuition that your heart and head do not? What about your right knee? When you genuflect, you should never use your left knee. God might be offended.

Do not let your loaded language and a thought-terminating cliché fool your ability to choose. Psychology is not the entire basis of reality. We use psychologically loaded words to express meaning. It works and has practical and poetic value. When we used to say, “I got to see a man about a horse,” we meant we have something else to do that was a private matter. Our correspondent in 1890 or 1940 knew exactly what we meant and did not ask questions.

But idioms and euphemisms can have double meanings: metaphorical and literal. When a guru who purportedly has psychic powers or siddhis will not submit to a proper test of their powers, that is on a different order of magnitude than the man who said, “I got to see a man about a horse.” He does not claim special powers that can have undue influence over you. Both Sri Chinmoy and Frederick “Zen Master Rama” Lenz both claimed to fight demons for their disciples in the spirit world. When the guru said, “I have to check in with the spirits,” the devotees took it literally. In the first case, there was no “horse” nor an expectation of belief in an actual equine. In the second, there is a “spirit world” with the expectation to know that it is real. The choice to believe or “know” literally is bounded within the psychological and experiential pressures of constricted groupthink.

Stop and think again; use your head to save your ass (heart) from stupidity, I tell myself.

That said, Dual Process Theory can help us understand why cult formation in devotional belief systems is normal to human behavior. Yes, I said “normal.” DPT has two systems, one and two: System One applies to our intuition, instinct, quick reads, pattern recognition, emotions, immediate reactions, and humor. “When I first laid eyes on her, I was infatuated, and I knew she would be my wife.” System Two, as you might imagine, is less immediate, slows the evaluation process down, uses rational thought, has a self-correcting role, is experimental, weighs options, counts to ten before throwing a rock, and does some research on a potential mate’s background before proceeding to date. “When I found out that he abused his former girlfriend, I blocked him on Facebook.”  

Most of the time we go about in System One. It is easier. Most of the time it is practically right, tolerable, and at times, spot on. We are in System One mode when we drive a car, hammer a nail, or enjoy birds at our bird feeder. System Two applies when we are learning to play the piano by learning scales and music theory. System One applies when we are in full bloom as a musician on stage playing Mozart as if we were Moxart.

System One is hijacked by an unethical application of System Two. You might attend a yoga retreat for the first time. Learning the asanas (poses) and special Sanskrit terms engages System Two. At first you are clumsy and mispronounce words. Seasoned practitioners at the retreat compliment you and you feel good. Feeling pleased is System One. That is a normal response under immediate circumstances.

Two years later, after you have joined the Yoga community as an instructor, donned a white turban, and taken vows of seva (service) to the group ideals and to the leader, you begin feeling constricted. You begin to fight with doubts. Reassessing your affiliation causes anxiety and headaches. You have panic attacks. System Two is trying to engage. System Two engages in full force after you dare to meet with an ex-member who knew the leader intimately for five years, then defected.

You begin doing comparative research into group dynamics, the history of yoga, and the leader’s true background. He was never initiated properly as a guru in India! This whole deal is fake! It takes you two or three months to wrap up your affairs with the group, resign your position, and leave despite group pressure to stay. After you leave, the leader smears your reputation, calling you a demon and a traitor. System Two has saved you from further embarrassment and abuse.

This process between System One (S1) and System Two (S2) is not simply bipolar. The terms S1 and S2 are metaphors to simplify interactive processes in human choice. For example, you might be researching which make of a Suburban Utility Vehicle is best for you. After a week of reading reviews, you cannot decide between a Buick model and a BMW model. You dream in your sleep that you are in a red Buick! S1 makes the final decision after S2 discovers that both decisions can work for you.

System One tends to inspire connections with deities and astrological forces in the sky.

System One has similarities to HADD mentioned above: HADD is a hyperactive agency detection device, or a mental mechanism designed to identify agents, or intentional beings, even when they are not there. By the way, HADD, I just discovered, is not a thing in the brain, but more of a metaphor for behavior.

The Amish use a method of divination for deciding on a new leader. Several candidates are assessed as worthy, but the final decision is God’s in a ceremony called The Lot.

1. The Lot Ceremony:

• A slip of paper with a Bible verse is placed inside a hymnbook.

• The same number of hymnbooks as candidates are used, and the one with the verse is mixed in.

• Each candidate then selects a hymnbook.

• The candidate who chooses the book with the Bible verse is considered to be chosen by God.[54]

Ancient, reliable shamans relied on dreams and signs after sorting through what to do to guide the chief.

Up until the late 19th Century, Navaho tribes could put a shaman to death if he was found to be a liar or delusional. The entire tribe’s welfare could depend on a shaman’s wisdom.  

We live in different standards in the post-industrial, modern society. Modern shamanism, like modern art, is anything you can get away with. Anyone can call themselves a shaman. How they get away with it begs another question. For the most part, the consciousness raising communities behave well enough, sustain civil standards of exchange whether you agree with what they exchange or not. A skeptic might grimace at ideas and techniques used by life coaches and astrologers, but this is the marketplace we live in. The goods are determined by supply and demand. The law can apply some safeguards regarding fraud, undue influence, and insanity, but for the most part religious, self-help, and spiritual behavior is an unregulated market. Buyers must beware.

I am not campaigning to prevent astrologers from practicing and more than I campaign to prevent psychologists from practicing. My role, the one I have assumed, is to provide education as to what the mantic arts can and cannot do. The choice remains with the client to end paying an astrologer for advice or to proceed with more caution when seeking advice from star chart readers.

In the late 1960s, when I first studied art in college, I read popular books by theorist Marshall McLuhan. He coined the phrase art is anything you can get away with in his 1967 book, The Medium is the Massage.

I’ve signed my name on many thousands of works of art that I sold over my career. Around seven thousand were quick-sketch portraits in pastel or charcoal that I did on the Santa Fe Plaza, shore resorts, in malls, and at state fairs. Hundreds more carry my signature on murals, large and small canvases, and prints. I got away with that much, so far, but I would not rank my art career as a success by fame standards. I am yet a kind of one-eyed jack among the kings and queens in the art world.

Is there a cultic aspect to art appreciation? Do certain artists and art styles achieve cult status among collectors and museums? Is there any reason to apply System Two to art appreciation? The answer, I think, to all three questions is yes. But keep in mind that cult in this context does not mean sacred, evil or bad. It is ethically and morally neutral like aesthetic, as I mentioned above.

Cult behavior exists on an “influence continuum,” as my good colleague Steve Hassan argued in his PhD dissertation.[55] The description of cult is neutral if you are describing special devotional activity that cares for a person, idea, thing, or mission. In popular society, we tend to see cult negatively on the influence continuum. We assume pejorative adjectives about a group labelled as a cult. A useful substitute is special devotional activity, as in the art world Vincent Van Gogh paintings attract special devotional activity far above his peers: Van Gogh has a cult following.

Many films and documentaries celebrate Van Gogh’s genius with color, design, and texture despite his psychologically tortured life. His name is easy to recall. Vincent Van Gogh rolls off the tongue. Prints of his art grace the walls of millions of households worldwide. Yet during his lifetime he had no cult following. He sold one painting before he died. Without his brother Theo’s support, the cult of Van Gogh would never have emerged.

System One of Dual Process Theory accounts for the immediate appreciation of Van Gogh’s work throughout history. His sister, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, took special care to promote her dead brother’s work. Her special caring for (cultus) his legacy helped collectors and critics to value Vincent’s art. System Two, the slow, careful assessment of Van Gogh’s style and special place in the history of art among the Post-Impressionist movement anchored the artist’s value in the public mind. Today, we assume with System One that Van Gogh is great. So do museums. One Van Gogh fetched over one hundred million dollars at auction.

Special caring as cultus: The term "cult" first appeared in English in 1617, derived from the French culte, meaning "worship" which in turn originated from the Latin word cultus meaning "care, cultivation, worship". The meaning "devotion to a person or thing" is from 1829.” (from AI CoPilot)[56]    

Why are we so fascinated with fireworks displays? Explosions? Eruptions? Bursts of speed? Popping bubble gum? Something appears to emerge out of nothing. Where there was an expanding bubble of gum membrane, there is a chaotic mangled skin without elegant form. Where there was a rocket in the dark sky, there appears a flash of scintillating lights that soon disappear in the darkness.

Where there was a guru teaching meditation in a park to five people, there grew a worldwide charismatic collective of thousands of devotees attracted to one guru.

We say, “He suddenly exploded on the scene, while thousands spontaneously fell under his charismatic spell.”

New Thought cults believe in the Law of Attraction. That “law” is not a law, but it is a psychological principle based on desires for spiritual power. We gravitate to what seems to please us, to what promises peace and harmony and healing. New Thought believes that thought with intent of affirmation or decree moves through the cosmos like radio waves and the cosmos echoes those waves back with answers and solutions. It is no accident that New Thought appeared with the advent of the telegraph (1832) and spread with the advent of the radio in the 1890s. The occulture has appropriated advances in science in extraordinary ways that have no reality basis. Blavatsky’s mangled adaptation of Darwinian evolution to her Theosophy and Quantum consciousness beliefs are cases in point.

My good friend, retired nurse John Snell, who is a hobbyist Morse Code practitioner with a homemade device told me the story of a woman in the early days of telegraphy bringing a package and food that she wanted to “send” through the telegraph machine. There is no evidence that this was more than an incidental occurrence. Nevertheless, teleportation has been a popular belief within Spiritualist and paranormal circles in the occulture. Sending thoughts and intentions or prayers through the cosmos with hopes of a “manifestation” is a similar misconception of what thoughts are and can do. But this is a common, mostly harmless, hopeful, kind human belief entertained in churches, Wicca covens, and New Age retreats.

“Sending” a healing intent has value for the sender who “did” something positive for someone.

Let It Be written and sung by Beatle Paul McCartney (1970) taps the divine agent zeitgeist for me and millions of others who appreciate this song. “Mother Mary” appears to him in a vision during his dark distress to comfort him with words of wisdom: Let it be.

Maybe someone like God or Mother Mary is listening. The idea is comforting. Belief in Mother Mary is more comforting. The psychological realm of existence for humans is more valuable than the hard sciences for our social and individual welfare. Religion did not arise out of pure nonsense. All our senses participate in our personal psychologies with none more important than our sense of being and non-being. What else would have driven the Existentialist Jean Paul Sartre to write Being and Nothingness? Existentialism is a totally individualized religion. The downside of that religion is the condition of feeling utterly abandoned and alone as God before the Creation.

Patients with schizophrenia think this way too, but to a dysfunctional extreme. Haldol helps.

Beam me up, Scotty!

Send us your thoughts and prayers!

Mysterious as gravity is, we associate it with magnetism, with attraction. I purposely employ “Transcendent Attraction” as my first theme when I examine cult behavior. Something moves a movement. There is some kind of attraction for devotion, adherence, and focus.

In Ayurvedic medicine, guru means heavy, not easy to digest. Think about that for a second, or an hour. The heavier a thing is the more gravity “attracts” it to a center. Thus is the way of worlds and spheres in space. A heavy guru (pardon the redundancy) can attract millions of devotees or three who learn to experience that the guru or what the guru represents is The Center. That attraction draws people into an orbit like water circling a drain. How far dare you go? The rabbit hole beckons. Your salvation depends on it. Is that the proper Tao?

Of course, people who go all the way, then question, might be flushed into a sewer. Some Vaishnav cults say defection from devotion to Krishna is like a dog returning to its vomit. The guru says, “Begone! You are no longer worthy.” He flushes you out of the group. There are many ways out, but the flush is the way of very dedicated people who dare to challenge the guru and those deemed unworthy. Disabled people rarely last in high demand groups for the elite in spirituality unless they have a lot of money.  Less dedicated people might swim free of the circling waters in time. That is what I did. I did not sustain 100% dedication.

Cleaning up after a bad cult experience will take some time. The ideas in your head stink.

New Thought cults borrowing from Mesmerism, Quimbyism, and Christian Science proposed something “real” they called animal magnetism. The evil side was “malicious animal magnetism.”

Back in my cult days in 1979, I used to decree against MAM or malicious animal magnetism. The cult idea was that MAM could travel like radio waves or cosmic rays and could be directed by thought: New Thought. Dark Forces and Black magicians in the ethers could direct MAM against me. When I smashed my finger with a hammer, it could have been MAM. Easy peasy. Blame it on the spooks. I should have done more prayer or mantas. Or maybe I did not choose the right mantra.

As an example for all to see as I see it, New Thought is the toxic, bullshit psychology that influenced Donald Trump as a kid through his father and continued as his bizarre ideation as an adult. He cannot not believe that he is not a genius when he states utterly, positively, “I am a genius.”  New Thought has compromised his spine, the spine (metaphorically) that we need to self-correct. To admit when we are wrong makes us stronger and less stupid as humans.

Proverbs 12:1

Of course, my use of transcendent attraction has nothing to do with radio waves, etheric energy, or a vital force. It is about charismatic relationships. It is about human psychology and the impact of imagination on others. It is about influence techniques and projections. It is about sensual communication. It is about hero hungry seekers finding mirror hungry gurus that feed the seeker what they crave, which could be something as simple as self-image reinforcement: I am greater because I know Marilyn Monroe is great. I am stronger because I admire Vladimir Putin. I walk an XL Bully because people on the streets in New York will show me more respect.

The transcendent attraction, the charismatic relationship, or the “transference” as Freud tried to bend the language when he talked about the patient seeing him as an authority or father figure, accompanies all human relationships whether it is with a person, a tree, a pet, or a crowd. Specialness makes the attraction transcendent. The experience of transcendence makes the object special. When a young man speeds and crashes his car into a tree and dies, that spot is often marked with a cross by Christian families. That spot by that tree now feels transcendent and has value—for some people. Other trees nearby are not special trees. Ten years later, the cross may have disappeared due to lack of attention. The tree is no longer transcendent. It will grow old, die and rot like all the other trees. Without sensual attention, transcendence has no basis in reality. Like a temple empty of believers. Transcendence is a psychological construct while you meditate in the wilderness alone.  

Trees falling in the forest do make noise when no human is listening. The air hears. The air feels and carries the shock waves. No air, no gas, no sound. There is no sound in a vacuum. I am not talking about a vacuum cleaner.

If you cannot hear the preacher pray, his prayers have no effect on you. The preacher cannot send his thoughts and prayers to you through the air because your ears due to deafness or distance do not receive the waves of vibration coming out of the preacher’s mouth. During her last years of still attending mass, my mother had no idea what the priest said during his homily. All holy intents and special purposes were lost in spacetime. For all she knew, he could have been reading scripture from a car repair manual or the Koran.  

Dogs do not obey thinking statues, but dogs react to talking robots.

Statues do not think. Robots make sounds, but they do not talk.

Theories of everything appear in every spiritual seeker’s brain. Transmitting the essence of being is an old guru game, that is by gurus who have figured it all out after a transcendent experience. Ecstasy is like death before we die. Maybe. Stepping aside from life into a hyper-life seeds new religious movements throughout history. Moses di it after his ecstatic experience on Mt. Sinai. Islam’s prophet had an ecstasy that was well documented. The value, not the truth, of any religious movement depends on its behaviors and not “the truth.” A new religious movement can have tremendous social value. Or not.

If you believe that some gurus can transmit the essence of being, I own a tower in Dubai that I would like to sell to you on a life-time payment plan if you do not have cash.

Ken Wilber proposed a “theory of everything” with his map he called “the spectrum of consciousness.” Wilber has been a go to guru/non-guru for the elites in seeker society. Within his “non-dual” psychological construct, he is brilliant. That brilliance can be seductive. But he fell under the spells of selfish, abusive dolts with cult followings including Da Free John (Frank Jones) and Andrew Cohen. The non-dual self tends to be selfish, often mistaking narcissism for enlightenment. In these cases, we can call it cosmic narcissism

Part of Wilber’s scheme comes from Integral Yoga developed by Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) who attempted to integrate his Hindu tradition with modern ideas: Sports, music, yoga, and seva or working for the cause. Aurobindo and his partner called “The Mother,” failed to avoid sectarian problems despite Aurobindo’s attitude:

“In fact, Aurobindo insisted that in “serious work” propaganda was a “poison” resulting in a “boom or a stunt” or “a movement” and “a movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other damn nonsense. It means that hundreds and thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence.””[57]

To know, to dare, to do, and to keep silent was the occultist’s motto spread by Freemasonry and Theosophy.

The silent part was mostly ignored by Eliphas Levi, Blavatsky, Aurobindo, and the lot.

Profound words, guru. Here Aurobindo begs the question of “truth.” Does he, or does he not have it? He seriously explores it. A German woman I met in India in 1981 gave me her copy of a book by Sri Aurobindo. His ideas struck me as deep and densely crafted. By that time, when my Theosophy devotion waned, I recognized Aurobindo’s debt to the west as well as to his east. His seriousness betrays his inability to declare his subjectivity in metaphysical speculation. He assumes, like the western Theosophists that influenced him, that a seer can tap a primordial wisdom or “truth,” then transmit it. Perennialism is perennially myopic. Hell, we can’t yet know what life is like on other planets! Will an alien share the same “truth?”

Aurobindo influenced Ken Wilber and Sri Chinmoy who studied at Aurobindo’s Auroville ashram in Pondicherry, India. Chinmoy’s movement out of Queens, NY has been notoriously cultlike with Chinmoy performing the very “stunts” that perturbed Aurobindo. Wilber’s ideas have an elitist cult-like following. The “damned nonsense” that concerned Aurobindo continues based on his “work.”

Please do not get me wrong. The universe as we are beginning to understand it is linked together through “dark matter” creating systems of galaxies that “communicate” through the system. This is not a system of belief. This is a system of interactive forces, both creative and destructive, then recreative.  Leela, the play, the recreation of the universe. Shiva, the creator and the destroyer.

Mushrooms form some of the largest organisms (mycelium) on earth underground like “dark matter” out of sight. Humans study galaxies bound together in dark matter networks and mushrooms networking through mycelium to determine how they live or exist. We study how they behave. Behavior indicates evidence of value.

On the human scale, we imagine that if dark matter created us, we must be able to communicate through invisible dark matter with our thoughts and intents. That is an equivocation. In other words, there is no evidence that the dark matter produced brain matter in our skulls has supersensible powers like extrasensory perception or telepathy.

Manipulative cult leaders thrive on equivocations as if they have to ability to quantum leap into gnosis at will or after taking a red pill.

Sri AI Google says: Equivocation is a logical fallacy where a word or phrase is used with two or more different meanings within the same argument, leading to a misleading or invalid conclusion. It's a type of ambiguity that exploits multiple senses of a term. (June 24, 2025)

Sri Aurobindo equivocates when he says: “It means that hundreds and thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence.”[58] Truth in this context has a double meaning, but Aurobindo’s use is exegetic or subjective in interpretation, no matter how he feels about it or experiences it. “The truth that was coming down” is his prejudice that truth was coming down through him from a perennial, unassailable source. Aurobindo’s “truth” conflates badly with measurable truth. Its value is limited to how his cult appreciates it and how the cult members behave as a result. Religion is psychology, not objective truth.

This means that some people can find value for their personal development (psychology) by studying Integral Yoga. Some people might find Aurobindo’s work lame or obtuse. How many religions are there on planet earth? AI tells me “10,000 distinct religions” on June 24, 2025. But who is counting? Before 1992, I had a file with 450 weird cultic groups based on inquiries from clients over ten years. Up to half of those cults (that were household sized) never made it onto the Internet. What does AI know?

The neologism for UFO today is UAP or unidentified anomalous phenomena. The flying saucer sighting fads and phobias accelerated after World War 2, but we can go back to 1898 when H. G. Wells published War of the Worlds about an invasion from Mars. We were wrong about the Martians. The popular television shows about “ancient aliens” and UFO coverups by the government irritate me. The fuzzy evidence given leaves me with more questions than answers.

After all this hype, why am I not concerned about UAPs when I go about my daily walks, drives, and travels? If there were intelligent alien entities or their robots guiding these things in the sky, we would have had a ton of obvious evidence. Contact is easy. Land at a quiet resort, let dozens of people take unfaked, clear pictures, wave goodbye and buzz off before the locked and loaded military shows up. Your saucer moves with the speed of light. Why hide? Instead, we have fringe UFO promotion organizations with devotees—like cults—who swim in conspiracy pools. Belief rules over provable evidence; but let us not leave Karl Popper out of this: falsifiable evidence.

We humans cannot stop creating gods that visit from the sky and return or ascend back to the beyond. Superman: We love the savior guy, the moral hero in the red cape that flies without wings or flapping anything. His cape flaps. We hope the UFO or UAP things are real and beneficial. But we just do not know, so the tension between phobia or dread and awe or worship continues. The drama is what makes it real, psychologically real, real enough to drive some of the economy. Roswell, NM sells green bottles of alien wine. Like the god-of-gaps motif, the visitor from out there fills a need and a mystery.

We (if not schizophrenic or extremely monkish) do not like being alone. Is anyone out there? Hello?

Cult activities are an ideal solution to loneliness and aimlessness. Ideals can be overvalued. The behavior that attends overvaluation concerns me here, not cult activity, as such.

Will Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and the Ground Crew Project of the Galactic Federation ever get along? The simple answer is, they do already. In day-to-day affairs outside of civil and geopolitical conflicts, people tend to trust and are polite to one another. The tension of difference remains and is exposed when Juliet meets Romeo or a new, large Buddhist stupa disturbs the old look of the neighborhood. The angry, ideology driven outsiders make the most noise. Spray-painting a swastika on a synagogue stirs passions.

New religious movements including Theosophy tend to splinter readily within a generation. The Planetary Activation Organization (PAO} split from the Ground Crew Project (GCP) in 1997 after the Ground Crew Project formed in the 1980s. The GCP and PAO are part of new religions extended from Theosophy and New Age wherein members believe they have contact with angels, ascended masters, extra-terrestrials, and Olympic gods called the Galactic Federation.  These “UFO” cults are generally virtual with online meetings among members worldwide forming dozens of branches.

All UFO cults tend toward cosmic apocalypticism and claim to prepare mankind for the coming new age. Noah, build your boat. Start crowdfunding. Here we go again!

We as in WhereWeGo1We Go All (WWG1WGA) the rally cry and acronym of the QAnon movement. Both QAnon like the Ground Crew Project are iterations of life action role playing games that appeared in the 1990s and went viral. People sitting at computers and using handheld devices felt the thrill of being on a mission, fake or not—though mostly fake. The entertainment got serious and had serious social and political consequences.

Clients came to me and my peers for help. “My husband has changed. All he does in his spare time and even at work is follow what is happening with the Ground Crew Project. He thinks he is helping to save the planet. He says the Galactic Federation is real and yearns to help us, but we have to set up a receptive public first. I cannot take it anymore. I will have to divorce him if he does not get help. We have two young children.” IBID, QAnon—if IBID can be stretched a bit.

You have a right to be crazy and a right to be a cult member. They are not the same. People in cults tend to function within normal social boundaries though their personalities have morphed to eccentric. The latter are influenced more from without by social factors. The former “crazy” person tends to be shaped by inner features like bad genes. Sometimes the two categories meet when a crazy leader influences normal people. Heavens Gate can happen but mass suicide with cults is very rare, almost as rare as hen’s teeth.

The fossil record shows that ancient birds as descendants of dinosaurs had teeth.

My point is, do not go down that rabbit hole seriously worrying about your husband committing suicide because he spends twelve hours a day online texting with the Galactic Federation. Try to educate your children so they know how crazy dad is acting. Teach them that vital world is not mainly behind a computer screen.

The end of this essay feels ready to speak. My muse tapped me on the shoulder this morning to remind me to keep this book short. Musing my way through what I am and what I’ve done and what I think as a one-eyed jack has been a productive exercise to fill in time after I finally retired from hospital work in March of 2025. At 77, I am an orphan, meaning that all in my immediate family have died. Father, sister, mother in that order.

Some of my high school friends (that yet live) ponder about their legacies, what it all meant without getting too heavy when we meet for breakfast. Our bond has strong connections harking back to our time together as football players when our team was very good. Good humor glues our musings into friendship despite variance in political orientation. We share a Roman Catholic upbringing. We were altar boys who recited the mass in Latin. The Vietnam vet, the schoolteacher-coach, the lawyer-politician, and the artist-cult guy get along and love one another. We talk about medical problems and who died recently. We settle into our legacies.  

My wife and I are in the process of moving back to New Mexico. Parting with friends, perhaps for the last time, is like a death and we feel it. Reuniting with a few old friends in New Mexico is like a rebirth and we feel that too.

Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote a book about death that I have read a few times and will continue to reference it. Denial of Death won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974, a year after its publication. Becker argues that most human behavior either ignores or avoids the inevitability of death. He deepens our grasp of why and how people and cultures grapple with the awareness of death. The cycles of the cosmos and nature appeal to our hope for renewal in this life and after death. The “truth” (value) of eternal life is obvious, but how that works out is a mystery. So we make things up like religions.

Life feels eternal when we feel good. Death feels comforting when we feel bad. When we feel bad about life or death, we are vulnerable to influence and manipulation. We all know people who have a dozen or more supplements on shelves above the kitchen sink. I know people who have had their horoscopes read dozens of times. The required annual primary care exam can allay death anxiety and save insurance companies millions of dollars if physical dysfunctions are nipped in the bud.   

As a counselor for the National 988 Suicide Hotline, half my callers entertained the notion that ending their lives would be better than suffering from pain or a serious mental disorder.

Amy Telgar was not her real name, but it is how we knew her during the final year of her life. A handful of us in Santa Fe around 1982 supported Amy after one person, Camille, in our small circle helped Amy relocate from New York City to Santa Fe. Amy was suffering from bone cancer. She refused medical intervention, so hospice services agreed to assist. Amy had enough resources to rent a one-bedroom place on Santa Fe’s west side. She was bone thin when she arrived, barely ambulatory, and appeared much older than age 67.

We like to imagine going out like a hero, like Spartacus or Jesus, sacrificing all for our friends and more—for the universe. We are not so inclined to go out with a vague whimper, like Gautama the Buddha, who at age 80, legend says, told his disciples to “work out their own salvations.” He may have died from mushroom poisoning according to the Mahayana tradition. Other traditions say contaminated pork. Old age is another variable. Both teachers influenced world religions with various denominations, sects, and cult derivatives. Centuries passed after their deaths before the teachings of either great man gained traction and definition on the historical stage.

Amy was literally a nobody. We had no record of her birth, her name, or family, and she hid it from us. She was the embodiment of a dedicated occultist. Her personal history was irrelevant to her. But we did have her books and a couple of black and white pictures when she was in her prime as a dance instructor at Arthur Murray studios in New York. Her boxes of books were telling.

Most of the books were by Theosophist Alice A. Bailey, but her favorites were the Agni Yoga books by Helena Roerich and Nicholas Roerich. And, of course, she had some books by Helena Blavatsky. Notably, throughout the pages and on originally empty back pages, Amy scrawled notes, hundreds in every book, in tiny, printed script. She was a serious student of occult literature, to be sure. A non-believer might say she was obsessed with it.

Camille immediately thought of me when Amy arrived. She introduced us. Amy was delighted that someone in our circle knew anything about Agni Yoga. I was the only one. AY was her main focus as an occultist. She kept a framed sketch reproduction of Nicholas Roerich at the foot of her bed, as if it were an icon or a shrine.

 “My goal is to join him,” she told me. Amy regarded both Roerichs as ascended masters.  

By the time I met Amy, Theosophy was behind me. Like most of his artist peers, I now saw Roerich as a “poseur,” a French term meaning a person who pretends to be something or someone they are not. As I referenced above, Roerich coyly hinted to his cult following with doting support from his wife, that he was chosen by the Mahatmas to be King of the World in the early 20th Century.[59] Geopolitical systems were being rearranged from behind the curtains of public awareness for the Roerichs by the Hierarchy or Great White Brotherhood of masters. The location of his throne would be in Shamballa hidden from access in the Altai Mountains. Amy believed all that. She was certain, even if there was some delay in the prophecy.

Amy made part of her living in New York as an astrologer. Out of curiosity, I brought one of my old horoscopes done by a professional in Santa Fe. When I say professional, I mean Alan Oken (1944-2022) who ran the Voice of the Turtle esoteric/New Age bookstore. Oken famously did horoscopes at the Woodstock music festival in 1969 early in his sibylline career. He lectured internationally on esoteric astrology in five languages including Indonesian. Oken was a devotee of Alice A. Bailey when I met him around 1978. Bailey’s tome Esoteric Astrology had a profound effect on Oken.

Amy glanced at my horoscope by Oken for perhaps five seconds, tossed it aside and said, “I do not need them anymore.” After casting and reading thousands of horoscopes, she apparently believed that her intuition transcended the need of charts or star maps. She “knew” or grokked my fortune by reading me, so to speak. I forget what she said about my destiny, but it had nothing to do with my cult education work that I had already begun.

We had a deep connection through Agni Yoga. Amy was delighted that I had met and exchanged letters with Sina Fosdick, the Agni Yoga director at the time. “Sina is the best,” Amy would repeat, indicating Sina’s spiritual grasp of AY. Our AY discussions were private, not for occult reasons, but for reasons of civility. No one in our small circle at the time knew what the hell we were discussing.

Most cults (like astrology and Agni Yoga) have a loaded language that only insiders, ex-members, and dispassionate scholars can understand.

Another time I took a picture of the master El Morya produced by the Summit Lighthouse sect for Amy to see. “That’s not him!” she shrieked. Amy was used to the less bug-eyed Morya image produced by the Theosophists in the late 19th Century.

By all accounts I would read by reliable scholars, Morya was an imaginary master concocted by Helena Blavatsky in the 1880s.

The other man in our circle, Richard, took on the role of daily helper for Amy, augmenting what hospice could provide. Richard would switch careers from struggling therapist to hospice work thereafter.

My last evening with Amy—I visited her two or three times a week—was hours before she died. I helped her sit up by raising the hospital bed back rest. She asked me to read to her from an Agni Yoga book. I read a paragraph and stopped when she said, “That’s enough.” She took a last look at Roerich’s picture, I kissed her forehead, lowered her down, tucked her in, and stayed a few minutes longer until she fell asleep.

The next day, the hospice nurse let us know that she found Amy dead by the time she arrived in the morning.

Four of us, Camille, Pamela, Richard and I took Amy’s ashes high into the Santa Fe National Forest. We buried her ashes under a pine tree. Agni Yoga taught that pine trees had a special spiritual essence. We took turns saying something and thanking Amy for her life.

Amy never caught on that I was a “poseur.” I did not so much pretend that I was losing affinity for Agni Yoga or Theosophy by then as much as I felt compelled to be kind to Amy in her last days. She knew I understood her. She had someone to share her most cherished beliefs. That was enough. I inherited all her esoteric books and notes. No one else wanted them.

A year later, I met a middle-aged woman in New York who had studied with Amy. She augmented some of the history about Amy’s reputation as an astrologer and her Agni Yoga connections. She knew Amy as “Amy Telgar,” with no more insight than I had about her family origins.

One legend I heard about Amy was that she was the reincarnation of flight pioneer Amelia Earhart who disappeared while flying in 1937. Amy was well beyond age 45 when she died (she told me she was 67), so I ruled out that possibility. Amy never repeated that claim. But I could not absolutely disprove it. That is all a believer needs to squirm into a “truth.”

We cannot disprove the existence of unicorns or leprechauns either. We can only disprove the evidence people provide of their existence.

Why would I bother telling you about nobody? For all you know, unless you tracked down the three others I mentioned in this story, I could misremember or make up the entire Amy story. However, I kept a couple of Amy’s annotated Alice Bailey books and her picture. I have evidence. Such is religion with moral tales that have value if not objective truth.

Amy died with no public legacy beyond what I indicated here, as far as I know. She had no money. Her personal belongings fit into several boxes, half of which were books. The county, I believe, paid for cremation and supplied a simple cardboard box for ashes, all biodegrading under a pine tree somewhere on a slope to Lake Peak.

Amy was one of dozens of people I met and knew who followed eccentric spiritual paths or cults to the end. The bitter end may be too much of a judgement coming from those in opposition to Amy’s occult belief system. Amy was not bitter. In her mind, she entered the beyond to be among the “Masters” including her master, Nicholas Roerich.

Religion is psychological.

Ernest Becker ended his landmark study Denial of Death with a personal note.[60] After all his research, his main takeaway was that death teaches us to at least leave a legacy, a testament living through others as another drop in the ocean of being, with the hope that our lives have benefitted others and the world.

Whether that benefit is purely imaginary and self-serving, as in sending thoughts and prayers, or tangibly effective, as in feeding the hungry and visiting the sick, is up to us and our ability to fathom reality. Some people are very poor at reality testing, something I learned while assessing patients in a psych hospital.

I began with Melville. To end with him is not going full circle. This essay is a severely limited, jagged, cubist commentary looking at a problem from facets, anecdotes, and insights as best as I could produce at this time, from my single vision.

It is not down to any map; true places never are.[61]

[1] You can read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010) or do a search through Wikipedia, but in brief, “The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. The term is based on a Latin expression which presumed that black swans did not exist.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

[2] “The Prophet Who Failed” by Emily Harnett (Harper’s, June, 2024) https://harpers.org/archive/2024/06/the-prophet-who-wasnt-after-the-apocalypse-that-failed-emily-harnett/ (retrieved May 20, 2025)

[3] See Chapter 22 in Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism by Robert J. Lifton (1961), especially the section on “Mystical Manipulation.”

[4] Cult Sister: My decade with one of the world’s most secretive sects by Lesley Smailes, 2017: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34624034-cult-sister

[5] See the work of W. R. Bion: Experiences in Groups and other papers by Bion, first published in 1961; Bion’s Legacy to Groups edited by Parthenope Bion Talamo, Franco Borgogno, and Silvio A. Merciai (1998)

[6] Esoteric Freemasonry & Adelaide: “Don’t be one eyed jack, SEEK anywhere and everywhere … SEE what you can find that may shed some further light on the mysteries of Freemasonry.” https://a406.proboards.com/thread/328/masonic-eyed-jacks

[7] New American Bible (1987 edition): Genesis 3: 19

[8] Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control by Kathleen Taylor (2017). See Part II: “The traitor in your skull,” pp 155-277

[9] “Elohim and Yahweh: The Gods of the Hebrew Bible,” an essay by Kurt Struckmeyer     in Following Jesus: A Life of Faith in a Postmodern World. https://followingjesus.org/how-yahweh-met-elohim-and-created-the-world/

[10] Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet by Mircea Eliade, 1968

[11] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, 1990, page 24.

[12] Meditations on the Tarot: A journey into Christian Hermeticism by Valentin Tomberg (Angelico Press, 1980)

[13] My YouTube video critiquing Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot: Tomberg's meditations using tarot cards

[14] Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults by Janja Lalich, 2004.

[15] The Influence Continuum. Freedom of Mind resource center: https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/influence-continuum/

[16] Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age by Sergio Luzzatto (2010) https://www.amazon.com/Padre-Pio-Miracles-Politics-Secular/dp/0805089055 “Granted unprecedented access to the Vatican archives, Luzzatto has also unearthed a letter from Padre Pio himself in which the monk asks for a secret delivery of carbolic acid—a discovery which helps explain why two successive popes regarded Padre Pio as a fraud, until pressure from Pio-worshipping pilgrims forced the Vatican to change its views.”

[17] The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaître, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology by John Farrell (2005) p. 191

[18] IBID, p. 193

[19] The Russian Cosmists: Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and his Followers by George M. Young (Oxford University Press, 2012)

[20] Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession (Second Edition) by I. M. Lewis (1989), p. 5

[21] Wedenoja, W. 1990. Ritual Trance and catharsis: a psychological and evolutionary perspective. In Jordan, D. K. & Schwartz, M. I. (eds) Personality and the Cultural Construction of Society, pp 275-307.

[22] Transcendental Deception by Aryeh Siegel (2018)

[23] The Summit Lighthouse: Teachings. https://summitlighthouse.org/science-of-the-spoken-word/

[24] The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams (2002). p 291

[25] NBC News, July 12, 2024: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/doj-rejects-qanon-shamans-request-get-jan-6-helmet-spear-back-rcna161664

[26] Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults by Janja Lalich, 2004

[27] “Once in a Lifetime” (Talking Heads song, 1980)

[28] The TalkOrigins Archive: Dawin’s quotes on Design.  https://talkorigins.org/faqs/ce/3/part10.html

[29] Answers in Genesis uses equivocation and the divine fallacy to augment every argument that the Ark account in the Biblical Genesis is “true.” https://answersingenesis.org/noahs-ark/is-noahs-ark-myth/?srsltid=AfmBOorhelpHUuwWXw0EbXRgRfK09UBPjAkogwkLeL9K_I9SLYnh6Pyq

[30] “Muktananda: Entrepreneurial Godman, Tantric Hero” by Andrea R. Jain, a chapter in Gurus of Modern Yoga

Edited by Mark Singleton and Ellen Goldberg (2013)

https://academic.oup.com/book/7461/chapter-abstract/152377536?redirectedFrom=fulltext

[31] See my YouTube video that reviews The Three-Body Problem, a science fiction series by Cixin Liu. The author offers a new diagnosis for social influence in the second book, The Dark Forest, calling it “social pressure personality disorder.” Three-Body Problem: social pressure personality disorder

[32] Nicholas Roerich: The Artist Who Would Be King by John McCannon (2022)

[33] Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the heart of Asia by Andrei Znamenski (2011), p 126

[34] The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers by George M. Young (2012)

[35] The Week, “The billionaire-led quest for immortality What if Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel could live forever?” by Brigid Kennedy (September 20, 2023) retrieved June 15, 2025.

https://theweek.com/science/the-billionaire-led-quest-for-immortality

[36] IBID

[37] [37] Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the heart of Asia by Andrei Znamenski (2011), p 235

[38] Justia: US Supreme Court: Ballard vs US, 1946: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/329/187/

[39] Anson D. Shupe, Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anson_D._Shupe (retrieved June 16, 2025)

[40] “Everyday Philosophy” by Jonny Thomson (August 23, 2024) https://bigthink.com/thinking/everyday-philosophy-is-it-better-to-debate-people-or-shrug-and-drink-wine/ (retrieved June 16, 2025)

[41] IBID

[42] “Recovery-from Addictions Model Applied to Cult Intervention” by Joseph Szimhart in ICSA Today magazine: Vol. 1, No. 1, 2010)  https://articles1.icsahome.com/articles/a-recovery-from-addictions-model-szimhart-it-1-1 (retrieved June 16, 2025)

[43] Argument from Incredulity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity (retrieved Jun 17, 2025)

[44] Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman (1978; 1995)

[45] “Driven to Believe: We Are Designed for Self-Deception” by Massimo Polidoro, Skeptical Inquirer (Vol. 49, No 4, July/August 2025)

[46] IBID

[47] “HADD Had Its Day: There is no evidence for a hyperactive agency detective devise” by Kat Ford (The Skeptic: Reason with compassion, Nov. 13, 2024) https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2024/11/hadd-its-day-theres-no-evidence-for-an-inherited-hyperactive-agency-detection-device/ (retrieved June 21, 2025)

[48] The Ochre Robe by Agehananda Bharati (1980) p 78

[49] IBID, p 79

[50] IBID

[51] How To Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age by Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn (9th Edition, 2024)

[52] Aliens Among Us by Ruth Montgomery (1985). See Chapter IX: “Frederick’s Arcturian Friends.”

[53] Borrowed from Goodreads: Soren Kierkegaard: quotes. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10353977-if-hegel-had-written-the-whole-of-his-logic-and  (retrieved June 20, 2025)

[54] Retrieved from a Google AI response on June 21, 2025.

[55] Freedom of Mind by Steve Hassan, Ph. D.: https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/influence-continuum/

[56] Wikipedia: “Cult (religious practice)”

[57] Gurus of Modern Yoga edited by Mark Singleton and Ellen Goldberg (Oxford, 2014). Chapter 2: “Remembering Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: The Forgotten Lineage of Integral Yoga” by Ann Gleig and Charles I. Flores, p 54.

[58] IBID

[59]  Nicholas Roerich: The artist who would be king by John McCannon (2022)

[60] The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker (1973) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death

[61] Brainy Quote: Herman Melville quotes. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/herman_melville_108137 (accessed June 24, 2025)