My Life in a Cult

[Jack]

I'd like to have a discussion about the nature of cults.
I was raised in one, and have put a lot of work into learning about how that experience distorted my expectations of life.

My mind can readily identify the illogical nature of the cult thought. However, my emotions can sometimes return to the conditioned responses of cult-like thinking if I'm not alert. This is particularly a risk when I am physically run down.

I won't mention the brand name of the cult or the name of the leader right away, as I believe the pattern of manipulation is more important than the particular twists.

The cult's dogma included these precepts:

In the entire history of humanity, the most important person is the cult leader.
The reason the cult leader is important is because the leader is the only person who ever experienced the ultimate divine revelation.
Jesus had something of a clue, but wasn't very good at explaining it. Therefore, it doesn't particularly matter whether he actually lived or was just a metaphor. However, despite the cult leader being kicked out of mainstream Christian churches, the cult is the only true Christianity and the only true religion.

There are some sources of information that are utterly worthless in your life. These worthless, misleading sources of error include: your own experiences; your own thoughts; your own feelings; your own study of the Bible or of any other religious texts; your attempts to find answers in any source other than the cult leader; your own intuition; your own efforts to pray or do anything else spiritual, other than how the cult teaches devotion to the leader.
If any of these sources of ideas contradict the cult leader, those other sources are wrong and must be discarded, because the cult leader is always perfectly right.
The cult leader is welcome to use reason to point out logical flaws, non-sequitors, or contradictions in what others say. The cult leader may also point out claims by others that are not backed by evidence, or are proven to be deceptive, forgeries, plagiarism, or misrepresentations. Nobody else is allowed to use such techniques to reduce the devotion of all to the cult leader.

Personally, I have since come to believe that this cult leader was a psychopath. Biographers found that throughout the leader's life, every possible opportunity was taken to seize devotion, power, respect, wealth and respect - all totally unearned - in every way, moment to moment, with apparently no thought about consequences or being found out.

My tentative conclusion is that cult leaders differ from other psychopaths in only one way: The cult leader claims that their ultimate rightness came from God; other psychopaths either claim a lesser authority, or don't bother trying to make even that level of flimsy justification.

I'm particularly interested in comparing my findings with others who were raised against their will in cult environments.

 

[Mountain Crown]

Hi Jack,

Much of your post's description of the cult leader can easily be applied to the pope, the head of the largest cult in the world.

The main tool for manipulation for these organizations is the insistence on unquestionable belief. This short circuits the capacity for critical thinking which is essential for an objective understanding of reality - the existence of human predators, e.g.

 

[mada85]

There are some sources of information that are utterly worthless in your life. These worthless, misleading sources of error include: your own experiences; your own thoughts; your own feelings;

It's also interesting to see that these tactics are almost identical to the way in which narcissistic families operate.

 

[Jack]

It's also interesting to see that these tactics are almost identical to the way in which narcissistic families operate.

You got a bit ahead of me. One of the places I was intending to go with this thread was to discuss abusive relationships as a type of one-person cult.

...the insistence on unquestionable belief. This short circuits the capacity for critical thinking...

I believe that's the core of the issue, and I'll want to discuss that further too.

 

[Gimpy]

My tentative conclusion is that cult leaders differ from other psychopaths in only one way: The cult leader claims that their ultimate rightness came from God; other psychopaths either claim a lesser authority, or don't bother trying to make even that level of flimsy justification.

I'd encourage you to check out the Ponerology section of the site, to find out more about the ins and outs of psychopaths and other characteropaths. From observation and experience, psychopaths use whatever technique works best to get what they desire, with the least amount of personal effort. Try searching 'spellbinders' too.

The recommended reading section has some awesome resources where you may find valuable information too. ;) Searching the threads here in this section can also bring you up to speed on what's been discussed about this subject before.


Welcome aboard! And happy reading. :)

 

[Jack]

Like every psychopath, the cult leader has a redefinition of "good" and "evil" and tried to enforce the leader's crazy definitions on the rest of humanity.

The psychopath's internal definition for "good" is: whatever enriches the psychopath with more wealth and power right now, whatever it costs anyone else or even themselves in the future.

The psychopath's definition for "evil" is: whatever might lead to the psychopath being held accountable for any of the consequences of their actions, or accountable for what happens to people who believe the psychopath's lies.

And a a cult is any group of people who've been sucked into replacing accurate labels with the psychopath's self-serving redefinitions. When one is sucked into these definitions, that shuts down critical thinking about the cult's claims, as MC pointed out.

(I see this on a smaller scale with political rant radio. Whatever promotes Our Party is good, whatever undermines Our Party's authority is bad. But Rush is a pale shadow of Machiavelli's devotion to power through dishonesty.)

The cult my parents were in had its own mythology, of course. The grand myth included the premise that the cult leader had an utterly unique and divine revelation. This was utter fabrication, and thoroughly debunked by the time my parents got involved. The fabrication had long since been exposed.

The New York Times ran an expose about how the leader's main book was largely plagiarized from the cult leader's late mentor. The mentor didn't claim to have a unique revelation. The leader's career began with acknowledgment that the mentor had been the source of some of the leader's key ideas. As the cult began to take off, any mention of the leader disappeared down the memory hole. The NYT story ran side by side paragraphs from the mentor's unpublished last manuscript and the leader's allegedly uniquely inspired book, showing the extent of the plagiarism. Some of the cult's ideas were taken from other religions, also unacknowledged. In addition, the uncredited editor of the leader's book produced evidence of having taken the leader's tangled, nonsensical manuscript and put it into a semblance of order, further denying the claim of perfectly inspired origin.

The only unique part of the cult was the claim that the leader was perfectly inspired. (I guess that was swiped from Catholicism, as MC pointed out.) The rest of the material was a jumbled hodgepodge of misrepresented, overstated, out of context, uncredited use of the leader's "swipe file." (In advertising, a swipe file is a collection of successful advertisements run by other companies that can be used as inspiration for future sales writing projects.) The swiped material had enough nuggets of truth to be appealing, but they were wrapped in appallingly destructive lies. I like to think of it as a bleach sundae with a cherry on top. The initial bite may be soothing, but after that it really hurts going down.

Decades later I am still baffled and bothered about why two very smart and literate people, a teacher and an engineer, would have fallen for all of this. Not only the NYT but also two of my parents' favorite authors wrote shattering exposes about the cult and its leader. Those books were not present in my parents' abundant reading lists!

When it came to many other interests in life, my parents did their homework. For example, Mom usually got a book or two about gardening and cooking each time she visited the public library, and Dad got how-to books for his carpentry hobby. They would pick and choose what they liked, and set aside the ideas that did not apply to what they wanted to accomplish or explore. Yet when it came to the most important questions about life, somehow they forgot all about their ability to get more than one source of information in order to figure out for themselves what would work in their lives.

I hope that by exploring these ideas here, I'll attempt to work towards an understanding of what makes such smart people fall for such stupid lies, to the great detriment of themselves and their family.

Try searching 'spellbinders' too.

I'll do that, Gimpy. I've read most of the recommended reading and other topics here about the theme, but that keyword is a new one for me.

Jack

 

[Laura]

This whole issue is really a touchy one here because of the years of defamation we have endured being accused of being a "cult" with myself as the whacko guru, Svengali, whatever.

Nevertheless, having said that, and giving you (Jadk) fair warning that you might be pushing on some real tender spots, let me say a few things.

What I see as the problem is the glorification of any single individual as "godlike" rather than focusing on an idea or IDEAL as the object of cultic value.

At the same time, we have to consider that there are some - probably very few - human beings whose accomplishments or work make them worthy of being held in high esteem. But there's a difference between high esteem and believing that someone is going to save you. No one can save anyone, they can only teach, show a way, set an example, and perhaps support others with advice, material support, emotional support, etc.

If you haven't done so, you might want to read Schumaker's book "The Corruption of Reality." He points out that human beings seem to come hardwired with a need to dissociate. I think that this is actually a need to make contact with the higher self. Nevertheless, this "hard wiring" is present in all brains whether that individual could be considered potentially souled or not. In the OP (taking that as an hypothesis), the brain's ability to dissociate can simply be a normal way of coping, or can result in DID, or other mental disorders. In the potentially souled individual, the brain's capacity to dissociate could be utilized as it may have originally been intended: a means of shutting down the physical and connecting with the spiritual.

In any event, it seems clear from the evidence that Schumaker presents, that it is a hard-wired function that is just waiting to be taken advantage of by any snake-oil salesman that comes along.

It is also abundantly evident that those who do not utilize this ability of the brain - those who suppress it - suffer from other disorders.

There is an epidemic in the world today that doesn't get near enough attention - the epidemic of stress. According to the latest statistics, human beings are 100 times more likely to have significant emotional/mental problems than people born a hundred years ago. Adult rates of depression and anxiwety have tripled just since 1990!!! Over 80 % of people who go to a doctor with physical problems also complain of excessive stress. These problems are increasing so fast that, within the next ten years or so, the primary causes of early death and disability will be stress, outranking most diseases, accidents and violence.

So. something serious is going on and it is REALLY bad.

From my point of view, people seek out religion (cults) to try to get relief. The unfortunate thing is that there are any number of whacko snake-oil types out there who are waiting to snag these people - most of whom are also abysmally ignorant.

For instance, have you seen the movie Marjoe Gortner made about his life? How about the movie "The Apostle" about a fundie preacher? How about "Leap of Faith"?

Well, if you grew up in one of these sorts of outfits, I'm just preaching to the choir. I just want to mention them to point out that there is a lot of material available that shows exactly how these things work.

But we keep coming back to that little problem that people need to know how to 1) deal with their stress in a healthy way, i.e. using dissociative techniques positively; 2) use dissociative techniques to fuse the many aspects of the conscious mind while, at the same time, making direct contact with the higher self. Those true and workable techniques (which work because of the hard-wiring of the brain) have been taken and utilized by the snake-oilers to line their own pockets, to inculcate into people ideas and beliefs that are patently false and have no relationship to reality. They have been used to turn large groups of people against other large groups of people for the personal agendas of the snake-oil types and their cronies (the marriage between religion and politics is ANCIENT), to foment wars, pogroms, persecutions, and so on.

It has always worked because that is the way the human brain is hard-wired.

And it is hard-wired because that it the way humans evolved.

And they evolved that way because, clearly, for a very long period of time in our evolutionary history, it was advantageous to us to have this ability which has now been used against us by pathological types.

So, in the end, the problem is not so much the issue of "cult" or "religion" per se, but WHO or WHAT is creating it, promulgating it, and for what reason.

Let me give you a little feedback about the list of items you have already provided as "proof of cultism":

In the entire history of humanity, the most important person is the cult leader.

Well, that's an obvious giveaway. The facts seem to show that there have been many individuals throughout history who are worthy of looking up to as a role model and general good example. Also, since history isn't finished, that's a pretty arrogant thing for anyone to claim. It's like Truth... we can never know THE Truth because the Universe is infinite and THE Truth would, necessarily, include all knowledge of all worlds, states and levels of being, all history, all future, all present, and so on.

The reason the cult leader is important is because the leader is the only person who ever experienced the ultimate divine revelation.

Oh boy! Another dead giveaway. I'm not sure that there is something called "Divine Revelation" though there is certainly something to be said for achieving higher levels of consciousness and conscience. And such individuals who have done so could be examples and role models and helpers. In short, they should be ready to wash other people's feet.

Jesus had something of a clue, but wasn't very good at explaining it. Therefore, it doesn't particularly matter whether he actually lived or was just a metaphor.

I suspect that the individual around whom the "Jesus myth" was accreted (or deliberately created), had more than a clue and probably explained it very well which was why his teachings and followers had to be co-opted, twisted, and distorted as much as possible.

However, despite the cult leader being kicked out of mainstream Christian churches, the cult is the only true Christianity and the only true religion.

It may very well be that there is only one True Christianity and only one True Religion. but that doesn't mean that anybody really knows what it is. We think we are getting close to it by means of both inspiration followed by hard research and experimentation, but it's still only an approximation. Now, we see through a glass darkly... a work in progress.

There are some sources of information that are utterly worthless in your life.

I don't think that's entirely true, though there are some sources of information that can be given higher value or lesser value based on careful assessment and networking with others.

These worthless, misleading sources of error include: your own experiences; your own thoughts; your own feelings; your own study of the Bible or of any other religious texts; your attempts to find answers in any source other than the cult leader; your own intuition; your own efforts to pray or do anything else spiritual, other than how the cult teaches devotion to the leader.

Oh, boy! I reckon we are all damned here, then. While we do think that experiences, thoughts and feelings need to be calibrated like any reading instrument, that can only be done by study and research and certainly, you can start by a deep study of the Bible as I did myself.

If any of these sources of ideas contradict the cult leader, those other sources are wrong and must be discarded, because the cult leader is always perfectly right.

I'm assuming that this cult leader never admitted to being wrong or a normal human?

The cult leader is welcome to use reason to point out logical flaws, non-sequitors, or contradictions in what others say. The cult leader may also point out claims by others that are not backed by evidence, or are proven to be deceptive, forgeries, plagiarism, or misrepresentations. Nobody else is allowed to use such techniques to reduce the devotion of all to the cult leader.

It sure sounds like a Fascist religion to me.

That's why we like the idea of a Fellowship instead of a "church" though we do still like the word "religion" because it means "to bring back together":

re= back + ligare = bind togeher I.E. bas: *leg = to collect.

Here we are a Fellowship and, as the Cs have said, even if there are different roles for each individual, no one is more important than another.

Q: (L) You say that you are unified thought forms in the
realm of knowledge.

A: Yes.

Q: (L) Al-Arabi describes unified thought forms as being the
'names of God.' His explication seems to be so identical
to things you tell us that I wonder...

A: We are all the names of God. Remember, this is a conduit.
This means that both termination/origination points are of
equal value, importance.


A: Does this mean that we are a part of this?

A: Yes.

Q: (L) So, it has to do with...

A: Don't deify us. And, be sure all others with which you
communicate understand this too!

Q: (L) What quality in us, what thing, enabled us to make
contact. Because, obviously a lot of people try and get
garbage.

A: You asked.

Q: (L) A lot of people ask!

A: No they don't, they command.

Q: (L) Well, a lot of people do ask or beg or plead, but they
get all discombobulated with the answers.

A: No, they command. Think about it. You did not beg or
plead... that is commanding.

and

Remember, you learn on an exponential
curve, once you have become "tuned in." This means that
you become increasingly able to access the universal
consciousness. Please learn to trust your increasing
awareness. All who are present here are at one point or
another on that cycle, or one point or another on that
cycle of progression, some further along than others. If
you properly network without prejudice, you may all wind
up at the same point on this cycle.

And finally:

Life is religion. Life experiences reflect how one interacts with God. Those who are asleep are those of little faith in terms of their interaction with the creation. Some people think that the world exists for them to overcome or ignore or shut out. For those individuals, the worlds will cease. They will become exactly what they give to life. They will become merely a dream in the "past." People who pay strict attention to objective reality right and left, become the reality of the "Future."

Welcome to the forum Jack... even if it is not your real name, it has special meaning for me because my father's name was Jack.

 

[Laura]

<snipped>
Decades later I am still baffled and bothered about why two very smart and literate people, a teacher and an engineer, would have fallen for all of this. Not only the NYT but also two of my parents' favorite authors wrote shattering exposes about the cult and its leader. Those books were not present in my parents' abundant reading lists!

When it came to many other interests in life, my parents did their homework. For example, Mom usually got a book or two about gardening and cooking each time she visited the public library, and Dad got how-to books for his carpentry hobby. They would pick and choose what they liked, and set aside the ideas that did not apply to what they wanted to accomplish or explore. Yet when it came to the most important questions about life, somehow they forgot all about their ability to get more than one source of information in order to figure out for themselves what would work in their lives.

I hope that by exploring these ideas here, I'll attempt to work towards an understanding of what makes such smart people fall for such stupid lies, to the great detriment of themselves and their family.

Wow. It sounds to me like you have been really wounded by all of this! I know it is no longer available and I've been meaning to put it on the website, but haven't had time, but did you read my own account of growing up in a religious household and how I got out of Christian Fundamentalism?: "Amazing Grace"

For me, the problem wasn't the family I grew up in, but the fundie I married. A seemingly rational, reasonable, intelligent man, but when it came to discussing my issues about the church and religion - things that were obvious to me - there was NO getting through to him. His mind was made up, don't confuse him with the facts. And it was so bad that, despite the fact that we had been married many years, had five children that he claimed to love very much, when push came to shove and I could see this religious nonsense was hurting the kids, he loved his religion more than me and the children. Divorce was the only answer.

Talk about hitting a brick wall and being devastated! So, I know a little bit about where you are coming from!

 

[Jack]

Thanks for your comments, Laura.

giving you fair warning that you might be pushing on some real tender spots

Is there concern about what I have already written so far? If there's material I've put here that's inappropriate for this forum, I'll remove it. If there's material that is unclear, I'll do my best to clarify what I meant. I'll do that promptly, within a day of being notified.

Or is the concern about where I might go in the future, based on experiences with others?

I had seen the concerns from those who suggested the entire Cassiopaean exploration is a cult. I haven't yet written about that, so I'll now be clear where I stand: your work is not a cult; instead, it helps people better understand cults and escape them. It took me some time to think through those concerns, and to reach peace of mind about my own participation here. One of my goals with my series of posts was to ultimately contrast what I've seen of your work with the way that cults work. I believe that explaining the thought process I went through to distinguish cult-like thinking from what you're doing, which is not at all cult-like, may prove to be helpful to others.

This is important enough that I'll make my other comments separately. I can see how, given the history of what you've been through, there was reasonable concern about whether I was entering the forum to undermine it. I apologize for not making my intentions more clear up front. My goal is to support what you're doing, not to attack or threaten it in any way.

I have read quite a bit of the biographical and autobiographical material about you. Your openness to discussing your past problems, and your negative experiences with fundamentalism, were factors that helped me to gain trust that what you're offering here is not a cult. I'm glad that you responded quickly so I was able to clear up the misunderstanding quickly, and I apologize for starting in a way that set up that ambiguity.

Now on to my comments about the other things you mentioned.

 

[Jack]

I'm not familiar with Schumaker's work. That looks interesting to me. I had originally intended to get there through a series of essays, but I'll share my working conclusions here. I believe:

The human capacity to dissociate from extreme pain is the key leverage point for addictions. Addictions are attempts to remove the pain from awareness without resolving the underlying cause. Giving up one's better judgment to a narcissist or psychopath is always a type of addictive behavior, an anesthetic dissociation that temporarily stops the pain of the bully's attack, but at the cost of self-destructive behavior and thinking.

Pain is an attempt to notify consciousness that corrective action needs to be taken. Pain continues until it reaches consciousness. The resolution is to learn how to be compassionate witnesses to our own pain, through loving personal relationships (e.g. as Gay Hendricks describes in "Conscious Loving"), and/or through kind professional therapeutic relationships (e.g. as Carl Rogers, Viktor Frankl, Art Janov, and Aaron Beck have each described in their own way).

Ultimately, the compassionate witness is created internally through development of the Observer function that Gurdjieff described. Those who were raised in healthy, loving families, or with other positive role models of emotional maturity (which is pretty rare), can model their inner Observer on the people who observed their life with caring compassion. The rest of us need to first develop the model intellectually, then start to embody it. All abusive relationships and self-destructive behaviors, I believe, are the result of attempts to kill the pain rather than witness it with the apparent contradiction of compassionate and dispassionate observation; the balance of compassion and wisdom.

When we develop the Observer we can flow with the Tao, our own thoughts, feelings, and impressions merely being yet more changing circumstances that swirl around but don't change or break the spiritual core of who we are. Once one can Observe, one can subsequently act as one who is fully here now and able to make a moral choice. These are lofty ideas, not nearly the nature of my life now as much as I'd like. My experiences touch the edges of these concepts. I hope to increasingly live in their centers.

I might be wrong about some or all of this, but based on a lifetime of searching, this is the best I've been able to come up with so far.

My original plan had been to work through my cult experiences and build to my conclusions step by step, seeing along the way if other forum members could help me spot things I had missed or inaccurate thought processes that I should recheck. If I'm not treading on thin ice, I'd like to resume that plan with my posts here.

The movies you mentioned are new to me.

I'm assuming that this cult leader never admitted to being wrong or a normal human?

Yes, your comments show you clearly see the pattern of tactics. I think that my remaining comments about the cult won't surprise you at all.

It sounds to me like you have been really wounded by all of this!

Very much, and not just figuratively; there are major health problems traceable to the cult experiences, and I'll get to those as my story unfolds. While I am in cognitive therapy and have some people with whom I discuss some aspects of the situation, I don't have a network of people dedicated to learning how to help each other overcome subjective thinking. My goal here is to seek the insights of others for my own growth and healing and perhaps, in the process, also be of service to the growth of others.

 

[Marcus-Aurelius]

Much of your post's description of the cult leader can easily be applied to the pope, the head of the largest cult in the world.

Think it can even be applied to Yahweh with his "I am the only God, if you trust in me, I'll be nice with you, if not, will throw you in hell" claim and others. One wonder if he really was the only God, why he needed to say it, it should have been so obvious that there would have been no need to. The very fact of him saying this was an attempt to hide something.

When it came to many other interests in life, my parents did their homework. For example, Mom usually got a book or two about gardening and cooking each time she visited the public library, and Dad got how-to books for his carpentry hobby. They would pick and choose what they liked, and set aside the ideas that did not apply to what they wanted to accomplish or explore. Yet when it came to the most important questions about life, somehow they forgot all about their ability to get more than one source of information in order to figure out for themselves what would work in their lives.

I think the conversation between P.D. Ouspenski and A.L. Volinsky, and PDO conclusion on same, as described in ISOTM, can shed some light on this. I live in a society
where this way of thinking is everywhere, not only in religion: people just do not want to see reality, no matter how you point it out to them. I came to the conclusion that not only one needs to reach a certain minimum level of understanding to become free of lies, a minimum level of "being" is also required. This is what I suspect, but am not certain of it yet.

 

[Erna]

Decades later I am still baffled and bothered about why two very smart and literate people, a teacher and an engineer, would have fallen for all of this.

Due to a personal experience, this is something that has also worked my mind for some time.

In the early 2000s, when the Flash internet animation software started becoming big news, I bought a Flash book at a local bookstore from an American author. It was a thick and difficult book to work through, but because this author had such a natural teaching talent it was actually quite enjoyable. When I finished the book I mailed him to say thanks and when he replied to my mail, I was quite surprised because he was such a well known author. We then started corresponding on and off, usually when I ran into some programming difficulty, and then I would attach my Flash files and he would fix my code for me.

Then, in mid 2007 (I think), when Israel attacked Palestine (again), we started talking about that, and it wasn't too long before the topic shifted to religion and he admitted to me that he had been a Jehovah's witness for 30+ years already. I almost fell off my chair. At that point, I didn't know anything about them, and started reading up.

A long correspondence ensued, which eventually ended up in a bit of a train smash. I handled the whole thing like my ass, not respecting his free will (if you can even call it that) at all. At one point I said can't we just go back and talk about Flash again. The stuff I was reading about the Jehovah's witnesses and the hold they have on their members is astonishing, of which the most effective is the dissociation / shunning practice. God knows how many families they have wrecked, because a parent must break off all contact with their own child if the child walks away from the cult, same with husband/wife, parents, best friend whatever. There's no honourable way to leave the witnesses, or any other cult I would imagine.

I just read so many testimonies online of people who had been shunned by their loved ones and was totally broken. It's very common for cult members to suffer from cognitive dissonance, in fact, cognitive dissonance is hardly limited to cult members, due to the lovely world we live in. At that time I listened to a podcast from another guy (Ryan Sutter) who left the witnesses and lost everyone he held dear in the process, which gave me a lot of insight. He also wrote an article about it. Back to the Flash guru, what has always stayed on my mind was how such a funny, intelligent, accomplished guy can have such mental clarity in all matters, and completely shut closed when someone challenges the cult's beliefs. I still have such respect for him to this day, it's just mind boggling to me.

It shows you the power of sacred cows, although that's only a tiny fraction of the problem... It's not stupid peope that get caught up in these cults.

 

[Jack]

Think it can even be applied to Yahweh...

Marcus, I've seen several articles along this theme that are consistent with the themes of this site. However, I don't remember if they were here or elsewhere.

Your comment about a threshold of maturity being a prerequisite to seek the truth is an idea that interests me. Thanks for bringing that up.

I suspect both of those topics already have really good discussion threads here.

E, your experience is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.

One reason is that I'm interested in learning Flash some day. I have an extensive background in software engineering and audiovisual technology, but have only had the most cursory exposure to Flash authoring.

The JW connection is also interesting because for a few months, I stayed in the spare bedroom of a JW couple. They were some of the nicest people I've ever met, and were quite eager to share their religion with me. I had read about the JW movement before and have read more about it since. But when I saw and heard such nice and usually clear-thinking people have such devotion to ideas that didn't make any sense, that was somewhat of a turning point in my pondering about the nature of cults.

 

[Jack]

Continuing with my own story, I already referred to the major price of the cult my parents were involved with: complete abdication of one's own thought, will, emotions, experience, intuition, judgment, friendships or anything else that might decrease devotion to the cult leader.

Why would someone pay such a high price? With this particular cult, the reason is simple. The promise, clearly stated a hundred different ways, is that with enough devotion, all your problems would instantly disappear. If you had a health problem, a money problem, a work problem, anything that troubled or confused you, all of that would simply vanish in an instant - the instant that you were devoted enough. The one thing the cult couldn't fix is that there would still be some mean people in the world, because they hadn't yet chosen to be devoted enough, but you'd be free of any problems having to do with them.

And there were no other requirements of any kind. No need to be nice, to be kind, to be caring, to love one's neighbor, to be a good citizen, nothing at all... except to be devoted in mind, and contribute your money to the cult.

Devotion, by the way, was defined as intellectual agreement with the proclamations of the cult.

This led me to the questions: why were my parents willing to risk the integrity of their inner lives for such a promise? And why did they stay with it for more than a decade of failure to meet the promise?

These are the areas I'll explore next. But I wonder, is both the carrot and stick necessary for a cult? Are there some cults where there is no promise at all of anything positive for compliance, just the demand that everything is given up of one's own mind?

 

[Mountain Crown]

Jack,

Are you aware of how much this forum has discussed the topic of cults? With all due respect, maybe my reading skills are a little off today, but there's a feeling of being led here. If you feel something important hasn't been covered yet why not deal with it more directly?