In honor of all those who have died and their deep suffering

109. Elena - April 5, 2010 [Edit]

18. nige –
Hi Elena, again…..
I had a chance to view the few pages that are on your Public Square site. I feel you are as determined as ever to speak out against the FOF and cults in general. That being so , I think I must be supportive of all efforts here to expose the FOF and REB to close scrutiny, since I was one of those who survived the psychological and financial pressures of the cult (the scars of hell or “mestatized at the fingertips” as one student poetically wrote about my suicidal injuries remind me that there was a reason I survived).
I cannot be sure whether REB is inwardly quaking in his boots and putting on a brave face or whether he is just so pathologically far gone that nothing bothers him. Either way, we must keep probing away at his bubble…..Nigel.

Hi Nigel and All,

I am glad to hear you still have some enthusiasm. I am definitely not more determined to speak out against the Fellowship of Friends Cult than I am about speaking against myself or anyone else in this wide world. The problems at hand will not be solved by pointing at anyone but by exploring what in everyone tends to lead to crime and by crime I understand people who systematically act against their own self or that of others. Cults are just one amongst many of such groups. Perhaps the most tragic aspect about them is the willingness with which people walk to their own destruction convinced that they are going to heaven. When I look at similar phenomenon happening the world over in places as disparate as Sweden, Japan and Colombia, the urgency to understand what is actually happening simply triples itself.

I’ve been indulging in intense research on suicide and sexuality, religion and power but it feels like I have barely scratched the road that is to be tred. It is truly very exiting! One of the authors I’ve been digging deeply on is Michel Foucault and great as he is looking at each particular phenomenon and revealing worlds within worlds as he goes by, I’ve had the feeling that he is also simply scratching on the problem and that while he is a master at understanding some aspects of the problems, he doesn’t grasp the whole picture. Who could? Maybe no one is meant to grasp the whole picture and we’re all justly destined to reflect the piece that didn’t get lost in our own mirror. He and other equally great authors such as Jurgen Habermas seem to be looking at sides of the elephant and not the whole elephant as I believe a System tries to encompass and yet if we look at, for example the Fourth Way System as presented by Gurdjieff, it is so weak in the area of society that it lent itself to Robert’s separation from “life” and make of that weakness a tool for the development of the cult. I believe Rodney Collin tried to balance that but drastically bounced off religion when he thought that people in essence could take on the responsibility of consciously caring for others. They do it naturally as far as they can in their own sphere.

The more I look, the more it seems to me that Robert and the gurus of cults are as much the victims as the members. The fact that they commit suicide together at the end of the play in the classic “cult”, does not reveal a man who fooled the rest and got away with it but a man that is as deeply enmeshed in the problem as everyone else in the play. Robert to me is not self-destructing any less than the rest of the members. He is a man incapable of love and that already reveals someone who is pretty destroyed. Like Jim Jones, who boasted that he could have sex 15 times a day, the chaos and manipulation of his sexuality simply reveals the lack of focus of his own emotional sphere. It is very superficial to think that one man alone can make a thousand people poison themselves to death and the wonder of realizing that is the beginning of understanding that not only do people influence each other but that life itself is an objective reality that has the capacity to lead people to their destruction or their realization; that the “WAY WE LIVE” with each other, the way we interact and the things we do, has a dialectic power to recreate the “social” through culture and the individual through his personal participation in that culture: his “Work”.

The question then is: Why does life in cults lead to destruction? One possible answer is that people do not work from their self, that is, their own I is not active in the work they perform. Having given up their will to the guru they become automatons without soul and shun “culture” or creativity, which needs the inspiration that comes from the sphere of the I. They continue to “function” but without “life”. In that sacrifice of their “self” and surrender to the guru’s will, they, consequent to the premise, self-destroy. The actual ritual of “dying” is the culminating realization of what they had lived for: self-sacrifice. The tragic lesson that comes from such cults is not that the human being is a destructive entity willing to self destroy but that the human being is an entity willing to sacrifice itself for its ideals and that in the childlike immaturity of our being today, we give ourselves up naively to people as immature as our selves and who self-destroy together with us. That we all have to take responsibility for the problems because not one of us is able or capable to do so no matter how much power we give him or how willingly he takes the job.

The next question could be: Why are we living through a period of equally decadent culture in the world today? Another possible aspect of the answer is that like in cults, the majority of people work not because they are creatively inspired to do so but because they are tied to the economic profit and not the human gain, whether they are in the lower or upper classes. The production of millions of things that are not only not necessary but harmful to the world at large, using and abusing not only the material but human resources, creates, like in cults, a mechanism that tends to self-destruction. People in cults are trying to compensate what people in life are unable to offer: their capacity to sacrifice their own greed for the well being of the whole.

The election of Mr. Obama in the United States as much as the new direction in politics as presented by Sarkozy in his visit to the US, seems to carry an awareness of the problem that such “market” driven world was leading to, so I am much more optimistic about the future than I was when I was “pulled out” of the Fellowship cult by this blog. That alone makes it a worth while reason to keep supporting this blog in the hope that others inside will hold on to it to take a step outside. We are here to help you be less afraid of such a step. It is so beautiful to feel the expansion of one’s own self over the whole of the wide world without the constraints of a destructive little cult that I wholeheartedly invite each member inside to try it out for yourselves. This “life” is your life! You do not need to sacrifice your selves to show the world how willing you are to help it. Enough people have already done that in other cults. You will help yourselves and others more, not by self-destroying but by self-constructing through patient and gradual participation in the world at large. We are One! And it is a beautiful world!

Reply

110. Elena - April 5, 2010 [Edit]

Today a huge step has been taken in the understanding of the cult phenomenon and it is in realizing the deepness of the human tragedy that involves them. I do not know if other authors have seen this side of the picture but I haven’t seen it elsewhere and it is a beautiful side that merits the deepest look. I am talking about the self-sacrifice capacity of cult members that has immediately connected me to each and every soul that has committed suicide under cult conditions. They need to be heard. These were not just lunatics that killed themselves because the guru said so, they were human beings that deeply believed in what they were doing and they were sincerely protesting and renouncing to the alternatives that the world of today offered them. Mass suicide is all the more tragic than individual suicide and like in the individual, what these people are telling us is that the world left them no other alternative and that they are its willing victims.

With so many mass suicides and homicides today, we will inevitably come to understand the differences between individuals that kill others and those who kill themselves. Both are equally hurt by the world they live in but while one opts to escape it without hurting others, the other resolves it by trying to destroy those who hurt him. They are both telling us there is something substantially unbearable about their life conditions. The fact that they are so young, confirms that they are victims. These are not the mature suicide the hara-kiri demanded or Hitler escaped with, these are effects of social realities and not personal failures.

13 year old Megan Meier who committed suicide in her closet is no different to the 914 members of Jonestown that committed suicide with cyanide kool-aid one sunny morning. They were all, like the 100 suicides daily in Japan and that many more in Russia and other parts of the world, telling us that they can’t bear it. That they don’t have the inner resources to process and transform within themselves what they’ve received: That they needed help and couldn’t find it and weren’t strong enough to look too hard.

There is something pathetically tragic about cults and it is that they are like those poor girls whose mummy never allows them to go out and makes them obey everything she says until after they are forty and then dies leaving an orphan who never married or knew how to do anything but obey and struggles the rest of her life trying to live a life without having the life to live it. Cult members likewise, seem to be people that were willing to do everything they were asked to avoid the conflict that confronting the world implied and sacrifice themselves convinced that they are doing it for the well being of mankind. Their tragedy needs to be heard. They are screaming from beyond begging us to hear them and render them justice but more than that, desperately hoping that we do not follow their steps. I honor each and every one of these deaths. That is, I am present to their suffering and willingly embrace them with compassion. People in cults are not lunatic revolutionaries who act blindly against society, on the contrary, they have everything society asks for: self-renunciation, self-sacrifice, unconditional effort, work, work, work, submission to the authority, no matter which, no matter why. That is the problem.

We have lived under such authoritarian regimes for so many centuries, that we no longer know how to live, just like the little girl who at forty no longer has enough of a life to live it. What cult members tried to do when they joined a cult at thirty or earlier, is not show that they are not willing to commit themselves to mankind and work hard, on the contrary, they are ONLY willing to commit themselves to mankind and everything they do inside is justified by the “humanitarian” ideal. That is why they all act out the tragedy of the end of the world and when it doesn’t come, kill themselves or the people around them to make sure! Unless they are fortunate enough to be in feeble little cults like the Fellowship of Friends in which instead they become unconditional slaves to a psychopathic queen who is yet to prove how much further into self-destruction he can take them.

How many more people will have to commit suicide in cults before we the people resolve our conflict between our “self” and our “selves”? Our religion and our laws? Our humanity and our multiple nationalities? The sphere of religion is not and cannot be separate from the sphere of law. The sphere of humanity has to include the sphere of our multiple nationalities. What is right for our own people is right for all people in no matter what nation. Globalization cannot come without such consciousness without proving its destructiveness as it already has. We are One and there is enough for all of us if we share in illness as in health. The multiplicity of our nations speaks only of the grandiosity of the human spirit that we all carry inside. Just as we do not act against our brothers and sisters who are seldom like us, we cannot act against each other’s cultures and nationalities because they are different to us. Those differences between us are what make life glorious! What matters is not what religion or nationality we belong to but how human can we be with that religion and that nationality.

Nationalism in developed nations that have to suffer the presence of the people they previously invaded is as absurd as fundamentalism from those who continue to resist the reality of globalization. We are One and just like an adult has to bear with the consequences of his and her mistakes as a teenager, developed nations cannot avoid assuming their role in history. If they are to survive, they must be able to embrace their own acts and violence. People in the third world must bring forth their own humanity and embrace those in the first world after taking care of their own governments and their ability to rule their own lives coherently. Destruction is destruction and what we can and want to do, is live.