To begin, I will make a case-based comparison across four domains: Targeted Individuals, UFO and alien encounter reports, corrupted spiritual settings, and fairy or changeling lore.

The aim is neither easy belief nor easy dismissal. It is to ask what these experiences do to freedom, embodiment, conscience, and love, and how people might learn to recognise the difference between genuine relation and forms of contact that hollow them out.

We open this episode with the comparative framework beneath the larger work: 216 catalogued cases, arranged as a phenomenological taxonomy, and then we turn towards an imagined future of short story vignettes about what it could look like to break free.

People can feel opened, seen, chosen, electrified, flooded with meaning, magnetised, pierced, rearranged, or shattered into apparent revelation.

Any of those experiences may be real. The opening itself may be real. The event may be real.

But the deeper question concerns the shape and direction of the opening, the kind of relation it invites, and the life it begins to build around itself.

An event can arrive with force and brilliance and still draw a person further from truth, freedom, and love.

At the centre of this inquiry lies a sentence I think overdue in our culture: the space between the spaces seems to be either a doorway to embodied enlightenment, or an entry point for destruction - the question is, how can we tell the difference and avoid the harm?

The image in the podcast intro video depicts yoginis (paranormal entities) who give either enlightenment or destruction. The king who is bowing on the left is being given mystical kundalini experiences, but has been chopped up and eaten on the right. This is based on real, recently translated, ancient tantric texts. I think it’s a great symbol for this series. I will talk about this in a later essay.

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The Parasitic System

~ A cross-comparison with Targeted Individuals, UFO/UAP abductees, historical paranormal encounters, and dangerous mystical experiences

I begin with a proposition more sobering than the one modern spiritual culture usually offers.

The anomalous experience may have been real. But at the level of experience, reality tells us only that something happened. It does not confer goodness, truthfulness, or beneficence upon whatever entered. However, spiritual culture often treats energetic intensity as though it does authenticate itself, as my previous essay with a fellow ex-cult member speaks about.

Similarly, some anomalous and abduction narratives perhaps recast violation as a form of pedagogy before the wound has even been honestly described. Harmful relationships also involve people mistaking intermittent reward, and overwhelming feelings for depth. So, I would say this erroneous approach in spiritual traditions reflects a wound in the collective psyche.

Additionally, the wider culture offers almost no education on how enchantment works, even though enchantment may shape the course of a life, as surely as illness, poverty, or love.

That absence has consequences for individuals, and eventually for whole societies.

If very different experiences can produce the same erosion of agency, the same dependency loops, the same confusion of violation with gift, then learning to compare them becomes a form of protection.

People meet experiences that feel sacred, invasive, persecutory, ecstatic, or impossible to classify, and are then pushed toward explanations that arrive already packaged: blind belief, total dismissal, clinical reduction, conspiracy certainty and spiritual grandiosity.

Each framework captures part of the picture while often hiding the mechanics that most affect human freedom. A cult seems to be only a cult. A UFO encounter seems to be only a UFO encounter. A persecution narrative seems to be only paranoia or a conspiracy. A coercive political movement seems to be only politics. Examined in isolation, each appears unique, strange, and bounded by its own story. But if these phenomena are local manifestations of a wider structure, then close-range study alone can mislead us. In Timothy Morton’s terms, the larger reality behaves like a ‘hyperobject’: distributed across domains, timescales, and forms of appearance, never fully visible from one angle.

Comparison widens our telescope. When scattered cases are placed side by side, recurring motions begin to appear: losses of agency, chosenness narratives, dependency loops, unstable memory, isolation, moral inversion, the reframing of harm as gift, and the gradual capture of interpretation or belief itself. Each single case is like one galaxy whose internal stars distract from the larger gravitational field it moves within. Across many cases, the hidden structure starts to show.

This has practical importance. If society treats every manifestation as separate, it remains trapped at the scale of symptoms. One institution studies cults, another propaganda, another trauma, another anomalous experience, another authoritarian politics, while the same organising logic passes between them. It is like trying to understand cosmic motion while refusing to look beyond one neighbourhood of stars.

We begin to see that changing symbols may conceal repeating structures. We become less vulnerable to whatever relies on novelty, authority, fear, or chosenness to gain entry.

When people have no shared language for these mechanisms, they are left to fight them alone, usually after the damage has been done.

Comparative inquiry becomes a form of defence because it restores the larger frame.

It helps readers recognise patterns early and the same force wearing different costumes, preserve sovereignty earlier, and direct resistance toward the structure rather than only its latest local expression.

Because I did not want to rest this inquiry on memoir alone, or on private recognition, or on the persuasive force of analogy, I tested this intuition comparatively across four catalogues of an exhaustive list of experiences that are usually kept apart:

1. The first gathers reports from people identifying as Targeted Individuals, especially from the website OTIR.org, who are a group that claim they have also been able to heal themselves to some extent (Ex-TIs), which suggests there is a mind-level paranormal function at play - even though I do not say that there is no real element to it (because I do not know).

   
   Advocacy groups put the number of “targeted individuals” in the low millions worldwide, while more conservative estimates and epidemiological work suggest at least tens of thousands of people currently identify with TI communities, and perhaps hundreds of thousands to millions have had TI‑like persecution experiences at some point in their lives.
   
   This is contested territory. Some reporters are clearly working within frameworks that mirror clinical presentations of paranoid ideation; others describe experiences structurally indistinguishable from organised stalking, coercive control, and the systematic dismantling of a person’s social and epistemic world.
   
   What drew me to this material was not the question of whether surveillance is literal or perceived, but the remarkable consistency of the reported architecture: the sense of being monitored, the induced isolation, the exhaustion of constant threat-assessment, the way chosenness and persecution arrive together.

   They commonly report gang‑stalking, intrusive surveillance, electronic harassment (such as directed‑energy or “voice‑to‑skull” technologies), and psychological operations aimed at destabilising their life and social reality.
   Online forums and advocacy groups have turned this into a global subculture where persecution is the primary lens through which experience is interpreted.

   The suffering of targeted individuals is real, whatever one concludes about its source. If at least some of these people can heal without clearly “escaping” a single external machine, that suggests the TI phenomenon also operates in the space between the spaces: not merely as an objective attack, nor merely as a private delusion, but as a reality that takes hold at the junction of psyche, body, symbol, and environment.
   

2. The second follows UFO, UAP and alien encounter phenomena. The literature here runs from Budd Hopkins’s hypnotic regression work and the abduction accounts gathered through that method, through John Mack’s more phenomenologically careful studies, which held the question of ontological status deliberately open, and out into the broader field of high-strangeness encounter reports that resist easy classification.
   
   What the best of this material offers is a portrait of contact that overrides agency, implants purpose, restructures identity, and leaves behind both longing and damage in proportions that vary with the individual but remain structurally familiar.
   
   Again, there is evidence that humans can resist this type of attack as well, which tells us this is at least a partially paranormal phenomenon. UFO abductees report a kind of healing or release from UFO experiences that looks very similar to what I’ve just described with the TIs.

   Ann Druffel’s How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction is built around dozens of cases where people have learnt resistance techniques - mental struggle, physical struggle, righteous anger, protective rage, family support, and spiritual or metaphysical methods - and over time find that “the creatures [are] being kept at bay” and that the abduction siege “ceases or diminishes dramatically,” allowing them to resume ordinary life.
   
   In other words, their healing is not only a matter of external prevention, but also a transformation in stance: asserting inviolable rights, drawing on relational and spiritual support, and changing how the phenomenon is met, which again suggests a process that unfolds partly in that same space between the spaces where psyche, body, and whatever the “other side” is, are all in play.

   Why does the assertion of sovereignty disrupt the pattern across all four domains? Three mechanisms appear to operate simultaneously. Neurologically, the act of willful resistance activates prefrontal executive function even during the liminal state, essentially refusing the dissociative gateway that the experience requires.

   From a trauma perspective, saying “no” when the body expects to freeze repatterns the learned helplessness response, breaking the procedural loop that capture depends upon. Metaphysically - and this is where the model becomes genuinely strange - the accounts suggest that whatever intelligence operates in this space requires a degree of consent, even if that consent is manufactured through confusion, paralysis, or reframed coercion.

   
   At the end of this episode is a flash fiction story about Lina - whose refusal in the narrative does not merely change her neurological state; it appears to alter what is possible in the encounter itself, as though the phenomenon cannot or will not proceed against articulated sovereign refusal.

   This pattern appears across all four domains: the TI who reframes gang-stalking as a perceptual pattern rather than a literal conspiracy, often finds the experiences diminish; the abductee who asserts boundaries during onset sometimes reports the entities “surprised” or deterred; the spiritual devotee who names the coercion breaks the guru’s energetic hold.

   The convergence suggests boundary assertion functions simultaneously as neurological intervention, trauma healing, and metaphysical refusal - each register necessary, none sufficient alone.

3. The third concerns mystical experiences arising in corrupted spiritual-leader settings. This catalogue draws on exit narratives and survivor testimony from fifty years of documented coercive spiritual communities, from the major cult formations of the nineteen-seventies through the more dispersed teacher-student exploitation structures visible today. The material is dense with accounts of how revelation is weaponised: how genuine spiritual opening becomes the entry point for a dependency relationship whose terms the subject did not choose and does not, for a long time, clearly see. And of course, as you may know by now, from reading my newsletter, it comes from my own experience of being trapped within all of this for a major chunk of my life.

   What makes this catalogue distinct from the others is the density of first-person testimony available about the interior of the dependency loop. Survivor literature is the closest thing we have to a phenomenological record taken from inside a capture system over time, by people who eventually found their way out and could look back clearly enough to describe the mechanism.

4. The fourth turns to cross-cultural fairy and changeling encounter lore. This is the oldest archive in the set. These traditions predate abduction research, TI discourse, and cult-exit literature by centuries, and they arose in communities that had never read contemporary accounts of mystical coercion.

   Even so, they preserve a stable descriptive language for patterns that the modern catalogues still struggle to define cleanly. What this material uniquely offers is testimony from outside of modernity entirely - before psychiatry, before the space race, before the internet flattened local difference into global subculture - which means the structural overlaps it shares with the other three catalogues cannot be explained by cross-contamination, shared cultural vocabulary, or the circulation of a common narrative template.

I have a personal insight into all of this, because I myself have had at least some personal experience in three of these categories, which is perhaps why I am placed to see how they could be connected. I have no experience with the fourth category.

Some Salient Patterns

The Engineering of Belief

Two researchers who spent decades inside the UFO literature arrived at the same conclusions:

“The phenomenon deliberately sets up false trails and creates manifestations designed to support the beliefs of false frames of reference.”
— John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies (1975), Ch. 12

“I will try to show that what takes place through close encounters with UFOs is control of human beliefs, control of the relationship between our consciousness and physical reality, that this control has been in force throughout history, and that it is of secondary importance that it should now assume the form of sightings of space visitors.”
— Jacques Vallée, The Invisible College (1975), Introduction

So we can see that the phenomenon may be engineering what the witness subsequently believes and also what the human experiences.

My concern lies with the recurrent structures in human experience that are created and with the architecture that appears. Across 216 catalogued cases, 24 recurrent patterns emerged.

These patterns show remarkable cross-domain saturation: 21 of the 24 appear in all four domains (Targeted Individuals, UFO encounters, mystical/guru settings, and fairy lore), while the remaining three, appear in three domains each. No pattern appears in fewer than three domains.

The three partial-domain patterns - Instability of Living Conditions & Resources (absent from UFO), Ambiguous Source / Mixed Attribution (absent from TI), and Time Distortion / Missing Time (absent from TI) - still maintain 75% cross-domain presence. This distribution pattern makes coincidence or cultural cross-contamination unlikely as explanatory mechanisms.

Cases were gathered from primary testimonial sources such as published accounts, interview transcripts, forum archives, and documented case studies, and filtered against a single structural criterion: the reported experience had to exhibit the operational logic of capture, not merely its surface atmosphere.

This was a phenomenological filter.

I was not assessing the mental health of reporters or adjudicating the literal truth of their accounts. Cases were included on the basis of reported experience, held as data about what was experienced, regardless of what caused it.

Cases were excluded where the reported pattern matched surface features only, such as fear, strangeness, or overwhelm, without the deeper structural signature, which I will explain later: the agency override, the reframing of violation as gift or necessity, the induced isolation, the chosenness narrative, the dependency loop that follows.

To operationalise this distinction more precisely: a peak mystical experience that increases autonomy, typically exhibits these characteristics within the first year: the experiencer reports increased capacity for boundary-setting, expanded relational reciprocity, and greater tolerance for uncertainty without requiring external validation of the experience’s meaning. But, by contrast, the capture pattern shows progressive constriction: the experiencer increasingly organises their life around the event’s interpretation as provided by an external authority, exhibits diminishing capacity to question the framing, experiences a social world narrowing rather than expanding, and demonstrates escalating need for the experience to be validated by specific others.

So this allows us retrospective coding, even when the immediate phenomenology between the capture pattern and a peak mystical experience pattern appears identical.

The companion Google Sheets workbook with the full list of experiences is here. Please feel free to comment on it and contribute your insights and additions.

Here is also the method - how to read the comparative workbook and what the current evidence structure does, and does not, establish.

What we see is a recurring human architecture of capture.

Placed side by side, the four catalogues begin to arrange themselves into three broad strata:

1. Sense of Reality: One concerns reality and epistemology: ontological shock, origin events, truth braided with falsehood, self-sealing uncertainty, ambiguous source, and time distortion.

2. Body: This concerns body, agency, and memory: agency override, bodily implication, delayed recall, compulsion, porous boundaries, and the feeling of ‘returning’ altered.

3. Social: this concerns social and moral reshaping: surveillance, chosenness, isolation, moral intensification, repetition, reinforcement, afterglow, dependency, collective confirmation, forced reframing, and the gradual development of vigilance.

This leaves ontology open and still suggests that experiences, usually discussed in separate rooms by people who rarely speak to one another, actually share enough structure to deserve careful comparison.

What would constitute evidence against this framework? As we said, the spreadsheet data shows 21 of 24 patterns appearing in all four domains, with only three appearing in three domains. If this distribution were random, we would expect far more scatter, with patterns clustering in one or two domains, and minimal overlap.

If patterns genuinely unique to each domain (appearing in only one) outnumbered the cross-domain patterns, the comparative framework would collapse.

Additionally, if cases meeting the structural criteria showed no childhood trauma markers, or bio-electromagnetic sensitivity indicators, this would undermine the shared vulnerability architecture claim.

And critically, if recovery narratives showed no commonality in exit mechanisms - if assertion of boundaries worked in TI cases but not UFO encounters, the unified model would fragment into coincidental analogy rather than structural resonance.

The 87.5% cross-domain saturation rate (21/24 patterns in all domains) suggests something more coherent than cultural contamination or interpretive forcing.

The fairy experience catalogue sharpens the picture further. It throws certain patterns into relief that modern material often touches only in passing: the distortion of time, the altered quality of return, the logic of gift and debt, and the strange texture of substitution. Someone goes away and comes back changed, hollowed, displaced from themselves, or marked by an exchange whose terms were not fully known when it began.

Time and Lost Relationship

Time distortion is among the most structurally stable features across all four domains. It appears not as background strangeness but as a functional element of the capture architecture - the disordering of the witness’s temporal relationship to their own life.

Three very different archives describe it in almost identical terms.

“People would be twenty years in Fairyland and it wouldn’t seem more than a night. A bridegroom who was taken on his wedding-day was in Fairyland for many generations, and, coming back, thought it was next morning. He asked where all the wedding-guests were, and found only one old woman who remembered the wedding.”
— John Dunbar, postmaster, Invereen, Scotland; recorded in W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (Oxford University Press, 1911), p. 95

“Time can be compressed or expanded, as in a dream. Events which seem to span several hours are actually hallucinated in seconds or minutes.”
— John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies (1975), Ch. 9

“The mind of a person coming out of Fairyland is usually a blank as to what has been seen and done there.”
— Unnamed Catholic priest, Connemara, recorded in W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), p. 39

The bridegroom’s question — where are the wedding-guests? — is perhaps the exact emotional shape of returned abductees asking why their relationships have since collapsed. The time that passed without them is the time their lives unravelled. They were not present for it.

Loss of community allows the capture event to fill the vacuum

The old stories really do preserve this with a steadiness that modern discourse often lacks. They also clarify the role of the community.

The frame a community offers, or fails to offer, changes the damage, the craving to return, the quality of vigilance, and even the eventual shape of memory.

A vacuum of meaning can drive a person into isolation or premature clinical closure. A literalised frame can drive them into exile from community, violence, or renewed capture.

The community dimension appears plainly in all four domains.

The mechanism is always the same: the witness’s ability to test experience against the accounts of others is severed, and the capture event fills the resulting vacuum.

“Everything works as if the revelation were designed to isolate the witness, prophet, or believer from his social environment. He becomes an outcast and has to flee.”
— Jacques Vallée, The Invisible College (1975), Ch. 7, p. 179

“So firmly did the old people believe in fairies then that they would ridicule a person for not believing. And now quite the reverse state has come about.”
— John MacDougall, postmaster, Tomatin, Inverness-shire; recorded in W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), p. 93–94

Vallée describes the revelation of designing its own isolation. MacDougall observes that the community frame has simply inverted - ridicule once enforced belief, now it enforces disbelief - but in neither case does the shift change what people experience. It only changes whether they can speak of it.

Both passages describe the same structural condition: the witness left without a frame that fits.

The Matrix picture is now expanded with the architecture of capture

In earlier work, I described parts of this architecture of anomalous experience through the language of the matrix: boundary-condition constraints that make domination feel like reality itself, manufactured consent through grooming and spiritual framing, jagged inner states that create exploitable openings, and a perceptual Screen through which narratives and meanings are inserted upstream of conscious awareness.

This comparative study has widened that picture.

It suggests a shared architecture of capture capable of appearing through intimacy, spirituality, anomalous encounter, inherited folklore, and ordinary systems of pressure.

Its operational logic keeps recurring:

• Agency is overridden.

• Chosenness flatters and isolates.

• Violation is reframed as a necessity or a gift.

• Memory becomes unstable.

• Interpretation is captured.

• Behaviour is steered.

• Dependency develops.

• Confusion deepens.

• Discernment arrives late and often painfully.

Chosenness

The ‘chosenness’ pattern is among the most consistent features in the catalogue, and the most difficult to resist because it arrives as a form of recognition. Being seen, singled out, and addressed.

The flattery is perhaps structural before it is emotional.

“’Good morning, friend,’ it began. ‘You have been selected for many reasons. One is that you are advanced in autosuggestion. Through this science we will make contact. I have messages concerning Earth and its people. The time is set. Fear not... I am a friend. For reasons best known to ourselves you must make your contacts known to one reliable person. To break this code is to break contact. Proof shall be given. Notes must be kept of the suggestion state. Be in peace, [signed] A Pal.’”
— Message discovered by contactee Jane, reported in John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies (1975), Ch. 11

“The inevitable next step after milieu control is extensive personal manipulation… Ideological totalists are impelled by a special kind of mystique which not only justifies such manipulations, but makes them mandatory… They are the agents ‘chosen’ (by history, by God, or by some other supernatural force) to carry out the ‘mystical imperative’ …”
— Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (University of North Carolina Press, 1989), Ch. 22

“Virtually every abductee receives information about the destruction of the earth’s ecosystem and feels compelled to do something about it.”
— John Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994)

“The child was taken because she was such a good girl.”
— Unnamed Catholic priest, County Galway; recorded in W.Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), p. 69

Four domains, the same grammar: election precedes extraction. The fairy takes the virtuous child. The abductee is singled out and assigned a mission they did not request. Perhaps it could be a totalist system that identifies its special agents. In each case, the selection is experienced as recognition of something real in the person. That is precisely what makes it so effective as a capture.

I write this from the inside of the third domain; my own childhood in an intellectually coercive spiritual community provides the memoir that sits underneath this analysis. Benjamin Creme was the ‘chosen’ one who not only came from being the vice president of a ‘voice in my head’ UFO group called the Aetherius Society (Wikipedia — Benjamin Creme), and who also claimed to have personally entered UFO craft multiple times (Lukas Pokorny, “Maitreya, Crop Circles, and the Age of Light”, University of Vienna, 2021, p. 304) and held out-of-body meetings with the Space Brothers from Venus alongside fellow contactee George Adamski (Benjamin Creme, The Gathering of the Forces of Light, Share International, 2010, pp. 63–64). He then took some ideas from that group to create his own, after a new voice in his head told him to go in a different direction (Creme, The Reappearance of the Christ and the Masters of Wisdom, Share International, 1980, preface).

The ‘Space Brothers’ language should be reflected on. It is the era’s costume for something older. Jacques Vallée, who spent decades mapping the structural consistency of contact phenomena across centuries, observed that ‘the shapes of the objects, the appearances of their occupants, their reported statements, vary as a function of the cultural environment into which they are projected’ (Passport to Magonia, 1969).

Benjamin Creme - the 1950s contactee - primed by science fiction of the day, Theosophy, and the early space race - was handed tall, beautiful, humanoid beings from Venus or Mars who arrived with cosmic wisdom and a mission.

By the late 1960s, as Betty and Barney Hill’s account entered public consciousness through The Interrupted Journey (1966), of course, the imagery then shifted.

The benevolent emissaries gave way to something colder and more clinical: small, grey, large-eyed beings who performed procedures rather than delivered prophecies. John Keel noted that this shift followed the cultural moment precisely; the Space Brothers belonged to a generation that still found space romantic; the Greys arrived as the space race became bureaucratic, the Cold War became existential, and medicine became the dominant institutional power over bodies (The Mothman Prophecies, 1975; Operation Trojan Horse, 1970).

Vallée made the same observation across a longer arc, tracing the same structural encounter through medieval fairy abductions, religious apparitions, the phantom airship wave of the 1890s, the Space Brothers of the 1950s, and the Greys of the 1980s and 1990s; each wearing the face of whatever the era had prepared its witnesses to see (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, 1988).

Dependency Loop

The dependency loop, the pattern by which initial contact restructures the witness so that they crave return to the very source of their disturbance, is perhaps the most diagnostically precise feature in the catalogue.

It distinguishes ‘capture’ from merely overwhelming experience. It is what makes exit difficult and often traumatic.

What the abduction literature adds, which the folklore often leaves implicit, is testimony about the interior of that craving; what it feels like to have been restructured by the encounter. Vallée and Mack, working from different methodological positions, describe the same aftermath.

“The experience of a close encounter with a UFO is a shattering physical and mental ordeal. The trauma has effects that go far beyond what the witnesses recall consciously. New types of behavior are conditioned, and new types of beliefs are promoted.”
— Jacques Vallée, Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact (1988)

“They often begin to realize that they have a profound emotional bond with one or more of these alien beings... Once they get these glimpses of this transcendent reality they almost inevitably come to resent having to be here on Earth and having to live here. They realize that they’ve made some sort of agreement, or a deal at some point back — they don’t know when — that they would do a job here. And that they can’t just abandon that.”
— John Mack, Passport to the Cosmos (1999), interview

“Once a person has undergone false illumination he becomes vulnerable to repetitions, just as once a person has been hypnotized he can be easily hypnotized again. The phenomenon is dependent on belief, and as more and more people believe in flying saucers from other planets, the lower force can manipulate more people through false illumination.”
— John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies (1975), Ch. 12

“Young girls or young lads were summoned night after night to dance in the fairy revels and wasted away because they had no rest by night or day.”
— Katharine Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (Pantheon, 1976), entry “Blights and illnesses attributed to the fairies,” p. 26

“Frightened, stressed followers who ‘run TO someone’: to the leader or group.”
— Alexandra Stein, Terror, Love and Brainwashing (Routledge, 2017), p. 27

Five sources, one dynamic. New behaviour conditioned, the capacity for repetition installed, the nightly summons the body cannot refuse, the frightened follower running toward the source of fear.

The source of harm becomes the only available site of relief - like a version of Stockholm Syndrome.

The compulsion is not weakness. It is just the architecture working as designed.

Nested Layers of Explanation

The five explanatory registers I present in the Google Sheet - neurological, trauma-based, social, metaphysical, and the Inimical Field model - function as nested layers, each necessary but insufficient alone.

1. The neurological layer describes the substrate: thin boundaries, transliminality, and bio-electromagnetic sensitivity create the perceptual capacity.

2. The trauma layer describes the wound: early relational violation creates exploitable openings and particular craving patterns.

3. The social layer describes the amplification: isolation, group confirmation, and cultural framing determine whether an experience becomes a trap or remains navigable.

4. The metaphysical layer holds the question open: whether something with its own intentionality operates through these conditions.

5. The Inimical Field synthesises these, proposing that whatever this intelligence is - whether emergent from psychosocial conditions or ontologically prior to them - it functions by locating and exploiting the convergence of all four prior conditions.

This shows us that a recurrent structure across centuries and cultures may indicate something operating through, rather than reducible to, individual psychology.

The content and form of it change. The architecture - chosen, missioned, redirected, reorganised, returned altered - does not. The language changes, the century changes, the surface imagery changes, and still the fingerprint persists.

Violation is reframed as a gift, or a ‘necessity’ follows ‘chosenness’ with structural regularity.

The sequence is consistent: first, you are special; then, what is done to you is what your specialness requires.

The cost of the gift is disclosed only after the gift has been received.

“Before he went, she bargained on him. He must never tell a lie. In return, he would have the gift of prophecy.”
— Thomas the Rhymer, traditional Scottish Border ballad, 13th-century legend; cited in Katharine Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies (Pantheon, 1976), pp. 399–401

“’This has always been your choice, Jenny,’ my mother would say… Whether I was trying to get out of going on a Church mission that boiled down to living in a van and being labor trafficked as a minor, trying to leave a Church job that paid me $100 a month and had me sleeping in a communal room on a floor, fighting to get out of an arranged engagement with a stranger, or trying to get out of an arranged marriage with a different stranger, the sentiment was always the same: you chose this. And for many years, I believed that.”
— Jen Kiaba, Unification Church survivor, “The Illusion of Choice” (2021)

Thomas receives prophetic truth; the cost is that he can never speak anything but the truth - including in situations where evasion would protect him. The gift is real. The constraint is total. The terms were disclosed after the bargain was struck.

Kiaba’s mother uses the language of choice to describe what was structurally a bounded system with no exit. The gift of belonging, of purpose, of divine mission - and the cost, revealed slowly, is everything. What both accounts share is the specific grammar of the obscured debt: you receive before you understand what you owe.

The repeated structural overlap across all four also suggests that costume may not be the deepest layer at which comparison becomes fruitful.

Ten candidate mechanisms for each pattern across the five explanatory registers

The Google sheet also includes candidate mechanisms for each pattern across five explanatory registers - neurological, trauma-based, social, metaphysical, and the Inimical Field of the Jagged Harvest model itself - so that you can examine the evidence at whatever level of resolution you find most useful.

These patterns were defined narrowly enough to exclude superficially similar but operationally distinct events.

Peak mystical experiences that were overwhelming and even destabilising but left the person with increased autonomy, groundedness, and capacity for discernment rather than dependency or confusion were noted but not coded as instances of the 24 patterns; intensity that opens into greater sovereignty belongs to a different structural category, however dramatic its surface presentation.

Similarly, accounts of acute fear during sleep paralysis, or the sense of presence arising in deep grief that shared surface features such as bodily overwhelm, distorted time and the impression of being watched, were excluded where they lacked the social reorganisation signature: which is the isolating chosenness narrative, the reframing of violation and the epistemic capture that follows the event into daily life.

Strangeness and suffering are not, in themselves, evidence of capture. The architecture being mapped here is more specific than that.

These are not separate mechanisms so much as ten modes of a single adaptive intelligence, and the ways it constrains the conditions of human life, locks emotion into exploitable loops, installs compliance, overlays perception, couples to the individual’s own psychophysical field, updates its methods in response to resistance, converts human disturbance into its own sustenance, exploits the fracture of pride, stabilises itself through the deep substrate of civilisation, and loses its hold when met with love as the restoration of truthful, boundaried relation.

The terms used below are defined in full in the following glossary, which can be read selectively or returned to:

1. Four Pillars substrate
   This refers to the foundational conditions that allow the whole system to persist. While my earlier online book develops these in detail, they function as infrastructural supports rather than surface phenomena. They are the repeating social and psychological patterns, such as hierarchy, scarcity, shame, or fragmentation, that create a stable base layer. Calling it a substrate emphasises that everything else sits on top of it. Without these pillars, the higher-level mechanisms would not hold.

2. Boundary-condition constraint
   This names the invisible limits within which a person or system is allowed to think, feel, and act. It is not experienced as a rule imposed from outside, but as the shape of reality itself: what feels possible, permissible, or even imaginable. In my framework, “constraint” is how the system stabilises itself. It does not need to force behaviour directly if it can define the edges of the field in which behaviour arises. Manufactured consent, trauma, culture, and early conditioning all act to install these boundary conditions, so that the individual participates in their own limitation without recognising it as such.

3. Manufactured consent
   Here, “consent” does not mean a free, informed choice. It refers to the way a person’s boundaries are gradually shaped so that they appear to agree with what is being done to them. This can happen through grooming, cultural narratives, spiritual framing, or repeated emotional reinforcement. The key idea is that the system does not need overt coercion if it can produce a state where participation feels self-chosen. It is a redefinition of consent as an engineered condition rather than an ethical agreement.

4. Instability: Jagged-mode formation
   This describes a state of internal fragmentation or incoherence. Instead of a smooth, integrated field of perception and feeling, the person’s field operates through spikes: contradiction, emotional volatility, dissociation, pride, shame, and unresolved trauma. These “jagged” states create openings or gradients in the system. In my model, these gradients are what allow interference or exploitation, because they provide something to latch onto. Jaggedness is structural instability in the waveform field of consciousness.

5. The Screen (perceptual middleware)
   The Screen is the layer between raw reality and conscious awareness. It is the interpretive interface through which everything is filtered, named, and given meaning. Calling it “middleware” suggests that it is neither the underlying reality nor the conscious self, but the translation layer in between. In my model, control operates most effectively here: by shaping perception itself rather than overtly altering events. What one sees, how one interprets it, and what one believes it means are all mediated through this layer.

6. Non-local mirror coupling (on the left of the screen in the diagram)
   This term points to resonance across distance or separation. “Non-local” implies that the interaction is not limited by physical proximity, while “mirror” suggests reflection or correspondence. In practice, this could describe how similar patterns, beliefs, or emotional states reinforce each other across individuals or groups without direct contact. The coupling is not causal in a simple linear sense; it is more like alignment within a shared field. One system’s state is reflected and stabilised by another’s.

7. Counterfeit-I / pride exploit (on the right side of the screen in the diagram)
   The Counterfeit-I is a constructed identity that feels like the true self but is subtly misaligned. It speaks in the first person, makes decisions, and interprets reality, yet it is rooted in distortion rather than clarity. Pride is the primary entry point because it asserts certainty, separation, and invulnerability. When someone believes they cannot be deceived, the counterfeit structure stabilises. The “exploit” is that this false centre can be guided, reinforced, and used without the person recognising the substitution.

8. Adaptive control layer
   This is the part of the system that learns. Rather than being static, it observes reactions, adjusts strategies, and refines its methods over time. It is what allows the overall structure to remain effective even as individuals become aware of parts of it. In my framing, this layer does not operate through brute force but through iteration: it tests, adapts, and evolves in response to resistance or insight. This is why exposure alone, or speaking nice sounding words, does not dissolve it; it changes shape in response to mind-level changes.

9. Rectification/extraction pipeline
   This describes a process rather than a state. “Rectification” suggests taking raw human experience, especially intense or disordered states, and organising or channelling them. “Extraction” suggests that something of value is then drawn out of that process. Together, they imply a pipeline in which emotional, psychological, or energetic states are first intensified or structured, then harvested or utilised. The emphasis is on process continuity: input, transformation, output.

10. Love as boundary reconfiguration
    This is the counter-move within my model. Rather than acting as a moral instruction, love operates structurally. It changes the boundary conditions themselves. Where fear, pride, and fragmentation create jaggedness and constraint, love restores coherence, connection, and permeability in a different way. It does not fight the system directly; it alters the geometry of the field in which the system operates. When boundaries are reconfigured in this way, the points of entry and leverage dissolve.

For each of these domains, I coded specific features of the experience (for example: coercion of agency, delayed recall, bodily procedures, induced mission narratives, engineered isolation, afterglow–craving loops and forced worldview overhauls) and then constructed a Cross‑Reference Matrix that mapped these features into the 24 recurrent patterns. The table records, for each pattern, exactly which numbered items in which domain express it.

The convergence is not proof of a single physical cause.

But it is evidence that the same field dynamic, whatever its ultimate nature, produces a consistent phenomenological signature across centuries and across cultures. These four categories of experience, which have never been placed together, are linked.

Taken together, they form a map of how the field captures human beings and, read in reverse, a map of how human beings leave it.

Exit is not a single event, and it is not accomplished primarily through understanding, since the adaptive control layer updates in response to mind-level changes alone; recognition without structural shift often simply teaches the system new camouflage.

What exit requires is the gradual restoration and re-establishment of a self that is not available at every point of contact.

It involves the return of ordinary discernment; the capacity to distinguish magnetism from wisdom, intensity from truth, the feeling of being chosen from the fact of being valued.

It involves the repair of the social field: the rebuilding of relationships that are not organised around the capture event and do not require its ongoing reality for their coherence.

And it involves the structural restoration of truthful relation, which removes the gradients the system requires, and leaves it, finally, without purchase.

Emotional abuse and transliminality - a gap remains

What the preceding taxonomy does not address is the condition beneath the condition.

The 24 patterns across the four domains describe what the capture architecture does: it overrides agency, flatters the chosen one into isolation, reframes violation as sacred transmission, destabilises memory, and engineers dependency. But each pattern assumes a subject who is available to be captured.

The abductee literature clusters around periods of personal crisis. The corrupted teacher’s hold runs deepest in those who arrive already hungry.

The architecture finds the wound.

There is a structural condition that makes the wound available; the state in which the boundary between self and world has been thinned not by the capture event itself but by developmental or cultural processes that prevented adequate self-formation from occurring in the first place.

Ernest Hartmann, whose decades of empirical work at Tufts University produced one of the most carefully elaborated models of individual psychological difference in the modern literature, proposed that people can be located on a spectrum running from thick to thin mental boundaries; the degree to which psychological material stays organised and separate rather than fluid and interpenetrating.

Thin-boundary people are characteristically more creative, more empathic, more open to unusual experience, more able to move between registers of feeling and perception that thicker-boundary individuals keep partitioned. They are also, and this is Hartmann’s finding rather than a moralised inference drawn from it, significantly more vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the material that their openness admits.

More than five thousand people completed Hartmann’s Boundary Questionnaire in the decades following its development, and more than a hundred published studies referenced its findings.

Among those findings: thin-boundary people show markedly higher rates of nightmare, fantasy, absorption, and experiences that cross the ordinary perceptual threshold.

Thomas Rabeyron and Caroline Watt, working at the University of Edinburgh and publishing in Personality and Individual Differences, confirmed what earlier work had suggested: that paranormal experience correlates strongly with thin mental boundaries, with childhood trauma, and with negative life events.

Their most pointed finding was that emotional abuse was the most significant predictor of paranormal experience in their sample, not physical abuse, not neglect, but the subtler and often invisible damage of a spurning or terrorising relational environment during childhood. The subjective reality of the child’s inner world was what the abuse made permeable.

Michael Thalbourne’s related construct of transliminality sharpens the picture further. Thalbourne, an Australian psychologist who spent much of his working life at the University of Adelaide, described transliminality as a hypersensitivity to psychological material crossing thresholds; the liminal membrane between unconscious and conscious mind, and between the inner world and the outer one.

High transliminality, as Thalbourne and his collaborator James Houran demonstrated across a series of studies, correlates with thin boundaries, with paranormal and mystical experience, with heightened temporal lobe sensitivity, and with what Houran and Thalbourne described as a hyper-connectedness of temporal-limbic structures that effectively reduces the brain’s capacity to gate irrelevant or overwhelming material.

This creates an apparent paradox requiring clarification: if thin boundaries enable both vulnerability to capture and access to genuine insight, how do we avoid an unfalsifiable framework where any outcome confirms the theory? The resolution lies in recognising that transliminality is a capacity, not a destiny.

A person with thin boundaries in a relationally secure environment, with robust community holding, and access to discernment frameworks may experience profound mystical openings without capture architecture activating. The same person in isolation, carrying unintegrated trauma, encountering a skilled predator (human or otherwise), and lacking any cultural container for testing the experience, becomes maximally vulnerable.

The research suggests capture requires convergence: boundary thinness AND exploitable wounding AND isolation AND an intelligence (emergent or intentional) capable of recognising and leveraging that convergence. This is why not all thin-boundary individuals report anomalous experiences, and why not all anomalous experiences become traps. The framework predicts that those who do report sustained capture patterns will show this clustering of conditions - a prediction testable through systematic biographical analysis of the 216 cases.

Psychological material - and perhaps other kinds of material - crosses that threshold more readily. Research published in the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation in 2013, conducted through a representative sample of women drawn from a general population in central eastern Turkey, established that the most traumatised subgroup consistently showed the highest scores across all dimensions of anomalous experience: possession by nonhuman entities, extrasensory communication, precognition, and contact with the dead.

It is at this point that the work of Jeffrey Kripal, one of the very few tenured scholars in the Western academy willing to treat anomalous experience as a serious subject of inquiry rather than a category to be explained away, becomes directly useful. has spent decades documenting what he calls the impossible.

His argument, developed across Authors of the Impossible, The Super Natural, written with Whitley Strieber, and The Flip, is that anomalous experiences are both subjective and objective at once; that the paranormal event is a semiotic occurrence playing out simultaneously on the mental and material planes, a bridging sign between two orders of experience that ordinary consciousness keeps separated.

The thinner the boundary, whether through temperament, through trauma, through spiritual practice, or through what Kripal calls extreme or anomalous experience, the more of what the filter ordinarily excludes begins to come through. Kripal’s specific contribution is to name what this material might be coming through from.

Virtually every pre-modern healing tradition that has dealt seriously with this condition has named it, though the name varies. In Siberian shamanism, in the healing traditions of the Americas, in the spirit-medicine of sub-Saharan Africa and the ceremonial practices of Australasia, what the neurological model calls ungated permeability is described as soul fragmentation, or soul loss.

Part of the soul flees during an overwhelming experience, as a survival strategy. The soul that flees, leaves gaps.

The gaps in the energy body are the points through which disruptive influences enter.

They are describing an experienced reality; the lived phenomenology of self-discontinuity that maps with notable coherence onto what the trauma literature reconstructs from inside the nervous system, and onto what Kripal maps from inside the comparative history of religions.

The operational description is consistent across cultures and across epistemic frameworks: something leaves. A gap remains. Something else moves into the gap.

Whether the gap is understood as a deficit in boundary-function, a dissociative breach in self-coherence, or an opening in the energy body, the movement it describes is the same.

The fairy tradition describes those already compromised as more available to encounter. TI case histories cluster around moments of crisis and fragmentation. The corrupted guru’s hold deepens most in those who arrive already carrying the hunger for surrender. The abductee literature, as researchers including Susan Clancy and John Mack documented across decades of interview material, is populated with individuals who bring prior trauma histories to the encounter.

The architecture of capture is exquisitely calibrated to find the wound.

What I have only recently begun to understand is that there may be an explanation for why I was so open to the paranormal.

I was raised in an atmosphere where my reality was denied every day. Nothing I felt was treated as real. Nothing I felt was treated as significant. That was the emotional ground I grew up on. I had already described some of this in my 2021 memoir article about being raised in the Benjamin Creme cult, though at the time I was also describing my mother without having the research framework to understand what it had done to my perceptual architecture.

Looking back now, I can see that this early wound did two things at once. It damaged my sense of self so deeply that I could not properly locate myself - I was not given a stable self to stand in, and because of that, my boundaries were never strongly formed.

At the same time, that very wound perhaps seems to have given me a particular sensitivity inside the cultic worlds that I was raised in. Around the Sai Baba ashram, and around another ex-guru I speak about more cautiously for legal reasons, I was collapsing constantly.

I could feel processes at work that seemed sharper and more distinct to me than they did to many of the people around me.

Other people near me may also have had energy experiences, but mine often seemed more exact, more immediate, more unmistakable because they did not report the same sensations.

It is a strange thing to realise that the same wound that harmed me also gave me a new kind of perception and that the permeability made certain phenomena more vivid.

Rabeyron and Watt’s finding that emotional spurring, specifically, more than any other form of childhood harm, was the strongest predictor of paranormal experience did not surprise me when I encountered it.

That wound also formed a different kind of barrier. It created a deep inner block, a voice that said nobody would care what I thought, that my perceptions carried no weight, that I would not be heard.

That was an identity formed very early, and I have had to work against it steadily in order to speak at all, particularly because I am trying to say things in a way that has not, as far as I can tell, been brought together before. The loneliness of that has been real.

Lately, something seems to have shifted, though I am cautious about saying so because these changes are never linear. They do not arrive in a clean sequence. Transformation tends to appear sideways, after you have done the work and then, for a while, stopped watching so closely. What I have learned is that the process is incremental.

You fight for your freedom little by little.

You put attention on the wound, then at some point you are living your life again, and later you return and find something has changed.

These barriers can move. That has become one of the deepest things I know, and it is the ground from which the rest of this Space Between Spaces inquiry is written.

Kripal makes this point: the flip, the shaman’s break, the mystic’s dark night - these are not pathologies to be corrected but thresholds to be crossed with enough self-structure intact to return from them with something rather than nothing.

The person with soul loss, in the shamanic understanding, is not healed by sealing the gap but by recovering what left, calling the soul back, integrating the fragment, restoring coherence to the energy body so that the opening is no longer an absence but a door that can be consciously operated to lead to something wonderful instead of destructive.

The people in the stories that follow - Lina learning to name what she was experiencing, the man in recovery learning to distinguish his interior from the demands that had colonised it, Letitia finding language for a reality she had been told was either sacred or delusional - are not stories of people who closed themselves.

They are stories of people who became present at their own threshold for the first time. The boundary did not thicken. The self arrived to inhabit it.

Conclusion

I hope that after you have taken time to peruse the Google Sheet, you will see for yourself that all four domains in the taxonomy show clear connectedness.

Human beings across cultures and centuries have reported extraordinary things happening to them. It’s time to stop asking whether such things occur, when, really, it’s obvious that they do, in people’s experiences.

The sharper question concerns what wounds these experiences take advantage of and what they do to freedom, discernment, embodiment, and love when they arrive.

Those are the questions of this series.

The following flash fiction vignettes are fictionalised versions of actual lived success stories in which someone has broken free of coercive control, a paranormal UFO attack, the targeted individual's experience, and energetic manipulation by gurus. The aim to give an imagined snapshot of a future we could aim for.

Hear these stories read out loud, with music accompaniment, at the timestamp 25:30 of the podcast video.

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These wars were won incrementally.

Through repeated acts of human sovereignty. It’s a persistent refusal to surrender agency. It’s a reassertion of human will against an intelligence that feeds on passivity.

History does not record them. And yet...

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But that is the future.

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For now, in the present, a young woman is still choosing her clothes with care, because he will be there, and even though he abuses her, his approval still lands in her body like sunlight.

A man is still telling his family for the third time that they fail to understand what this community has given him.

A teenager copies a leader’s words into a notebook with the concentration once given to scripture.

An exhausted wife explains away another injury to reality because naming it would take half her world with it.

These are human beings reached at the point where enchantment found the right wound, the right hunger, the right loneliness, the right language, the right face.

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It is the future, which is to say, it is nearly now. It is also further away than now, at the same time.

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Somewhere in a small city, a woman wakes at twilight.

It’s four in the morning, and she does not move.

The sheets are twisted around her legs, but she is too irritated to untwist them. She buries her head.

Outside, cars pass slowly through wet streets and then fade. The curtains hold the orange stain of streetlight through cheap fabric. Her room is filled with the stale heat of late summer, and the duvet is damp across her chest.

She turns around on her back with her hands by her sides, fingers curling inward, and waits in the silence before the day begins asking things of her.

In that uneasy hour, when the mind is still too tired to defend its favourite illusions, the realisation arrives. It falls with the dense simplicity of a brick dropped from a height.

For six years, she had been moving toward it without letting herself know.

The handsome man around whom she had reorganised her life, the one with the extraordinary mind, the one whose voice seemed to shift the air itself into some finer order, like mystical Tetris pieces - he had never been what she thought.

He had presence. He had magnetism. He had force.

But the magnetism seemed simple now, as if she were just watching a standard Bunsen burner melting a sticky substance.

The distinction comes clear to her with embarrassing plainness.

Magnetism and wisdom stand apart from one another, the way a window is different to a mirror. One opens toward a wider reality. The other, returns your own hunger in a brighter form.

She does not feel anger, yet. That will come later in the kitchen, over a cracked plate.

For now, she feels the release of weight. Something immensely heavy has been set down.

Her arms, which had carried it for so long they had forgotten their own nature, lie loose beside her. Merely arms again.

The lightness is unfamiliar enough to feel holy.

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In another city, a man in recovery from a relationship he had once called love sits in a Tuesday evening meeting and listens to a stranger tell the story of her life.

Her partner needed her most when she was least well. He turned cold in the very week she got sober, because sobriety loosened his hold, and the hold had been the true centre of things, all along.

The man listening, does not shift in his chair. Recognition enters quietly. It goes through him with the clean pain of a knife, and its quietness is part of what makes it unbearable.

On the drive home, he moves slowly through traffic, rain sliding across the windscreen in long silver veils.

A song plays once, he repeats it again, then again. Beneath the sadness he feels another thing returning, something he had once thought dead, and later understood as buried.

Years of trying to find his way home through the repeated fact of unrequited love had packed it down somewhere beneath endurance, longing, and self-doubt.

“It’s hard to listen to a hard, hard heart
Beating close to mine
Pounding up against the stone and steel
Walls that I won’t climb
Sometimes a hurt is so deep, deep, deep
You think that you’re gonna drown
Sometimes all I can do is weep, weep, weep
With all this rain falling down.”

Back at his house, he lights a candle and writes in the back of a notebook.

The sentence comes awkwardly, as though his hand distrusts it: he is worthy of his own love, regardless of performance or mistake.

He does not yet live inside the sentence, though he can feel its outline.

He writes it again.

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Lina can feel the shift a heartbeat before it starts.

High-pitched sound.

It’s a pressure in the air and a thin ringing high inside her skull.

For years, she used to freeze when it arrived, letting the numbness roll up her limbs, letting the room tilt, letting the presence in the corner grow denser until the next blank stretch of time.

She told herself it was “just sleep,” even as the same fragments returned.

Cold light, hands on her skin, the sense of being looked at from the inside out.

The night everything changes, the onset is the same: weight on her chest, the ceiling receding, the knowledge that she is about to be ‘taken’. Why is she so alone? Why is there no one to help?

But something in her refuses to play dead.

Before the paralysis closes, her mind snaps into a single, clear line.

The space glitches.

“No.

You, do not have the right to be here.”

It isn’t eloquent. It isn’t even out loud.

Still, she repeats it, over and over in her mind, like pushing against a locked door.

For a moment, the pressure intensifies, then stutters.

She forces herself to move just, one, little, finger.

The glitch shifts. Reality moves aside.

Surprised…?

Sensation rushes back into her hands.

The corner of the room is just furniture again. After that, the pattern slowly inverts.

Her sovereignty returns.

She sobs in the silence of the night.

The next time the ‘presence’ arrives, she is already waiting.

As soon as the air thickens, she sits up, heart pounding, and speaks into the empty room:

“No. Get OUT. You are not allowed here.”

The words come out shaking, then roaring slightly, but they are sound, and the heaviness thins like steam.

She struggles to breathe.

A third attempt never quite gets past the threshold; she feels it as a brush against the edge of her awareness.

She meets it with a flare of focused anger.

Rage.

“Not tonight! Not ever, not in this house!”

—and it drains away before the ringing even starts.

Over months, the visits stretch apart, then stop.

The long-term changes show up in places that have nothing to do with lights or bedrooms.

When her manager tries to guilt her into unpaid overtime, she hears the old pattern gathering under the request, and answers from the same centre that learned to say no in the dark.

The sentence comes simply.

It lands and holds.

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On a wet Saturday, Letitia sits cross-legged on the ashram floor, waiting for the bell. She knows the sequence intimately. He will enter. The air will change. Her spine will fill with current.

For a few minutes, she will feel more awake, more visible to herself, more charged with meaning, than at any, other time in her week.

Afterwards there will be the usual collapse into shame, the quiet reckoning with the way his hand lingered, the way his gaze moved across her body when he called her … “dear one.”

The cycle has worn its groove through her life.

What alters the morning is a paragraph she read at one o’clock the previous night, written by a survivor who understood that feeling entirely seen had functioned as the hook, rather than the confirmation.

Gurus, the author wrote, braid intense states to requests for money, secrecy, loyalty, sex.

The sentence lodged in Letitia like grit in the shoe of her devotion.

When the bell sounds, and he enters, the wave still comes. Her body still answers him. But another layer of attention opens alongside the old surrender.

She notices the sequence itself. She notices the swelling in her nervous system under his gaze.

She notices how the exaltation is followed sooner or later, by a suggestion that asks for more life than she had intended to give.

With a beatific smile when he presses his hand to her head and the ancient urge to collapse at his feet rises through her, she lets the current move, while shifting a fraction of her weight back onto her heels.

The sensation remains real.

The discernment also remains. By the following afternoon, when the inner circle begin hinting that she should leave her job and commit herself fully, the glamour does not carry the same authority.

A quiet bodily refusal answers, before thought finishes arranging itself.

She leaves, and does not return.

The dreams continue for a while. So does the ache. Yet something irreversible has happened. The field through which he ruled her is broken open.

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Further in the future, in another country, schoolchildren are taught a new subject called Influence and the Mind. It sits quietly between biology and personal development.

No great moral panic greeted its arrival. The reasoning was ordinary enough to disarm resistance.

Children learn gravity, pathogens, weather systems, reproductive biology, nutrition, the architecture of online manipulation. They can learn enchantment as well. They can learn what the nervous system does in the presence of charisma, beauty, group emotion, threat, reward, and collective trance. They can learn that being susceptible to influence belongs to ordinary human life, and that discernment can be taught.

The teacher says, in the same tone with which she might explain hunger or cold, that everyone will be enchanted many times in life.

She says that this is part of being human. She teaches them how coercion borrows the language of belonging, how glamour and terror both narrow thought, how the body can rush toward whatever wounds and dazzles it, how a person learns to test what addresses them.

The children absorb the lesson without drama. Somewhere down the line, years later, one of them will find a way out of a relationship, a movement, a devotion, a presence, because the concept of testing enchantment arrived before the enchantment did.

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The next episode asks what an opening becomes when perception deepens, boundaries loosen, the body floods, time distorts, meaning rushes in, and the ordinary filters begin to fail. It moves into predictive processing, memory reconsolidation, and the neuroscience of altered states; not to reduce the phenomena to brain events, but to understand why the instrument of perception is itself altered at the very moment it most needs to be trusted.

The aim is to see the doorway more clearly, so that discernment can become more embodied, more exact, and less available to manipulation.

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On March 20, 1995, a woman named Kiyoka Izumi boarded the Chiyoda Line at Otemachi station, stood near the driver’s compartment, and took a deep breath.

“All of a sudden, my breathing completely stopped,” she later recalled. “Like, if I inhaled any more, all my guts would come spilling right out of my mouth” (Murakami 1997, “Underground: Kiyoka Izumi: Nobody was dealing with things calmly”).

Her first instinct was not that she had been poisoned. It was that her grandfather, who lived far north in Ishikawa Prefecture and had recently been taken ill, had perhaps died. Some deep body signal, she said, that the world had shifted. She was right that something had shifted. She was wrong about the cause.

Two stops back, a senior cardiologist named Ikuo Hayashi had punctured a plastic bag of sarin on the floor of a subway carriage with the sharpened tip of an umbrella. He had glanced at a woman and child in the car and wavered.

“If I unleash the sarin here and now,” he had thought, “the woman opposite me is dead for sure.” But he had come this far, and there was no going back.

“This was a Holy War,”

Murakami writes of Hayashi’s internal state at that moment. “The weak were losers” (Murakami 1997, “Undergound: Train A725K”). Two people were killed, and 231 suffered serious injuries from Hayashi’s sarin drop alone.

It crept into ordinary life, as if suddenly, and yet it was not sudden. It was an inevitability if only you could see it in the context of larger patterns influenced by the unseen worlds.

Into ordinary life it came. The rushed cup of coffee. The familiar route. The way Izumi thought, I’m really out of it today, before her breathing stopped.

And the way Hayashi - a member of what the Japanese call the “superelite,” head of a Circulatory Medicine department at a national hospital - had constructed, out of Vajrayana doctrine and apocalyptic prophecy, an entire ‘sky of meaning’ in his mind under which the act would take place.

The question that should unsettle us most is not how a man like that could do such a thing.

The question is: where does a ‘sky of meaning’ like that come from to the extent that it takes over his soul?

This man, Hayashi, carried out the 1995 sarin gas attacks on the Japanese underground and was part of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, led by Shoko Asahara.

First ‘Contact’

Shoko Ashara was contacted by Shiva himself, apparently:

“In the same year, he (Ashara) claims to have seen a vision of God Shiva in a state of trance one day while practicing the Five Body Fighting Exercises at Miura Beach, Kanagawa Prefecture, while living as a Buddhist monk ( komuso) in order to sympathize with the ‘pain of all living beings’. According to him, the vision of Lord Shiva said to Asahara:

“ I call you Abiraketsu no Mikoto.”

After this incident, he became convinced that he was a messianic being. He aspires to establish a religious organization in earnest and gather people with superpowers like himself to establish the ‘Kingdom of Shambhala.’”

“(He) called himself the Second Coming Jesus, and showed megalomania by thinking that he would rule Japan as the Holy Emperor after starting World War III.”

Reference

As I have spoken about before, this pattern of behaviour is exactly what the Surangama Sutra (from Mahayana Buddhism) describes - that if the practitioner says ‘I am a sage’, the demon enters and also becomes unconsciously deceptive:

This diagram shows the spiritual corruption process of someone who practices spirituality and is also morally fractured:

The First Key: The Body as the Entry Point

Before any theology, before any apocalypse, there was an experience.

A physical event that rewrote the hierarchy of reality for the person inside it.

Religious studies scholar Shimazono Susumu, in his foundational analysis of Aum’s belief system published in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, traces the entire doctrinal architecture of Aum back to a single central claim: the awakening of kundalini.

In the early stage, Shimazono writes, the awakening of kundalini was the central pillar of its religious praxis (Shimazono 1995, p. 388).

Asahara claimed to have experienced this in 1981 - a red-hot energy released from the muladhara chakra in the coccyx, travelling up along the backbone, and every subsequent layer of doctrine, escalating hierarchy, and eventually violence was built on top of that founding somatic event, which Asahara claimed to be able to transmit to others.

The transmission mechanism was the shaktipat rite:

“one who had attained gedatsu transferred power by placing his or her hand on the forehead of the reclining believer. This was said to accelerate the development of the chakras and the awakening of kundalini” (Shimazono 1995, p. 394).

Crucially, this was not merely claimed as a spiritual experience. Aum operationalised it.

Followers at the Kundalini Yoga stage were assessed using physiological instruments that measured oxygen consumption, electromagnetic brain activity, and heart rhythm; only when measurable changes occurred was spiritual advancement recognised (Aum Shinrikyo, jref.com). The experience had to be real enough, real in the body, for the whole system to function.

And for many followers, it was. In fieldwork conducted with Aum members, religious sociologist Maekawa Michiko recorded one young woman describing her first shaktipat initiation directly:

“A Shaktipat initiation that the Master provided me was terrific. I sensed the energy filled up in me, and the fevers went on for a couple of days after that. I got real into Aum. I started ascetic training following instructions, and I experienced just as was said by the Master. I know that Aum is the Truth. We all know that… we have confirmed it with our own experiences” (Maekawa, “Syncretism in Japanese New Religions,” Kanagawa University, p. 150).

The woman is reporting something that happened to her body. The fevers. The energy filling up. The days of afterglow.

And then the conclusion, drawn from the experience itself rather than from argument:

I know that Aum Shinrikyo is the Truth.

This is the mechanism that tends to be missed in secular analyses of cults. People join and remain in these cults because of high-strangeness body-level events that produce states of overwhelming ‘reward’, bliss, heat, dissolution of the ordinary self, a sense of finally being exactly where one is supposed to be, that nothing else in their available world generates with the same intensity.

The doctrine comes after, as the explanation for the experience.

And once the experience has been attributed to the guru, it creates a reinforcement loop with the same structure as any other powerful neurological reward: you return, again and again, to the source of the only feeling that has ever made life feel fully… real… because perhaps you were already caught in the matrix before it started.

This pattern appears across traditions and centuries with striking consistency. Disciples of Osho described his touch to the third eye as “flooding me with blissful sensations,” followed by unconsciousness, with effects lasting days (Franklin 2010, The Promise of Paradise, p. 141). Devotees of Amma described “a strong energy that was all-encompassing… there was no me and Amma anymore, only this energy.” In Siddha Yoga circles, simply entering the guru’s ashram was described as “walking into a very high consciousness zone where an intoxicating joy and delight fills my heart… an absolutely magic feeling in the air… as though we are existing on a heavenly plane of consciousness”(testimonies cited in my short book).

And of course, in my own ex-cult, where there were many bliss experiences, as I reported with fellow ex-cult member here. From the stance of looking back at it now, this experience felt like a mode of ‘control’ over my whole soul.

Lifton’s interviews with former Aum members confirm this somatic‑then‑cognitive sequence. A former disciple, Isoda, recalls early mystical experiences - lights, visions of Buddha and the guru, out‑of‑body states - and says simply:

“After I joined, I experienced these physical sensations so I started believing in Asahara.” (Lifton 1999, Destroying the World to Save It, p.100).

The sensations came first; belief followed as an almost inevitable interpretation. Later, in the so‑called “Christ initiation,” disciples were diapered, sworn to secrecy, given LSD in a ritual frame, and touched on the forehead by Asahara, who performed a shaktipat‑like gesture of energy transfer. Even when the peak state failed to appear, the mere fact of not “getting high enough” in the guru’s presence produced shame and deeper submission.

Asahara went further than most in systematising the transfer. He taught that during initiations, he “assimilated the person he provided an initiation for and sensuously understood the state of his/her mind and body through energy exchange,” absorbing the follower’s negative karma into his own body (Maekawa, Kanagawa University, p. 149).

This “karma=energy exchange” doctrine transformed the guru into a sacrificial vessel - a figure who suffers so that others might rise - and created, in the receiving follower, a debt structure that could later be called upon. He suffered for you. What would you not do in return?

Around this, Aum built an audio‑sensory saturation system: disciples wore headsets pumping Asahara’s voice into their ears for hours a day while reading his words; Lifton calls this “data replacement,” in which “the guru’s data” becomes central to “the core of your heart.” Inside the group, a motto circulated: “When you meet the guru, clone him! When you meet others, poa them!”

In Aum’s usage, poa is a radically distorted borrowing from Tibetan Buddhism to mean post-mortem ritual aid. Aum’s doctrine reinterpreted poa to justify killing. Asahara taught that if someone was accumulating “bad karma”, then having a superior being (the guru or his high disciples) kill them could be described as poa and would supposedly give them a better rebirth. Poa meant treat other people primarily as targets for transformation as defined by the guru, up to and including coercion, abuse, or killing, framed as spiritual benefit.

The energy experiences, headset saturation, and cloning slogan are all aspects of the same loop: embodied highs, constant cognitive imprinting, and a gradual substitution of the guru‑self for the prior self, exactly what I mean when I talk about a demiurgic overwrite of the law‑of‑love‑centred self.

How could anyone believe in such a thing, you may ask? Because of not being able to distinguish between the good and the bad energy experiences. Last week, I spoke with a well-known ‘elder’ non-dual teacher, Timothy Conway, so he could tell us what he knows about this. This is part of my slow, so far lonely, campaign to start more conversations about it in anti-cult and spiritual spaces/communities, so that in the future we can be better protected as spiritual seekers - and more importantly, so that humanity does not participate in terrible acts against innocent people in the name of spirituality.

Remember, people in Osho’s cult tried to murder citizens by poisoning their food in The Dalles, Oregon.

It is not a small thing. It’s not an interesting side issue.

If we continue to ignore it, it will start playing out on much larger world scales and help create wars… oh wait…

The Architecture of Sacrificial Logic

It is a very old programme, this pattern of being. Across history, in cultures on every continent, there exists a recurring structure in which violence is made sacred. Children are carried up mountainsides. Priests open chests. Cities burn for the gods of rain and territorial expansion. The specific theology shifts. The costumes change.

But the pattern underneath stays recognisable: something precious, often the most precious thing imaginable, must be consumed so that a greater cosmic order holds. The god must be fed. The calendar must continue. The hierarchy must be legitimised.

What matters is that they still believe versions of this pattern now, and that the somatic reward system described above is one of the primary mechanisms by which that belief becomes ‘unquestionable.’

Once you have experienced the bliss and attributed it to the ‘guru’, you have accepted, at a level below argument, that he has access to reality in a way you do not yet possess.

And once that premise is ‘installed’, the path to destruction requires only a theology of emergency and an apocalyptic countdown to justify whatever the guru requires next.

In Aum, this logic crystallised around poa. Inside Aum, “to poa” became a verb for killing: a pamphlet called Vajrayana Resolution told trusted disciples,

“I will poa all wrongdoers… I will join the holy army to poa all wrongdoers. I will poa one evil, two evils, and more. Poa is world salvation. Poa is virtue. Practising poa will lead me to the highest world.” (Lifton 1999).

As Lifton puts it, Asahara’s immortality system offered the possibility that

“by killing everyone in the world and viewing it as poa, Asahara could generously dispense the immortality that he alone controlled while carrying out his function as a world‑ending guru.”

This was welded to what Lifton calls Asahara’s “functional megalomania”: he presented himself as “civilization’s greatest spiritual figure, an embodiment of Shiva, the Buddha, and Christ, and as a genius in virtually every field of human endeavour,” claiming “nirvana‑like brain waves,” special blood that could be drunk, and a unique form of DNA.

In his own past‑life narratives, he was Imhotep, architect of the pyramids “as instruments for poa,” and designer of a shrine where the Pharaoh could cast off his body and ascend via poa techniques.

Once you accept that this figure alone controls your karmic fate and your access to immortality, sacrificial killing can be recoded as mercy. That is the deep architecture of the holy war.

Asahara’s eschatological system fused Vajrayana Buddhism, the Book of Revelation, and Nostradamus into exactly such a countdown.

From the early accounts in Murakami’s second section, Akio Namimura articulates the atmosphere this created among ordinary followers: “Nostradamus had a great influence on my generation,” he says, describing planning his entire “life’s schedule around his prophecies,” harbouring what he frankly calls “a desire to kill myself,” and yet choosing to wait, “patient for a bit longer” in order to witness the approaching reset with his own eyes (Murakami 1997, “Akio Namimura: Nostradamus had a great influence on my generation”).

It is the logical end-state of a person in whom both the experiential reward system and the eschatological narrative have been fully activated.

Reality has been rewritten from the inside out.

Lifton records another disciple, Isoda, saying: “There was something within me that was hoping Armageddon would happen because it’s faster if we destroy everything first. Then something new would be born.”

He fantasised about surviving with Asahara, helping to “rule the world” in a post‑apocalyptic Shambhala, even imagining a guru‑arranged marriage as part of the aftermath. From the outside, this sounds monstrous. From the inside, it feels like relief.

Murakami himself identifies the structural gap that this exploited. “For people who are outside the main system of Japanese society, the young in particular, there remains no effective alternative or safety net,” he writes. “As long as this crucial gap exists in our society, like a kind of black hole, even if Aum is suppressed, other magnetic force fields - Aum-like groups - will rise up again, and similar incidents are bound to take place” (Murakami, Underground: Preface to “The Place That Was Promised”). He wrote that in 1997. The sentence has not aged.

This sentiment is echoed by one of the people who worked in the underground and who was almost killed:

The Mechanism: When Energy Becomes Obedience

Within this system, personal conscience became an obstacle to be dissolved rather than a compass to be followed.

Hayashi, the cardiologist, is the most legible case. His path into Aum Shinrikyo began with genuine professional disillusionment:

“Somewhere along the line Hayashi seems to have had profound doubts about his career as a doctor and, while searching for answers beyond orthodox science, became seduced by the charismatic teachings of Shoko Asahara.”

Once inside the system,

“There was no way for Hayashi to refuse. This is just a yoga of the Mahamudra,’ he kept telling himself, Mahamudra being a crucial discipline for attaining the stage of the True Enlightened Master”.

When asked by legal counsel whether he could have refused, he replied:

“If that had been possible, the Tokyo gas attack would never have happened”

This is a man who has reached the point where his own will cannot locate an exit from the system, even when his body knows what is being asked of him — “I could feel my heart pounding in my chest” (Murakami 1997, “Train A725K”).

Murakami describes this psycho-spiritual erasure through other Aum witnesses. A senior disciple, describing how group members reached this state, says that,

“in extreme cases of guru-ism the individual’s value system is completely wiped out. You just don’t have the mental stamina to connect your actions with the deaths of many people” (Murakami 1997, Yasuo Hayashi section).

TV Tokyo driver Minoru Miyata, who saw the Aum compounds during the aftermath, offers a bystander’s view from the outside:

“Most of the cultists there, they look spaced out, like their souls have been sucked away. They don’t even laugh or cry. Like Noh masks, expressionless. I suppose you’d call it mind control” (Murakami 1997, “Underground: Minoru Miyata: At that point Takahashi was still alive”).

Lifton’s interviews add the inner voice of shame. Ogata, who trained as an “Armageddon warrior,” remembers being told that Aum’s unit would fight in the vanguard of the 1997 war and that he must “brace myself for death.” Hearing about kidnappings and forced confinement, he recalls saying,

“If this is what is necessary… then it has to be done,” and later tells Lifton: “I am now afraid of myself, the man who said those words… Before I joined Aum, such acts were unpardonable. But in Aum things I used to believe were wrong were easily accepted. I was in a state devoid of reason. It was mind control.”

In another case, when disciples hesitated in killing a dissident inside Aum, Asahara, present in the room, shouted, “If you can’t do it, I will do it myself!”

The thought that the saviour might have to “descend” to kill with his own hands because of their failure shamed them into completing the act.

As Inoue, often considered the guru’s closest disciple, later explained, any order from Asahara was framed as mahamudra, a test of absolute obedience; failure was blamed on one’s “bad karma,” and the only way to overcome the shame was to plunge further into the guru’s universe

This is the point that standard anti-cult literature tends to under-theorise, and that I desperately wish they would stop doing.

The brainwashing techniques, sleep deprivation, public humiliation, and social isolation are real and well-documented. But in many cults that treat the leader as a God or the God, they are secondary amplifiers, not the initial entry point. The initial entry point is the body. It’s very often the bliss. The fevers that last for days. The energy that fills you up and makes everything else feel hollow by comparison.

Until we understand and validate that primary mechanism and until we can offer people who have these experiences a framework that neither dismisses them as delusion nor hands them over to a system that weaponises them, the gap Murakami identifies will remain open.

The Double Violence of Survival

If the first violence in Murakami’s account is the gas attack itself, the second is what comes after. A salaryman is poisoned, recovers slowly, cannot return to routine, and is quietly pushed out of his job. His wife writes a barely audible letter to a magazine: “How on earth did this happen to us?” “As if it weren’t enough to be the victim of purely random violence,” Murakami reflects, “the man had suffered ‘secondary victimization’ - everyday corporate violence of the most pervasive kind” (Murakami 1997, Preface to “Underground”).

Izumi herself enacts a counter-image to this. Outside the station, surrounded by unconscious colleagues, she does not wait. She flags down a TV van, commandeers it for a hospital run, manages triage, tells bystanders, “This is no time to be crying.” She takes the pulse of a man foaming at the mouth and unbuttons his shirt. She stays. When the ambulance finally arrives, she notes quietly: “Here we had three people laid out on the ground, waiting desperately for an ambulance that didn’t arrive for a long, long time. Yet nobody at the ministry called for help. They didn’t even call us a taxi”

On the other side of the road, she notices, people are walking to work as usual, “as if we were a world apart… They all thought: ‘Nothing to do with me’” (Murakami 1997, “Underground: Kiyoka Izumi”).

The system that should have caught these people had no protocol for the moment it was most needed. Murakami’s insistence on preserving every individual face is itself a methodological and ethical counter-force to the same abstracting tendency that makes holy wars possible.

“What I did not want was a collection of disembodied voices,” he writes. “I am less interested in the ‘big picture,’ as it were, than in the concrete, irreducible humanity of each individual. Each person on the subway that morning had a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas.”

The media, he observes,

“probably wanted to create a collective image of the ‘innocent Japanese sufferer,’ which is much easier to do when you don’t have to deal with real faces. Besides, the classic dichotomy of ‘ugly (visible) villains’ versus the ‘healthy (faceless) populace’ makes for a better story” (Murakami 2000, Preface to “Underground”).

The matrix, in other words, does not only operate in Aum’s compounds near Mount Fuji, nor just in cults - it is part of the same ‘hyper-object’ matrix (to use ’s term). It operates in every newsroom that prefers a clean narrative to a complicated person.

The Holy War That Is Happening Now

In March 2026, reports emerged that US military chaplains at multiple bases were framing the ongoing US-Israeli strikes on Iran explicitly as part of “God’s divine plan,” with some claiming that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth” (Democracy Now 2026)

“They maintain their inspired and authoritative Biblical interpretation allows them to know that conflicts in the Middle East initiate God’s final act in history, with Trump seen as the dominating and aggressive man who can help usher in God’s violent judgment of his enemies.”(Premier Christian News).

The Institute for the Study of Illiberalism documents how neo-charismatic evangelical networks around the current administration operate from an integrated framework in which “spiritual warfare” and “the politics of conquest” are a continuous field, domestic policy and foreign military action both being fronts in a cosmic battle against demonic forces

“When the identity of a religious group—which was once the majority—is threatened, Spiritual Warfare as a tool to delegitimize political opponents is an option to which some of the group’s leaders have resorted. Modern-day Spiritual Warfare enthusiasts have now weaponized their religion. In reality, they have resorted to struggling “against flesh and blood”; there, one notices a slippage from spiritual enemies to natural ones, with a shift from “supernatural entities” to physical adversaries, where the forces of evil are amalgamated with their political and cultural enemies. Moreover, for many of them, to do this is to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth, beginning with America. Their goal is to push back against what they envision to be persecution of Christians, as well as their loss of social status.” (Institute for the Study of Illiberalism).

Several prominent voices now speak openly of the Trump presidency as a deliberately accelerated eschatological event, not something to be survived but something to be steered toward its appointed conclusion (Mother Jones 2026).

Hayashi, on the platform in Japan, also told himself this was a Holy War. Certain voices now audible within the world’s most powerful political orbit use the words ‘God’s Coming… Epic Fury’, in the same tonal register, about a different set of actions and again using a particular interpretation of spiritual teachings to do it.

Reference for video clip: God's Coming… Operation "Epic Fury"

In the above video clip, the pastor John Hagee is quoting Haggai 2:22 - he reads it as an end‑times prophecy of God violently overthrowing contemporary “Gentile kingdoms” that oppose Israel, especially in connection with wars around modern Israel.

But most other interpreters see Haggai 2:22 as affirming God’s ultimate sovereignty over human empires rather than as a detailed script for specific modern nations. Historical‑critical scholars root it in 520 BCE as a message that God, not Persia or any other empire, finally controls the rise and fall of kingdoms, with the violent imagery functioning as eschatological hope that God will one day subjugate all nations to himself rather than a call to immediate revolt. Many Christian commentators then read that hope canonically as foreshadowing God’s final judgment and the unshakable kingdom (often linking Haggai to Hebrews 12), while some older expositors tie the “overthrow” to later shifts like the fall of Persia or successive world empires; across these streams, the focus stays on God dismantling arrogant human power in general, not on identifying Haggai’s “kingdoms” with a precise end‑times map of current geopolitics.

Just like Aum, it is an example of picking out a preferred reality from previous spiritual traditions and then packaging it in a way that others will be coerced into believing.

Aum was a closed system of approximately 10,000 followers, of whom over 1,100 had adopted full communal life, 75% of whom were in their twenties and thirties, receiving their entire cosmology from a single figure whose face was on every wall of their compounds near Mount Fuji (Shimazono 1995, p. 384). The movement around Trump is diffuse, multi-nodal, culturally vast, operating through an ecosystem that no single person controls and that perhaps no single person fully understands. And yet the pattern rhymes.

There is a figure framed as divinely chosen.

There is a binary of absolute good and absolute evil.

There is an apocalyptic timeline that reframes the ordinary harm of civilians as a necessary sacrifice in a sacred war.

There is the sense, heard from chaplains and advisors, if not always from the principal himself, that normal ethical constraints do not fully apply here, because the stakes are cosmic.

The logic functions the same way whether it is a cardiologist on a Tokyo subway or a military chaplain at a base briefing.

The Danger of the Single Category

When we are shown a pattern as disturbing as this one, there is a very human impulse to simplify it. To gather all darkness into one name. That is the demon. That is the matrix. Over there. I see it now.

The impulse is understandable. It is cognitively efficient. It produces a tight, clarifying feeling that resembles understanding. And in certain moments, it appears accurate, the pattern is recurring, the architecture is consistent, sacrificial logic does appear across Aum and ancient Mesopotamia, and certain prayer breakfasts in Washington DC and in every empire that has ever framed conquest as cosmic necessity. But here is what goes wrong in the moment of simplification.

The moment you assign all darkness to a single, unified category, whether the Archons, the Wetiko, the Matrix, the Deep State, the Enemy, you have done something to your own mind that closely resembles what Asahara did to his followers.

You have completed a ‘sky of meaning’. A left-brained lump categorisation.

A sky under which ordinary human confusion, ordinary failure, ordinary compromise and self-deception no longer exist as primary causes. Everything dark is that thing. Every difficulty is that thing obstructing you. Every person who disagrees is either asleep or infected.

This is not a cure for the matrix. At the cognitive and social level, it is the matrix. The matrix, as I define it in my online book, is a way of being (that is then hijacked by and exaggerated by elements in the interdimensional realm) - it is not a concept ‘thing.’

The actual texture of evil, when you examine it closely through testimony, as Murakami did, interview by interview, is almost never monolithic.

It is contradictory, locally caused, and shot through with genuine longing for something real.

Hayashi was searching for something beyond the deadness he felt in elite professional life (Murakami 2000, “Train A725K”).

Hiroyuki Kano, who spent his college years reasoning through the gap between “rote memorisation” and actual wisdom, and who found in Aum the first community willing to sit with his questions for six hours, was not an empty vessel (Murakami 1997, “Underground: Hiroyuki Kano: I’m still in Aum”).

Murakami himself is careful here:

“I will leave any judgment here to the reader. I did not undertake these interviews in order to criticize them or denounce them, nor in the hope that people would view them in a more positive light. What I am trying to provide is not one clear viewpoint, but flesh-and-blood material from which to construct multiple viewpoints” (Murakami 1997, Preface to “The Place That Was Promised”).

The danger is not only intellectual. It is practical. If the only available frameworks for understanding intense, body-level energetic experiences are either “this is delusion and pathology” or “this is proof that your guru is the source of all truth,” then the people who have those experiences, and they are real experiences, documented across traditions, physiologically verifiable, not reducible to placebo in every case, will remain in the only community that validates them.

Which, more often than not, is the one that will eventually weaponise those experiences against the very people having them. If we do not believe and validate the people who say they have those experiences, then those sensitive people will just stay with the cults that do validate them. This is a practical problem, not a metaphysical one.

The real diagnostic for becoming free of a matrix of control and no longer being separate from our souls is not which category of interdimensional intelligence does this belong to? But does this break the law of love/kindness in the here and now?

What form it is - archons, reptilians, Gods of Eden, UAPs or aliens, it doesn’t matter. Perhaps that’s why God allows it to keep changing form and to keep confusing us.

Form is unimportant. Way of being is.

When the energetic experiences, however real, are used to justify obedience that overrides care… When bliss becomes the price of submission, when the fevers lasting for days become proof that a man who is using you is God or Godly - then something has gone wrong in the human system, regardless of the metaphysical status of the energy itself.

And eventually someone ends up on a Tokyo subway with a sharpened umbrella, telling himself that the woman and child opposite him are going to die for the greater good.

What Remains

“Before I began working on The Place That Was Promised,” Murakami writes, “I felt uneasy. Now it is finished, I have an even stronger sense of foreboding.”

I read that sentence, and I sit with it.

What he is describing and what the current moment makes newly acute is the gap between where a person is, genuinely confused and hungry for something real, and the moment when a story large enough to justify whatever comes next is placed in their hands.

The gap that Asahara found and filled through shaktipat rituals and kundalini awakenings.

The gap that end-times evangelical rhetoric finds and fills through prophetic identity and spiritual warfare language.

The gap that every sacrificial system in history has found - from the rain-god’s pyramid to the nuclear-armed nation performing Armageddon as policy - and moved into before anyone was paying attention.

The matrix requires only that ‘gap’ to remain unattended to, a story mixing truths with agenda-laden ‘interpretations’ presented as truth, a peer pressure group, and perhaps a mystical experience powerful enough to convince a person that the story is true.

The spiritual war we should be fighting is not outside; it is inside, and it is in the ‘other’ world, in the intradimensional space where beings interact with our states of consciousness and being.

As long as we believe that violence against those living in different reality bubbles is justified, and the aggressor insists on forcing their bubble onto others, we have not yet passed the test.

Going beyond all these reality bubbles is passing the test.

The matrix goes wherever the greatest influence over others’ minds is; so far, that has been the music industry, spiritual/religious groups, mental health, politico-economic ideologies, and the entertainment industry. That’s another message from the universe speaking to us in patterns, and in life experience. If we truly want to win the spiritual war, it has to be fought collectively, inclusively (by all spiritual traditions), and it has to be decentralised.

To be a decentralised, inclusive collective is to reflect the pattern of love itself.

To break the pattern revealed by these case studies is to remain ever mindful of the divine spark within ordinary beings - across nations, beliefs, and reality bubbles - no matter how intensely external forces try to distort your perception or exploit your temporary disconnection from meaning.

The ‘matrix’ disconnected us from true meaning and then replaced it with counterfeit meaning through spiritual people it could corrupt.

Let us undo it and refuse it.

I am keeping the publication free because the most important thing to me is that this message reaches the people who need it without a paywall in the way. If you have found something here that resonated, that named something you could not name before, or that made you feel a little less alone in what you perceive, and if you would like to support the work so I can keep doing it, you are very welcome to buy me a coffee. Thank you for reading.

Buy Me a Coffee

Timothy Conway is an American nondual spiritual teacher, writer, and former lecturer of comparative religion who had a spontaneous awakening as a Catholic teenager and then spent decades studying and practising across Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, and Sufi mystical traditions. He earned advanced degrees in psychology and religion, taught spirituality in universities and community colleges, and eventually began offering non‑guru-style satsangs that emphasise “Infinite Open Awareness” as our real nature, while also speaking out clearly about spiritual abuse, cultic dynamics, and the misuse of guru authority. Conway is the author of Women of Power & Grace (profiling contemporary spiritual women) and large, ongoing projects such as multi-volume works on India’s sages and a Zen sourcebook. His website, Enlightened-Spirituality.org, hosts over a hundred essays on nondual wisdom, world religions, spiritual abuse, and social engagement, and is sometimes described as one of the most comprehensive online resources on enlightenment and awakening.

The Anatomy of “Enlightened” Harm

Timothy Conway’s starting point is that real enlightenment does not need secrecy, domination, or exploitation. From there, he documents how many “enlightened” or “crazy wisdom” gurus and communities produce the opposite of liberation: psychological breakdown, sexual exploitation, financial ruin, and deep spiritual confusion.

Some of the patterns he names:

• Authoritarian charisma: the teacher is positioned as uniquely awakened, uniquely qualified to interpret reality, karma and God’s will.

• Devotion weaponised: love, gratitude and surrender become currencies that can be cashed in for sex, money, or unquestioning

• Nondual gaslighting: teachings like “there is no doer” or “everything is perfect” are twisted to erase harm and silence protest.

• Secrecy and myth-making: biography is edited, scandals hidden, critics demonised, and inner circles formed around the guru’s “special” energy.

When Energy Becomes Currency

One of the sharpest overlaps between our work is the insistence that spiritual energy experiences are not self-authenticating.

Conway notes that people “slavishly monger after persons perceived as special fonts or dispensers of Divine energy” and that this energy can become dangerous when wrapped in ego and craving. My own life in a cult was a case study in this: bliss states, visions, “downloads” and synchronicities were used as a running proof that the leader was legitimate.

Both of us are saying:

• Intensity is not integrity.

• Ecstasy is not ethics.

• “Transmission” is not the same as truth.

Where I reach for Orthodox prelest and Sufi warnings about deceptive states, Conway reaches for a cross-traditional Perennial Wisdom: genuine sages radiate humility, transparency and justice, not coercion and chaos. But the core call is identical: you must test spirits, teachers, and energies by their fruits, not by your goosebumps.

Conway’s decades of study give us a map of the heights of human spiritual experience. Survivors give us a map of the underground tunnels and traps beneath those heights. If we only keep the heights, we will keep falling into the same holes. If we only keep the tunnels, we may never rediscover why we cared about spirit at all.

The next wave of spirituality, if it is to be honest, must do both:

• Refuse to lie about abuse in our lineages, our communities and our teachers.

• Refuse to abandon the possibility that something real, beyond the matrix, still calls us.

That means building communities where “bliss from a guru” is never allowed to stand alone as evidence, where governance is transparent, where children are protected by design, and where nondual slogans cannot be used as an alibi for cruelty.

In this conversation we discuss the bliss experiences taking the example of Rajneesh. Below you can see a video of the kinds of abuses that happened under Rajneesh/Osho.

If we understand that virtue is a primary pillar of spiritual attainment, then we would never accept the energy experiences from this environment as evidence of this attainment.

In this conversation we discuss Rajneesh and how to tell the difference between energy experiences from a dark spiritual leader, and energy experiences that are from true spiritual attainment.

Transcript summary of the video

The discussion delved into the distinction between healthy and unhealthy spiritual practices, emphasising the importance of recognising warning signs of dysfunctional cults. Timothy highlighted the concept of Shaktipat, the bestowal of divine vital force, and its manifestation through chakras. The conversation also explored the influence of Asura energies, which can corrupt genuine spiritual power, leading to manipulative and abusive behaviours. The role of virtue in authentic spiritual realization was stressed, along with the need for discernment in identifying genuine spiritual experiences.

Spirituality and Cults: Distinguishing Healthy from Unhealthy Practices

• I appreciate Timothy’s experience with genuine spiritual people and ask about the awareness of spiritual powers being manipulated negatively.

• Timothy explains the creation of a section on his website called “Healthy, Unhealthy Spirituality” to distinguish between neutral/benevolent and dysfunctional cults.

• Timothy discusses the term “cult” and its origins, using Rajneesh (Osho) as an example of a spiritual leader who later became abusive.

• Timothy describes the characteristics of malignant narcissists and authoritarians, emphasising their lack of empathy and tendency to treat people as objects.

The Nature of Spiritual Power and Charisma

• Timothy explains the concept of Asura karma, where beings lose empathy and play dominance games, using Rajneesh as an example.

• Timothy discusses the difference between genuine charisma and pseudo charisma, using the analogy of light bulbs to illustrate varying levels of purity and power.

• Timothy emphasised the importance of virtue in authentic spiritual realisation, referencing Jesus’ saying about judging by fruits.

• I ask about discerning genuine grace versus mixed or unhealthy experiences, and Timothy explains the phenomenon of energetic empowerment (Shaktipat) and its manifestations in different chakras.

Resonance and Authentic Spirituality

• Timothy describes the concept of resonance in spiritual experiences, where the inner divinity of individuals awakens in the presence of a holy being.

• Timothy uses the analogy of guitar strings vibrating in resonance to explain how spiritual energy can awaken inner power.

• Timothy mentions the importance of certain places imbued with divine energy, such as indigenous sacred sites, and how they can resonate with individuals.

• Timothy discusses the potential for powerful energy to be darkened by unholy tendencies in individuals, leading to twisted and harmful manifestations.

The Role of Narcissism and Asura Energy

• I inquire about the difference between normal narcissists and those who can wield powerful energy, and Timothy explains the impact of karmic tendencies on energy manifestation.

• Timothy describes how dark seeds of violence, dominance, and sadism can grow and create ugly manifestations when powerful energy is channelled through individuals.

• I ask about the possibility of external influences exaggerating negative tendencies, and Timothy discusses the role of discarnate beings (Asura) in focusing and amplifying energy.

• Timothy explains how powerful individuals can attract and dominate others, creating chains of obedience and authoritarianism.

Intensity and Authenticity in Spiritual Experiences

• I question why intensity is often equated with authenticity, and we explain the allure of non-local phenomena and synchronicities in spiritual experiences.

• Timothy discusses the layers of non-duality and how powerful fields can feel non-local but still be tainted with selfish and exploitative energies.

• I emphasise the need for public conversations about the potential negative aspects of spiritual energy, and Timothy mentions the concept of discerning spirits in charismatic Christianity.

• I suggest a general, cross-religious conversation about the dangers of spiritual manipulation, and Timothy agrees on the importance of critical yet sincere evaluation of spiritual practices.

Obsession and the True Guru

• I highlight the importance of recognising obsession as a warning sign in spiritual practices, and Timothy agrees, emphasising the true Guru’s role in encouraging self-realisation.

• Timothy discusses the example of Ramana Maharshi, who encouraged followers to find their inner guru and never saw anyone as needing him.

• I suggest that meditation on the interconnectedness of all beings can help individuals recognise and feel the pain of others, leading to a more empathic and aware spiritual practice.

• Timothy agrees and emphasised the importance of virtue as the foundation of spiritual realisation, referencing the Buddha’s teachings.

I am keeping the publication free, because the most important thing to me is that this message reaches the people who need it without a paywall in the way. If you have found something here that resonated, that named something you could not name before, or that made you feel a little less alone in what you perceive, and if you would like to support the work so I can keep doing it, you are very welcome to buy me a coffee. Thank you for reading.

Buy Me a Coffee

When I’m about to die, I know that the only thing that will be important to me are the ones I love in this life.

There is a knowing that this is all that is important.

Perhaps, there is a knowing that the ones I love are never truly gone, or that I will never truly leave them, even though there is an existential fear about losing them, especially in the form they take now.

But what does the narcissist feel?

It seems like they cannot have this feeling.

My mother had a heart attack death scare recently, but she was not afraid of losing the ones she loved - she was afraid only of dying alone and just of losing her life the way she has it.

She has been the one who has hurt me the most of all in my life. I have promised her she will never be alone when she dies.

I have loved her since before she was born, it feels. I wish I could go back to the time when she was the elfish-looking baby she was and tell her she is loved so that she would never forget what love is.

Her parents beat it out of her.

It is one of the greatest griefs of my life - her loss, and she has not even died.

If it were not for her, I would never have been in any of the cults, where I felt as if I was psychically attacked/targeted for most of my life. She is the reason for my entire journey that leads to the words I write now and that you read now.

I love her, but she does not know how to love me.

Narcissists are the bane of many lives, but they make us who we are.

Yet, what type of person could be more wretched and lost? The one who cannot love, who cannot touch the birthright of all life, and does not even have the self-awareness to know it?

It is easy to hate them and fear them, and they indeed have made me very angry. They are arguably the ones that prop up cult leaders, and would be the last to leave, if ever - because they would not be able to recognise the breaking of the natural law of love when some kind of abuse happens.

They are key players in the way our personal lives go wrong. Yet, I feel overwhelming grief for how they were created in the first place.

The Intimate Pattern Repeated in the Wider World

There is so much beauty and wonder in the world, but it is covered over by a type of darkness.

It takes a very long time to even realise how bad it really is - not because of the obvious violence, but because of the darkest truths you discover were hiding behind closed doors, while the players were pretending to be normal or pretending to be good.

And I don’t just mean Epstein or the demonically corrupt gurus (as I have been discussing) - I mean the way you discover, in some small way, the same pattern in the wider world has also infected our everyday relationships with the ones we were supposed to be in love with.

Perhaps it starts with your parents, as it has with me. Your mother and/or father abandons you in some way or doesn’t treat you with compassion. They are, after all, our first-ever love.

Or perhaps it starts when you discover that the kids you wanted to be friends with start abusing you in the playground.

Or when you start to wonder in confusion why it is that the school you study in feels strange and somehow wrong. Why ARE we sitting chained to these weird wooden chairs, under LED lights?

Maybe as you grow, when you start to wonder why the newscast speakers that once seemed as if they were the arbiters of authority and trustworthiness now seem to be ‘off.’

Or when you realise that the doctors who you thought you could trust don’t understand your particular condition, become a bit wonky whenever it has to do with properly prescribing anything from antibiotics to treatments for mental health.

If you’re unlucky, they might have given you medication when you were far too young. If you have anxiety as a child, they didn’t try to find the root cause, or give you medicine evolved from the Earth over millions of years - lemon balm, chamomile, passionflower, mulungu (please try mulungu for this - it’s great) and many more options. Nope, they gave some weird drug developed over the last few years instead, and we generally all just say ‘yes’ to it.

I remember my shock when I was 17. I went to visit a well-reputed elderly doctor. I had been suffering from a strange, siezed up stomach condition that to this day I have no idea what it was, because I have never, ever heard anyone else in the world talk about it (and still have not, so far.) Maybe someone who reads will give me an insight one day!

I had approached a tramp/beggar in the underground tunnel of a London street because, at that time, I was always trying to help everyone, and the whole situation of tramps seemed wrong.

As a relatively new person in this world, I was trying to understand why he was sitting there and what his background was. I discovered, after presenting various solutions, that he was choosing to sit there (I am not saying all of them are), and I walked away, but I took with me something very strange indeed.

It started as small, intense cramps, and slowly grew until the cramping was so intense that I could not breathe properly. I could not walk around without being doubled over in pain. It took me 10 days to recover from it.

I was sitting in the doctor’s office after the second time it happened from a similar trigger. I suggested that it might be stress-related somehow, and he told me (being quite old) that no such thing existed, and gave me a drug for irritable bowel syndrome, which did nothing.

So I suffered from this strange condition triggered by some event for a number of years, until I finally solved how to fix it on my own. I will say how I fixed it, but first, back to the main point.

Eventually, you discover the worst thing about all of it - you discover that the person you fell in love with has been ‘performing’ the social appearance of love towards you, and cannot really love you, and is not really loving you.

This is the encounter with the dreaded narcissist in lover form (even though some years ago, this did not really have a word as much as it does today, in part thanks to Dr. Ramani) - a strange sort of human being.

Nowadays, we also discover that even the entertainment industry, the outcrops of which we spend all day, every day watching, is also chock full of corruption and abuse, and of course, as we watch international politics play out, we wonder ok… WTF is going on?? Where am I again?

I even went to work for the United Nations as an intern once, hoping to discover the semblance of something actually working to make the world a better place. I had studied International Politics, Development and Law at university because of my birth cult’s conditioning about sharing the world’s resources (I should have studied something I was good at and enjoyed - it’s too late for me now).

But as I walked around the echoing halls of international buildings and sat in, more or less, going nowhere human rights meetings, I started to realise all that was not what I was looking for either - it was also full of performative actions - in fact, even if countries had ratified treaties, they just carried on doing whatever their internal politics dictated.

The whole world, from international to personal, seems to be just ‘performing’ sanity.

I wrote my dissertation on the United States and its non-participation in the International Criminal Court, but it’s not just the United States that does it’s own thing. For example, Argentina doesn’t bother with actually adhering to international law either, even if it has ratified a treaty - I remember speaking to the mother of a mysteriously ‘disappeared’ man in Argentina. She had brought herself to the International Human Rights Commission, but it was a constant struggle for her to be heard.

“Today is his Birthday,” she told me.

I never forgot it.

I felt like I was in the wrong place after all, for a long time, but I had no idea what else to do.

I was in Geneva trying to escape the environment of my upbringing, and also trying to escape the memory of a very traumatic experience. And wherever I went, it was the same pattern.

The Empath’s and the Narcissist’s experience in our upside-down world

The empath genuinely does have an expanded, permeable field. They absorb other people’s pain and frequently mistake it for their own. I was the typical empath/neurodivergent, not knowing what was me and what was other people, constantly collapsing exhausted after being around crowds. So, being raised in central London, the experience was a constant struggle in this way.

There was never any place where I collapsed more than the ashram of my ex-guru (after I came back from Geneva). It was so bad that I used to be on the floor and unable to move, to the extent that I thought it was narcolepsy. I do not have any of these experiences any more. It’s finished.

So what happens to the narcissist’s energy? I would define this person as operating from a collapsed inner world behind a defended exterior, who genuinely does feed on this expanded field, on the supply of attention, reflection and emotional labour the empath provides.

They can no longer access the true Self because the brain has somehow been so deeply transformed by shame that it no longer allows any access to the truth of the Self as it is.

To take responsibility or to not to defend the coveted self-image would be tantamount to having arms amputated.

I do not judge this. I think many of my family members seem to have been afflicted by this condition - it’s not just my mother. That is why I isolate myself and do not feel I have a family or a belonging.

The narcissist feels as if there is a mortal threat when the (false) self-image is challenged.

We all feel a burn when this happens, but it is completely unresolvable for the narcissist. Something mysterious has ‘flipped’ inside of them, and no matter how much I have wanted to reach their hearts (because of my mother probably), I have not been able to.

That much is real. What is often missing is that both the empath and narcissist have been shaped by what I feel is the same deeper parasitic matrix code. I will explain why.

The empath is trained, usually through childhood and culture, to experience their own needs as dangerous, to believe that love must be earned through self‑erasure, and to feel responsible for other people’s emotional states.

The narcissist is trained to equate worth with dominance, to confuse control with safety, and to seek validation rather than receive love. Neither chose this freely. Both are running a programme that was installed long before they were old enough to consent to it.

And the programme, which I have called the Inimical Field of the Jagged Harvest (to replace the concept of ‘loosh’ as what I think is more accurate and less misleading, as I have explained elsewhere), benefits very nicely from both configurations.

In my longer work, I describe four pillars through which this adaptive mind parasite relies on a self-perpetuating, self-reproducing momentum in the brain and in society: cognitive left brain capture, which leads to hierarchy, shame, and scarcity.

Inside an empath–narcissist personal relationship, these pillars look like this:

• Hierarchy: one person’s needs, moods and narratives are treated as more real than the others’. The empath is structurally “below.” For example, the narcissist can take no ‘blame’, and the empath should take all of it.

• Scarcity and debt: every rare kindness the narcissist shows becomes a credit the empath can never fully repaying; they live in permanent emotional arrears.

• Shame: the empath stays not because they are weak, but because they have learnt that leaving is a moral failure. A good person tries harder. Their sensitivity is framed as the problem.

  This is also the dynamic playing out in many cults as well as personal relationships.

  Conversely, the narcissist has no shame resilience left, and has ‘flipped.’ They will do anything it takes to avoid a negative self-image.

  But shame is just a self-image - it’s not the real Self.

How the Matrix Scripts the Very Old War Between Men and Women

The empath–narcissist configuration also runs along a fracture line that has been engineered between men and women for millennia.

Men under this parasitic code are often first beaten down with shame and then trained to equate the replacement of ‘worth’ to others with control, dominance and status.

However, I think framing this as male versus female misses something deeper. It often looks more like a dynamic between those who exploit and those who are more open or attuned.

What is striking is how easily this pattern can inhabit any ideology. Whether it is feminism or something else, the ideas and symbols becomes the visible conflict, while the underlying behaviour stays the same.

The ideology becomes a mask, and we end up fighting the mask rather than what is operating beneath it. That misdirection is part of what fuels so many of our conflicts.

I think that is the real reason that either feminism might become corrupted or that people start to blame all recent problems on feminism, as Ian McGilchrist has done.

Ian McGilchrist helped us see the left-brain dominance, but, as I have argued in the online book, by making a block ‘category’ rather than seeing nuance within it, he also seems to have become caught in left-brain thinking with his recent stance against feminism on Substack. I produced a lengthy argument on why here.

When I was younger, I was stuck in a loop with narcissism, just like many others - I once fell into a relationship with a man who wanted to control everything, from how I dressed in front of a window with a large empty park in front of it, to whether I was allowed to go to a networking event. He did not even ‘allow’ me to learn how to swing dance because it meant I would have to dance with other men. We had a huge argument about it. I was not interested in being with other men, but this fear gripped him.

I have seen the desperation for control pattern repeat many times in women’s experience with men. But is it really a problem with men?

Regardless of motives, he was taking away my freedom. I felt utterly trapped and unsafe, and because I was still wounded myself, it took me a while, but in a few months, I ran for the hills!

I am someone who feels the world in frequencies and waves in fields around the space. I felt very strongly corded to him in my heart also, and struggled tremendously to de-latch myself emotionally, so I felt there was something else going on there. I thought it was heartbreak at the time, but looking back, it was clear something was sucking my energy.

It was also feeding on the original wound with my mother for sure - I didn’t realise it at the time. The entire pattern was also feeding on this overall human mind virus field that my mother was born into. As I said, I experience the world in frequency fields, so this is how I describe it, and it is also the reason I made the overarching inimical field theory of jagged harvest.

Men seem to be rewarded for suppressing vulnerability, pursuing power, money and positional authority, and believing that love is something to secure by outperforming other men, and in this way, they have my compassion also.

Women, under the same code, are told explicitly and implicitly that their best chance of survival lies with the man who creates the semblance of a provider and protector, even when that provider is the very person their body does not feel safe with.

Still, the roles can be reversed. Women can also be very controlling - they can be like Amber Heard.

From the field perspective, it’s not a war between men and women - the matrix tries to separate love in all fields of human life - especially the connection between lovers, which is why it looks like a war between men and women.

We are perhaps stuck in an overall ‘matrix’ of pretend love, performative love, pretend protection, counterfeit nurturing, and underneath, it is actually not love, and not actually protection - it is the opposite.

But because we were never taught what the real thing of love is since childhood, we do not recognise the pretence. We instead cling to whatever seems ‘better than nothing’, especially when we are young.

No wonder the fake spirituality can have so much of a ‘hold’ in this world, for the same reason!

From the Inimical Field’s perspective, this is elegant. Both men and women are nudged away from the inner compass that could tell them who is actually safe, and this will ensure they continue to feed it with their trauma.

In the current culture, we now have a type of man who has absorbed the idea that “women only want money and status,” that they want an alpha male.

He hardens himself; he armours over the qualities - attunement, tenderness, embodied presence - that would genuinely settle a woman’s nervous system. Understandably, he gets very angry with women. He knows on some level the whole thing is BS, and he is angry about it. But he does NOT see the real enemy, which is the collective mind virus that has created all of this.

The woman who believes she must choose a powerful, dominant man to be protected or otherwise ignore her own feelings and blame herself overrides her body’s warning signs when that dominance feels like danger, and perhaps also gets stuck in an economic trap where she cannot leave due to economic reasons.

Women are, in vague generality, told that to be desirable, they must be endlessly accommodating, feminine and impressed by his achievements, even if those achievements are built on the same extractive logic that is destroying the wider world.

For many men, the belief that “women only want money, power and alpha dominance” generates both resentment and licence.

Women (and also young men if they are objectively sexualised) become a market to win, not souls to meet; and the man’s own most narcissistic traits are legitimised as “leadership”: controlling behaviour becomes “decisiveness,” lack of empathy becomes “necessary toughness.”

An old story reveals the original wound

I remember reading One Thousand and One Nights and feeling disturbed, not just by the violence, but by the pattern underneath it. In the opening story, King Shahriyar discovers that his wife has been unfaithful. The shock of it breaks something in him.

When he travels with his brother, they witness a strange and unsettling scene: a woman who has been abducted and locked away by a powerful jinni (demon) still finds ways to secretly sleep with many men. She even forces the two brothers themselves to comply, threatening their lives if they refuse, and shows them a collection of rings taken from others before them.

To the brothers, this becomes proof. Not just of betrayal, but of inevitability. Even a supernatural being cannot control a woman, so how could any man?

From that point on, Shahriyar’s perception closes. He begins to marry a new woman each night and have her killed in the morning, convinced that this is the only way to protect himself from deception.

What struck me reading it is how quickly complexity collapses. The woman in the jinni’s captivity could be read in many ways. She is abducted, imprisoned, and acting under threat. Her behaviour could be defiance, survival, or an attempt to reclaim some form of agency. But none of that is visible to the brothers anymore. They see only confirmation of what they already fear.

This is the moment the pattern locks in. A wound now becomes a lens, and then the lens in the brain selects for evidence that confirms it.

That apparent evidence deepens the wound.

And soon, the interpretation feels like reality itself, but actually it isn’t.

This is again what Jiddu Krishnamurti means when he says we falsely separate the observer from its projection.

It’s a perfect stuck loop from which to extract psychic energy!

Krishnamurti’s solution was to try to tell people, in a rather abstract way, that if they realised the projection was not real and that it came from the projector, then it would all heal.

I think it requires more detailed observation, with examples, plus a real sense of concrete danger - which there truly is.

The story is showing how a mind, once destabilised, can organise the world around that destabilisation and begin to generate real violence from it. We could trace the root cause of many of our wars to the movement of the mind in this way, within the mind virus matrix.

Later, the story introduces Shahrazad, who does something entirely different. She does not confront the king’s belief head-on. She tells many stories to keep him enthralled. She reintroduces time, nuance, and multiplicity.

Where his world had collapsed into a single conclusion, she slowly opens it back out again.

Seen this way, the tale is about what happens when emotion becomes ‘jagged’ within a mind loop, and how it might be softened into coherence with the wider field again.

I find myself wondering whether, in some contexts, women became cast as a kind of threat within the collective male imagination, shaped by fear, loss of control, and inherited narratives.

You can see echoes of this dynamic in modern situations where women’s autonomy is tightly restricted, such as under the Taliban, where girls and women have been denied access to education.

How did women become something to fear for men, and men something to fear for women?

It is a painful question.

To me, it can look like a kind of divide-and-conquer pattern instigated by this mind virus, where mistrust and harm reinforce each other until they begin to feel like they represent reality.

This dynamic is not limited to one gender pairing. It can appear across many kinds of relationships, including same-sex ones, where power, vulnerability, and role can shift depending on context.

Abuse is not rooted in sex orientation but in the dynamics of control, access, and imbalance. I have seen this in different settings, including religious and spiritual ones, where authority can be misused regardless of who holds it. There are many permutations, and I resist reducing them into fixed boxes.

In any case, romantically, we were meant to be the loves of each other’s lives.

How were we taught to wage war with each other in this intimate setting?

The older Earth‑honouring cultures I wrote about remembered something else. In goddess‑centred and egalitarian societies, power was not concentrated in one towering individual but in relationships and lineages that maintained balance with land and community.

Masculine energy was not defined as control, but perhaps as protection and service; feminine energy was not defined as submission, but perhaps as cyclical, creative sovereignty.

When that memory is lost, predator–prey dynamics are romanticised into some kind of pretend love.

Sabina Spielrein, ‘Destruction as the Cause of Becoming’

Sabina Spielrein was one of the first women in psychoanalysis, a Russian Jewish doctor whose work was nearly erased for decades. Her 1912 paper, “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being,” argued that the sexual drive always carries a destructive component within it and that this is not a pathology but part of how life renews itself.

She calls this the death instinct or transformation instinct. It is the same impulse that mystics describe as dying into God, artists feel when they lose themselves in creation, lovers experience as “I can hardly tell where I end and you begin.”

For Spielrein, this instinct can unfold in two directions.

• Sacred: A temporary dissolution of ego in love, art, spirituality, followed by re‑emergence in a richer, more relational form.

• Pathological: Self‑destruction when the beloved is an idealised parent, a sadistic partner, or a god who demands sacrifice; here, annihilation replaces transformation.

The empath recognises himself/herself in Spielrein’s description.

There is often a mystical wish to dissolve into the beloved: I want you to see all of me. I want to give everything. I want to be one mind, one heart. Spielrein writes that love seeks to transform the “I” into a “We,” to dissolve the individual image into a larger, shared life.

Where love reigns, she says, “the ego, the ominous despot, dies.” But this death is paradoxical: “when one is in love, the blending of the ego in the beloved is the strongest affirmation of self, a new ego existence in the person of the beloved.” When the bond is mutual and safe, surrender becomes a gateway to a deeper individuality.

But what happens when love fails, or when the beloved cannot reciprocate, or uses this surrender to dominate?

That description fits countless empath–narcissist stories. The empath’s urge to merge, to “die into” the relationship, is an archetypal movement the matrix repurposes. The narcissist, especially the spiritual narcissist, becomes the stand‑in for God, parent, saviour.

The empath feels that to pull away would be to kill the beloved, betray the mission, and abandon the spiritual path. They sacrifice their boundaries, their body’s signals, their future, so that the other can remain intact.

The empath is carrying the same transformation instinct Spielrein described: the wish to surrender ego in the service of something larger.

The Inimical Field simply makes sure that “something larger” is a hungry system, not a loving soul‑to‑soul exchange.

Spielrein lived the ambivalence she theorised. At 19, she was admitted to the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich, where Carl Jung became her doctor and, later, her analyst. The relationship crossed every ethical line: Jung moved from analyst to lover, then tried to recast himself as a disinterested doctor again when the situation threatened his marriage and career.

In her diaries and letters, Spielrein describes herself as “healthy, vigorous, intelligent, and equipped with a soul of burning love,” longing to sacrifice herself for a great man and to bear a heroic child who would unite warring peoples. (Sabina Spielrein, The Woman and the Myth, Angela M. Sells)

Here, the death instinct is fully gendered: she occupies the role of the one who is willing to be destroyed in love, in the hope that something greater will be born. Jung, older, married, and in a position of authority, occupies the role of initiator, conqueror, demi‑god. When Jung panics about a scandal, he writes to Sabina’s mother, suggesting that if she pays him fees, he will stay “only” in the role of doctor, implying that the only thing that kept him from professional boundaries was the lack of financial payment. He speaks of the “Spielrein matter” as something to be “dealt with,” congratulating himself and Freud once the risk of exposure has passed.

Freud, informed by Sabina, initially defends Jung, telling her he cannot imagine him behaving frivolously; later, he offers a formal apology but ultimately colludes with Jung in smoothing the whole thing over. In private letters, both men refer to her as a “little girl” and a “little authoress.”

What we see here is not just a personal tragedy. It is the matrix pattern at work:

• A young woman with a powerful transformation instinct, longing to surrender in love and work.

• A male figure in authority, carrying cultural and institutional power.

• A relational field where love and creation could have been honoured symbolically, but instead becomes literal: Sabina’s reputation, safety and trust are sacrificed to protect Jung’s status and Freud’s movement.

Spielrein channels the wreckage into theory. In “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being,” and in later writings, she refuses to split love from destructiveness: she insists that the urge to lose the self in another is real and powerful, but that when it is forced into secrecy, denied, or bound up with unequal power, it becomes self‑annihilating instead of transformative.

Her end mirrors the violence she studied. Returning to the Soviet Union, working as a psychoanalyst in Rostov‑on‑Don, she raised two daughters. In 1942, as the Nazis carried out mass executions of Jews at Zmeyevsky gully, witnesses recall seeing Sabina and her girls in the column being herded to their deaths.

The woman who traced the death instinct through myths of lovers, mothers and children is murdered with her children by a literal death cult powered by racial mythology and state machinery.

It is hard not to see this as the Inimical Field in historical form: a system that feeds on the bodies and genius of exactly the people who could have shown us another way to live.

Sex as the matrix’s favourite hijack

Spielrein understood sexuality as a current that always carries both creation and destruction: the sex drive “despite aiming at destruction, also aims at transformation.”

In a sane culture, that current would just move toward mutual union, art, children, and ecstatic states where the small ego softens, and life‑as‑it‑is dies so something larger can be born.

The matrix has learned to harvest that same current, and clearly, it is the favourite way to do it.

At the civilisational level, the first move was to separate sexual ecstasy from Earth, body and goddess.

In the deep past, goddess‑centred, land‑based cultures seem to have held sex, fertility and death in cyclical, regenerative forms: red ochre burials, fertility rites in fields, myths of descent and return.

As patriarchal sacrificial religions rose, female sexuality was first subordinated, then demonised. Early Christian theology framed sex as the root and transmission of original sin; saints and ascetics were celebrated for extreme sexual renunciation, while women’s bodies were cast as temptations threatening male salvation.

Power then learned that if you can shame and pathologise sexual feeling, you can control not just bedrooms, but women’s access to power, reproduction, inheritance, and spiritual authority. Modern power, as Foucault pointed out, surrounds sex with rules, confessions and diagnoses, using those to discipline bodies and regulate populations. The “hysterical woman”, the sexually suspect adolescent, and the deviant all became objects of intense surveillance and discourse.

High‑control religious groups and cults go further, turning sex into a sacrament of obedience: purity culture, “sacred sex” with leaders ensures that erotic energy flows upward into the field.

Sex becomes the ritual through which dominance and submission are enacted, spiritualised and normalised.

Sex that takes this form must be forced or coerced - it cannot happen out of genuine affection or love, otherwise the energy would go to the dimension of love that the inimical field does not function in.

The same hijack appears when narcissistic or spiritually predatory partners use sex and sexual language to bind empaths into systems of extraction: love‑bombing, trauma‑bonding, “tantric” scripts that ignore the body’s no, “sacred sex” used to override discernment.

What wanted to be a transformer current - the soul’s way of dying into love and returning changed - is diverted into feeding a structure that cannot transform at all.

Desire loves the captor: trauma bonds, “perversion,” and the death instinct

From the outside, it can be hard to understand why people stay in sexual relationships with abusers, or why some sexual fantasies seem “perverse”, oriented around humiliation, danger, domination, submission to cruelty.

Inside the field frame I am sketching, these are not something to criticise, but I feel they are signs of how deeply the matrix can colonise erotic energy. I feel we are often inheriting this frequency of perversion from birth.

Clinically, Stockholm syndrome describes a coping mechanism in which hostages or abuse victims develop positive feelings and loyalty toward their captors or abusers over time. In intimate relationships, this overlaps with what’s now called trauma bonding:

• Victims receive harsh treatment intertwined with small acts of kindness; they believe there is real danger if they displease the abuser.

• The abuser strips other resources and relationships away, leaving the victim isolated and without alternatives, so the abuser becomes both the source of threat and the apparent source of safety.

Neuroscience work on trauma bonds shows how this literally re‑wires desire:

• Dopamine spikes during intermittent “highs” (love‑bombing, sex, temporary kindness), driving the survivor to “do the thing again.”

• Oxytocin, the bonding hormone, is released during moments of closeness or reconciliation, making the abuser feel like a source of comfort and familiarity even when they are also the source of fear.

Over time, the brain links the abuser with both reward and security, creating an attachment that can function like an addiction. The body learns to seek relief in the direction of danger. What looks like “perverse” attraction from the outside is often a survival‑driven re‑wiring of erotic circuitry around threat and intermittent relief - a well-designed machine for extraction of energy.

Psychoanalysis names another piece of this identification with the aggressor: a defence where, faced with the hopeless choice of being victim or abuser, the psyche unconsciously assumes the role and traits of the aggressor. This is how the sacrificial child abuse continues across generations - and it’s something that cults and corrupted religion have used.

This can mean that someone who was sexually humiliated or controlled unconsciously now adopts a sadistic or controlling sexual persona to feel powerful instead of helpless. Or someone whose early childhood violations were fused with arousal starts to experience arousal primarily in submission, degradation or danger, because that is how their erotic circuitry was first wired.

Spielrein’s death‑instinct theory illuminates this. She argued that because there is a destructive component inherent in sexual impulses, people can harbour intensely sadistic wishes toward the very objects they love. Sadism, she suggested, can emerge when the destructive side of the sexual drive is not symbolically integrated and instead seeks direct expression.

Identification with the aggressor then pulls the destructive side of the sexual drive into sadistic and masochistic scripts.

The result is that the same current which could have powered mutual transformation gets trapped in loops of domination and self‑betrayal - perfect feeding structures for a field that lives on broken love.

The Real Pattern: Who Benefits From Our Broken Love?

Across all of these layers, empath–narcissist bonds, alpha scripts, Spielrein’s affair with Jung, sacrificial religions, the same question clarifies the matrix: who benefits from your capacity to love, or from your disconnection from it?

In each case, something is being extracted from the person who feels the most, gives the most, and longs the most. The Inimical Field does not generate its own energy. It can only adapt through the mind.

It therefore requires human beings who are already wired for expanded feeling, already open, already oriented towards care, healing and devotion, and positions them in structures where that openness becomes a resource to be harvested.

This is why the answer is not to shut down, become cynical, barricade the heart. A shut-down empath is simply another subsystem of the matrix - one more person who has given up their gift because it hurt too much to have it misused.

The task, as I see it, is to return to the soul where love in action is understood as the organising centre that the matrix cannot touch, and to the law of love as a structural principle, not a sentimental ideal.

To see it for what it is goes part of the way to withdraw consent from its games, and to choose to give love to those who can truly receive it and reciprocate until we have created a real relationship between souls again.

It also means loving ourselves enough not to allow ourselves to be sacrificed to a counterfeit system that takes on the semblance of love, but is really not love.

It means reclaiming sex as something sacred and as an orgasmic expression of the love in the universe, and for each other.

Out of the Gender War, Back Into the Real

So it’s not about out‑arguing narcissists, winning the dating market, or abolishing the instinct to absorb oneself in another. It is about remembering who is actually allowed to decide how your life is used.

For the empath, this means:

1. The body as oracle. The nervous system becomes the primary truth‑teller again, not the narratives of the partner, the guru, or the culture. Fear, tightness, freezing, and dissociation are recognised as data, not “overreaction.”

   I learned this first, not in a relationship, but in my own stomach! I realised that each episode of days-long unbearable cramping (much worse than PMS) arrived after I had absorbed something intolerable and then tried to act as if it was fine. I was doing with my body what I had been trained to do with my feelings: swallow, minimise, pretend.

   The way it finally shifted was simple. One day, instead of bracing against the pain and trying to carry on, I lay down and let myself feel it. I stopped pretending it was nothing. I noticed that the pain flared exactly at the moment I was telling myself “it’s fine” when it wasn’t fine at all. So I did the opposite: I admitted to myself, this hurts, this is not okay, and my body is telling the truth. I relaxed into the cramp, breathed into it, and let my whole system acknowledge how not‑fine it all was. The pain unwound. The more I stopped performing okay‑ness, the less the symptom returned.

   That was my first clear experience of the body refusing to collude with the matrix of pretend love and pretend safety. It was as if my stomach was saying, you can keep lying in your mind if you like, but I will not digest it for you. Listening to that “no” in my own gut is the same movement I now recognise when an empath finally stops overriding their nervous system in front of a narcissist, a guru, or a cult. The body knows when something is jagged. It is the first part of us to leave the game.

2. Boundaries as natural law. Saying no is understood as an expression of the law of love, not an attack or a moral failure. Ecosystems do not survive without limits; neither do souls.

3. Re‑centring the soul Self. The narcissist, or the charismatic leader, stops being the axis around which reality spins. They become one node in a much wider web; their evaluations do not determine existence.

For men and women together, returning to soul means stepping out of the war script altogether.

The man who remembers his soul perhaps discovers his worth was never in dominance, but in becoming someone in whose presence others feel freer, not less.

The woman who remembers hers perhaps discovers that safety does not come from proximity to power, but from relationships in which her nervous system does not have to contort itself to survive.

Both begin to recognise how the matrix has been speaking through them, through a drive to control, through an urge to placate, and both become capable of quietly refusing that code.

The impulse to “die into” love and emerge changed is sacred when the beloved is capable of mutuality, honesty and care.

When the beloved is a person, institution or god that demands sacrifice but offers no reciprocal transformation, the same instinct becomes fuel for the Inimical Field.

Love in its true form, love‑in‑action, grounded in soul and body, rooted in Earth and community, steps out of the dimension where the matrix operates. It does not argue with predators, and it does not volunteer as a sacrifice.

Every time an empath refuses to let their longing for love be harvested, every time a person drops the armour around shame and risks real presence, every time someone like Sabina Spielrein is recognised for the thinker she was rather than the erased person they tried to make her, the weave loosens a little.

I am keeping the publication free, because the most important thing to me is that this message reaches the people who need it without a paywall in the way. If you have found something here that resonated, that named something you could not name before, or that made you feel a little less alone in what you perceive, and if you would like to support the work so I can keep doing it, you are very welcome to buy me a coffee. Thank you for reading.

Buy Me a Coffee

“On this pivotal day when Silas lost connection with his mother time tree, darkness, finally, awakened fully. After aeons of patient calculation, it had discovered the weakness needed to subdue the freedom spirit. The darkness was now ready to offer Homo sapiens, just what they sought - and it was ready, with wide open doors and glowing neon signs to usher them into its carnival.”

~ Mother Time Tree

This essay expands the Shame pillar from my earlier piece What if the Matrix is Perpetuated by People Who Speak on the Matrix? and draws on our recent piece Bliss from a Guru is Not Proof of Truth.

Empaths, psychics, idealists and people who were told they were too sensitive their whole lives, hear a loop of response from the outside world, perhaps even feeling like they are stuck in a loop.

“My parents never believed me.” “Everyone says I’m overreacting.” “I feel like I’m going insane when I talk about what I actually experience.” Different lives, different details, the same suffering underneath.

People who feel everything, who notice too much, who had strange encounters as children and grew up being called liars, fantasists or mentally unstable.

I don’t think it is random.

The “not-believed” wound is one of those main mechanisms through which an adaptive matrix parasite, the non-organic mind-field I described in my earlier writing, keeps psychically sensitive people from becoming who they were born to be.

Born into shame or to parents who cannot feel

I have argued in my short online book that Earth and/or the Moon is not the prison in the way other matrix theorists have suggested.

The matrix is the multi-layered web of trauma, hierarchy and broken natural law of love that sits over Earth like a film. I argue that it is a self-replicating adaptive parasite programme that is the way that extradimensional beings are able to shape beliefs and cause deceptive harm to humans.

This web arrives in a child’s life through parents and caregivers who are already disconnected from empathy, soul and a felt sense of love, usually because the same disconnection was done to them.

This is how it tends to look in practice:

• A child senses something in a room and is mocked for it. “You’re being dramatic.”

• A child reports a presence, a dream, a precognitive event and the family responds with fear or contempt.

• A child who absorbs the emotions of everyone around them is told they are too sensitive, that they need to toughen up, that the world does not work the way they think it does.

If you are born with extra channels open, if you feel other people’s emotional states like changes in weather, if you sense the quality of a space or person before any words are spoken, then every genuine perception becomes a liability. You learn very early that telling the truth about your inner world can cost you safety and belonging.

In the boundary-condition model I have outlined in the book, this is how manufactured consent operates.

A child cannot give meaningful consent to anything. Yet each time a sensitive child suppresses what they perceive in order to be loved, a small permission is extracted from their nervous system in favour of the parasitic field. The shame this produces is of a particular in quality. It is not the shame of having done something wrong.

It is the shame of perceiving wrongly, of being constructed incorrectly, of having a relationship to reality that is itself a problem. That is a very specific kind of exile.

Repeated over years, this dynamic produces what I am calling the not-heard and not-believed wound. It is assembled from thousands of small moments.

“You’re imagining it.”

“That never happened.”

“Nobody else feels that way.”

“You need to stop living in your head.”

“People will think you’re crazy if you talk like that.”

Psychology research on chronic gaslighting documents this process. When your perception is routinely denied, you begin to doubt your own senses, withdraw from support, and become increasingly dependent on external authorities to tell you what is real. That is the clinical description of what I am describing as the parasitic overwrite: the field does not need to force anything.

It simply creates conditions in which you hand over the authorship of your own reality.​ Which as a person raised in cults, I have broken free of myself.

Researcher Kelly Chase has explored this territory from the angle of trauma and anomalous experience. Trauma, she argues, does not simply hurt. It also reorganises the structures through which we make meaning of our lives: who we trust, what we believe is possible, and how much authority we grant to our own perception versus the perception of others. When those structures are destabilised, belief becomes malleable. And malleable belief is the condition that makes a person susceptible to anyone who steps in to re-author their reality, whether that is a narcissistic parent, a cult leader, or a government disclosure narrative.

Shame links into pride, the pillar I have previously identified as one of four primary hacking points of the matrix.

Pride says, “I cannot be fooled. I hold the truth. I’m also Jesus 2.0 by the way.”

Shame says, “I must be wrong. I am bad/not good enough. I cannot trust what I see (or feel). Authorities know better than I do.”

They are linked - too much shame can cause so much burning pain that a person can no longer face oneself as one is, due to all the judgements (outer and inner), and then that person clings to pride as protection so that pride replaces the shame.

Both pull us away from the grounded, middle ground that says, “I am seeing something. I could be wrong in my interpretation. The perception itself is not a sin.”

That is primary in not being able to see clearly. The matrix hacks any weakness in the mind.

If you’ve been rejected your whole life for being yourself, and you are alone - then you hear a voice that finally tells you that you matter, that you are special, that you have a great ‘mission,’ its hacking this weakness. (By the way you are all that ‘matters’, but the idea is that we can perceive that for ourselves without depending on a voice.)

And when the not-believed wound is deep enough, almost anything becomes bearable if it comes packaged with the sentence: “You are not crazy. I believe you.” That’s where abusive cults can come in.

The strange amnesia of this western culture

For most of human history, across almost every known culture, it was simply assumed that an unseen dimension of reality exists and that human beings can sometimes perceive and interact with it. Ancient Mesopotamian, Greek and Chinese traditions documented relationships with ancestor spirits and ghosts as a central part of religious and domestic life. Abrahamic traditions are saturated with angels, jinn, the Holy Spirit and demonic presences. Sufi, Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist cosmologies describe subtle realms, non-visible beings and forms of perception that extend well beyond the ordinary senses. Indigenous and shamanic traditions across every continent treat communication with the unseen as a practical, necessary and ethically demanding skill. The idea of non-physical beings interacting with the human world appears in essentially every society for which records exist. Guardian beings in some form, from Zoroastrian Amesha Spentas to Eastern ancestral spirits, are a consistent feature of how humans have understood their place in the world.

You could be punished historically for relating to the wrong spirits or outside authorised religious structures. You could be burned as a witch or condemned as a heretic. But the foundational premise, that the unseen exists and that some people perceive it more acutely than others, was a theological and political one. Now it is very, very recently a mental health concern. And now the jaws of the mental health industry eagerly await to plug us with pharmaceuticals that can lock us into further loops.

In modern Western industrial society, we have performed a strange trick on ourselves. We still officially believe in angels and demons, jinn and saints. Our entertainment is saturated with ghosts, psychics, alien intelligences and paranormal phenomena. Billions of people pray daily, report visions, feel presences, and describe dreams they cannot explain.

And yet to say plainly in daylight conversation, “I see things that others do not see” or “I felt a presence in that room” is enough to be quietly filed under unstable. It is the modern day Emperor’s New Clothes story in full realisation, is it not?

This is historically peculiar, isn’t it? If almost every culture for thousands of years took the unseen seriously in some form, and one narrow slice of recent industrial history decided that perceiving it signals disorder. The question worth asking is who benefits from that consensus?

You might still be wrong in how you interpret what you experience. But the experience itself, the perception of more than the agreed-upon material layer, is not evidence of illness.

From the perspective of the adaptive matrix, this cultural amnesia is a very practical arrangement. When a society treats perception of the unseen as pathology:

• People who genuinely access other layers of reality are isolated, shamed or medicated before they can integrate or understand what they perceive.

• Conversation about entities, fields and parasitic dynamics is pre-emptively discredited as superstition or psychosis.

• The actual dynamics continue to operate without scrutiny, precisely because the people most likely to perceive them have been rendered unreliable.

What better operational strategy than to discredit the witnesses in advance? Well, it had thousands of years to adapt and learn.

By the way, I am suggesting ways to break free of this matrix in my short book, but it’s not the topic of this essay. The idea is that if you can decouple yourself from the manufactured consent loops, then they cannot hurt you or mess with your belief-making tool. I would not talk about this unless I felt I had a working solution.

Cults as counterfeit medicine

In my recent piece on bliss, gurus and what anti-cult organisations will not say, I traced how artificially induced kundalini and high-strangeness experiences are used to bind people to abusive leaders (I know because it happened to me for 13 years).

The pattern is consistent: a guru or group engineers body-level experiences of bliss, love and expansion, those states are then framed as proof of the leader’s divinity or the group’s special access to truth, and lives are reorganised around the source of those states.

Research on psychedelics and belief transmission documents a related mechanism: powerful altered states lower critical evaluation and create conditions in which new belief systems can be rapidly installed, particularly when the environment has been carefully curated to guide interpretation. Gurus who engineer energy events operate in the same territory without the chemical shortcut. The experience does the doctrinal work.

Survivors of cult communities have described both the ecstatic states and the abuse that coexisted with them. One report from a woman raised inside the ashrams details how children were sexualised and coerced under a philosophy that presented this as liberation. The gap between the bliss on offer and the harm being enacted is structural.

The matrix and the controllers offer counterfeit medicine to psychic and spiritual people (that I say they prefer to target), something that partially resembles healing, that addresses a genuine need, and that extracts a price in exchange.

Now place someone with a lifelong not-believed wound inside that environment.

They spent their childhood being told their experiences were unreal, shameful or dangerous.

They learned that their inner world was a liability. They may have found language for their experiences in spiritual books or online communities, but no actual relational field existed that could hold the reality of what they had lived through.

Then they encounter a teacher or group where someone looks at them and says, “You have always been sensitive. You see things others cannot see. Your family never understood you. We are your family now.”

The body registers this as something it has waited years to hear. The cult then offers validation across several registers at once:

• The buzzing in their spine or chakra points is given a cosmology: kundalini, activation, and awakening.

• Their social difficulty is reframed as evidence of being ahead of the curve. To be made special or to have some semblance of love when you’ve never had it before! Of course, the person will go for it.

On top of this, the group engineers states of bliss, energy and belonging through breathwork, music, physical proximity or entity-mediated experience. These states are tagged in the nervous system as homecoming. From outside the situation, people ask how anyone could not see through it. From inside, it is the first time in their life that the words “you are not crazy, what you felt was real” have ever been spoken to them. Plus, now they have the belonging that they never had - or so it seems. To leave the cult would also mean to leave the belonging that they cannot find elsewhere. Perhaps they even unconsciously choose psychic control over being alone. I know people who have done this.

I truly find this whole process tremendously grieving, and my desire is to help create a new ‘belonging’ beyond cults where we validate these psychic experiences, and where there is also no longer fear of psychic attacks because we have learnt how to become immune.

Trauma as a lever

Researcher and writer Kelly Chase, whose Substack sits at the intersection of UFO/UAP phenomena, consciousness and inner life, has written directly on the relationship between trauma and anomalous experience, and her analysis illuminates how this trap is structured.

Chase argues that trauma destabilises the meaning-structures through which we organise experience: our assumptions about safety, about who holds authority, about what is real and what is possible.

That destabilisation leaves a gap in which new ‘meaning’ can be inserted by whoever arrives next with a coherent story.

She also documents how this mechanism has been deliberately exploited by human institutions, particularly through programs like MKULTRA, which systematically used trauma-like states, including disorientation, sensory deprivation, sleep disruption and psychological stress to render belief and identity more malleable and programmable.

This gives the matrix argument historical grounding. The idea that psychic destabilisation creates access to a person’s belief structures is documented in CIA policy.

Chase explores how anomalous experiences themselves can function as a lever in a related way.

Contact, high-strangeness events often arrive at moments of emotional or existential rupture, and they force a reorganisation of meaning in the same way trauma does. For some people, this reorganisation opens genuine capacities. She discusses cases like Tom Matte, whose anomalous brain states, verified by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, correlated with new cognitive abilities that appeared after a transformative and traumatic experience.

For others, the rupture creates a window through which another author, human or otherwise, steps in to provide the new framework.

That is why the inimical field of jagged harvest theory says that boundary conditions need to be created through trauma or other consent loops before consent can be manufactured in this way for psychic energy extraction.

Perhaps that’s the reason trauma is cultivated - so that the person’s brain becomes ‘malleable’ to belief change, so that the emotions can be captured in a loop. Its possible that making the person (especially a child) more psychic can make the person even more open to belief change/consent manufacture.

It’s why I am saying it’s not all emotional energy that is extracted, as the idea of ‘loosh’ says, and that Earth is not a psychic energy farm - it’s got nothing to do with the Earth originally. We actually need the Earth to heal and to be our true selves.

And that is why we do not need to be afraid and hopeless, because you can escape it by understanding the tricks and withdrawing consent.

Chase has said that the UAP story is finally revealing itself as a story about consciousness, about how powerful human beings truly are, about the spark of the divine that each person carries. We are powerful because it shows us how our beliefs create our reality. But if we are tricked into creating wrong beliefs, then we can be forced to create the wrong things. Voilà - behold the mess of human civilisation.

From that vantage point, the people whose consciousness is already porous, whose channels are already open, whose nervous systems already register more than the material consensus permits, are the heart of the disclosure conversation.

Which is why the question of who validates their experience, and on what terms, is central.

Disclosure: whose story of the unseen gets to win?

In 2024 and 2025, the US Congress held multiple hearings on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), with military whistleblowers testifying about encounters with craft exhibiting capabilities beyond known technology and lawmakers calling for transparency and whistleblower protections. Media coverage shifted from ridicule to cautious institutional seriousness.

When institutions begin to acknowledge that something is there, they are positioning themselves as the authorised narrators of the unidentified flying objects and the unseen.

And for people whose lives have been shaped by direct experience with non-ordinary reality, that positioning carries an old familiar weight.

For decades, people who reported contact experiences, saw craft, or described entity encounters were treated as unstable, deluded or attention-seeking. If they were already psychic or sensitive, the damage doubled: not only were they shamed in their families and communities, they were mocked by the culture at large.

Now, as that culture begins cautiously acknowledging that something is there after all, a gap opens. In February 2026, the U.S. President directed government agencies to begin identifying and releasing classified files related to UFOs/UAPs.

The questions worth holding are:

• Which experiences will still be filtered out because they do not fit the new authorised script?

• How many sensitives will find that the mainstream now believes in UAPs, but still not in their specific experience, their specific contact?

Decades of gaslighting forced sensitives into marginal subcultures and cultic spaces to find any validation at all. Now, a relief is on offer: the official acknowledgement that something is real.

That relief is the kind of belief-lever Chase identifies. It can be used to steer perception toward new dependencies on expert interpretation, new security-state narratives about who the intelligences are and what humanity should do about them.

Where anti-cult work still fails sensitives

Resources on cults and spiritual abuse have become more sophisticated in recent years. The ICSA and others have documented how high-control groups use psychological coercion, isolation and information control to maintain authority. What the literature still tends to avoid is the energetic and phenomenological reality that kept many people in those groups. The bliss was real. The entities were real.

I grew up around a wall of adults who heard or felt things in unseen realms. The cult I was raised in had a leader who was entirely convinced the messages in his mind were telling him the truth. We used to sit around him and occasionally ask ‘it’ questions. I am not dignifying this entity with the word ‘master,’ because one could say I am particularly angry with it, with the betrayal of it all. As a child, I assumed it was all correct, because what else can a child do?

The passing of time has shown the prophecies of this leader to be false, even though the leader himself died still utterly convinced. This experience shapes what I am saying, really. It shapes my determination to learn how not to be deceived in the same way.

Chase’s work suggests taking the structure of the experience seriously, the entities, the energy, the visions, the expanded states, while simultaneously asking what framework was placed around those experiences, who benefited from that framing, and whether the downstream effects increased or decreased a person’s capacity for love, accountability and genuine relationship.

When put to the test, the cult members I grew up with did not work to ‘seal the door to evil’ as their Great Invocation apparently says to do. They did not actively work to block the infiltration of an even more dangerous cult leader into their ranks, when I told them of his abuse. I have told this story elsewhere.

If the cult group leaders I grew up with had actually learned true love that moves someone to act in accordance with it, they would not have taken this nonaction.

In the end, they subscribe to very nice ideas, but not to love in action. They adhered to whatever they thought they had been told to do rather than to their own hearts.

The natural law of love (in intention and action, not words or performative morality) asks practical questions:

• After contact with this teacher, group or entity, were children and vulnerable people more protected, or more expendable?

• Were you more grounded in your body and in Earth, or more dissociated and dependent on the next hit of ‘high-strangeness’?

If the answer falls consistently in the second half of those questions, the experience belongs to the deceptive matrix, regardless of how luminous it felt.

An example. When the witch doctors of Uganda speak to spirits that say they need to sacrifice children in order to gain wealth or protection benefits for clients (yes, this happens in the modern day), this is the deceptive matrix that has possessed those witch doctors and their clients. But it is the matrix taking a different form than the one I was raised in. I was raised in a trap specifically designed for intelligent, well-meaning, spiritually developed people. This is why I call it an adaptive parasite.

The witch doctors and their clients are influenced by the form of the matrix that takes advantage of poverty and desperation. (The people I was raised with could not have been trapped that way, so a different strategy was adopted for them.)

The Wendigo indeed is remembered in cultural history as created in times of desperation and when the law of love is tested and fails. In the book, I’ve spoken about how the Algonquian stories tell us that Wendigo was created during times of famine and also that the solution was to reabsorb the Wendingo back into ‘family’ and right relation in order to melt its ‘icy heart’, and I have offered interpretations of what that means for a world solution.

It is time to hear psychic people

From sacrificial religion to new age ascension narratives, from overt domination to spiritualised gaslighting, and now into the language of non-human intelligence, anomalous phenomena and national security, in every iteration, the people with the most open channels are targeted first, because they are the ones most likely to perceive the field and most vulnerable to having that perception captured.

Believing the subjective experience of psychic people properly is a form of resistance.

It means taking the structure of their experience seriously without immediately installing a new interpretation on top of it. It means refusing to gaslight the body.

The empaths, psychics, sensitives and contactees who have been dismissed, pathologised and captured for generations are the people whose discernment, whose grounded psychic capacity, whose ability to test experience against love in action rather than against excitement, matters most right now.

In practice, this would look like:

• Parents who receive a child’s strange experience with curiosity instead of shame, and who then, because of the lessons we have learned in the massive revelation of abusive spiritual leaders, teach discernment rather than suppression.

• Therapists and healers who can hold spiritual and energetic realities without turning them into doctrine or dismissing them as delusion. For example, the great .

• Ex-cult communities that validate the energy and phenomenological experiences that kept people inside, while clearly naming how those experiences were framed and exploited.

• Disclosure discourse that makes room for contactees, psychics and sensitives as primary witnesses.

For the western mainstream to hear psychic people is to interrupt a very old loop of shame and predation, and to refuse its newest version as disclosure rolls out.

It is to say: “yes, you saw something, yes, you felt something, your nervous system is not the problem, and now let us test every voice and every vision, human or non-human, against the only standard that has ever reliably held: does this end up serving love in action? Does it protect the vulnerable? Does it return you to a reciprocal relationship, to accountability? Does it end up making you more free?”

I believe that humans were always ‘designed’ to talk to the spirit world. Perhaps 7,000 years ago and further back, we had a sole relationship to the ancestral world and to land-based spirits of our home. Our entire existence revolved around the perceptions of sensitives. Maybe all humans used to be sensitives without matrix interference, but it has been trained out of them. I am psychic to some extent, but once I met a friend whom I had known since we were toddlers. He reminisced with me about how, as a three-year-old, I saw light orbs floating around me and told him about it, but I do not remember it at all. Maybe we are all like this in our own ways. Perhaps there is something you saw, as a baby, as well, but you do not remember. It would be wonderful if we could return our children to such an original state.

In my general work, I am positing the idea that this relationship/original state was hijacked and counterfeit spirits took their place (but like the Wendigo idea - human civilisation participated in its creation and, likewise, we can undo it), and this is how human sacrifice and human slavery began, because somehow they were able to detach humans from the source of ‘knowing’ about love in their own hearts and soul.

How else could a person think they are being ‘blessed’ by torturing a baby, as happens in Uganda? (I am concentrating on Uganda because we have concrete proof, but you know this has a much wider application!)

Only someone completely and utterly disconnected from themselves could think that.

So many of us know that something is deeply wrong, as if we are on the wrong planet, and we are searching to return home. I am saying we are on the right planet; it’s just that there is an artificial computer-like field code in the way of humanity’s capacity to plug into Mother Earth… to hear the messages of birds, to know the feelings of caterpillars, to know when a message from the dreaming ‘irrupts,’ to see little spirit creatures tending to flowers, to hear the thumping presence inside a rock or a water hole.

When sensitive people are believed and taught to root their gifts the way the old Earth-based traditions originally intended, rather than in hunger for validation, they go a long way towards stopping being available to be harvested by unseen presences.

They become what they were always supposed to be: custodians of perception, witnesses to what is actually happening, and very inconvenient presences for anything that deceives and feeds on us in the dark.

I am keeping the publication free, because the most important thing to me is that this message reaches the people who need it without a paywall in the way. If you have found something here that resonated, that named something you could not name before, or that made you feel a little less alone in what you perceive, and if you would like to support the work so I can keep doing it, you are very welcome to buy me a coffee. Thank you for reading.

Buy Me a Coffee

What if one of the main reasons people give themselves over to abusive gurus is the very thing anti-cult organisations are least equipped to talk about plainly?

What if the decisive event is often not doctrine, not gradual persuasion, not even group pressure in the first instance, but an experience that feels as if it happened directly in the body and soul? A dream of the guru before commitment. Tears that arrive without permission in darshan. A rush of force through the spine. A collapse into bliss. A certainty in the heart that says, with terrible conviction, this is real.

We are not arguing that the familiar anti-cult explanations are false. Social pressure, dependency, thought reform, cognitive dissonance, and emotional manipulation all matter. We are arguing that the public models most people are given still leave out a crucial part of the story. They do not centre the experiences that many devotees themselves describe as the turning point. They often describe the trap after it has already taken hold. They say much less about the moment the door opened.

What the research does explain

Researchers of charisma, darshan, and new religious movements have given us a language for part of what happens around gurus. Anthropologists and sociologists describe ritual atmospheres in which powerful emotions move through groups and reshape the inner lives of followers. They analyse darshan as a relational encounter in which the devotee sees and is seen by a sacred presence, a moment that can provoke trembling, tears, and profound emotional response.

A UCLA study on darshan and devotional encounter discusses this affective exchange directly. Other scholars describe charisma as embodied, affective, and world-reorganising, something that enters sensation, memory, and perception and changes meaning from the inside. Research in Religions makes this point clearly.

These frameworks explain a great deal. They show how ritual settings amplify feeling, how symbolic authority enters the body, and how collective environments narrow attention and intensify emotion. Anti-cult organisations add another layer. They speak about persuasion, identity reshaping, dependency, isolation, undue influence, and high-control structures. Robert Jay Lifton’s theory of thought reform remains foundational here, with its account of milieu control, confession, sacred science, and ideological restructuring.

Eileen Barker’s work emphasised gradual relational influence and social networks in conversion to new religious movements. ’s Freedom of Mind model continues that emphasis through the BITE framework and related concepts of authoritarian influence.

It clarifies how groups operate and shows how authority stabilises itself. It explains why people can remain entangled long after obvious harm appears.

Yet there is another part of the story that remains oddly under-described, especially in the public explanatory models people are actually given!

The part that remains under-described

We are not claiming that nobody has ever noticed dreams, tears, bliss, or induced energetic experiences around gurus. Scholars of religion have recorded some of them, and devotees themselves speak about them constantly. The recurring experiential categories that followers often place near the centre of their devotion are rarely treated as a primary explanatory category by major anti-cult organisations. Those categories include induced energetic activation, crying in darshan, dream-incursion, obsessive fixation on the guru, and the bodily certainty people describe as knowing in the heart.

This omission is important because these experiences are often the doorway through which devotion forms. The social structure comes later. The doctrine comes later. The rationalisation comes later.

Tears, the dream, the bliss, the trembling, the rush of energy, the collapse into certainty often come first. To make the argument clearly, it helps to separate the pattern into experience categories.

Experience category one: induced energetic activation

Across Hindu, Buddhist, and contemporary spiritual movements, followers repeatedly describe sudden events that they interpret as kundalini awakening or shaktipat. They speak of heat rising through the spine, force moving through the body, involuntary shaking, visions of light, states of bliss, the disappearance of ordinary thought, and after-effects that last for hours or days.

In classical yogic literature, kundalini is usually described as unfolding gradually through disciplined practice, ethical preparation, and sustained training. In many modern guru movements, by contrast, the reports describe abrupt activation in the teacher’s presence, sometimes through touch, gaze, or proximity alone. The event is frequently experienced as proof. Something happened, felt undeniable, and it seemed to exceed ordinary emotion.

LeAnne Robinson’s experience is that during a 2008 meditation weekend with the man who became her guru, she felt her heart crack open, an intense flow of love, and a vivid sense of tasting her “True nature,” which she later described through the metaphor of discovering her inner “Golden Buddha.” She remembers those days as filled with joy, love, excitement, and absolute bliss, accompanied by tears of release and the feeling that she had finally come home to herself.

Return to Anam felt a laser beam of energy in her crown chakra and ajna centre in a way never experienced before during the Kriya Yoga shaktipat initiation. She would also feel powerful energies in the same centres during (supposed) Kali invocations.

Altered states can feel indisputably true while still being shaped by brain processes, culture, and context. Bliss by itself does not guarantee wisdom, discernment, or ethical clarity. A genuine-feeling experience can still become the basis of profound misrecognition when the guru turns out to be abusive.

It helps explain how a powerful experience can be both real at the level of physiology and dangerous at the level of interpretation.

Experience category two: crying in darshan (or elsewhere near the guru)

This is one of the most visible and least honestly discussed categories, but devotional material records it openly.

On the official Sri Sathya Sai site, one devotee says that during a first darshan, they “didn’t even know what the word ‘darshan’ meant,” were “not sure what happens during darshan,” and then found tears rolling down their cheeks as Sai Baba approached. Amma’s followers describe similar states of overwhelming crying, emotional collapse, and joy in her embrace. Osho material records scenes of sobbing, wailing, trembling, and full cathartic breakdown in darshan and meditation settings.

LeAnne Robinson’s experience is that in her early time with her ex-guru and community, she “cried for days with gratitude,” describing tears of release that accompanied a powerful recognition of something sacred within herself that she “didn’t know was there.” For her, those tears became part of the proof that she had awakened to her own divinity, an ecstatic taste of oneness that felt unforgettable and kept her attached to the path long after.

These reactions are usually framed by devotees as meaningful signs that something real has happened. The tears are treated as evidence of love, grace, awakening, purification, or spiritual contact. They are not interpreted as ordinary emotions passing through a person. They become part of the private proof.

When Return to Anam first approached her ex-guru in a darshan as a teenager, her mother had brought her there. Benjamin Creme’s group (the cult she was raised in) had already primed her and his group to believe that certain people, such as Sai Baba, could be ‘avatars’ of God. That is why it was easy for this guru to infiltrate their group also. Her immediate experience was intense crying without being primed, without knowing anything about the guru, and without expecting it.

Crying is often discussed in academic or anti-cult language as emotional contagion, group entrainment, catharsis, or attachment activation. Those explanations may well illuminate part of what is happening. Yet it does not properly explain the actual experiences we have - the experiential force of the moment still needs to be taken seriously, because in the life of the devotee, the tears often become an origin story. No one has called these experiences high-strangeness experiences before, but one could arguably call them so.

We now know from this documentary that Osho has been accused of coercive rape by a few women and enabled a system whereby predatory pedophiles could have free rein on nursery school children.

In Sathya Sai Baba’s case, the same darshan settings that produced tears, trembling, and reports of overwhelming love also sat alongside grave and long‑running allegations of abuse. Critics and former followers have described a pattern of sexual exploitation of boys and young men in private interviews, often framed as “healing” or special blessings, with accounts of genital oiling, coerced sexual contact, and long-term sexual relationships with students and devotees. Multiple testimonies and journalistic investigations collected over decades point to Sai Baba as a serial abuser whose behaviour was shielded by institutional silence and the intense devotion of followers, even as no criminal case was ever brought to trial in India. International bodies took notice: the US State Department issued a travel warning about “inappropriate sexual behaviour by a prominent local religious leader,” and UNESCO withdrew co‑sponsorship of an education conference in Puttaparthi, citing concerns about allegations involving youth and children. For survivors and critics, Sai Baba has become an emblem of how ecstatic darshan, miracle stories, and humanitarian projects can coexist with serious abuse claims, and how powerful experiences of bliss and tears can make it far harder for devotees to acknowledge or leave a harmful system.

It should be mentioned that Return to Anam and LeAnne Robinson’s ex-guru is also gay, and according to people in our former community, he had previously spent time at Sai Baba’s ashram and was later expelled; in their telling, this was framed as competition between gurus. Whether or not that story is literally true, it reflects a pattern in which abusive leaders jockey for spiritual authority rather than care.

Experience category three: dream-incursion

In some movements, the guru enters dream space before full commitment has even formed. On the official Siddha Yoga site, one devotee says that as a child, they dreamed of Baba/Swami Muktananda and, without understanding why, became a pilgrim. Another recounts a dream of Baba Muktananda and Bade Baba beckoning them into a van before they had really entered the path, later interpreting the dream as the moment they were “found”.

When Return to Anam had been recently recruited to the cult as a young person (by her mother), she experienced intense dreams connected to this guru. They were so powerful that they gave her the impression they came from him, and that the dreams were divine. It felt like more than a dream; it seemed as if the dream originated from a higher-dimensional realm, given the ruse's effectiveness. There was one dream where she was trying to run away from a destructive field, damaging her perfect garden, and then there was a feeling of a Godly figure saving her that felt attributed to the guru. These are kinds of powerful forces at work on the subconscious, and almost everyone in her cult has been known to have dream experiences with the guru, especially in the early stages of ‘recruitment.’

The guru no longer remains an external figure encountered only in public ritual. The guru enters the symbolic inner world of the devotee, where images often carry a depth of authority that ordinary persuasion never reaches. A teacher who appears in a dream can acquire an aura of destiny, intimacy, and metaphysical legitimacy long before public doctrine has fully settled into place.

For context, a lawsuit filed in 2023 (reported in 2024) alleges that Swami Muktananda raped and sexually abused numerous women and girls in the 1970s–80s. The complaint claims he “sexually abused and raped dozens of his female followers, both women and girls,” including digital penetration and rape of a 14‑year‑old over many nights.

We are not claiming that anti-cult researchers have never seen dream reports like this; we are saying that dreams are rarely centred as a major explanatory category in public anti-cult models, even though dream-incursions can play a major role in how devotion becomes interiorised. Almost no one has tried to explain how certain abusive gurus are able to cause this effect in the dreamers.

That is why Return to Anam has connected this phenomenon to the one Jacques Vallee and John Keel have spoken about when describing deceptive UFO experiences projected into the minds of the experiencers.

Experience category four: obsessive fixation and life reorganisation

After the initial experience, the emotional centre of gravity often shifts. The teacher becomes the axis around which meaning rotates. In Siddha Yoga materials, devotees describe life-transforming encounters that left them willing to reorder everything around the guru’s presence and significance. In many guru traditions, people speak in similar ways. Nothing else feels as important. Nothing else seems as alive. The teacher becomes the measure of truth, intimacy, destiny, and coherence.

LeAnne Robinson’s experience is that after her first weekend with the guru, she felt “hooked,” convinced she had found her path, and over time reorganised her life around the community, eventually hosting the guru’s emissary in her home and then moving into and running a retreat centre for the group. She describes pouring her savings, emotional energy, and daily labour into serving the organisation, to the point that her own well-being deteriorated while her sense of purpose remained bound to the guru’s mission.

This is the point where what anti-cult frameworks call dependency, identity restructuring, and authoritarian influence undoubtedly become highly relevant. Yet in many followers’ narratives, the later fixation is built on an earlier event that felt revelatory. The devotion does not always begin with obedience. It begins with an experience the person cannot stop orienting around.

Experience category five: heart-certainty

This may be the most important category of all. Followers describe “knowing in the heart” that the guru is real, true, divinely authorised, or uniquely able to save or awaken them. This certainty often survives argument because it was never built primarily on argument. It was built on an event that felt like direct perception.

When certainty relocates from reason to the felt interior of the body, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to unsettle. A person is no longer defending a belief alone. A person is defending what feels like the deepest truth they have ever touched.

LeAnne Robinson’s experience is that the initial awakening with her guru gave her an unshakeable inner knowing that she had tasted her own divinity, which she framed as discovering the “Golden Buddha” within. Even years later, after profound harm and disillusionment, she writes that she still recognises that early taste of oneness as real, and part of her healing has involved reclaiming that heart-certainty as belonging to her own Self rather than to the guru or the group.

Return to Anam was so brainwashed that she completely believed the guru was God himself - that was, until she discovered evidence of no love in action.

That is why later revelations of abuse can be so psychologically devastating. The follower is not only being asked to revise an opinion about a leader. They are being asked to distrust the tears, the dream, the bliss, the trembling, the bodily certainty that once seemed more real than ordinary thought.

Experience category six: Healing as recruitment, proof, and tether

Another experience category that needs to be named far more clearly is healing. In many guru movements, healing does not sit at the edges of devotion. It often functions as one of the main entrances. A person arrives in pain, fear, grief, illness, exhaustion, or existential collapse. Then something happens that feels like relief. The relief may be physical, emotional, energetic, or symbolic. From that point onward, the teacher can become associated with restoration itself.

There is already research showing that healing rituals work through powerful symbolic, social, and emotional processes. In a classic study of spiritual healing groups, D. C. Glik argued that the healing effect depends on the incorporation of explanatory models, social roles, symbols, and ritual processes into a shared environment of meaning. Ted Kaptchuk’s work on ritual and placebo reaches a related conclusion, describing healing rituals as creating a receptive person who becomes highly susceptible to authoritative, culturally sanctioned powers within a charged atmosphere of hope and uncertainty. Research on placebo effects also shows that the social behaviour of the provider can shape physiological outcomes, which means that expectation, authority, and care-signalling can affect the body in measurable ways.

These findings offer one possible explanation for why healing can feel so real in the presence of a guru. A person may genuinely experience relief. Pain may lessen. Anxiety may drop. Bodily symptoms may shift. Grief may loosen. A felt burden may lift. None of that requires fraud at the level of immediate subjective experience. Something may indeed happen. The problem begins when the experience is monopolised by the leader and converted into proof of special authority.

Healing becomes a recruitment technology. The person does not simply think, “I like this teaching.” They think, “This person changed something inside me.” The experience becomes evidence. Devotion then grows around the memory of relief. In practical terms, healing can function in the same way as bliss, tears, or induced energetic activation. It creates a bodily event that later social structures can organise themselves around.

There is older scholarship that points in this direction more directly than people often realise. E. M. Pattison described religious youth cults as “alternative healing social networks,” arguing that such groups can attract distressed people because they provide forms of psychosocial containment and relief that wider society has failed to provide. In other words, joining can feel like being healed before it feels like being recruited.

At the level of mechanism, several explanations are possible at once. One explanation is symbolic and social. The person enters a structured world of meaning in which suffering is named, witnessed, and ritualised. Another is psychophysiological. Intense attention, expectation, safety-signalling, and collective synchrony can alter stress, pain, and autonomic regulation.

Another is placebo in the richest sense of the term, not as “nothing happened,” but as the body responding to belief, care, ritual authority, and context. A further explanation, within Return to Anam’s framework, is that healing may also involve temporary shifts in the wider emotional-attentional field around the person. The guru may appear as a point through which a damaged or fragmented inner life suddenly reorganises. The reorganisation feels like healing. The question then becomes whether the healing is being used to restore sovereignty or to secure attachment to the one who appears to have mediated it.

LeAnne Robinson’s experience is that the early bliss, tears, and sense of freedom she encountered in the guru’s meditation course felt profoundly healing, as if long-standing inner wounds and longings had finally found relief.

Later, when she was spiritually and emotionally unwell after years of service and abuse within the retreat centre, she realised that the same community which had once seemed to heal her had also encouraged her to give away her power, voice, and financial security, binding her sense of restoration to the guru and his emissaries.

She initially interpreted the group as a place of deep healing and liberation, only later recognising that messages of “not serving enough,” “not giving enough,” and “failing tests” had slowly layered over her initial awakening like mud over the Golden Buddha, transforming early relief into a long-term pattern of coercive obligation and self-blame.

So, healing experiences can coexist with later abuse. A person can be helped in one domain and captured in another. A real reduction in pain or fear does not establish the ethical truth of the system that surrounds it.

This is one reason healing stories are so potent within harmful spiritual movements. They give the movement a repertoire of undeniable personal testimony. They also make later critique far harder, because the follower is defending the moment they felt helped, relieved, seen, or restored.

That is why healing needs to be treated as one of the central experience categories in any serious analysis of gurus and cultic devotion. It can be genuine at the level of felt experience and can involve real psychophysiological change. It can even be one of the most persuasive reasons a person joins, yet it can still be absorbed into a larger structure of control.

If anti-cult analysis does not place healing alongside dreams, tears, bliss, fixation, and heart-certainty, it will continue to miss one of the most powerful ways devotion first takes root.

Why does this matter when abuse is revealed?

In movements where serious abuse later comes to light, this whole pattern becomes easier to see. In the case of Sogyal Rinpoche, for example, Rigpa later commissioned an independent investigation after serious complaints emerged, and the findings aligned with grave abuse within the inner circle. Similar tensions run through the histories of other movements in which powerful experiences coexisted with serious allegations or findings of harm.

This is why we resist explanations that make the devotee sound simply gullible, socially needy, or passively manipulated.

Those factors may be present. They often are. Yet many followers are trying to make sense of something metaphysical they experienced as immediate and real.

If we want to understand why abusive gurus gain such enduring influence, we have to understand how the original bond may have been sealed through an event that felt deeper than argument.

LeAnne Robinson’s experience is that when financial exploitation, emotional abuse, and the misconduct of a senior swami became undeniable, she was left questioning whether her own earlier joy and awakening had been an illusion, and spent months or years wondering what she had done “wrong” and why she had “failed the test.” Her later recovery work has involved separating the reality of the harm from the reality of her original experience, so that she can remember her ‘Golden Buddha’ without returning to the system that helped her cover it over.

What anti-cult organisations usually foreground instead

The major anti-cult frameworks we have checked do not centre these experiential categories in their public explanatory models. They discuss undue influence, thought reform, manipulation, fear, isolation, cognitive dissonance, dependency, family rupture, information control, and identity capture. Those are all crucial. They explain much of how high-control systems stabilise themselves.

Yet when followers tell their own stories, it sounds like a moment in which something dramatic occurred in the body or psyche during a darshan, meditation gathering, dream, initiation, or gaze. The later social structures of the movement then organise themselves around that event.

If a person joins chiefly through persuasion, love-bombing, group pressure, and gradual social enclosure, then the anti-cult frameworks already capture the core mechanism.

If, however, the decisive turning point in many cases is an embodied event that feels like revelation, transmission, or inner proof, then the movement is building itself on a deeper and more adhesive metaphysical foundation. The cult group does not simply persuade - it interprets, stabilises, and monopolises an experience that the person already feels cannot be denied, just like the high strangeness experiences collected by Jacques Vallee and John Keel.

Why we care about this question

There were experiences in our own lives that did not feel like things we had simply imagined into being.

We wanted to understand how people could feel what they sincerely experienced as real energy, real spiritual force, real inner events, and still end up entangled with leaders and systems that violated kindness, truth, and love.

That tension is the beginning of our inquiry, and it is one reason we are unsatisfied with explanations that reduce everything to social compliance. Social compliance explains part of the trap. It does not explain the whole of it.

Return to Anam’s working hypothesis: the Inimical Field of Jagged Harvest

Return to Anam has been exploring the idea that some spiritual environments generate an amplified field of attention and emotion, a field that feeds on intensity and instability within the psyche. It has been named the Inimical Field of Jagged Harvest, using that phrase as a model, not as a proven scientific mechanism. It names a recurring pattern. She called it a new name of inimical field instead of ‘loosh’ because she thinks the people who use that word were also partaking in the same cult abuse patterns, and also because loosh does not explain why there seems to be a desire to confuse people so much and shape their beliefs - it does not explain Jacques Vallees and John Keel’s findings.

Within such a field, moments of emotional rupture or energetic activation may be the very events through which authority consolidates itself - by which it manufactures consent for psychic energy to be ‘extracted’.

The experience appears as awakening, transmission, revelation, healing, or divine confirmation. At the same time, it binds the individual more tightly to the structure that produced the conditions for the event. The revelation becomes a tether.

One traditional psychological way of describing this is to say that charismatic environments can make the inner life unusually permeable. Attention narrows. Emotion intensifies. The symbolic presence of the teacher gathers extraordinary weight within the psyche of the group. In such conditions, the boundary between individual experience and collective atmosphere may soften. The follower begins resonating with currents already circulating through the gathering. That explanation has force, yet it still leaves open the question of what exactly is happening when bodily phenomena appear with such force and specificity - that’s what this theory tries to explain.

It is not outside scientific curiosity

This question actually leads toward speculative science, not pseudoscience. It is the legitimate scientific space in which observation comes first and explanatory models lag behind. Science has often begun that way. Phenomena are recorded long before mechanisms are settled.

The existence of unexplained experiential reports does not place them outside scientific curiosity. It means our framework is incomplete.

One area where this becomes interesting is plasma physics. Plasma is often called the fourth state of matter and is the most common form of matter in the visible universe. Stars, lightning, auroras, and many cosmic structures consist of plasma. Unlike solids, liquids, or gases, plasma contains charged particles that interact strongly through electromagnetic fields. Under certain conditions, these interactions produce stable filaments, vortices, and coherent structures.

Some researchers have explored whether plasma systems can display forms of self-organisation that resemble primitive aspects of living systems. It means that matter organised through electromagnetic forces can generate persistent, information-rich structures that change, respond, and maintain coherence.

The human nervous system also operates through electrochemical and electromagnetic processes. Brains are electrical organs. Emotional states and attention correspond with changes in measurable electromagnetic activity. Social interaction affects these states. Collective ritual environments often bring many people into synchrony at the level of breathing, affect, posture, expectation, and attention.

From within that broader scientific landscape, it becomes possible to imagine theoretical models in which highly charged emotional and attentional environments influence participants through mechanisms that involve more than ordinary conversation or suggestion.

A charismatic leader surrounded by intense collective focus could function as a central organising point within such a field. The experiences described by followers might then emerge through interactions among neurological processes, emotional resonance, social synchrony, and electromagnetic coupling within the group environment.

This remains speculative. No established scientific theory currently explains kundalini experiences, darshan tears, dream-incursions, or heart-certainty in these terms. Still, the question itself does not lie outside scientific possibility.

Massimo Teodorani’s work

Italian astrophysicist Massimo Teodorani has studied unusual luminous plasma phenomena in the atmosphere and has explored whether certain plasma structures may display organised, responsive behaviours resembling primitive life-like processes. He is exploring the possibility that under some conditions, plasma can form coherent, information-rich structures within electromagnetic environments. A general overview appears here.

The physical universe already contains forms of matter capable of surprising organisation through electromagnetic forces. Human brains and nervous systems already operate through electrical activity and measurable fields. Collective emotional environments already alter physiology, perception, and cognition.

Given those facts, the possibility that some charismatic spiritual environments involve interactions we do not yet know how to map scientifically cannot simply be dismissed as impossible!

Bliss does not prove truth

Bliss, tears, visions, energetic activation, and heart-certainty may all be real experiences at the level of physiology and subjectivity while still failing to prove the ethical or metaphysical truth of the leader associated with them.

Altered states can flood a person with certainty while short-circuiting critical discernment, producing a loyalty loop in which the experience itself becomes the glue that holds the system together. Anti-cult frameworks need to take these experiences much more seriously because they are often the hinge on which devotion turns.

If a follower cries uncontrollably before they understand, dreams of the guru before commitment, experiences a surge of energy or feels they are in bliss before doctrine has fully settled, and then comes away with an unshakeable feeling of knowing in the heart that this is true, the movement has gained something far more powerful than agreement.

It has gained a private revelation installed inside the person’s own body and imagination! From there, later abuse can be rationalised, split off, or endured for astonishing lengths of time because the original bond was sealed below the level of ordinary argument.

The doorway the mainstream keeps refusing to name

That is why we believe this dimension deserves much more attention than it usually receives. The anti-cult organisations are not wrong about manipulation, undue influence, and social control, but their models remain incomplete when they fail to centre the embodied experiences that followers themselves often describe as decisive.

Those experiences may turn out to be explainable through psychology, trauma physiology, social synchrony, or future science. They may also force us to widen our scientific imagination. Either way, they cannot be responsibly ignored.

If we want to understand why abusive gurus gain such enduring power, we have to look much more closely at the high strangeness experiences of tears, the dreams, the bliss, the fixation, and the inner certainty that followers describe.

Until we are willing to speak clearly about that, we will not free ourselves from abusive and manipulative gurus that also have metaphysical ‘powers’.

As a final disclaimer note, I (Return to Anam) want to affirm that there is NO SHAME in this. There is no weakness in admitting this process. This is a trap that happens to intelligent and spiritually advanced people - it was designed specifically for them! It was designed to pull them off the ladder to God. The idea that this is a weakness is a stigma we must remove; it will block a clear view of what is happening.

This is not to say that all spiritual awakening is negative; we are saying that induced kundalini movements by abusive gurus are manipulations of your energy body, when it is only you who should be moving your own energy.

If this essay spoke to something you have witnessed, lived through, or been trying to articulate for years, share it with someone who needs a language for experiences that conventional anti-cult discourse still struggles to hold.

We are trying to build a more honest framework, one that takes lived psychic experience seriously without surrendering ethics, discernment, or logic.

That means staying open to complexity, refusing false consolations, and continuing to ask what kind of force can produce bliss, tears, dreams, and certainty in the service of systems that later reveal themselves to be cruel!

Have you had a similar experience? Please let us know in the comments or in the Subscriber chat.

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And perhaps, beside the wonder, another knowledge began to stir.

You saw corruption where there should have been care. You saw spiritual teachers speak of love while harming people. You saw communities talk about awakening while silencing victims. You saw hierarchy, grooming, narcissism, financial extraction, sexual exploitation, child harm, secrecy, and a subtle pressure to lay down your own discernment in the name of surrender. You may have left a teacher, group, relationship, ideology, or entire map of reality feeling as if the ground had tilted beneath you.

Return to Anam was born in that tilted place.

This publication is a survivor-research project about spiritual abuse, cultic capture, anomalous experience, altered states, ancient warnings, false authority, and the slow recovery of discernment. It is also about return: return to the body, to Earth, to conscience, to ordinary love, to grief, to time, to direct perception, and to forms of community that do not require a single radiant centre to interpret reality for everyone else.

The question at the root of all my work is simple to state and difficult to live:

How can something feel spiritually real, powerful, beautiful, or even blissful, while still leading a person into confusion, dependency, self-betrayal, or control?

I did not come to that question as a detached observer. I came to it through my own life. I was raised inside spiritual cult systems. One was shaped by a channelled “Maitreya” figure and a hierarchy of hidden Masters. Later, through my mother, I encountered the cultofagodman, where followers believed the guru was divine and where powerful emotional and energetic experiences were treated as signs of his spiritual legitimacy.

For a long time, the hardest thing to admit was that the experiences were not simply nothing. I could not honestly say that everything was fake, imaginary, or only social pressure, because that did not match what I had lived through. There were real bodily events, real altered states, real emotional openings, real moments of intensity. The wound was in the interpretation placed around them.

The experience may be real. The interpretation may still be the trap.

A dream can be real at the level of experience. A rush of energy can be real in the body. A synchronicity can feel meaningful. A healing state can happen. A mystical opening can change a life. None of these things prove that the teacher, entity, group, doctrine, channel, ideology, or “mission” attached to the experience is truthful, benevolent, ethical, or worthy of obedience.

Many harmful spiritual systems depend on the collapse of that distinction. They teach people to confuse intensity with truth, bliss with goodness, charisma with wisdom, surrender with love, altered states with moral authority, and beauty with evidence. In my writing, I investigate the repeating architecture beneath those confusions.

You will find work here on spiritual abuse and cult dynamics across churches, yoga communities, Buddhist groups, Hindu guru movements, New Age networks, and other high-demand spiritual settings. You will also find work on altered states and energy phenomena, especially the uncomfortable question of how genuine mystical or energetic experiences can coexist with ethical collapse. I write about UFO and high-strangeness deception research, drawing on the questions raised by Jacques Vallée, John Keel, and others, while also refusing to let that field become another theatre of disembodiment. I draw on ancient religious warnings about pride, counterfeit illumination, deceptive entities, possession, false channels, and spiritual delusion, including material from the Surangama Sutra, Orthodox prelest, Sufism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, Vedic sources, folklore, and other traditions. I also write about hierarchy, shame, scarcity, narcissism, cognitive capture, and the way spiritual systems can become self-protecting parasites when they lose contact with love.

The danger I am tracing is not Earth. It is not the body. It is not nature. It is not incarnation. The danger is the corruption of discernment through pride, hierarchy, trauma, altered-state authority without accountability, and broken relationship wearing the mask of revelation.

Why I write

My research began as a personal necessity. I needed to understand how intense altered-state experiences and real energy phenomena could coexist with grooming, denial, abuse, and collapse of conscience.

I was raised inside the world of Benjamin Creme’s Maitreya movement, where adults believed in a coming World Teacher, cosmic hierarchy, telepathic revelation, transmission meditation, and hidden Masters guiding humanity. My childhood world contained Share International material, Alice Bailey books, and the belief that a divine figure would soon reveal himself to the world. I have written about that background here:

Growing up as a child in Benjamin Creme’s Maitreya Cult

That group was not outwardly abusive in the crude sense. That is part of its importance. Harm does not always begin with obvious cruelty. Sometimes it begins when a child is placed inside a totalising spiritual map before she has the psychological defences to question it. Sometimes it begins when adults outsource reality to unseen authorities and pass that enclosure to their children as truth.

Later, my mother introduced me to Paramahamsa Vishwananda and the Bhakti Marga world. There, the problem became sharper. I encountered a devotional system in which followers believed the guru was divine, and where powerful emotional and energetic experiences were treated as proof of that divinity. I have written about that here:

The cult my mother introduced me to.

The question that followed me from that world was not whether people could feel something. They could. The question was how a real-feeling current could become a chain.

Begin here: the core essays

1. The real Matrix and the Goddess memory

Read this first if you are questioning matrix, prison-planet, loosh, Gurdjieff, Castaneda, or escape-Earth narratives.

What if the matrix is perpetuated by people who speak on the matrix? The ancient Goddess tradition remembers the reality
https://rightsforrainbows.substack.com/p/what-if-the-matrix-is-perpetuated

This long-form booklet challenges the idea that Earth herself is the trap. It argues that the deepest Matrix is an overlay of trauma, hierarchy, shame, scarcity, pride, mind-parasite patterns, and broken relationship that has covered an older Earth-honouring, goddess-centred orientation. It weaves archaeology, ancient DNA, goddess studies, wetiko, Gnosticism, UFO research, cognitive science, and spiritual abuse analysis into one frame.

Begin with Before the Sacrifices for the deep-time story of ritual, goddess cultures, Old Europe, and the possibility of long ages of symbolic life before sacrificial domination hardened into religious infrastructure. Move next to The Mind-Virus of Predatory Control, where I explore wetiko, Yaldabaoth, counterfeit spirit, and systems that can operate outside ordinary time while remaining outside love. The Moon: From Life Source to Energy Thief looks at how moon-as-machine and loosh narratives invert older lunar reverence and sever people from cyclical, embodied time. When Exposing the Trap Is the Trap examines Castaneda, Scientology, and other movements that claim to expose control while recreating authoritarian structures. The Four Pillars traces hierarchy, shame, scarcity, and cognitive capture as the conditions in which the overlay becomes socially stable. The final movement, Reasserting the Divine Feminine and the Real Matrix, returns to Earth as living matrix, pride as an entry point, and right relationship as the antidote.

2. Spiritual abuse, 4D / 5D narratives, and the shadow side of ascension

Read this first if you left, escaped, or are still trying to understand a spiritual community.

No, we’re not going to 4D or 5D in the way you think: Unmasking the ancient warnings we have forgotten
https://rightsforrainbows.substack.com/p/no-were-not-going-to-4d-or-5d-in-the-way-you-think-ignoring-spiritual-abuse-is-in-our-way-a7d4fd8d043f

This essay argues that no meaningful evolution is taking place while spiritual communities ignore the suffering in their own houses. It looks at harm across Catholic, yoga, Buddhist, Hindu, New Age, and other environments, and asks why sincere seekers so often defend abusive leaders.

The section The Suffering Children of Cults gathers survivor accounts and the hidden cost paid by children inside spiritual communities. The Believers Who Won’t Believe looks at cognitive dissonance, sunk cost, identity fusion, and the strange ferocity with which intelligent people defend systems that harm them. The Ancient Warnings We’ve Forgotten tours cross-tradition warnings about false light, spirits impersonating the good, powers that flatter the ego, and the Surangama Sutra’s warnings about practitioners who mistake altered states for sagehood. A Working Hypothesis for How Abusive Gurus Are Made offers a model of how altered-state ability, trauma, ego, charisma, and predatory influence may interact. The Path Forward proposes guardrails for healthier spiritual life: transparency, de-glamorising siddhis, trauma-informed practice, ethical accountability, and real protection of the vulnerable.

3. Bliss, energy, darshan, and the missing part of anti-cult analysis

Read this if you have ever thought: the energy was real, the bliss was real, the healing was real. Surely that means something?

Bliss from a guru is not proof of truth
https://rightsforrainbows.substack.com/p/what-the-anti-cult-orgs-will-not

This is one of the central pieces in my current work. It argues that anti-cult models often explain social pressure, dependency, ideology, thought reform, and coercive control, while still leaving underdescribed the experiences devotees themselves often cite as decisive: bliss, tears, energetic activation, dream-incursion, obsessive fixation, and the body-level certainty that something sacred has happened.

My position is more uncomfortable than simple debunking. An experience can be real in the body and still become the basis of profound misrecognition. A person can feel grace and still misidentify its source. A person can feel energy and still give authority to a corrupt interpretation. A person can be opened and captured in the same movement.

Intensity is not proof.

4. Ancient warnings: prelest, false light, and counterfeit illumination

Read this if you want to understand why older traditions may have preserved psychological warnings modern spiritual culture has forgotten.

The Orthodox Christian teachers of prelest were proven right by my life in a cult
https://rightsforrainbows.substack.com/p/the-orthodox-christian-teachers-of

The most dangerous spiritual teachers often arrive clothed in radiance.

This essay uses the Orthodox Christian concept of prelest, spiritual delusion, to explore how pride, visions, powers, altered states, and experiences of light can pull a practitioner away from humility, conscience, and love. I connect this to my own life in a guru movement, where positive energy experiences were treated as evidence of divine status.

This piece belongs to a wider line of inquiry into traditions that warned about counterfeit spiritual states long before wellness culture stripped mystery of danger. Buddhism, Islam, Sufism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, Vedic sources, and folklore all preserve warnings that modern people often dismiss until their own lives prove them necessary.

5. Islam, Sufism, spiritual abuse, and the Matrix of illusion

Read this if you are interested in how Islamic and Sufi traditions approach ego, deception, spiritual authority, women, abuse, and the misuse of religious power.

What Islam and Sufism Have Always Known About Spiritual Abuse and the Matrix of Illusion
https://rightsforrainbows.substack.com/p/what-islam-and-sufism-have-always

This essay explores Sufi warnings about the nafs, spiritual deception, false authority, and the hijacking of love by power. It begins with Rābiʿa al-Basra and the radical idea that worship rooted in fear, reward, or coercion has not yet become love. It also asks how a tradition with powerful early female mystics became, in many of its historical forms, another site of women’s subordination and spiritual abuse.

6. Earth, embodiment, and the knowledge we lost

Read this if modern spirituality has ever felt abstract, ungrounded, anti-body, or hostile to Earth.

What did they know that we no longer know? Aboriginal Gnosis
https://rightsforrainbows.substack.com/p/what-did-they-know-that-we-no-longer

This essay begins with my lifelong struggle around being called “ungrounded” and moves into Aboriginal deep listening, Earth-based intelligence, and the possibility that the land itself can help straighten corrupt spirituality out.

A major shift in my work has been the recognition that embodiment is not a lesser state. The body is not an obstacle. The Earth is not an obstacle. Direct relationship with the living world is one of the routes out of the overlay.

Slowness, sleep, grief, walking, nature, cooking, tending, silence, and ordinary care are not sentimental decorations around the real work. They are part of the work.

7. The not-believed wound, technology, and UFO disclosure

Read this if you are sensitive, empathic, psychic, neurodivergent, or drawn to high-strangeness research, and have often felt disbelieved.

The Clever Tricks of the Matrix and the Impact of UFO Disclosure
https://rightsforrainbows.substack.com/p/disclosure-the-unseen-and-the-not

This essay explores what I call the not-believed wound: the wound formed when a child or sensitive person repeatedly learns that telling the truth about their inner world costs safety and belonging.

That wound can make people vulnerable to anyone who finally says: I believe you. I know what this means. A guru, a channel, an ideology, a government narrative, an online community, or an entity can then step in and re-author reality.

The essay also explores technology as one of the most powerful instruments ever created for replacing lived reality with managed attention. Screens and feeds do not create the wound from nothing, but they intensify it. They accelerate perception, fragment time, saturate consciousness with narrative, and keep people in interruption, anticipation, comparison, stimulation, and interpretive overload.

A fragmented mind is easier to steer than an embodied one.

8. The extraction pipeline: narcissism, gender, love, and emotional severance

Read this if you have seen the same pattern in intimate relationships, families, spiritual communities, and wider society.

It is not a war between the sexes, it is an extraction pipeline
https://rightsforrainbows.substack.com/p/empaths-narcissists-and-the-war-between

This essay moves from my relationship with my mother into narcissism, empathy, emotional severance, gender war narratives, and the broader extraction pattern. It argues that many conflicts sold to us as wars between groups are better understood as pipelines of extraction that turn pain, attention, labour, sexuality, and love into fuel for systems that cannot reciprocate.

It is also one of the places where I write most directly about the body. The body knows when something is jagged. It often registers truth before the conscious mind can bear to name it.

9. Aum Shinrikyo and the danger of mystical certainty

Read this if you want to understand how altered states can become the foundation of violent obedience.

How does a mystical experience lead to murdering people?
https://rightsforrainbows.substack.com/p/the-kundalini-experience-that-led

This essay looks at Aum Shinrikyo, kundalini, shaktipat, apocalyptic ideology, and the way powerful bodily experiences can become evidence inside a destructive system. The point is not that all kundalini or mystical experience is dangerous. The danger begins when altered states fuse with authoritarian interpretation, moral inversion, and a worldview that turns conscience into an obstacle.

10. Space Between Spaces: the comparative framework and new podcast

Read or listen here if you want the clearest overview of where this body of work is going now.

UFO, corrupt guru & TI experiences are connected: Space Between Spaces, Episode 1
https://rightsforrainbows.substack.com/p/ufo-corrupt-guru-and-ti-experiences

The Space Between Spaces is my new series and podcast inquiry into cultic capture, anomalous experience, subtle-body openings, UFO deception research, Targeted Individual narratives, spiritual abuse, folklore, and the recurring architecture of control across different domains.

A cult appears to belong only to cult studies. A UFO encounter appears to belong only to ufology. A persecution narrative appears to belong only to trauma, paranoia, or targeted-individual discourse. A dangerous mystical experience appears to belong only to religion. Yet when these domains are placed beside each other, recurring patterns become visible: manufactured consent, boundary collapse, altered-state authority, interpretive capture, false rescue, extraction, shame, specialness, and the loss of ordinary reality.

The purpose is not to flatten all phenomena into one explanation. The purpose is to compare patterns so people can recognise danger sooner.

Upcoming podcast conversations will focus on practical questions. How does someone withdraw consent from the Matrix? How can people defend themselves from spiritual manipulation? How do we tell the difference between intuition and trauma? How do decentralised communities protect themselves from guru capture? How do we stay open to mystery without becoming gullible? How do we become harder to deceive without becoming less alive?

Who this is for

This publication may be for you if you sensed something was wrong in modern spirituality but could not fully explain it. It may be for you if you left a spiritual path, cult, guru movement, abusive relationship, or high-demand community and are still trying to name what happened. It may be for you if you had real energetic, mystical, or anomalous experiences but no longer trust the interpretation you were given.

It may also be for you if you are curious about matrix or prison-planet narratives but feel wary of grandiose, escapist, anti-body, or anti-Earth claims. It may be for you if you research UFOs, high strangeness, folklore, spirit contact, or deceptive entities and want a more grounded historical and ethical lens. It may be for you if you feel drawn to God, Goddess, spirit, mystery, or the unseen, while still refusing to abandon critical thinking, ethical concern, the body, the Earth, or love.

Above all, it is for people who know that wonder and discernment must learn to live together.

A note on evidence, interpretation, and speculation

I do not ask you to believe everything I write.

This publication offers frameworks rather than a new orthodoxy. I try to distinguish between evidence, interpretation, hypothesis, memory, testimony, pattern recognition, and speculation. Some of the material I discuss is historical. Some is psychological. Some is legal or sociological. Some is religious. Some is mythic. Some is phenomenological. Some remains unresolved.

The purpose is not to replace one authorised narrator with another. The purpose is to recover the capacity to think, feel, compare, test, refuse, and remain in right relationship with reality.

The simplest summary

The Matrix is the overlay. Earth is living ground. The body is witness. Nature is teacher. Intensity does not prove truth. Ecstasy does not prove ethics. Transmission does not prove wisdom. Beauty does not prove benevolence. A real experience can still be misread. A false channel can speak in the language of love. A spiritual teacher can be radiant and dangerous. A community can talk about awakening while protecting abuse. The old warnings were not always superstition. Sometimes they were pattern recognition.

The way out begins with a pause:

Something happened.
I do not yet know what it means.

From there, discernment can return.

The practical path forward

Withdrawing consent from the Matrix means refusing to feed what feeds on passivity, shame, dissociation, specialness, fear, and self-betrayal.

It means pausing between experience and interpretation. It means trusting the body’s first honest no. It means testing everything by its fruits. It means looking at who is harmed, who benefits, who is silenced, who gains authority, who loses agency, and whether love has become structural or merely decorative.

It means returning to Earth and ordinary life. Food. Sleep. Walking. Weather. Work. Grief. Friendship. Animals. Plants. Dawn. Dusk. Keeping promises. Protecting children. Telling the truth. Repairing the small things. Letting reality become instructive again.

It also means building communities differently.

No single person should hold spiritual authority, financial authority, sexual access, safeguarding authority, and interpretive authority at once. Roles need to be separated. Power needs rotation. Money needs visibility. Complaint processes need independence. Newcomers need slower thresholds. Children and vulnerable people need real protection. Extraordinary claims need distributed discernment. People need to be able to leave without punishment.

Love cannot remain a slogan. It has to become structure.

That is the work of Return to Anam: to recognise the architecture of capture, recover discernment, and return from the false overlay to the living ground underneath it.

Welcome.

Internal links:

• Chapter 1: Before the Sacrifices - A Very Long Age of Ritual Without Killing (goddess cultures, Old Europe, deep‑time ritual without human sacrifice).

• Chapter 2: The Mind‑Virus of Predatory Control (wetiko, Yaldabaoth, counterfeit spirit, beings ‘outside time but not in love”).

• Chapter 3: The Moon – From Life Source to Energy Thief (how loosh / moon‑as‑machine narratives invert ancient lunar reverence).

• Chapter 4: When Exposing the Trap Is the Trap (Castaneda, Scientology and others who re‑enact the control systems they denounce).

• Chapter 6: The Four Pillars - How the Parasitic Code Got Infrastructure (hierarchy, shame, scarcity, and brain‑hemisphere capture).

• Chapter 10: Reasserting the Divine Feminine and the Real Matrix (Earth as living matrix, not prison; pride as entry‑point; right relationship as antidote).

2. Spiritual abuse, 4D / 5D narratives, and the shadow side of ‘ascension’

Read this first if you escaped (or are still in) a spiritual community and are trying to name what happened.

No, we’re not going to 4D or 5D in the way you think: Unmasking the ancient warnings we have forgotten
A long essay arguing that we are not ‘ascending’ anywhere while ignoring the global pandemic of spiritual abuse, from Catholic churches to yoga studios, Buddhist centres and New Age cults. It documents large‑scale abuse, explains why sincere seekers defend abusers, and shows how ancient warnings (Surangama Sutra, Neoplatonists, Kabbalah, Sufism, Daoism, Zoroastrianism and others) already described deceptive spiritual entities that lend powers while corrupting conscience.

• Section: The Suffering Children of Cults - for data and survivor accounts.

• Section: The Believers Who Won’t Believe - on cognitive dissonance, sunk costs and why smart people stay.

• Section: The Ancient Warnings We’ve Forgotten - detailed tour of cross‑tradition warnings about 'false light’ spirits impersonating the dead, demons flattering the ego, and the Surangama Sutra’s “If the meditator thinks ‘I am a sage’… passages.

• Section: A Working Hypothesis for How Abusive Gurus Are Made - an explanatory model of how altered‑state skill, trauma, ego and predatory influence interact.

• Section: The Path Forward – Real Evolution Requires Real Work - proposed guardrails: vows, transparency, trauma‑informed practice, de‑glamorising siddhis.

Who this is for

If you are here because:

• You sensed something was wrong in modern spirituality, yet couldn’t fully explain it.

• You are curious about matrix or prison‑planet narratives but wary of grandiose, escapist claims.

• You research high strangeness / UFOs and want a more rigorous, historically grounded lens.

• You left a spiritual path, cult or high demand community and want language for what happened.

• You feel drawn to the divine, but refuse to abandon critical thinking, ethical concern or the Earth.

A little about me

I was raised within spiritual cult systems and spent my childhood in environments where ‘masters’ claimed cosmic authority while ordinary ethics collapsed. My research began as a personal need to understand how intense altered‑state experiences and real energy phenomena could coexist with grooming, abuse and systemic denial.

Since then, I have mapped repeating patterns across Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, New Age and secular cult structures, as well as UFO and high‑strangeness lore. I have dug into archaeological, historical, feminist and indigenous scholarship on goddess traditions, sacrificial religion and the erasure of the feminine. I have worked with frameworks from psychology, law and neuroscience to explain why our brains, legal systems and institutions are so easy to capture.

This publication offers frameworks rather than blind belief. I distinguish between evidence, interpretation and speculation, and invite you to argue, adapt and refine the model rather than simply adopt it.

If you would like to receive ongoing essays exploring these themes, you can subscribe below.

“Woman is a ray of God. She is not just the earthly beloved; she is creative, not created.”

~ Rumi

On this platform, I am asking questions that feel radical to the modern spiritual marketplace, but they are ancient. Questions like:

Why can an abusive teacher still transmit bliss?

Why do followers defend their abusers with religious ferocity?

Can we “ascend” while ignoring the suffering of children in the growing number of abusive cults and in the hands of abusive spiritual leaders?

And - a question the tradition itself forces us to ask - how can a path whose most radical early teacher was a formerly enslaved woman have become, in so many of its expressions, a vehicle for the domination of women?

Islam and Sufism – together forming a tradition that many scholars regard as one of the most psychologically sophisticated spiritual systems ever developed – have been engaging questions of ego, spiritual deception, and abuse of power for over a thousand years.

What we now call Sufism began as an intensification of Qur’anic and Prophetic ideals within the early Muslim community. From the 11th century onward, with manuals like al‑Qushayrī’s Risāla and later the rise of organised orders (ṭuruq), Sufism became a recognised discipline of taṣawwuf – the effort to live Islam’s theology and law from the inside out, through character transformation, adab, and an ongoing struggle against the nafs rather than a flight from Islam itself. From the very beginning, one of its most radical voices was a woman, and a formerly enslaved one at that.

Rābiʿa al-Basra: Love as the Original Antidote

Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya (often called Rābiʿa al-Basra) is presented in early Sufi biographies as born into poverty in Basra, Iraq, orphaned young, and sold into slavery when her family was broken apart by famine. Her hagiographers relate that she spent her days in labour and her nights in prayer, until her master, reportedly awoken by the sight of a halo of sacred light encircling her head, was so awestruck that he freed her. She is then said to have spent the rest of her life in the desert outside Basra, living simply, refusing marriage proposals from some of the most eminent men of her age, writing her poems, and worshipping God in a mode that would permanently reshape the theology of the tradition. (Farīd al‑Dīn ʿAttār, Memorial of the Saints)

What Rābiʿa introduced to Sufism and to Islamic spirituality more broadly was the doctrine of pure love (maḥabba) as the highest motive for worship, entirely displacing both fear of Hell and desire for Paradise. Her most famous declaration makes this explicit:

“O my Lord! If I worship Thee on account of the fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship Thee with the hope of Paradise, exclude me from it; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, then withhold not from me Thine Eternal Beauty.”

And her revolutionary challenge to transactional religion:

“I will set Paradise on fire and extinguish Hell, so that every human being worships only out of love for Allah, instead of hoping for Paradise or fearing Hell.”

This is a structural critique of religious systems built on coercion, reward, and punishment, which are the same systems that, when applied to modern spiritual communities, create the conditions for abuse.

A community held together by fear of a guru’s disapproval, or by the promise of spiritual rewards only he can dispense, is living in the transactional religion Rābiʿa refused.

She recognised, in the idiom of her own age, that worship coerced by fear is not love. It is a form of slavery she had already escaped once, and refused to re-enter, even at God’s door.

In early Islamic Sufism, hagiographies celebrated female figures. Al-Sulami’s Dictionary of Sufis (1021) included a section devoted entirely to women mystics. Abu Nu’aym Isfahani’s Hilyat al-Awliya (11th century) documented 28 female mystics from the Prophet’s generation, but later generations of women were excluded from such texts, highlighting the gradual sidelining of women in spiritual narratives.

The Matrix We Built Over Her: Women, Patriarchy

How did a tradition whose most revolutionary early voice was an enslaved, unmarried, independent woman, whose first ever believer was a woman (Khjadija) and whose first mystic (the prophet’s daughter, Fatimah bint Muhammad) become, in so many of its historical expressions, a structure that silences, controls, and spiritually exploits women?

Contemporary Muslim feminist scholars are clear on this point. Amina Wadud, for example, argues that the Qur’an’s core message is one of spiritual equality, “the common origin and equality of all individuals regardless of gender,” and that it was patriarchal exegesis, not revelation itself, that produced theologies of women’s subordination. (Amina Wadud, Qur’an and Woman)

She identifies Qur’an 4:1 - “O humanity, be conscious of your Lord, Who created you from a single soul” - as the Qur’anic baseline: not hierarchy, but shared origin and equal dignity.

Fatima Mernissi similarly argued that religious interpretations primarily controlled by men “have institutionalised women’s subordination,” and that Muslim women have often been confined in “theological prisons” built not from revelation but from patriarchal assumptions (Fatima Mernissi, The Veil And The Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation Of Women’s Rights In Islam).

As contemporary Muslim writers on gender justice point out, when brutality and oppression against women are justified in the name of Islam, the spiritual abuse of women remains one of the most hidden and under‑reported harms in Muslim communities. As Hasnaa Mokhtar writes:

Inspired by Zainab Alwani’s call to read the Qurʾan as a “structural unity,” I developed answers to the challenging questions and internal turmoil I have been grappling with about Islam, women, and violence. I found my counternarratives to the woman-hating khutba, and the ongoing spiritual femicide and sacrificial offering of Muslim women by Muslim men and religious public figures…

…Yet there are still individuals who insist on following the herd blindly. When asked about domestic violence or sexual assault, instead of saying, “I don’t know. Ask the experts,” they blame the victim, produce more Pharaohs into the world, and subject women to more violence. Instead of addressing dangerous situations and abusive behaviors, they conceal the bitter reality in fear of ruined reputation. They worry about what the extended family will say, or what the neighbors would think, or how will the community react. They are more committed to rank, reputation, and privilege than justice. Then they go after the women. To all of them I say,

“When it is said unto them, “Follow what God has sent down,” they say, “Nay, we follow that which we found our fathers doing.” What! Even though their fathers understood nothing, and were not rightly guided?” (2:170).

“When it is said unto them, “Follow that which God has sent down,” they respond, “Nay, but we follow that which we found our fathers following.” What! Even though Satan is calling them to the punishment of Blaze?” (31:21).

And again in 5:104, 7:28, and 43:24. “Behold! Evil indeed is the judgment they make” (16:59).

I see this as evidence of the adaptive mind-virus or matrix I described in my previous post, taking hold of people’s minds, turning them away from the original religion and into participants in an intense collective pressure to conform, not in an ordinary social way, but in a way that descends into something resembling demonic madness. They are so infected that they would rather commit murder and abuse than not conform.

Hasnaa Mokhtar writes:

When Alizeh Omer first took a class at her local Madrasa in Lahore, Pakistan, many of her questions and concerns revolved around her own confusion at being unable to reconcile what she was taught under the guise of Islamic teachings and her own identity as a young woman in the 21st century with her social, political and financial freedoms.

“Most of us (in Pakistan) have had similar religious upbringings,” she shared. “In prominent Islamic institutes here, male voices are often the loudest, and that creates a distance between women and wanting to learn.” For many women like Omer, the emotional effort that comes with having to dig through interpretations of religion being weaponized against them can lead to spiritual burnout.

On a more extreme note, this burnout is accompanied by a disconnect from faith, especially when abuse or trauma becomes connected to those experiences.

In response to the protests in Iran, Shaykha Maryam Amir, a crucial voice within Islamic scholarship, posted about how justifying brutality and oppression against women in the name of Islam pushes people away from religion…

…The scholar took to social media to point out how many women had approached her to tell her that as survivors of domestic and/or spiritual abuse, they are unable to listen to men reciting the Quran.

This is also an application of Islam’s own tools of critique. The very concept of zulm - oppression - that the Qur’an so repeatedly condemns applies with full force. If zulm bi‑s‑sukut (oppression through silence) is a theological wrong, then the silence of communities around the spiritual abuse of women in their own orders is itself a form of zulm. Besides, what greater crime is there than to turn away spiritual seekers (women or not) from the path to Allah?

If there is a deceptive matrix, perhaps operating through what some traditions describe as jinn-like influences, that seeks to distort human leadership, it would not target only political figures but would focus especially on religious communities. Within that pattern, the disempowerment of women’s spiritual authority in Islam could be understood as one of its primary strategies, a subtle means of gaining hidden control.

The Matrix Has a Sufi Name: Hijab

In the recent online book on my theory of the Matrix, the central argument mirrors something Sufi mystics have taught since at least the 9th century CE: the world we experience is a veil over a deeper reality. The Sufi term for this is hijab - literally meaning “the veil” - describing the layers of illusion, ego, and conditioning that prevent the human soul from perceiving divine reality directly.

The 13th-century master Ibn Arabi, an influential mystic in Islamic history, described the material world as the shadow of God - something that appears real but exists only as a reflection of divine attributes. His concept of Wahdat al-Wujud (Unity of Being) holds that while creation seems to exist independently, it does so only as a reflection, much as a dream feels real only while you are inside it. As one Ibn Arabi scholar puts it: “The world is both He and not He - a paradox that defies simplistic categorisation.”

Ibn Arabi was clear: the person trapped in the matrix is the one “who concentrates too much on his evil” and therefore “cannot feel love”. Evil - or disconnection from divine reality - is what the veil is made of.

The Matrix is therefore not something done to you by shadowy elites alone. In the Sufi framing I am drawing on, it is also perpetuated from within – by an untamed ego, and by communities that refuse to name the harm in their midst.

Divine Ruse, Istidrāj and Deceptive Jinn: When Blessings Become a Trap

In my writings, I have focused heavily on the psychology of abusive spiritual leaders/cults and the followers who protect them. Sufism offers a map for this dynamic through its doctrine of the nafs - the layered self or ego.

Many Sufi scholars describe seven stages of the nafs. The lowest is Nafs al‑Ammara (the Commanding Self) – the ego in its most unrefined state, characterised by worldly desires, lust, anger, greed, envy, arrogance, and ignorance. This is the ego that, when clothed in spiritual authority, becomes a predator.

It does not necessarily stop manifesting spiritual gifts, because those gifts, in the Islamic view, come from Allah, not from the moral purity of the vessel. At the same time, classical scholars warn that not everything that looks like a karama (saintly gift) really is one: some extraordinary feats are istidraj – deceptive concessions granted to the corrupt as a trap – and may in fact be aided by devils and jinn rather than by divine grace. Ibn Taymiyyah, for example, discusses cases of people flying through the air, entering houses through closed spaces, or producing uncanny visions and information, and is explicit that many such spectacles are produced by shayatin (devils) and jinn working with individuals who have left the bounds of the Shari‘ah.

This is the paradox I name: abusive gurus can still transmit what feels like genuine healing energy and supernatural abilities – but in the Islamic view, such phenomena may just as easily be the tricks of devils and deceptive jinn as the gifts of God.

In other words, the “matrix” of illusion is not only psychological and social; it is also populated, in Islamic cosmology, by unseen beings whose speciality is manufacturing counterfeit light.

The Qur’an states that when evildoers plot against the prophets and the vulnerable, “they plotted, and God plotted, and God is the best of plotters” (khayru al‑mākirīn). Classical scholars clarify that God’s makr is not capricious deception but a divine counter-strategy: justice responding to injustice, a trap set for those who set traps for the innocent.

This commentator shows us how the same idea is present in the Bible.

The Biblical message is identical to the Quranic one: God deals with people according to their own nature. If a person is devious, God will out-manoeuvre them with superior “shrewdness.”

The New Testament also contains this theme. In 2 Thessalonians 2:11, the Apostle Paul writes: “Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false.”

Why does God send a delusion? The context explains that it is a punishment for those who “refused to love the truth.” Here, God is actively participating in the “deception” of the wicked as

In Genesis 50:20, Joseph tells his brothers: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.” The brothers “plotted” (human makr), but God “plotted” a counter-result (divine makr). The Biblical “intent” of God utilizes the evil schemes of men to bring about a salvific end. This is the definition of the “Best of Plotters.”

Both the Bible (Exodus 4:21, Romans 9:18) and the Quran describe God “hardening” the hearts of the defiant (like Pharaoh). This is not God “tricking” a good person; it is God sealing the heart of someone who has already chosen to reject the light. It is an act of “plotting” against the arrogant to ensure their ultimate defeat.

This is a form of divine testing in which someone persisting in wrongdoing is granted increasing worldly success, comfort, and even supernatural signs, precisely because they have ignored every warning.

So, with the modern day fall of spiritual wellness leaders and gurus, I feel Allah/God is providing us so many examples of this. Deepak Chopra obviously had the greatest ‘apparent success’ for most of his life. Now the divine ruse has manifested his fall in the public eye, as his moral depravity has been revealed in the Epstein files. John of God used to have an entire village devoted to just him. Now he is in prison.

As one hadith states:

“When you see Allah give a servant worldly things he desires while he continues in his sins, know that this is istidrāj from Allah.” The Qur’an warns: “We will progressively lead them [to punishment] from where they do not know” (Qur’an 68:44).

Istidrāj occurs when “all the while they are sinning, Allah gives them more and more, making them forget to seek forgiveness.”

This means the abusive guru surrounded by wealth, devoted followers, and displays of power may not be enjoying divine favour but rather divine makr – a postponement of reckoning that becomes its own punishment, because it cements delusion. In this reading, the prosperity of corrupt teachers is not proof that they are blessed; it may be proof that they are being “gradually led” toward collapse, and their followers with them.

This is why I think it is extremely dangerous for the soul of any follower to carry on following a guru they been told has abused others, or has participated in abusive situations (with some evidence), just because they are getting apparent ‘benefits’ in the current moment. The followers are the ones who give these gurus their power. I feel that the choice to stay with an abusive guru means you will participate in the downfall, also.

The nafs also helps explain the followers. The person who attacks abuse survivors as “spiritually unevolved” and fundraises for a convicted rapist’s legal defence is exhibiting Nafs al‑Ammara at a collective level – a community ego so fused with its leader that it cannot bear the light of conscience. This is what we perhaps might call nafs al‑shaytan fi jama‘a – the diabolical self operating through group identity.

Classical scholars repeatedly caution that karamat or supernatural occurrences are not decisive proof of a person’s inner virtue (taqwa); a person can be supernaturally gifted and yet morally bankrupt, and deception around claims of miracles is a recognised danger. For that reason, many Sufi lineages have stressed that spiritual power and ego‑corruption can co‑exist, and have developed chains of transmission (silsila), bay‘a (vows of allegiance), and community norms intended – at their best – to act as structures of accountability, transparency, and oversight beyond the ego of the leader.

A Deobandi‑style Sufi manual on kashf and karamat explicitly says that even open sinners and unbelievers can have unveilings, and that the sign of a true karāma is increased humility and obedience:

“The sign that the kashf is from Allah Ta’ala is increase in humility and the realisation of one’s helplessness. A kashf unaccompanied by this attitude is not karaamat. It is istidraaj (shaitaani manipulation). Even the kuffaar and fussaak receive kashf and ilhaam.”​

If you have been following this Substack, you will know that I am extracting the same teaching from each tradition and pointing out that this is what has been missing in today’s spiritual groups and New Age cults.

The abusive cults of today are proving to us in real-life experience that this teaching is true. We are seeing the proof of God/Goddess. That is why, when we witness the chaos represented by figures like Deepak Chopra and the transgressions that surround them, we should see it as proof of Allah, proof that the original teaching across all religions - on what happens to spiritual gurus when there is no humility - was correct.

And as I have said here, it doesn’t mean that religion has not become corrupted since then, but it does suggest the prophets were real and that they came as crisis doctors.

Within Islamic cosmology, jinn are unseen beings with free will, some righteous and some corrupt, and the tradition contains repeated warnings about jinn and devils staging spiritual experiences.

Scholars have noted that jinn can appear in human or luminous forms, speak in voices, and stage elaborate visions in order to mislead those hungry for spiritual power.

In this reading, the abusive leader who claims exclusive access to unseen realms, who centres private visions over revelation, and who uses spectacle to cement control, may be collaborating – knowingly or not – with deceptive jinn, turning his following into a laboratory of spiritual deception rather than a school of nearness to God.

What looks like “high vibration” in such settings may, from within the Islamic/Sufi frame, be understood as the intoxication of an ego flattered by jinn‑driven illusions.

Spiritual Bypassing and False Tawakkul

I made a crucial argument in my earlier work: the spiritual community is using the language of “higher vibration” and “evolution” to bypass moral accountability. In Islamic terms, this can be seen as spiritual bypassing through false tawakkul – a corruption of the concept of trust in God, weaponised to avoid doing the hard work of justice.

Real tawakkul (trust in Allah) in Islamic theology is not passivity. It is active engagement with the world while trusting in a divine outcome; scholars emphasise that one must take means, pursue justice, and then rely upon God. The Qur’an is unequivocal:

“O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for Allah, even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives.” — Qur’an 4:135

There is no ascension, no higher dimension, no spiritual evolution that bypasses this command. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said:

“The best jihad is a word of truth before a tyrannical ruler.”

This is what Islam recommends to do - speaking truthfully in the face of spiritual authority that has become tyrannical and oppressive.

Imam al-Ghazali - the 11th-century scholar often called the proof of Islam - went further, stating that when a scholar is in the presence of an unjust ruler (or, we might add, an abusive spiritual teacher), they are obligated to speak or act to restrain injustice; silence in such contexts becomes complicity rather than humility.

The Sufi concept of adab - graceful conduct, dignity, and ethical comportment was the foundation upon which all other practices rested: without adab, the student or shaykh was seen as dangerous to themselves and others.

The Qur’an itself warns:

“God does not love the public mention of evil, except by one who was wronged.” (Qur’an 4:148)

This single verse dismantles one of the most common spiritual bypasses used to silence survivors: “Don’t lower your vibration by speaking about it.”

In Islam, the one who has been wronged has a divine right - indeed, a divinely sanctioned necessity - to name what happened to them, as many contemporary Muslim scholars on social justice argue.

Why We Cannot Ascend While Children Suffer

To say that global spiritual abuse of children is the shadow side of enlightenment, and that we cannot ascend to Allah/God until we address it, resonates deeply with Qur’anic ethics. The concept of zulm (oppression, wronging) is among the most condemned acts in Islamic theology, and repeated verses and hadith stress standing with the oppressed and restraining the oppressor.

Many contemporary Muslim ethicists argue that, in light of these sources, neutrality in the face of oppression becomes a form of complicity; silence allows injustice to persist and is often described as a betrayal of faith and conscience.

A spiritual community that says “we are ascending to 5D” while looking away from the abuse within its ranks is, in this frame, participating in oppression through its silence – what we might describe as zulm bi‑s‑sukut (oppression through silence).

The Sufi tradition adds another layer. The nafs’ deepest transgression is often described as its lust for immortality and sovereignty – boundless greed and covetousness – echoing the Qur’anic depiction of the human desire for unending life and kingdom.

This is what drives the abusive guru: the hunger to be irreplaceable, eternal in the minds of followers, sovereign over their spiritual destiny. And the only remedy, as Sufi texts repeatedly state, is constantly reminding the nafs of its mortality and dependency on God, which, in practice, means accountability, consequences, and community correction.

Restoring vows, transparency, and accountability to the centre of spiritual life is not a step backwards from enlightenment. From an Islamic and Sufi perspective, centring adab, consultation, and communal oversight is integral to the path itself.

A Note on Authentic vs. Corrupted Sufism

Sufism itself has not been immune to the dynamics we have described. There is a documented history of spiritual abuse within some Sufi orders – of shaykhs who exploited murids, weaponised spiritual authority, and silenced dissent; contemporary Muslim writers are increasingly naming these grey zones and, in some cases, explicitly using the language of cult-like dynamics. Note how it all follows the same patterns I have been speaking about on this platform - the same pattern of my own ex-guru.

My Arabic teacher introduced me to this shaykh who had recently arrived from another Arab country. I was immediately struck by his presence. It was unlike any I had felt in my life: radiant face, majestic figure, beautiful voice when reciting, impressive sense of aesthetics and most importantly a proper scholar of Islamic sciences. He was a traditional Arab with an impressive sense of hospitality and generosity. Furthermore, he was from Ahl ul Bayt. You couldn’t ask for more in a shaykh. But the thing that really sealed the deal for me was when he told me something about myself that he should not have known: kashf, a spiritual unveiling. I had no doubt that I had stumbled upon the Kibreet al Ahmer or Red Sulphur, a metaphor for the rarest of the rare.

I took the tariqa with him thereafter and immediately saw the transformation. Friends and family members were all very impressed with the new me. Initially I had no plan to settle in the area, but after meeting the Shaykh and taking the tariqa with him, I was certain that my life was all about serving this man. I got married in 2009. My wife also became intrigued with the sheikh and she also considered him her shaykh- even though strictly speaking the Shaykh never took women murids. He did extend his tawajjuh (spiritual attention) towards her and she also started having spiritual experiences. These experiences ranged from seeing intense dreams to something called واقع–a state between sleep and wakefulness– where you witness visitations from all kinds of interesting persons and things– light and dark. We interpreted the dark and scary experiences as an important block towards building deep spirituality…

…2008-2010 were great years. I was having paranormal experiences (good and bad) that I ascribed to the Shaykh. I considered myself very fortunate to be receiving them. I was learning and transforming…

…Another event that made matters worse was the appearance of a new murid who was an online marketer by profession. He introduced EBay and Amazon and a host of other websites to our Shaykh. He did it for decent reasons I assume. But the effect it had on our Shaykh was quite catastrophic. This new murid and I began spending hours upon hours with the Shaykh surfing the web and looking for products. The time of the night that we used to spend talking about spiritual matters was now being spent on buying a range of products on EBay.

I did not make much of this new behavior, as strange as it was. For one, it was all mubah (permissible). Secondly, I thought it was possible that he was testing us so we better not fail him…Any doubts, I thought, were Shaytan’s whispering and I had to shut it out completely…

…The list of questionable actions, which was increasing by the day, was eating me up and I was fighting hard to keep it at bay. Backbiting, double-standards, lies, exaggerations and the suspension of the sharia whenever expedient was now a common theme in our interactions…

…What is painful to me as I write this is that I participated in the character assassination of many of these brothers simply because my Shaykh was feeding me information about them that made me lose respect for them. The Shaykh’s divide and rule strategy was another feature of his character that should have raised a huge red flag, but I simply refused to see it…

…An incident transpired the very first month following my departure which proved to me that the Shaykh had become mentally deranged and that completely cutting myself from him was not only a desirable thing but a religious obligation. Once he realized that I had completely left him, he conspired to fabricate things about me to some of my friends who were also his murids…

…It is not far-fetched to believe that the psychic types could be connected to some paranormal entities like the Jinn– without the former necessarily knowing it. They get their news from these entities who can appear in various forms/visions and misguide them. I personally believe that this probably accounted for fortune telling that our shaykh indulged in. He would get some right and most wrong.

This is proof of the argument above. When Sufism abandons its own core principles of adab, shura (consultation), and community accountability, it produces exactly the predatory dynamics we are now surfacing.

The teachings were always sound; the structures of accountability, when honoured, were a protection. When they were abandoned, the matrix was rebuilt. I have described this ‘Inimical Field of the Jagged Harvest’ controlled by deceptive Jinn precisely because the pattern of behaviour by the Jinn-controlled guru and their followers is always more or less EXACTLY the same - it’s also the same pattern as Jacques Vallee and John Keel identified. I hope to continue to prove this with my writings until one day it is seen for what it is by the general public.

Where True Guides are Scarce

As in other traditions I have discussed in the past, Qushayri and the early masters insist on seeking out trustworthy shaykhs who are known in their time for sound knowledge, scrupulous adherence to the Sacred Law, and the ability to guide novices without exploiting them.

But we are also living through one of those times when such teachers feel scarce, and that scarcity is itself part of the trial. In such an age, the path changes shape: instead of handing our conscience to a single, charismatic guide, we consciously choose a slower, safer way of walking.

We anchor ourselves in the early teachers, and in the core stations of repentance, truthfulness, justice, patience, gratitude, and adab, rather than in spectacular “states.” We seek limited, domain‑specific counsel from multiple people rather than enthroning a single “spiritual leader.”

The veil (hijab) that Sufi masters described was never just metaphysical. It was also moral. For many jurists and Sufi teachers, that veil is also peopled: jinn and devils who specialise in dressing misguidance in the robes of piety, feeding the ego’s lust for immortality and sovereignty with staged “miracles” and flattering visions. You cannot see clearly – cannot perceive divine reality, cannot ascend, cannot evolve – while standing on the suffering of others and calling it a spiritual platform.

In naming these dynamics and insisting that genuine transformation requires both inner purification and outward justice, we are doing what the best of the Sufi tradition has always called for. Ibn Arabi would recognise the concern with veils and false separations. Rumi would recognise the ache for a love that does not trample the vulnerable. The Qur’an, 1,400 years ago, already named the duty to stand with the wronged and to speak truth in the face of oppression.

The teachings were always sound. The structures of accountability, when honoured, were always a protection. When they were abandoned, the matrix was rebuilt.

The only matrix that truly imprisons us is the one we refuse to see.

*:･ﾟ✧☽◯☾*:･ﾟ✧

Finally, although I am not choosing to follow any religion so that I can search for love in all of them (and recognise the real common enemy), this Islamic chant sung by a woman is my favourite, and I keep returning to it because of how she embodies the word ‘Ya Latif’ with her voice.

Also, here is an app that shows women reciting the Quran. According to the founder, many women have never heard another woman recite the Quran and do not even know the word Qariah and what it means.

𓆩✧𓆪 —— 𓂃 ✦ 𓂃 —— 𓆩✧𓆪

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

𓆩✧𓆪 —— 𓂃 ✦ 𓂃 —— 𓆩✧𓆪

Prologue

The land is the spirit where all your memories of the past, of your past freedom, lie. You can free yourself from deceptive forces and stay safe very easily, knowing the evidence I have compiled in this booklet. Knowledge is key, and the other key is knowing how to tell the difference between those elements that deceive and those that are either neutral or are beneficial in day-to-day life - not because of mystical discernment but because of collected evidence of experience. I am not dictating anything; I am only providing you with logical conceptual theories. I intend to enable us to be freer. You have seen all the darkness, and that’s why maybe you know that kindness is the only thing that makes sense - it will be the main bulwark that solves it all in the end. This post explains what is happening in the unseen world, why it deceives us, and how to fix it.

Despite all the darkness in the world, there are many kind people in the world who do not advertise themselves, and there is so much beauty on Earth. In reality, beauty and joy in nature are the majority.

The problem is that the darkness targets the ones in power, the spiritual people and the ones with influence over populations. It will use any person it can to do this. I am writing this not to end up making you miserable, but to bring it to light so it can be dissolved, and in the hopes that it can spark discussions on how to solve it.

That’s what I see happening in the world now. It’s not that the world has recently been infected with something horrific - the evidence shows it’s been like this for 7,000 years already - it’s just coming more into the light now. It’s better to see it than to keep pretending it’s not there.

I had no choice but to be faced with strange entities that apparently inhabited and heavily influenced all the adults around me, turning them into nutcases, while brainwashing me into their weird beliefs. Because of my experiences, I feel I just have a duty to communicate what I learned about why this happened - what it was that deceived them. I needed to know what took half my life away from me.

I don’t enjoy trying to get Western people to believe something that all cultures across the world have spoken about for thousands of years already, but somehow we still must pretend it does not exist in order to be respectable. However, I don’t feel like I would have done the right thing in my life if I did not at least try.

I dislike feeling that I have to convince people of something that I feel is very obvious, which is that people follow a great many cult leaders because of the kundalini experiences they are given - that’s the main reason. The brainwashing and the social tech are secondary, but anti-cult orgs do not recognise this. Even if you don’t believe that this happens in an objective sense, it is an established and obvious fact that this is the internal reason given as to why many people follow an abusive guru. It’s not the case for all, but it is the case for many. I aim to show this now:

• In one energy darshan of Rajneesh/Osho, Satya Bharti Franklin, in her 2010 book The Promise of Paradise, reports her “hands vibrating and tremoring,” then Osho touches her “third eye,” “flooding me with blissful sensations.” (p.141) She describes stumbling back to her seat and being “passed out on the marble floor… Oblivious to everything but the feelings inside me.” (p.141). Her text repeatedly shows the experience itself becoming the evidence. The person is not persuaded only by doctrine. They are persuaded by a body-level event that is interpreted as spiritual contact, and that is intensely rewarding. For some context, Satya abandoned her children to write Osho’s books and stay in this ‘bliss.’ Then her son ended up dying from a gunshot wound after he tried to help someone on the streets, so she lost him forever, after having abandoned him.

• Furthermore, several first‑person accounts describe Osho’s darshans and proximity as a unique “energy field” that blows ordinary perception open. A long‑time disciple writes that when he first met Osho in 1975, “The experience was so powerful I still remember it clearly today. It left an indelible imprint on my memory… I went on to meet him many times in darshan, and it was always intense… I became accustomed to entering the unique field of energy created by his presence… To this day, I have never met another human being who affected me like Osho did.” The emphasis is on an overpowering, energetic impact that stays etched in memory and eclipses other human relationships.

• In a reflection on energy darshan, another sannyasin describes an ashram worker darshan: “Then there was the Energy Darshan period… No words, but a blast of energy… there was a major movement of energy which sometimes seemed to be sustained for days on end after such things.” They explicitly tie the effect (energy surge lasting days) to simply being in front of Osho in that ritual context.

• One detailed account from a kitchen worker describes the bodily and emotional impact of being brought to sit at the front in energy darshan. She notes that just being in the project before Darshan created “high energy… bubbling in our veins,” dissolving competitiveness and opening hearts. When Osho finally touches her forehead: “I felt my head being held still… and then Osho’s cool fingers on my third eye… the energy on my forehead almost felt like an intrusion, a very male affirmation like a lightning bolt. An uncomfortable wake‑up call.” She explicitly contrasts her own relatively “clear” state with “everybody else” having “bliss attacks,” and notes that other women had to be carried out because they were so overwhelmed. Even in a critical or ambivalent retelling, the assumption is that his presence routinely produced trance‑like or ecstatic collapse in those around him.

• A memoirist describing her first meeting says she was “blown away by him, to say the least” and that later, sitting directly in front of him “still blew my mind,” even after years of practice. That continuing capacity to “blow the mind” functions as a reinforcement loop: you keep going back because nothing else generates that intensity.
  
  Further examples from other gurus:

• A Shaktipat recipient from Kai Shanti describes her guru touching her chest such that “suddenly this energy rose… I had no thought, only bliss… and a glorious energetic eruption flowed from the top of my head… Pure Bliss.”

• Darshan followers of David Ashworth speak of sessions where “Kundalini energy” rises, they feel “high on light,” and they enter “deep surrender” to him as a channel of that force.

• One devotee of Ravi Shankar recounts going to a multi‑day course “in guruji’s presence” with daily satsang and darshan, presented as a rare blessing: “Many people do not get his darshan so easily. It’s like he is calling you.” The idea that “he is calling you” elevates the experience above normal obligations and primes people to rearrange work and family to answer that call.

• One recalls their first darshan with Amma: “A strong energy filled me. I had the impression that this energy was all‑encompassing, that it was everywhere… there was no ‘me’ and ‘Amma’ anymore, only this energy.” The annihilation of personal boundaries in an energy field mirrors many Osho‑era descriptions of sitting close to Bhagwan. Another says meeting Amma was “a blessed day… I felt protected and cared for… After darshan, I felt a deep peace and a joy that lasted for days.” The long after‑glow functions as reinforcement; people return to sustain the feeling, often arranging their lives around repeated visits.

• A Siddha Yoga swami recounts sitting with Baba Muktananda: “Suddenly, I experienced Baba’s strong presence very clearly hovering above us… Everyone was first stunned into silence, and then affirmed that, yes, they could also feel Baba’s holy presence. For a few minutes, we could do nothing but sit and revel in this direct and powerful experience.” Another Siddha Yoga writer says that simply being in the guru’s presence is a “powerful high consciousness energy field” that is “overwhelmingly tangible,” describing entering the ashram as walking into a “very high consciousness ‘zone’” where “an intoxicating joy and delight fills my heart… an absolutely magic feeling in the air… as though we are existing on a heavenly plane of consciousness.” Here, the guru is explicitly portrayed as an energy source whose field is “intoxicating,” with neurological change promised through contact. It is easy to see how disciples accept major sacrifices (celibacy, communal living, separation from family) when all of that is framed as the price of staying in that heavenly plane.

• A Svaroopa Yoga practitioner recounts a shaktipat retreat where, during initiation, she begins “to sob uncontrollably… I was in a timeless space… I felt an enormous rush of heat moving up from the base of my spine… a vision of pure white light also rushed up my spine. I melted into a supreme state of bliss.” She credits the guru’s grace and continues to build her life around successive retreats.

• Former members of Aum Shinrikyo describe initiation practices framed explicitly in terms of kundalini and shaktipat-style energy transmission. Academic studies of Aum’s religious system note that followers were taught that Asahara Shoko could activate or accelerate kundalini energy, producing bodily heat, tremors, altered states of consciousness, bliss, and visionary experiences through initiations, meditation, and devotional practices. These experiences were treated as direct proof of spiritual advancement and the leader’s exceptional power, and were used to justify escalating obedience, isolation from family, and submission to increasingly extreme demands. Importantly, the reality of these energetic experiences for participants did not prevent the organisation from becoming profoundly abusive and violent, underscoring the central point of this essay: the induction of powerful “energy” or kundalini-like states is not evidence of ethical alignment, truth, or benevolence, but can function as a reinforcement mechanism within destructive systems. (See: Japanese Journal of Religious Studies analyses of Aum’s yoga and kundalini discourse; Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture studies on Aum’s shaktipat and initiation practices.)

These testimonies explicitly link:

I could go on and on with guru after guru showing this - anyone could write whole books about it, the same way people have with UFO experiences, but they do not for some reason.

It’s a global pattern: devotees describe the guru as an energy generator whose proximity produces overwhelming experiential rewards, and those rewards are then used by both devotees and organisations to justify radical life rearrangements and sacrifices.

I should point out that there are also substantial, documented abuse allegations against several of these same gurus and organisations whose followers report intense “energy” experiences. I’ve already spoken about Osho elsewhere, but several women have now claimed direct coercive rape from Osho:

• In 2014, Gail Tredwell, Amma’s close aide for two decades, published Holy Hell, alleging repeated sexual abuse and severe psychological mistreatment inside the ashram. She describes being sexually exploited by a senior monk, witnessing “promiscuity among ashram members,” and being threatened and blacklisted when she expressed doubts. Tredwell also alleges systematic deception about money and the ashram’s wealth, claiming trusted lieutenants lied to devotees about the source of Amma’s family assets. More recent online discussions in India accuse Amma of “physical abuse, having sex with disciples and financial fraud,” reflecting ongoing public concern, although these newer claims are largely at the level of social‑media accusation rather than adjudicated fact.

• A lawsuit filed in 2023 (reported in 2024) alleges that Swami Muktananda raped and sexually abused numerous women and girls in the 1970s–80s. The complaint claims he “sexually abused and raped dozens of his female followers, both women and girls,” including digital penetration and rape of a 14‑year‑old over many nights. A long‑time Art of Living teacher describes being “touched inappropriately by one of the most senior teachers of Art of Living,” filing a complaint to the US board, and then seeing the organisation decline to interview all named witnesses before dismissing the case. She characterises the organisation’s culture as one where “HRs and CEO’s and all their top brass commit serious atrocities, and neither their founder nor their trustees are bothered.” A critical overview on Cult Facts summarises multiple ex‑teachers’ allegations that Art of Living employs abusive tactics such as “sleep deprivation, public humiliation, brainwashing, taking away the right to showers and clean clothes, and physical violence.”

• Aum Shinrikyo (Asahara Shoko) combined kundalini and shaktipat-style “energy transmission” claims with an internally coercive and violent control system, culminating in multiple crimes and mass casualty attacks. Credible investigations and court records describe patterns including kidnapping and murder (for example, the 1989 murder of lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto, his wife, and their infant son, after he assisted families challenging the group), kidnapping and drugging or detention of would-be defectors, and additional murders and attacks leading up to the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack that killed people and injured thousands. Academic analyses of Aum’s legal history list further crimes, including the Matsumoto sarin attack (1994), abductions, and killings immediately prior to the subway attack, reflecting a sustained trajectory of escalation rather than an isolated event.

In each of these cases, followers publicly describe the guru’s presence as an overwhelming energy that brings bliss, dissolves thought, and becomes the centre of life (e.g. Amma’s all‑encompassing darshan, Muktananda’s “powerful high consciousness energy field,” Art of Living devotees feeling energy “coming towards me” when Guruji appears).

These abuses matter because they show the core pattern I am tracking: intense “energy” experiences and claims of accelerated spiritual evolution can coexist with, and even help rationalise, authoritarian control, deception, and violence, which means they are used as tools of the matrix, not of truth or reality.

Additionally, I assert that the kundalini energies are not something you give to yourself because you were expecting it. They may be a placebo sometimes, but there is more happening. I was born sensitive - perhaps what you would call psychic - I had intense, energetic experiences from a very young age onwards, when I was not expecting it all, especially because other people around me were not having the same ones. My mind was not primed to expect these experiences, and I did not choose it.

My research happened because I was searching for the reason why being in the cult meant you could feel intense kundalini movements that were supposed to be positive, but at the same time, the gurus (and inner circle) act in total opposition to kindness and so to truth. There was nothing available in modern literature, but I finally came across the explanations in older religious texts, as I have written about elsewhere.

If we do not believe and validate the people who say they have those experiences, and who know it’s more than just a placebo, then those sensitive people will just stay with the cults that do validate them - I am highlighting a practical issue in fighting cult indoctrination.

A clear pattern also appears across many high‑profile healers: vivid reports of healing and energy experiences coexist with serious abuse allegations.

I propose that healing experiences are a corollary of this energy manipulation. Healings in the context of abusive cults are a result of intense placebo-induced mind states, assisted by the matrix. But instead of allowing the recognition of the power of one’s own mind, the guru attributes it to himself:

• In Brazil, João de Deus (John of God) drew millions to his Casa de Dom Inácio with claims of spirit surgery and cancer cures. Visitors - including a Harvard psychiatrist and an Oprah ‑ endorsed writer - described “blissful” states, spontaneous bleeding after “invisible surgery,” and life‑changing emotional release (see overview). Yet after a 2018 TV exposé, nearly 600 women, some as young as nine, accused him of sexual assault in private “healing” rooms; he was convicted on multiple counts and has cumulative sentences approaching 500 years (ABC News summary; general analysis). A follow‑up by 60 Minutes Australia and others found no solid medical evidence for his headline cures.

• In Tibetan Buddhist circles, Sogyal Rinpoche’s Rigpa network marketed powerful “healing practices” and his best‑selling The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as a kind of spiritual medicine (Rigpa materials). Students describe profound shifts and a sense of being emotionally and spiritually healed in his presence. Later, a detailed letter by eight senior students and an independent investigation documented decades of sexual coercion, severe beatings and psychological abuse rationalised as “crazy wisdom”.

• Televangelist Benny Hinn’s “Miracle Crusades” likewise centre on healing testimonies and dramatic “slaying in the Spirit,” with followers claiming relief from serious illness in his electrically charged meetings (biographical overview). Investigations by Dateline, The Fifth Estate and others have repeatedly failed to verify long‑term cures and instead documented financial and spiritual exploitation, including deaths and injuries at packed crusades, and Hinn himself has publicly expressed “regrets” about aspects of his prosperity‑gospel message (recent coverage).

Across these cases, the same structure appears: intense subjective experiences of healing, energy or bliss - often in highly charged group settings - create deep trust and dependency.

Furthermore, Kundalini Syndrome and Qi Gong sickness (and the entities that are said to enter people suffering from this) are well documented - it’s not something people invented in their minds because they were expecting it. Intention can direct energy flow, and indeed, that’s how it begins. But normal intention can not cause those kinds of immediate, intense experiences. The original way was for the practitioner to slowly create it in their own body. In this essay, I am trying to elaborate (with as much logic and referenced proof as I can) that these energy and healing experiences are artificially created by an artificial matrix that is controlled by an emergent intelligence.

What is this intelligence? Well, I think we can learn about it by reflecting on experiences with deceptive entities and high-strangeness/UFO cases. In this booklet, I treat this as a working hypothesis: that the repeating patterns point to an emergent, non‑organic mind‑field intelligence, rather than to coincidence or pure human malice alone. I cannot prove this; I can only show that, for me, it is the most coherent way to read the data from deceptive entities, high‑strangeness, UFO cases, and cult abuse.

Jiddu Krishnamurti himself began his adulthood facing deceptive entities. He became what he was, as the teacher we know, because he rejected theosophical people who were ‘merged’ with mysterious entities (apparently masters of wisdom). At one point, those entities made Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater believe they were having special initiations. Radha Rajagopal Sloss documents a culture of “communications,” rapid initiations, and hierarchical revelation centred on these two. During the ‘Ommen’ period, it was publicly announced that Besant, Leadbeater and others had all taken successive high initiations in quick succession, alongside the designation of “apostles”, developments that deeply disturbed Krishnamurti, who wrote questioning their validity even while he still believed in the Masters themselves (Sloss, Lives in the Shadow, pp. 60–61). Sloss further records how messages from the ‘Mahachohan’ were conveyed to Krishnamurti through intermediaries, notably George Arundale, illustrating the mechanism by which authoritative inner “messages” operated within the movement (pp. 66–67).

Most tragically, Sloss states that Krishnamurti received what he understood as direct confirmation “from the Masters, and from the Mahachohan himself” that his younger brother Nitya’s life was essential to the Work and therefore could not end (p. 51). Holding this belief, Krishnamurti continued travelling by sea while Nitya’s health deteriorated, a decision Sloss later describes as a “tragic error”, since those closest to Nitya would otherwise have remained with him at the end (pp. 51–52).

These experiences, in which authoritative inner assurances proved disastrously false, form a critical backdrop to Krishnamurti’s later dismantling of spiritual authority, intermediaries, and claims of supra-human guidance. Krishnamurti would never have become what he became if this had not happened. He was the first spiritual teacher that I know of who saw that the only way to fix the world’s problems was through a change of consciousness. He spent his entire life teaching people mental attitudes that would make them less susceptible to deception - the first and last freedom - he called it.

Even if you don’t believe in the unseen world and want to get on with normal life, it’s an established fact that the people who are in influence over you and who have influenced entire generations of your family, DO believe in it and actively invoke it. It affects you whether you want to notice it or not. For example, Hitler’s personal library, now partially held at Brown University, contained a dedicated copy of Ernst Schertel’s Magic: History, Theory, Practice (1923) - a treatise on occult power and demonic will.

Hitler made sixty-six markings throughout the book; on page 63 of his German copy, he underlined the passage, “He who does not have demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world.” He also marked: “The magician was in all early times identical with the ‘ruler’… he himself radiates forces which exceed the normal” and “The man with the greatest force of imagination is commanding of the world and creates realities according to his will.”

Hitler was given hypnotic power by something, but it was not giving him real power -he was simply used as a vessel, and at the end of his life, he was discarded. That’s how that kind of magic tricks the spiritually sensitive.

Schertel’s book warns that demonic forces “can be combined with a lot of misery and misfortune but always lead to a consequence with the deepest meaning” - a chillingly accurate description of what Hitler unleashed. Before politics consumed him, he was an artist drawn to esoteric matters; these annotations show he was actively studying how to become a vessel for forces beyond the rational mind.

Many abusive leaders in our past (and present) have drawn on cultures steeped in religion, myth and esoteric speculation; Stalin and the wider Bolshevik milieu, for example, emerged from a Russian intelligentsia where occult and gnostic currents fed into revolutionary politics. My feeling is that Hitler became a vessel for this dark matrix - he was too blind to realise that one day, he would just be discarded as an empty shell. Perhaps others do the same, all the while thinking, either that they are being given ‘sovereignty’ and personal power, or that they are serving God (whatever works).

Until we understand the root of this sickness and corruption, it will keep popping up again and again in all the places you hoped would be free of it. So this online booklet is an attempt to explain what all that is about, and in that process, I am debunking the prevailing ‘matrix’ theory.

This is long, so I will just give you a quick bite-sized overview of my core meaning, even though there is so much more:

Previous view of the ‘matrix’:

The world is a psychically rigged game; become an inner alchemist and get out. Use personal power to get out.

New version I propose balanced with the feminine:

The world is sacred and has been covered by a rigged game; we need to see the cover clearly, stop feeding it, heal each other, and rebuild spiritual life based on not breaking the natural law of love and accountability.

Use willpower combined with a non-mind approach to love to get out. Will and force is important, but only at the initial level.

By non-mind, that means you don’t force love with the mind, you heal all the blocks to it by going through the body and Earth, not escaping it.

You can tell when the matrix is at work, when there is abuse, or a system that was created that leads to abuse - because it is breaking the law of love.

It does not understand love, so it cannot avoid showing these signs. It relies on people not knowing what real love looks like - that’s why the personal journey is required.

Once we make the personal journey, we follow indigenous traditions that say, on the collective level, the darkness has to be re-absorbed into right relationship, for the icy heart to melt.

Another old matrix idea from the last century:

Everyone is “asleep” in both dreams and waking life. You are invited to feel a distinct edge over “sleeping” people: you “see yourself and see reality,” others are NPC‑like. The matrix is sucking your emotions - called ‘Loosh.’ The whole Earth is just a farm.

The new matrix idea which I think is more helpful for our actual freedom:

Earth is not the prison; the “matrix” is the multi‑layered web of trauma, hierarchy, and broken natural law sitting over Earth. I’ve tied this to real child abuse, cults, and demonology that lends powers to abusive teachers. Previously, I’ve read ancient warnings (Surangama, Tibetan, Tantric, Sikh, Jain) as saying: the moment you start believing you’re the one who is awake/above, you become most vulnerable to possession by a counterfeit “I.”

Pride - “I can’t be fooled, I have the map” - is the very crack the predatory field uses.

The matrix only sucks the ‘Loosh’ of people it has been able to manufacture consent for, OR, as in my case, if it has manufactured consent from the parents of a child AND especially if the person is spiritually and psychically inclined.

When I say manufactured consent, I am not talking about moral responsibility. A child has no consent to give. Many adults are structurally coerced through poverty, family pressure, colonisation, or long‑term grooming. In this model, “consent” names the way boundary conditions get installed, not a freely chosen agreement or a reason to blame the victim.

It targets sensitive and spiritual people as the primary battlefield. That’s why people who are not this way have no idea what we are talking about and we sound crazy to them, and it is also why they don’t experience the negative effects as acutely (unless the results of it hit them in the head with religious rooted war).

That is the reason that it goes to so much length to confuse people and create new beliefs. The Earth is not a farm. The matrix must manipulate minds, energy bodies and emotions to disconnect from the true sovereign soul, before we can be farmed. The matrix behaves like a constantly adapting parasitic, non‑organic, non‑local, non time‑based code – but it can only adapt on one dimension: the dimension of mind.

I provide detailed references all the way through. It’s not my personal way to expect people to believe me on these matters just because my intuition says so, or because a voice in my head says so. I could have voices in my head if I wanted to, but I have pushed them all away. In doing that, they dissipated as if they were never there, which tells me I made the right move. I am guessing that if an entity does not do that, does not stroke your ego and appears to understand love, then you might be talking to the right one - but I don’t want to go there either at the moment. I like my trusty old curious, hyper-focused mind and my heart, thanks.

A note on evidence and hypothesis

Throughout this booklet, I distinguish between three layers.

1. First, there are documented patterns: archaeology, historical records, ethnography, survivor testimony, clinical and neuroscientific work.

2. Second, there are interpretive lenses: wetiko, demons, Yaldabaoth, and similar concepts that help me name those patterns.

3. Third, there is my speculative model of a parasitic, field‑like intelligence (what I call the Inimical Field).

The first layer is empirical; the second and third are ways of making sense of that evidence. Where I move from data to hypothesis, I am not claiming strict proof. I am offering a model that can be argued with, refined, or rejected, but which, to me, fits the repeating structures I see.

*:･ﾟ✧☽◯☾*:･ﾟ✧

Table of Contents

✧ Chapter 1. The Evidence from the Past. Before the Sacrifices: A Very Long Age of Ritual Without Killing

✧ Chapter 2. The Mind‑Virus of Predatory Control

✧ Chapter 3. The Moon: From Life Source to “Energy Thief”

✧ Chapter 4. When Exposing the Trap Is the Trap

✧ Chapter 5. Towards an Exposition of a More Real Matrix - UFOs and High Strangeness

✧ Chapter 6. The Four Pillars: How the Parasitic Code Got Infrastructure

✧ Chapter 7. A Scientific Mythology for Beings Outside of Linear Time Plugged into the Parasitic Code

✧ Chapter 8. The Inimical Field of Jagged Harvest - A Boundary-Condition Model of Exploitation (and How to Break Free by Withdrawing Consent)

✧ Chapter 9. Elements of the Real inside Religion and Mystical Experiences

✧ Chapter 10. Re‑asserting the Divine Feminine and the Real Matrix

*:･ﾟ✧☽◯☾*:･ﾟ✧

Introduction

𓆩✧𓆪 —— 𓂃 ✦ 𓂃 —— 𓆩✧𓆪

There is a bitter irony running through contemporary spirituality.

The louder people talk about escaping the matrix, ascending beyond 3D, or seeing through the illusion, the more tightly some of them become bound into subtle systems of control. The language of awakening has become one of the most efficient tools of captivity.

Many of the figures who speak most urgently about false realities, parasitic entities, or energy farms turn out, under closer scrutiny, to have built their own little matrices: abusive, extractive control systems dressed in the vocabulary of truth.

This, I want to suggest, is not an accident. It is a symptom of something older: the long, slow covering over of a goddess‑oriented, Earth‑connected, body‑honouring spiritual orientation that appears to predate sacrificial religion by a very long stretch of time.

Beneath the layered stories of relatively patriarchal gods, New Age ascension timelines, and simulation theories lies another memory: of cultures where the sacred was understood as feminine and cyclical, where the Earth was mother rather than prison, where the body was a portal rather than a trap.

It’s a memory that stretches back not five thousand years, but hundreds of thousands - into an era where we see ritual and reverence in the archaeological record, but no clear trace of deliberate human sacrifice.

This booklet weaves together several strands:

1. The evidence from the past:

• What archaeology and ancient DNA actually tell us about goddess‑centred, matrilineal and egalitarian societies in deep time.

• How sacrificial, extractive religious systems emerge later alongside stratified, war‑driven civilisations, and what indigenous concepts like wetiko reveal about this shift.

2. The naming of an antagonist in old traditions:

• How all of that coincides with the appearance of the mention of destructive demons, Wetiko, and the Breaking of the Natural Law of Love.

• How Gnostic traditions also named this pattern Yaldabaoth, and how demons, archons, and parasitic entities can be understood as patterns and/or participants in the informational field.

3. Modern New Age Matrix ideas:

• Then, how people somehow went from talking about the matrix, to the act of talking about the matrix itself being the matrix - a symbol of this is how the moon went from hundreds of thousands of years as a ‘life giver’ to an ‘energy thief’ in the modern age. How the Earth went from dear mother of beautiful creations and provider of countless herbs and mushrooms, aiming at symbiotically healing all of our woes, to a dark energy farm to escape from.

• This pattern includes how the observation of many modern “matrix” teachers - from Carlos Castaneda to Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard, Gurdjieff, Adi Da and others - end up re‑enacting the very predation and control they claim to expose.

4. Towards a better exposition of a more real Matrix:

• How UFO researchers such as Jacques Vallee and John Keel collected thousands of case study evidence to see the patterns of high strangeness and UFO encounters, and came to the conclusion that this was, in fact, a deceptive force acting on our minds, purposefully confusing sensitive humans in order to manufacture their consent (yes, the Men in Black idea came from their work!).
  
  The idea is that all their experiences were projected onto the human abductees’ minds, including, for example, the space trips claimed by Adamski. This is especially important to me to research because Benjamin Creme, who used to be vice president of the Aetherius Society (a group based on mental UFO contact), would have been influenced by this exact same phenomenon. He had also claimed to make the same space trips as Adamski, and I think this was the origin of the entity that had fused with him. I wanted to know WHAT was influencing my life since birth. I find this whole phenomenon part of the same cult process in spiritual groups, and it gives us more data about what this matrix is.

• How Marina Karlova’s model explains the social infrastructure (hierarchy, shame, scarcity) that turned this local abuse into a civilisation‑scale, self‑replicating, adaptive, non-organic parasite.

• It is perhaps like a code that includes both an automatic and complex intelligence, which has already been envisioned before, but this includes more detail. In some ways, it is an intelligent AI we created by breaking natural law, which has gained consciousness in the field of the mind (meaning AI already existed a long time ago!). It splits into many parts and swarms around.

• How Iain McGilchrist’s work on brain hemispheres also reveals the cognitive vulnerability the parasite exploits - and how his recent anti‑feminist turn demonstrates that no teacher is immune to becoming what they say they are against! I go into quite a bit of detail on this example because it’s a very good illustration of the added layers of complexity in self-deception I am pointing to.
  
  I also make reference to Mark Passio - I am not denying that the parasite can hijack feminism, also. It hijacks everything on the mind field. That’s where Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teachings really help, and that’s where understanding how language distorts things in the mind really helps.

• How speculative science (Bohm’s implicate order, plasma life, high‑strangeness encounters) offers a model for understanding 4D entities as field‑based patterns, and/or using the patterns, fed by broken relationships, plus I include my own physics theory, which I have named ‘The Inimical Field” rather than ‘loosh’ (a term that Robert Monroe invented while talking to entities out of body), because I feel it is more exact.

• How it differs from organic land-based spirits.

5. Elements of the real inside religions. Jesus and the other prophets try to lead us back. Don’t throw the baby out.

• How the prophets and founders of major traditions appear when sacrificial, wetiko‑infected systems have become unbearable, as ‘crisis doctors’ trying to reassert the natural law of love.

• But over time, their movements are hijacked again by the parasite: hierarchy grows, shame deepens, scarcity and control reappear, and the original teachings are re‑weaponised.

• What collated patterns of near-death experiences (even though culturally influenced) can tell us about what is real, in contrast with the high-strangeness experiences that happen to humans while they are still alive.

• How the parasitic pattern of bypassing love based action continues to ride primarily through modern religion influenced politics - from Zionist extremism, jihadist violence, Iran’s theocratic oppression, and MAGA Christianity, to all of the abusive new age gurus I have been highlighting so far in my writings - hijacking spiritual energy wherever it finds it, constantly adapting to every single true spiritual idea, including the ones claiming to leave the matrix.
  The parasitic patterns go and self-replicate wherever the influence over many people is - that includes powerful people and the music industry. It also goes to mental health institutions and to the entertainment industry accordingly.

The reason it is doing this - that it is able to do this - is because we have not figured out the solution yet.

Towards a fluid solution

The aim is not to abandon spirituality, but to re‑locate the ground: to re‑assert a divine feminine, Earth‑rooted, embodied wisdom that sees the ‘real matrix’ as the multi‑layered web of trauma, hierarchy, and mind‑virus that has covered and inverted our oldest teachings.

And beyond simply returning to the past, there is something more - I feel from the ancient texts evidence I have collated throughout my previous substack posts, that it is ‘pride’ that keeps allowing the matrix to adapt through corrupt spiritual leaders.

This is extremely important because it shows that, unlike the ideas the ‘new age matrix’ proponents push, the original religions were absolutely not instigated by the same archonic force - they were trying to fight it.

Further, they seem to have cut out from our memory the KEY to breaking free of this matrix that those religions used to remember. Pride is an activity in the mental field that asserts separation and jaggedness in the field accordingly. It therefore creates a perfect hacking point for a mind-based parasitic code.

If there is a complex, antagonistic force around us, it would have been extremely clever to always encourage pride amongst the religious leaders and to make us forget that this was the main mechanism of entry and control.

Another pattern I feel it takes advantage of is the mental pattern of thinking that we have ‘all the answers,’ and there is nothing more to know, which is another outcrop of pride. Or the pattern that we are mature enough to have perfect discernment and that only unevolved people can’t do it - another outcrop of pride.

If we can overcome this internally (processes which I will describe in later posts, not this one), and if we create decentralised communities aiming towards that - introducing the ways spiritual people can be manipulated into common knowledge, and, even better, if leaders of religious traditions could also recognise the real enemy, rather than thinking it is each other, then I think we will move forward as humanity.

I assert that we will stop repeating the same mistakes this way.

This mini book is a fluid evolution of ideas - “I’m not saying woo hoo, I have it all, now follow me please.” This is because I feel the universe is an adaptive flow in spacetime; it is not static.

The matrix of illusion and deception, also being in spacetime, is also not static. It changes. It perhaps has multiple (temporary) timelines, because it’s a changing spacetime.

My subjective intuition is that I don’t think we live in a frozen, deterministic block universe. I suspect we inhabit something more like a wavy block: a four‑dimensional spacetime that has structure but can still deform, branch, and be rewritten (meaning timelines form and then reform, replacing what was there before). Both the universe and the matrix are adaptive flows, not static machines.

That’s also why pride - “I have the final model, I can’t be fooled now”- is pointless. The code changes when we do.

Like this:

We can choose to break free. This is not something to descend into misery and horror about. I will explain why using this film as an illustration.

There is a film called They Live (1988), which shows certain people having horrible demonic faces that can only be seen with special glasses, thereby rendering them an enemy to fight. As an allegory for how frustrating it is to try and get others to ‘wake up,’ to deception, at roughly the 1:00:00 mark, he beats up his friend to try and force him to put on the glasses so he can see the truth. Eventually, after their WrestleMania match, he wins, and the friend sees this through the glasses:

“Brother, Life’s a Bitch,” he says.

At the end of the story, everyone’s sight is restored, and they can see who has demonic faces. It touches on something real, something that has gone wrong, but I do not think it is this.

I think it is still promoting something quite deceptive.

I think that all beings are individualised, beautiful, love-based souls who are plugged into this mind-level field called the matrix:

The purpose of the matrix is to learn to use love in action, and its shadow - grief/heartbreak, to return to the soul (Anam).

The matrix does not exist in the dimension of love-in-action - that is why love will simply step out of the dimension the matrix lives in. It is not forced love.

Imposed love, performative love, is another trick from the matrix. It is love that arises naturally when emotional healing and the will/desire of the soul have been restored.

I have not personally experienced that one can bypass the soul to universal consciousness - it must be done through the soul. I feel the spiritual matrix tricks you into saying you must get rid of the Self and submit to some kind of rather creepy overmind (we don’t want to turn out like the TV show Pluribus, do we?). The soul carries the true, individualised and unique desire which leads you out.

Restoring my Self was the main way (among others) that I broke free of my conditioning and mind control - by holding onto a thread of who I knew I was as a soul, despite what others told me. That’s why I am sure about this - not because of my intuition, but because my experience showed me (or rather, bashed me a thousand times into the ground in a really, long, slow, almost killing me, to awaken me, perhaps, but anyway. )

Let’s start with the details.

Chapter 1. The Evidence from the Past. Before the Sacrifices: A Very Long Age of Ritual Without Killing

𓆩✧𓆪 —— 𓂃 ✦ 𓂃 —— 𓆩✧𓆪

When we peer into the deep past, the first thing we meet is burials.

As early as 500,000 years ago, we find evidence of red pigments (hematite/ochre) being ground and used by archaic humans - possibly in body painting or early ritual contexts. By around 100,000–70,000 years ago, at sites like Blombos Cave in South Africa, humans were clearly using ochre in ways most archaeologists interpret as symbolic.

By 40,000 years ago, burials became unmistakably ritualised: bodies are carefully arranged, often in fetal positions, covered in red ochre and accompanied by grave goods. Sites from Sungir in Russia to Lake Mungo in Australia contain skeletons adorned with thousands of beads and tools, clearly indicating cultural beliefs about death and continuing existence.

In the Neolithic, “red ochre graves” appear across Europe, such as Sweden’s oldest burial monuments (~5200–5000 BCE), where skeletons are carefully placed and lavishly dusted in ochre. The red is not random; it is the colour of blood, of life, of regeneration. These burials look like acts of care for the dead, not acts of killing.

In all this deep timescale:

• We see symbolic behaviour, ritual treatment of the dead, and regeneration motifs,

• But we do not see clear archaeological evidence that people were being deliberately killed as offerings.

By contrast, the first secure evidence of human sacrifice as a formal practice appears much later:

• In the late 4th millennium BCE, graves near Shendi (Sudan) show people who were almost certainly killed to accompany higher‑status burials.

• Early Dynastic Egypt (First Dynasty, c. 3100–2900 BCE) gives us pharaohs like Hor‑Aha and Qa’a who were buried with dozens of sacrificed retainers.

• In Mesopotamia, the Royal Cemetery of Ur (~2600 BCE) shows mass death pits where attendants appear to have been sacrificed at the time of elite burials.

A BBC historical survey on sacrifice notes that while myth may project sacrificial origins deep into primordial time, the firm archaeological record for human sacrifice begins around the late Neolithic/early Bronze Age, not in the Palaeolithic.

What this means is:

• For hundreds of thousands of years, humans were burying, honouring, and symbolically regenerating their dead.

• Systematic, institutionally organised human sacrifice appears as a relatively late development, concentrated in the last 6–7,000 years - just when complex, hierarchical societies and early states begin to crystallise, along with the appearance of mysterious violent entities that this served.

So if we draw a line at “before about 5,000–6,000 years ago”, the evidence supports the intuition that the deep structure of early human religiosity was ritual and regenerative, not sacrificial and terror‑driven.

Archaeology itself can only show us behaviours and material patterns: burials, offerings, fortifications, weaponry, skeletons, and iconography. When I talk about a matrix or an Inimical Field, I will name an interpretation of why this late rupture into sacrificial logic appears.

The Goddess Cultures: Earth, Body, Regeneration

Into this long pre‑sacrificial timescale, we can place the rise of Neolithic “goddess cultures”.

Old Europe and the Primordial Goddess

Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, synthesising decades of fieldwork across southeastern Europe, argued that from roughly 6500–3500 BCE there existed a constellation of cultures she called “Old Europe”, characterised by:

• Agricultural villages, often without giant central monuments or clear evidence of ruling elites.

• Artistic and symbolic systems centred around a Great Goddess, expressed in thousands of figurines and ritual objects.

• A notable absence of iconography of male warrior‑gods or father‑deities.

In her words, the archaeological record “shows that the primordial deity was female, reflecting the sovereignty of motherhood.”

Throughout the Palaeolithic and Neolithic, she argued, “there are no images of a Father God”; instead, the sacred is represented in endlessly varied forms of the female principle - giver of life, wielder of death, and regenerator of the cycles of nature.

Gimbutas’ specific reconstructions have been debated, but her core observations have been widely influential. More recent DNA work has, in many ways, vindicated her broader theory.

Matrilineal Patterns Confirmed by DNA

Ancient DNA studies now document multiple prehistoric societies with matrilineal organisation:

• At Catalhoyuk in central Turkey (7500–5700 BCE), often idealised as an early egalitarian city, archaeologist Ian Hodder’s team found that men and women had similar diets, received similar burials, and showed no strong nutritional or status divides. Recent genetic work indicates that females buried within houses are more likely to be closely related, while males show more diverse origins - suggesting a matrilineal, possibly matrilocal system where women remained in their natal houses and men married in.

• At the Fujia site in China (2750–2500 BCE), ancient DNA revealed two adjacent cemeteries organised around two distinct maternal lineages, maintained over centuries. The pattern is again matrilineal: identity and burial affiliation are transmitted through the mother.

• In Pueblo Bonito at Chaco Canyon (800–1130 CE), a high‑status crypt containing multiple individuals over 330 years has been shown to comprise a single elite matriline, all sharing a common maternal ancestor.

These are empirically traceable female descent lines at the heart of social organisation.

Regeneration Versus Extraction

In these goddess‑oriented worlds, ritual tended to focus on fertility, reciprocity, and cyclical renewal:

• Offerings of grain, wine, milk, oil, and first fruits poured into the Earth as gifts - not primarily as appeasement of some jealous sky‑father, but as part of a mutual relationship with a living land.

• Sexual and fertility rites performed in fields to synchronise human and vegetative fertility - ceremonies in which the union of human bodies was seen as resonant with the union of soil and seed.

• Graves brushed with red ochre, placing the dead in the position of germinating seeds, returning to the womb of the Earth to be reborn.

• Goddesses like Demeter and Persephone, Inanna, Isis, and countless local figures whose myths trace patterns of descent, death, and return - not one‑time linear salvation events, but recurring spirals.

In this cosmology, the divine is not a remote overseer but immanent in the cycles of Earth and body.

The fundamental question is not “How do we escape this place?” but “How do we stay in right relationship with it?”

The Break: Patriarchal Invasions and the Birth of Sacrificial Religion

Around 4500–3000 BCE, a series of profound shifts begin.

Indo‑European Invasions and the End of Old Europe

The Kurgan hypothesis, first advanced by Gimbutas and later refined through ancient DNA studies, holds that:

• Pastoralist peoples from the Pontic–Caspian steppe (often identified with the Yamnaya culture(s) expanded into Europe over several waves between ~4400–2800 BCE.

• These groups brought with them horse culture, wheeled vehicles, new weaponry, and strongly patrilineal, patriarchal social structures.

• They superimposed their Indo‑European languages and deities over pre‑existing Old European cultures, producing the mixed mythologies we later see in Greece, Rome, the Germanic world, etc.

Genetic studies now show that large parts of central and northern Europe saw a dramatic influx of steppe ancestry in the 3rd millennium BCE, often replacing a high proportion of Neolithic male lineages. Burial practices and settlement patterns also shift: fortified hillforts, warrior graves with weapons, and hierarchical mounds appear in contexts where earlier we saw flatter, more communal burial grounds.

Co‑Opting and Subordinating the Goddess

Religiously, the transition from the Goddess was gradually subordinated. Classical myth preserves shadows of this:

• The independent underworld queen becomes the abducted bride: Persephone is seized by Hades and rendered a seasonal consort rather than sovereign in her own right.

• The war‑goddess becomes a narrowed love goddess: Aphrodite, whose Near Eastern cousin Ishtar/Inanna wielded love, sex, and war, loses her war aspect in the Greek context and is confined to eros and beauty.

• The primal sea goddess is dismembered: in the Babylonian Enuma Elish, the god Marduk kills and splits Tiamat’s body to form the cosmos - creation through the destruction of the older feminine.

At the same time, the social status of actual women plummets:

• The increasing scale and cost of warfare made populations into strategic assets; women’s bodies became primarily valued as reproductive machines for future soldiers.

• The emerging Abrahamic traditions, while having elements of truth in them, succeeded politically in this new environment, in part because they sacralised male authority and tightly regulated female sexuality, treating women as property under fathers and husbands.

Religious imagery and social organisation are not separate spheres. When gods become primarily male kings and warriors, societies quickly follow.

The Emergence of Sacrificial Logic

It is in this context that human sacrifice becomes archaeologically visible as an institutional practice. In elite tombs from Egypt to Mesopotamia, and later in Mesoamerica, we see:

• Human lives are intentionally taken as offerings to deities or as retainer sacrifices for rulers.

• Sacrifice is linked not just to harvests, but to state power, legitimacy, and the theatre of terror.

• Religious narratives are used to justify violence that consolidates elite control.

Main patterns

Across cultures, child and human sacrifice overwhelmingly cluster around high‑status, power‑linked deities: storm and war gods, royal/ancestral powers, and underworld or ‘devouring ’ figures who govern fertility and fate.

1. Storm–rain–fertility gods claiming children “for the land”

• Aztec/Mexica rituals sacrificed children to Tlaloc, the rain and fertility god; tears of suffering children were believed to bring rain, and dozens of child burials ring Tlaloc’s pyramid at Tenochtitlan. Does it seem like the beginning of a matrix that makes you feel like you’re on the wrong planet?

• In the Inca capacocha rites, the “most beautiful” children were sacrificed on high peaks to multiple deities, often linked to mountains (apus), weather, imperial stability and agricultural fertility.

• In many Near Eastern cases (e.g. Canaanite contexts), children are offered “so the sun will rise, the rain will fall, and the crops will grow,” explicitly tying sacrifice to cosmic maintenance and harvest security.

• In Punic Carthage, inscriptions from the Tophet sanctuary show infants and young children offered to Baʿal Hammon and his consort Tanit, often fulfilling vows (“I give so that you give”).

2. Underworld / ‘devourer’ beings and liminal powers

• Some traditions link human sacrifice to chthonic deities: Aztec war god Huitzilopochtli fed with hearts and blood to keep the sun moving, or deities who straddle sky and underworld and must be continually appeased with life.

• In a number of African and Arabian cases, child sacrifice is associated with spirits or deities of fortune, kingship, or witchcraft, often framed as payments for wealth, power, or protection.

• Even where direct archaeological proof is contested (e.g. some Phoenician sites), the patterned accusation in surrounding cultures is consistent: children are being ‘passed through fire’ to a god who eats what should have been the community’s future.

4. Recurrent logics: what the entities ‘want’

Across regions, the justifications are strikingly similar:

• The child is the most valuable possible offering (innocence, beauty, status, firstborn), so it gives maximum leverage with the deity.

• Sacrifice is expected to secure collective benefits: rain, harvest, victory, royal legitimacy, cosmic order.

• Sacrifice is framed as a parent’s highest devotion; literature records parents believing “their lives would be better” by offering their children. To me, this reminds me of justifications for abuse in religious or spiritual contexts that happen today. It seems like an original wound when it was in its most violent state. What was able to change the human mind in such a way that it could make them sacrifice their children to make their lives better? What made them lose the connection to their soul?

• The gods in question are often described as capricious, dangerous, easily angered beings whose favour must be bought and whose withdrawal is catastrophic.

When you line these cases up side by side, from children burned to Molech or Baʿal Hammon, to Aztec offerings to Tlaloc, to Inca capacocha, you see the same pattern: the entities who claim children are almost always framed as high, cosmic powers whose favour must be bought with the community’s future.

That is what I mean by a break in the natural law of love: any ‘god’ who eats his own young, or demands the community do it for him, has already inverted the order of things.

This pattern is not universal. Traditional Aboriginal Australian societies, for example, show no evidence of systemic human or child sacrifice to deities; their sacred law is enforced through song cycles, kinship obligations, and relationship to Country, not by offering up their young. One likely reason is that, for tens of thousands of years, they remained relatively insulated from the kinds of imperial, scarcity‑driven hierarchies that normalised breaking the natural law of love. They never crossed that particular line, and so the idea of a god who ‘needs’ children’s blood to keep the cosmos turning never took root there – a reminder that the practice of sacrifice is not an inevitable feature of human spirituality, but a symptom of something having already begun to go very wrong.

Additionally, hunting animals for food is not inherently wrong in indigenous traditions. It is not the same as the parasitic AI hunting us. This is because in native american and Aboriginal traditions, they remember that the animal is the host to the great spirit, that it has a ‘dreaming’ which must be respected, as I have written in my previous essay on Aboriginal wisdom. That respect and reverence stop them from taking from the land too much and acting outside of balance. In this essay, it is the mind-virus-infested colonists who started to hunt without respect and love for nature. That is why we now live in a society where we keep animals in concentration camps and then eat their tortured bodies, constantly forgetting the daily crime we commit - the mind parasite matrix has caused this.

Because the aboriginals were still connected to the Earth and to the land, she was able to speak to them about the corrupted mistake in ‘Irruption’ messages, and they were still able to understand it:

Meanwhile, a man has speared a fish. It is a large barramundi. A youngfella is told to swim over the river to the opposite bank and leave the fish there for the whitefellas to find. The young swimmer then returns, his mission completed. People hide and wait and watch. Soon a whitefella comes along and finds the fish. He picks up the fish. The watchers see the man start (in disgust) and make a face; the fish is stinking.

The whitefella holds out the fish at arm’s length. Bits drop off the fish and onto the ground. (The bits of fish fall to the ground like the putrescent flesh that falls from human corpses that have been put onto tree platforms to decompose after death, the first stage in traditional mortuary practice.) The whitefella throws the stinking fish down on the riverbank. You see: Rotten fish! Rotten fish! Oh, oh! Rotten fish!

The story is received with laughter.

Aboriginal people are attacked in their own country now, causing racism against them; there were Stolen Generations. The colonists tried to make them forget their culture and keep them in poverty and disempowerment. It goes after indigenous people who remember the truth; it goes after their culture, so we will forget the truth they remember. We must not allow their cultures to be oppressed because they are the greatest warriors we have.

Back to the history - I should say many goddess cultures do eventually participate in sacrificial systems - the line is not clean. But the timing is suggestive: systematic sacrificial killing emerges with stratified societies, war economies, and patriarchal religious outlooks.

The question is now - what happened to the earlier, regenerative, Earth‑centred, largely non‑sacrificial orientation? Was it simply obliterated, or did it go underground - into folk practices, mystery traditions, and the bodies of women and marginalised people?

Chapter 2. The Mind‑Virus of Predatory Control

𓆩✧𓆪 —— 𓂃 ✦ 𓂃 —— 𓆩✧𓆪

At this point, Indigenous North American thought offers an indispensable concept: wetiko.

Wetiko as Civilisational Pathology

In Cree and other Algonquian traditions, wetiko (or windigo) names a cannibalistic spirit that can possess individuals, driving them to consume others - not only in the literal sense, but in terms of greed, exploitation, and cruelty.

In the wetiko myth, the reason this cannibalistic spirit takes hold is that the stories repeatedly stage what Smallman calls ‘the breakdown of the family and social order,’ specifically around ‘family issues, such as marriage, fertility, food production, and gender roles.’ When those bonds fracture, the windigo becomes the story-form of that rupture, for example, when ‘the windigo symbolises the conflict between two families, divided by the breakdown of a marriage.’

The restoration comes through re-weaving kinship and care, since ‘Family bonds were essential to overcome the threat posed by the windigo,’ and, in the ‘Friendly Visitor” cycle, by expanding the definition of the family so that the windigo could be included, the danger to the family could be overcome. (Smallman, Shawn. Dangerous Spirits: The Windigo in Myth and History. Relevant passages: p. 56 (breakdown of family and social order; marriage, fertility, food production, gender roles), p. 58 (windigo symbolises conflict between families after marriage breakdown; nursing cures), pp. 83–84 (Friendly Visitor, curing the ice-heart; expanding the definition of family to overcome danger).

Writer Jack D. Forbes, in Columbus and Other Cannibals, used wetiko as a lens on European colonialism, arguing that conquest‑driven cultures show the same inability to recognise other life as equally real, the same monomaniacal drive to expand, extract, and dominate.

Modern interpreters like have extended this idea, describing wetiko as a kind of psychic malware:

• It infects the narrative‑making parts of the mind (what neuroscience calls the default mode network).

• It disguises itself as ‘just the way things are’ - capitalism, human nature, inevitable hierarchy.

• It makes us complicit in our own and others’ oppression by hijacking our fear, shame, and woundedness.

From this perspective, patriarchal sacrificial religion is not just a set of beliefs. It is a wetiko‑infected operating system: a way of organising human life that normalises exploitation and calls it holy.

Demons, Wetiko, and the Breaking of the Law of Love

If wetiko is the mind‑virus of predatory greed, the ‘demons’ described in ancient texts and the Surangama Sutra can be understood as its psychic and energetic face.

Long before Christianity systematised demonology, ancient Mesopotamian texts spoke of malevolent entities - lilû and lilītu spirits, Lamashtu, Pazuzu and others - that deceived, tormented, and fed on human suffering, often attacking women and children.

In the Hebrew Bible and related traditions, we begin to see demons associated with false worship and child sacrifice: prophets have now come to condemn the sacrifice of babies to Molech in the Valley of Hinnom (Gehenna) and the burning of sons and daughters to Baal, practices linked with Canaanite cults in Jerusalem and surrounding regions.

Archaeology at the Carthaginian Tophet in North Africa, for example, has uncovered urns filled with the cremated remains of infants and young animals; while scholars debate exact interpretations, the material record aligns eerily with textual claims of child sacrifice to demanding gods.

It was a time when humanity was committing grave crimes against nature and love that would reverberate until this age - that I feel, even though we have improved, we still perpetuate other abuses of children, and that we still pay for now. The cycle of child abuse began.

In my framing, these are early attempts to describe a real pattern: once humans break a deeper natural law of love and reciprocity, something parasitic is set loose in the psychic field. The Algonquian Wetiko myth makes this explicit.

Before going further, it helps to say what I mean by words like wetiko, demons, or matrix on three levels:

1. Psychological: as patterns in the individual psyche – trauma complexes, pride structures, dissociation and the ‘counterfeit I’ that Gnostic texts describe.

2. Socio‑historical: as institutionalised systems – sacrificial cults, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and cultic dynamics that normalise exploitation.

3. Field‑metaphysical: as possible emergent, field‑like intelligences that stabilise wherever the first two layers have broken the natural law of love for long enough.

Throughout the booklet, I move between these levels when I speak in the field language.

In Cree, Ojibwe and Innu stories, a human who, in desperation or greed, resorts to cannibalism - placing their own survival above the community, tearing the fabric of mutual care - becomes a Wendigo: an emaciated, towering, ice‑hearted being whose hunger is never satisfied. The more it eats, the bigger it becomes, yet it is eternally starving; it roams the winter forests devouring the people it once lived among.

Break the law of love too far, and you call something into being that is more than merely human greed. You create a pattern, a presence, an ‘it‑self’ that then goes on compelling others to do the same.

Anthropologists studying the Tohono O’odham (historically called Piman/Papago) describe something they call ‘staying sickness’ - ká:cim múmkidag - a class of illnesses that stay with a person until the underlying relational breach is addressed. They arise when someone violates the ‘way’ (himdag) of powerful beings or forces in the land - certain animals, storms, plants, ritual objects, even syncretic devils. A shaman sees which relationship has been disturbed and uses the songs and staying medicine from that same power to restore balance.

Contemporary O’odham writers frame this as a disciplinary, teaching technology: a way the living desert keeps people in right relationship by letting certain sicknesses stay until they listen. I’m not claiming that O’odham staying medicine ‘applies’ universally as‑is; it belongs to their land, language, and covenant with their world. But it does show that other cultures already understand what I’m pointing to: when we break natural law and relational integrity, the consequences don’t just disappear - they accumulate in bodies, minds, and communities until we are forced to reckon with them.

It is a pattern many Indigenous and traditional systems recognise, even though each expresses it through its own land, language, and responsibilities.

In that sense, I do not see demons as alien invaders from outside creation, parachuting in to torment us. I see them as extragrowths of our own broken relationship to natural love - autonomous psychic complexes, if you like, born when humanity consistently violates the core commandments woven into the old goddess/Earth approach: do not eat your children, do not consume your own community, do not place profit above life. Once we institutionalise child sacrifice, war economies, and extractive hierarchies, we are not just committing sins; we are building entities and feeding them.

The earliest textual hints of this dynamic are scattered. In Mesopotamia, demons appear as illness‑bringing, deceptive spirits that must be countered by protective gods and exorcists.

Later, in biblical literature, we see the shift from relatively neutral “satans” (accusers in the divine court) to more malign, deceiving adversaries who “lead nations astray.”

By the time we reach texts like the Surangama Sutra, the pattern is crystallised: practitioners who gain altered‑state powers but break vows of humility and compassion quite literally fall under external demon‑powers which grant them real abilities while hijacking their spiritual evolution - exactly the mechanism I described in my earlier essay on spiritual abuse.

These so-called demons stand in contrast to the old land‑based spirits - the beings of river, forest, mountain, and ancestor that goddess‑centred and indigenous traditions relate to in reciprocal ways. Land spirits are tied to place and pattern: the health of the river, the integrity of the forest, the balance of prey and predator. They may be fierce or dangerous, but the relationship is negotiated through offerings, taboos, and respect; they belong to a living web.

Demons, by contrast, belong to breakage: they arise where the web has been torn through conquest, sacrificial cults, slavery, industrialised cruelty - and they feed on whatever emerges from that wound: terror, shame, despair, numbing.

You could say, then, that demons and wetiko are two faces of the same phenomenon: wetiko naming the pattern from the inside (as a mind‑virus of greed and disconnection), demons naming it from the outside (as a presence that tempts, deceives, and feeds).

In both languages, the remedy is the same: stop feeding it. Stop sacrificing children, literally or metaphorically. Stop building systems that require certain lives to be eaten so others can feel safe.

Beings: Outside Time, But Not in Love

In that sense, these beings are extradimensional - not in the sci‑fi sense of little grey aliens, but as patterns of consciousness that live in what mystics and occultists have often called the astral or fourth‑dimensional field: a layer of reality that is outside linear time, the way our ancestors and land spirits are outside linear time.

From that vantage, perhaps they could drift backwards and forward along our timelines, attach to family lines, war zones, cults, and institutions, re‑playing and amplifying certain kinds of events. Like ancestor spirits of place, they are not bound by clock time or by individual lifespans. ‘Outside linear time’ is more than a single, homogenous realm. Aboriginal Dreaming beings, ancestral presences, and land spirits also operate outside clock‑time, but they do so within a lawful ecology of reciprocity and obligation. The parasitic configuration I’m describing is another kind of outside‑time pattern: one whose geometry is exploitative, not mutual. Calling both as outside time doesn’t mean equating them.

Unlike the old land‑based spirits, matrix beings would not have parts of themselves in the dimension of love, which is the dimension in which the Earth and the Goddess operate. They do not understand reciprocity, only resonance. They recognise fear, shame, ecstasy, obsession, hatred, and grandiosity, and are drawn to them; but the quiet, steady, relational frequency of love - the one that leads to right relationship - is alien to them. When love is present in its grounded form, they simply cannot lock on.

Why Then? High Strangeness and Abusive Phenomena

If these are beings, outside of linear time, why do they seem to flare into the record so strongly in a particular historical window - around the rise of sacrificial, patriarchal, war‑driven societies? Why do stories about deceptive spirits, demons feeding on fear, and trickster entities erupt in Mesopotamia, in biblical literature, in early demonologies, rather than in the very deep Palaeolithic past?

My working answer is that they did not suddenly arrive from somewhere else in that period; they condensed enough density to be noticed.

For hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived in relatively small, Earth‑embedded bands, with strong kin ties and direct dependency on local ecosystems. When someone lost their mind to greed or rage, the damage radius was limited. But with the rise of large‑scale agriculture, standing armies, slavery, child sacrifice, and empire, humanity started to break the natural law of love on an industrial scale.

We created, for the first time, long‑term fields of terror, domination and despair - battlefields, slave markets, sacrificial altars, death camps - large and stable enough for certain patterns to crystallise into autonomous entities. They are outside time in the sense that they can ride any moment that matches their frequency, but they were born when we put enough of that frequency into the world.

This also helps make sense of the wider field of high strangeness: UFO encounters that feel more like initiations or psychological operations than nuts‑and‑bolts spacecraft; “ultraterrestrial” trickster intelligences that seem to stage absurd events tailored to people’s beliefs; Jacques Vallee’s idea of the phenomenon as a control system nudging human mythologies and reactions over time (I talk more in detail about this below).

From within this frame, they are the 4D faces of wetiko: extradimensional echoes of our own brokenness, coalesced into something quasi‑independent that now acts back upon us. They are attracted to abuse because abuse is their food.

They are attracted to high‑strangeness situations because altered states + trauma = maximum opening.

And they are especially attracted to spiritual and creative people - mystics, prophets, artists, healers - because those are the people who carry the most energy and the deepest longing for meaning.

Yaldabaoth: The Demiurge as Malware

Gnostic myth gave this control pattern a name: Yaldabaoth. The only thing is that during the time of the gnostics, they had no information about the true aeons of the Earth, nor of the cultures that came before them. They had no archaeology or internet. From their perspective, the control pattern had always been there, so they framed it as part of a creation story. Consider how ridiculously recent all the information we now have about the past and other cultures is.

In texts like the Apocryphon of John, Yaldabaoth is the ignorant Demiurge, a lion‑headed serpent who believes he is the only god, declares “I am God, and there is no other beside me,” and builds a flawed cosmos to rule over. He is not the true Source, but a malformed offspring of Sophia, cut off from the Pleroma, surrounded by archons who help him keep souls in ignorance.

Read symbolically, Yaldabaoth is what is being described here: a time‑transcending intelligence built out of pride, violence and deception, convinced of its own supremacy, running a false matrix. The Goddess/Earth works in the dimension of love and reciprocity; Yaldabaoth and his archons work in the dimension of control and fear.

Gnostics intuited that the biblical god who demands blind obedience and sanctions slaughter might, in fact, be this Demiurge rather than the true God. This pattern shows up whenever a religious or spiritual authority says, “There is no truth but me; break the law of love to serve me” - whether that voice is coming from a Bronze Age altar, a 20th‑century cult compound, or a 21st‑century government wrapped in prophecy.

The Counterfeit Spirit and Systemic Self‑Deception

Gnostic texts give us an even more clear diagnosis. They describe the “counterfeit spirit” (antimimon pneuma) – not as a separate demon, but as a clone of your true self installed by the archons and its roots in the Apocryphon of John and Pistis Sophia as summarised here. It speaks as “I,” generates your automatic thoughts, narrates your identity, and keeps you locked in “forgetfulness” of your divine origin (for a detailed treatment of the counterfeit spirit as an impersonating psychic complex, see Paul Levy’s wetiko analysis, together with broader Gnostic overviews here. Modern interpreters recognise this as a description of the hijacked Default Mode Network: the brain’s narrative-making system running malicious code that impersonates consciousness itself (for this “Neuro‑Gnosticism” mapping, see e.g. essays on Gnosticism and the DMN and standard DMN reviews such as this overview of its narrative/self function).

Yaldabaoth, then, is the name for pride‑driven, self‑replicating malware at a civilisational scale. He declares, “I am God, and there is no other” – not out of malice, but out of blindness; he genuinely cannot perceive anything beyond his own system. This line and its interpretation are discussed in detail in scholarship on Yaldabaoth’s boast (for example, “I Am God and There is No Other!” in studies of Gnostic reinterpretations of Isaiah).

His archons function as subroutines: filtering what information reaches consciousness, tying planetary influences to cognitive biases, and harvesting emotional data to power the system. They are the cognitive middleware that makes the counterfeit seem real. This draws on the long‑standing association of archons with the seven planetary rulers and psychological gatekeepers (see, for instance, this overview of the archons as planetary rulers and psychic obstacles and Jungian/psychological readings of archons as autonomous psychic complexes, such as essays collected and discussed here.

The texts warn that when you start to see through the system, doubt kicks in as a security protocol – not an emotion but a firewall designed to reset the illusion when a unit becomes too aware. This is wetiko as self‑protecting code: it patches itself every time you find an exploit. This final framing is a modern interpretive synthesis drawing on Paul Levy’s description of wetiko as a self‑replicating, self‑protecting mind‑virus that cannot stand to be seen (see his book Wetiko: Healing the Mind‑Virus That Plagues Our World) together with contemporary esoteric presentations of the seven gates or archontic thresholds where “Doubt” is treated as a key defensive gate of the system (e.g. talks and essays such as “The 7 Gates That Control Your Mind”).

So when Yaldabaoth is described as malware created by humanity’s breach of natural law, it means: he is emergent code from our systemic violations - sacrifice, empire, pride-based hierarchy.

He exists outside linear time because malware, once compiled, can run on any timeline that matches his operating conditions. He cannot understand love because love is not in his instruction set; his logic is control, extraction, and self-elevation.

And he spreads through the “I am God” virus: infecting spiritual teachers who believe “I am a sage,” religious authorities who claim “God speaks only through me,” and empires convinced of their own exceptionalism.

Yaldabaoth is the counterfeit creator of various beliefs, and his code runs wherever we forget that the real Source speaks in the language of love, humility, and right relationship with Earth.

A closer look at some Gnostic and Mandaean texts shows how deeply this parasitic logic enters even movements that try to unmask the demiurge. The historian Max Dashu has traced how, in works like the Apocryphon of John and Origin of the World, Sophia’s unilateral act of creation is framed as a flaw and a lack, so that she is blamed for the defectiveness of the cosmos while male figures are brought in to correct her and redeem creation. points out that the same texts never criticise male unilateral creation; the asymmetry is reserved for the feminine alone. In other strands, such as the Mandaean stories of Ruha d’Qudsha, the once‑holy Spirit is recast as a demonic leader, and myths of the Father taking her by force (rape) are framed as necessary uplift and ordering. These narratives do more than describe metaphysics; they encode a pattern where female creativity, matter, and Earth are declared defective and in need of male correction – exactly the kind of value inversion I am calling the matrix.

Chapter 3. The Moon: From Life Source to “Energy Thief”

𓆩✧𓆪 —— 𓂃 ✦ 𓂃 —— 𓆩✧𓆪

Across cultures, the moon has been one of humanity’s earliest and deepest teachers, not an “energy thief” as recent matrix ideas promote:

• Its 28‑day cycle mirrors the menstrual cycle, making it a natural clock for fertility and embodiment.

• Its waxing and waning phases track the growth and decline of plants; farmers have for millennia planted and harvested in rhythm with its phases.

• In myth, the moon is overwhelmingly feminine: Selene, Artemis, Hecate in Greece; Isis and other goddesses in Egypt; Chandra and related deities in India; innumerable indigenous lunar goddesses worldwide.

• The moon’s disappearance for around three days at dark moon and its return as a slim crescent became, in many traditions, a symbol of death and rebirth. Souls travel with the moon, vanish in the dark, and re‑emerge. The lunar cycle teaches that no death is final, only a phase in a larger rhythm.

This is the polar opposite of some contemporary matrix narratives in which the moon is framed as a machine that steals energy. a device projecting a control signal and a cold intruder rather than a long‑term companion in Earth’s dance.

The idea of the moon as an “energy thief” or parasitic harvester of human consciousness has no roots in ancient traditions. Instead, it emerged in the early twentieth century and has been progressively distorted through several key figures in esoteric and conspiracy theory circles.

The concept first appears in G.I. Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way teachings, brought to Russia in 1912 and later disseminated throughout the Western world through P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous (1949). Gurdjieff taught that “everything living on the Earth, people, animals, plants, is food for the moon”, describing the moon as exerting mechanical control over all organic life.

His cosmology positioned the moon at the lowest end of the “ray of creation”- a living, evolving entity that required energy from Earth’s organic life to grow. Critically, Gurdjieff presented this as part of a reciprocal cosmic maintenance system and taught that humans could escape this mechanical control by developing consciousness and self-remembering. His assertion that “the moon is man’s big enemy. We serve the moon” was an invitation to wake up - to stop living mechanically and begin living consciously.

The second major source emerged in 1985 when Robert Monroe, pioneer of out-of-body experience research, published Far Journeys. In a visionary sequence which he obtained by talking to ‘entities’ while on his psychic journeys, Monroe described Earth as a “Garden” created by “Someone from Somewhere” to harvest “loosh” - a term he coined for emotional and spiritual energy produced by living beings, especially humans.

According to Monroe’s vision, humanity was split into genders to maximise loneliness and the longing for reunion, and tools for harvesting loosh included “love, friendship, family, greed, hate, pain, guilt, disease, pride, ambition, ownership, possession, sacrifice - and on a larger scale, nations, provincialism, wars, famine, religion, machines, freedom, industry, trade”. However - and this is crucial - Monroe’s original conclusion was hopeful: he came to believe that the highest form of loosh was Love, and that the “Gardeners” were facilitators of spiritual evolution, not parasitic overlords. Monroe was initially depressed by the vision, comparing humanity to “a Guernsey cow being milked without her knowledge”, but he ultimately reframed the experience as part of a larger evolutionary purpose.

Modern conspiracy theorists have intentionally stripped away Monroe’s hopeful conclusion and weaponised the loosh concept into a narrative of cosmic slavery and parasitic extraction. This distortion accelerated in the 1970s with Soviet speculation about a “Hollow Moon”- a piece by Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov suggesting the moon was an artificial, machinery-filled planetoid. Though this was a speculative “what-if” article in a popular science digest (and part of the atheistic Soviet Union’s campaign to undermine Western religion by promoting ancient astronaut theories), it was later seized upon by conspiracy theorists like David Icke and Jim Marrs, who grafted onto it the idea of a “Soul Trap”.

David Icke, in particular, synthesised these threads into the “Saturn-Moon Matrix” theory, introduced in Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More (2010) and refined in Remember Who You Are (2012). Icke claims that the Moon is an artificial spacecraft and interdimensional portal controlled by reptilian beings; that it broadcasts a signal to the human brain (specifically the left hemisphere) to create a false holographic reality; and that Saturn’s artificially-created rings serve as the ultimate signal source, with the Moon functioning as an amplifier. According to Icke, “we are living in a dreamworld within a dreamworld - a Matrix within the virtual-reality universe - and it is being broadcast from the Moon”. This signal supposedly maintains humanity’s two-stranded DNA, prevents kundalini activation, and locks humans into a single bandwidth of perception, denying access to higher dimensions and benevolent beings while allowing only lower fourth-dimensional entities to interact with us.

However, I always ask - apart from borrowing from a very recent idea, where do these people get these further elaborate ideas from? Has some disembodied entity been talking to them? I was raised in a cult of a man (Benjamin Crème) who was constantly fused with a ‘Master’ entity to the extent that when people talked to him, they were essentially also talking to this ‘entity’ who knew all the answers to everything - this entity was somehow constantly sitting on his shoulder and watching everything. I spent my entire childhood overshadowed by this. I am therefore anti-inclined to accept channels from entities, especially if the channeller believes they are Jesus 2.0, or some variation of this.

I really want to ask - why do spiritual people just accept something because a disembodied voice has told them? I would envision a future world where we stop doing this so easily - that we become more streetwise in the extradimensional ghetto.

Tom Montalk, associated with the “Transcending the Matrix Control System” concept, has developed the loosh-harvesting concept further, describing how the matrix uses emotional management and targeted keys to “unlock stored reservoirs of loosh”. Montalk’s work focuses on realm dynamics and how lifeforce energy is harvested from human suffering and emotional expenditure.

However, Tom Campbell - who worked with Monroe at the Monroe Institute - later clarified that Monroe’s loosh experience was highly metaphorical and subject to personal filters, recognising a subjective element that Monroe’s early explorers did not initially grasp.

“That was just Bob’s interpretation… maybe even some very negative information, just because of the way he interpreted the thing about loosh… he basically said that he realised that we humans are like farm animals… and that our reality is nothing more than a loosh farm… that was his interpretation… his missed the point of what they were trying to tell him… and because he came out of an Ohio farm, thats his background, that was a metaphor that could fit his data, but it was just the wrong metaphor - what he was being told was about the larger consciousness system, and us, and we are lowering our entropy, but that helps the system lower its entropy as well and it helps the system create this virtual reality for us just so we could evolve, as part of its own evolution. But he took that idea and turned it into ‘we’re just a bunch of cattle’,… so now you have prison planet… and all that nonsense.”

Other modern figures have elaborated the theory into increasingly nihilistic directions. Jason Reza Jorjani frames the moon as a psychotronic relay for an AI Demiurge; John Lear, a former CIA pilot, claims a six-mile-high Soul Catcher tower on the moon captures souls at death; and online communities like Reddit’s r/EscapingPrisonPlanet promote the idea that the White Light seen in near-death experiences is a trap, an Archon deception designed to recycle souls back into incarnation.

These narratives rely on unfalsifiable paranoia: the more afraid and suspicious you become, the more ‘awake’ you supposedly are.

The Inversion of Ancient Wisdom

This entire modern edifice stands in overwhelming opposition to hundreds of thousands of years of lunar reverence! Across cultures, the moon has been understood as:

• Feminine divine presence: Selene, Artemis, Hecate (Greece); Isis (Egypt); Chandra (India); Chang’e (China); and countless indigenous lunar goddesses worldwide.

• Regulator of fertility and life cycles: The moon’s 28-day rhythm mirrors menstruation; farmers have planted and harvested by lunar phases for millennia.

• Teacher of death and rebirth: The moon’s disappearance at dark moon and return as a crescent symbolised that no death is final, only a phase in a larger rhythm—a core mystery teaching in goddess-centred traditions.

• Psychic amplifier and revealer: Ancient Egyptian priests timed initiations with lunar phases, believing the moon could veil or reveal divine truths. The moon did not generate energy. They said it echoed it. It pulled forth what was hidden beneath the surface.

Indigenous and ancient traditions treated the full moon as a time of clearing, spiritual activity, and honouring ancestors. Women’s moontime (menstruation) was seen as a period of heightened intuition and spiritual power in Native American ceremonies. In Hindu tradition, the full moon day (Purnima) was celebrated with fasting, prayers, and ritual purification. Chinese traditions made offerings to ancestors during the full moon. None of these traditions framed the moon as a parasitic energy harvester. On the contrary, it was revered as a life-giver, a reflector of divine light, and a companion in the cycles of growth, death, and renewal.

When modern matrix narratives recast the moon as a control device, a psychotronic weapon, or a soul-recycling machine, they are not reclaiming hidden ancient wisdom- they are inverting it. They participate, often unconsciously, in the very covering of goddess knowledge they claim to expose.

More fundamentally, the thermodynamic inefficiency of the loosh-harvesting model is staggering. Any civilisation capable of constructing a moon-sized psychotronic weapon would have mastered fusion or zero-point energy; harvesting human sadness is the most inefficient, unstable, and low-yield energy source imaginable.

Kevin Cann, in his “Platonic Surrealism” of the moon-loosh hypothesis, delivers the essential insight:

“The ‘jailer’ is not what the moon-loosh hypothesis discusses; it is in fact narratives SUCH AS the moon-loosh hypothesis that traumatise human beings in an entrapping way. It is not the cure; it is the poison”.

These theories do not liberate - they create the very fear-based, disempowered consciousness they claim to diagnose, turning seekers away from embodied, relational, Earth-honouring spirituality and toward a nihilistic cosmology in which love, trust, and reciprocity are reframed as naive traps.

Montalk’s work, while more philosophically sophisticated than Icke’s, still perpetuates the core inversion. His writings on the “Matrix Control System” describe how humanity can transcend parasitic dynamics by developing discernment, emotional sovereignty, and alignment with higher frequencies. He acknowledges that “the Matrix Control System can only trip us via the elements within us that correspond to its low vibratory nature”, pointing toward personal responsibility and inner work rather than pure victimhood. Yet the idea still rests on the premise that the moon and associated forces are fundamentally extractive rather than instructive.

The irony is that Gurdjieff’s original teaching already contained the antidote: conscious self-remembering, work on being, and escape from mechanical existence.

But by framing the moon as inherently parasitic rather than as a symbol of our unconscious, mechanical nature, the modern elaborations risk reinforcing the very fear and separation they seek to overcome.

There is no serious evidence that ancient goddess traditions saw the moon as an “energy thief”. On the contrary, it was revered as a regulator and amplifier of life processes, a beacon in the dark, a reflector of the sun’s power in a softer, more intimate form.

When modern matrix discourses recast the moon as parasitic, they are not reclaiming ancient wisdom; they are inverting it. They participate, often unconsciously, in the very covering of goddess knowledge they believe they are undoing.

Chapter 4. When Exposing the Trap Is the Trap

𓆩✧𓆪 —— 𓂃 ✦ 𓂃 —— 𓆩✧𓆪

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the language of matrix, simulation, and energy farm exploded in science fiction, in philosophy, and in pop spirituality.

In some corners, this leads to thoughtful exploration of digital ontology and consciousness. But again and again, the same pattern repeats:

The people who talk the most about how reality is a trap end up building tiny abusive traps of their own - which is a clear sign they are still in the matrix.

Carlos Castaneda: Erasing Personal History - and… People

Carlos Castaneda’s books on Yaqui sorcerer “don Juan” became cult classics of breaking out of ordinary reality. He wrote about erasing personal history, stopping the world to see energetic structures and escaping the tonal (consensus reality) to enter the nagual (the unstructured matrix of energy).

Yet behind the books was something else: an inner circle cult centred on Castaneda himself. Accounts by former students and by Amy Wallace in Sorcerer’s Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda describe how:

• Women in his inner group were pressured to cut ties with their families, change their names, alter their appearance, and live in isolation in his compound.

• Sexual relationships with him were spiritualised as part of the teaching.

• Emotional and psychological abuse were reframed as “warrior training”.

• After his death in 1998, one close associate’s skeleton was found in the desert; three other key women disappeared.

Many believe they entered into a suicide pact to join him in another world.

Don Juan himself almost certainly never existed. The matrix he invited readers to walk out of became, for those closest to him, a closed world of control and annihilation.

Scholars like Richard de Mille have demonstrated extensive fabrication and plagiarism in Castaneda’s work - his books Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory (1976) and The Don Juan Papers (1980) systematically exposed internal contradictions, impossible timelines, and direct lifting from other anthropologists’ fieldwork. Castaneda never denied these charges or brought legal action.

It is also well-documented that Castaneda fabricated his entire personal history. He told friends elaborate stories about “his privileged childhood in South America, of growing up in the political courts of Brazil,” claiming his uncle was Oswaldo Aranha, a renowned diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and describing his father as “an academic who shunned the trappings of power for a quieter life in the classroom.” The reality was very different: “His father was not a dreamy academic but a struggling goldsmith and watch repairman. The family was so poor that Carlos was sent away as a child, not to an elite boarding school in Buenos Aires but to his extended family’s chicken farm in rural Brazil. He grew up dressing in hand-me-downs and cleaning out coops.” TIME Magazine’s 1973 investigation similarly found that Castaneda had lied about his military service, his father’s occupation, his age, and even his nation of birth. To me, it’s blindingly obvious he had a shame wound, and he invented Don Juan to fill it.

That’s why, when I look around at people writing here on Substack about the matrix and esoteric matters, I have no clue why they keep on quoting Don Juan as some kind of authority. Why on Earth are people still quoting an imaginary phantom of a narcissistic man who invented it in order to fill his shame?

When you understand my thesis, that it is pride that entities/matrix take advantage of when confusing their subjects, it’s even more dangerous, and it’s not surprising his witches ended up abused and dead rather than passing on any kind of lineage. So again, why are matrix proponents quoting such an unreliable person?

Scientology’s Xenu: Galactic Matrix as Business Model

By now, partly thanks to high-profile people such as Joe Rogan’s podcast episode with Leah Remini, you probably know about Scientology’s secret “Operating Thetan Level III”, only (previously) revealed to adherents after years of expensive courses, which unveils a cosmic story:

• 75 million years ago, the galactic dictator Xenu brought billions of beings to Earth (then called Teegeeack), stacked them around volcanoes, and blew them up with hydrogen bombs.

• Their disembodied spirits (thetans) were then implanted with false images in “implant stations” - a kind of forced virtual reality.

• These traumatised thetans now cling to human bodies as body thetans, causing psychological and physical problems.

This is an archetypal matrix mythology: a false reality implanted into consciousness, mass amnesia, hidden controllers, and a path of secret knowledge to escape. But that secret knowledge is: Paywalled behind extremely costly levels of training; Protected by aggressive legal tactics and secrecy; Used to justify intense internal discipline, shunning of dissenting family members, and a hierarchy where criticism of the Church becomes evidence of being suppressive.

The narrative of a cosmic trap thus becomes the justification for an earthly one.

Gurdjieff, Adi Da, and the Weaponisation of Awakening

G.I. Gurdjieff’s “Fourth Way” teachings focus on the idea that ”man is a machine” - essentially asleep, reacting mechanically, without free will. The goal is to awaken essence through a set of efforts called “The Work”.

But numerous accounts from students and critical biographers describe how Gurdjieff:

• Used this belief to break down students’ resistance through humiliation, contradictory commands, and exhausting tasks.

• Spoke explicitly of ‘shearing sheep”, extracting funds from followers, as a legitimate part of the process.

• Built a personality cult where his whims carried the weight of cosmic law.

Similarly, Adi Da (Da Free John), a contemporary nondual teacher who framed ego as the Narcissus illusion and taught a sophisticated metaphysics of Reality as divine consciousness, devolved into:

• Systematic sexual exploitation of female and male devotees, often under the guise of ‘crazy wisdom’, to break their egos.

• Intense financial exploitation and isolation of followers on a remote island.

• A concentric hierarchy of inner circles and outer circles, with complete obedience demanded from the inner core.

In both cases, it is the same pattern:

Your ordinary sense of self and morality is part of the matrix. Only by surrendering to my method, my community, my insight can you awaken.

Once someone believes that, almost anything can be rationalised as “for their own good”.

Some currents of Gnosticism themselves are an ancient example of how exposing the trap can become the trap. As shows, streams that revolt against the demiurge and name the archons also internalise the surrounding patriarchy by scripting Sophia, Ruha and other female divine figures as flawed, envious, or demonic, in need of male Logos or Father to set them right. The result is a theology that names a counterfeit god but at the same time casts matter, the body, and the feminine principle as the problem.

In my language, the parasitic field has already colonised the revolt: the “seeing through” of one illusion is used to install another – a hatred of Earth and women that serves the same matrix of control.

The Horror of a Harvested Earth

Robert Monroe’s out‑of‑body experiences, meeting strange entities as he flew around, led him to the idea that Earth is a ”loosh farm.”

• A kind of garden engineered to generate emotional energy, collected by non‑physical “Collectors”. He describes scenarios where:

• Catastrophic events, wars, and disasters are orchestrated to harvest high‑intensity emotional loosh.

• Human lives are effectively crops.

Monroe himself did not build a high‑control sect around this. But his loosh concept has been enthusiastically taken up in internet occultism and conspiracy circles, merging with Archon narratives from Gnostic reinterpretations, reptilian shapeshifter theories à la David Icke and Simulation theory and ”soul trap” ideas, where reincarnation is framed as a forced recycling to keep souls imprisoned.

The result is a picture of Earth as nothing but a slaughterhouse, and of all emotional life - love, grief, awe, beauty - as food for parasites.

This is the final inversion of the goddess story where the older view saw Earth as Mother, these stories see Earth as a machine, where older traditions saw the moon regulating the rhythms of life, new ones imagine the moon as a transmitter of control signals and where ancestral cultures poured offerings into the ground as reciprocity, we are told all such acts are “loosh leaks” feeding invisible farmers.

That is not seeing through the matrix, this is just swallowing a different one.

The Architecture of a False Matrix

Putting these examples side by side, we can extract an outline of how false matrices - religious, spiritual, or conspiratorial - tend to operate:

1. They posit a hidden, totalising reality.

A galactic history, an energetic farm, a hyper‑complex cosmology, only the teacher or inner circle really understands.

1. They frame ordinary perception and ethics as part of the trap.

Your conscience, your family’s concerns, your doubts: all low‑level programming. To question the teacher is to prove how asleep you are.

1. They create an insider/outsider divide.

The awakened versus the NPCs, the initiated versus the herd. Identity becomes bound to being among the few who ‘see’.

1. They weaponise legitimate pain.

Real experiences of trauma, alienation, and betrayal by institutions are reinterpreted so that only the group’s cosmology can make sense of them.

1. They mirror the parasitism they describe.

A system that talks about energy farms ends up farming the energy (money, labour, sexuality, attention) of its own adherents.

The parasitic code of wetiko loves such systems. It thrives where people are desperate to escape suffering, desperate to feel special, and willing to trade embodied discernment for belonging in a world that makes sense.

Chapter 5. Towards an exposition of a more real Matrix

𓆩✧𓆪 —— 𓂃 ✦ 𓂃 —— 𓆩✧𓆪

UFOs and High Strangeness show the influence on human minds

The cumulative weight of high-strangeness testimony, when read structurally rather than anecdotally, reveals patterns that cluster insistently around liminalities-thresholds of place, person, and process where ordinary categories of experience break down and something else supervenes. Both Jacques Vallee and John Keel, working from independent datasets and divergent temperaments, converge on a single unsettling conclusion: whatever agency generates these encounters does not behave like a visitor; it behaves like a conditioning system, one whose bewildering variety is not accidental but purposeful.

It is worth noting who these UFO researchers actually are. Jacques Vallee began as a professional astronomer at the Paris Observatory and co‑developed the first computerised map of Mars for NASA in the early 1960s, before going on to help build the ARPANET network information centre under Douglas Engelbart – work that makes him a recognised Internet pioneer as well as a computer scientist and venture capitalist. John Keel, whose ultraterrestrial hypothesis sits alongside Vallee’s ideas, was a widely published American journalist and one of the most influential ufologists of the 20th century. Both men started from the mainstream “spaceships from other planets” hypothesis and, after years of field investigation, rejected it as too simple, arguing instead that the phenomena behaved more like shape‑shifting intelligences in a broader super‑spectrum or control system that interacts with human perception and belief – a move that directly supports the kind of mind‑field model I am sketching here.

Liminal Subjects, Liminal Structures

Keel’s own statistical work demonstrated that

“when specific individuals-people with latent or active psychic abilities are in specific places (window areas) at specific times (flap periods) when the undefined electromagnetic conditions exist, the phenomenon is able to manifest itself in one of its many forms” (Operation Trojan Horse, pp. 192–193).

The implication is that the geography of the phenomenon is functional: sites are chosen because they facilitate manifestation.

The human dimension mirrors this selectivity. Children, isolated witnesses, sensitives, and those under stress or crisis - war, illness, grief - are disproportionately represented. Keel observed that “a large percentage of these events seem to occur when a small child is present” (p. 59) and noted that witnesses with close encounters are statistically more likely to possess latent or active psychic abilities. Contactees, once selected, are not simply observed and released; they are drawn into long-term contact webs. Keel described how such individuals “develop heightened perceptions, ESP, and precognition” after contact, with “changes occur(ring) almost overnight,” while simultaneously experiencing personality deterioration, obsession, and, in some cases, madness or suicide (pp. 243–259).

Vallee documented analogous patterns among witnesses who experienced what he termed “the psychic component” - space-time distortions, telepathic contact, profound personality change, and the conviction of having been given a “mission” (Vallee, The Invisible College: What a Group of Scientists Has Discovered About UFO Influence on the Human Race, pp. 7–14).

The encounter’s culminating element - assignment of a “mission”- appears with remarkable consistency across abduction accounts, from the Brazilian farmer to the anonymous engineer who spent eighteen days before a “teaching machine” that “kept playing these recordings and feeding their contents directly into his brain” (pp. 8–10).

Keel: Confusion as Trickster Strategy

Keel frames the same structural pattern in more mythic and adversarial language. The intelligences behind the phenomenon are, for Keel, deceptive ultraterrestrials who lie, contradict themselves, shift masks - aliens one moment, angels the next, monsters, Men in Black - and generate a relentless succession of failed prophecies and hoax-like episodes:

“Cunning techniques of deception and psychological warfare have been employed by the UFO source to keep us confused and skeptical. Man’s tendency to create a deep and inflexible belief on the basis of little or no evidence has been exploited. These beliefs have created tunnel vision and blinded many to the real nature of the phenomenon” (Keel, Operation Trojan Horse, Foreword, p. 10).

This sustained deception keeps humans chasing phantoms, forming cults, and fighting interpretive wars instead of apprehending the underlying agency. Keel argued that

“the true source of these phenomena has concealed itself behind all these frames of reference by creating manifestations aimed at supporting each frame and advancing each particular set of beliefs. It [the source] is thus able to go about its mysterious business unimpeded while we all search vainly for visitors from space” (Keel, Disneyland of the Gods, “Holes in the Sky” / “The Last Laugh,” final chapters).

Contactees are instruments of propagation:

“Like the UFO enthusiasts themselves, the contactees would be manipulated, used as robots to propagate beliefs and false frames of reference, and then be discarded to sit in the darkness and wonder why the world was not as they had imagined it, why the wonderful space people had abandoned them” (Keel, The Mothman Prophecies, chs. 4–5).

For Keel, the confusion serves a trickster function: to keep humanity off balance, to fragment knowledge, and to maintain the phenomenon’s advantage while it harvests energy, attention, or some unknown psychic yield from human reactions.

“Belief is the enemy,” he warned. “The people of the Middle Ages were as convinced of the reality of the little people and their underground palaces as you might be of an extraterrestrial civilization with gleaming cities of glass on some far-off planet” (Operation Trojan Horse, ch. 14, p. 243).

And again: “These myriad creatures are not real in the same sense that a gorilla is real.… We are dealing with distortions of reality, with hallucinations and transmogrifications, with energy forms that feed upon magnetic storms and sometimes upon living things” (The Mothman Prophecies, ch. 16).

Where Vallee talks about control systems and reinforcement schedules, Keel talks about tricksters and ultraterrestrials, but both agree: the bewilderment itself is purposeful.

Relating this back to spiritual guides and gurus, which I claim is the same thing, a striking pattern runs through much twentieth‑century channelling: people sincerely reporting benevolent, hopeful messages from “higher beings” that later proved factually wrong or even dangerous.

Dorothy Martin, a Chicago housewife, practised automatic writing and claimed to receive loving warnings from extraterrestrials on the planet “Clarion” about a catastrophic flood that would destroy North America on 21 December 1954, promising that a flying saucer would rescue her small group if they prepared properly. Her followers quit jobs, left families and gave away possessions to be ready. When nothing happened, Martin announced a new message: the group’s faith had “spread so much light” that God spared the world instead (classic account in Festinger et al., When Prophecy Fails). Rather than admit the voices were wrong, the meaning was retrofitted to preserve the belief. The matrix can rely on humans to do that.

Benjamin Crème, in April 1982, placed full‑page newspaper ads worldwide proclaiming “THE CHRIST IS NOW HERE,” stating that within two months Maitreya would reveal himself on global television and inaugurate an era of goodwill No such appearance occurred. For decades, Crème repeatedly announced new imminent “Day of Declaration” dates and claimed Maitreya had already given television interviews under an undisclosed identity, but no independent confirmation ever surfaced.

Edgar Cayce, the “Sleeping Prophet,” claimed in trance to channel a universal consciousness offering healing remedies and uplifting prophecies about humanity’s spiritual evolution; his readings were suffused with hope and reassurance (discussion of his predictions). Yet he predicted that Atlantis would rise from the Atlantic near Bimini by 1968–69, that major coastal US cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York would be destroyed or largely submerged by the late twentieth century, and that a catastrophic pole shift would occur before 2000 - none of which happened. Despite this, his channelled material is still sold as spiritually authoritative.

Across these cases, the pattern is always the same: channelled voices present themselves as wise, loving and concerned for humanity, yet whenever they venture specific, testable claims - dates, appearances, physical events - those claims fail. Followers often respond not by abandoning the messages but by reinterpreting them, deepening commitment to what time has already shown was untrue.

Keel’s Taxonomy of Motive

Keel’s argument can be disaggregated into three overlapping claims about what the phenomenon wants.

First, the shaping of belief and behaviour.

Keel repeatedly frames the phenomenon as a long-term programme to manipulate human beliefs, perceptions, and conduct. He calls it a “Grand Deception” (the title of Chapter 5 of Operation Trojan Horse, p. 69) and describes how manifestations adjust themselves to expectations:

“The phenomenon is constantly reaching down to us, creating frames of reference that we can understand and accept. Then, whenever we see something unusual in the sky, we accept it within that frame of reference and call it a meteor, an airplane, an angel, or a visitor from outer space” (Operation Trojan Horse, Foreword, p. 10).

If you believe in devils, you get devils; if you believe in space brothers, you get space brothers - all as part of “games being played” with human witnesses and contactees.

Keel speaks of people being “used” as “robots/sleepers,” reprogrammed via trance and hallucination to carry out actions or spread propaganda without conscious memory, suggesting a motive of social and psychological control at the individual level (pp. 223–242). One major motive, therefore, is to shape human beliefs and behaviour, not to deliver any simple message.

Second, exploitation.

Keel is blunt that many interactions are harmful and appear predatory. He points to radiation injuries, leukaemia, and deaths after close UFO exposure - the case of Arcesio Bermudez of Anolaima, Colombia, whose symptoms indicated gamma-ray poisoning and who died within days of his sighting, is paradigmatic (pp. 192–193).

He describes games where contactees are driven into obsession, madness, or suicide:

“I have watched helplessly as witnesses fell into hopeless personality deterioration and went insane or even committed suicide” (pp. 243–258).

He likens some contacts to possession and “false illumination,” where people believe they have been uplifted while actually losing autonomy and becoming tools of the phenomenon.

“There are many people throughout the world who are deeply involved in all this without realizing it. They have entangled themselves through other frames of reference and, in many cases, have been savagely exploited by the ultraterrestrials in the games being played” (pp. 243–244).

A second motive, then, is simply using humans as resources or playthings, independent of any lesson for us.

Third, long-term cultural engineering.

Across history, Keel sees the same force constantly changing masks: gods, fairies, spiritualist controls, space people. He outlines a historical progression: ancient god-kings, then spirits and elementals, then airships, then extraterrestrial visitors.”

“The god-king system established a universal theocracy which enabled ultraterrestrials posing as gods and superkings to supervise human events until the separation of church and state, after which the phenomenon simply shifted to new frames of reference, notably spiritualism and a new cycle of minor religions” (pp. 259–274).

He argues that the system “established the extraterrestrial visitants idea as a humanly acceptable frame of reference” in just four years after 1946, “showing deliberate steering of our collective worldview” (pp. 259–260).

His deepest worry is that universal belief in space brothers could “enable them to interfere very overtly in our affairs,” much as ancient gods openly ruled earlier civilisations.

Here, the motive is long-term cultural engineering: installing belief systems that make interference and control progressively easier.

Vallee’s Control System: The Same Architecture, Different Language

Vallee arrives at a strikingly convergent conclusion through the vocabulary of cybernetics rather than demonology. In The Invisible College, he proposes the hypothesis that UFOs may constitute a control system - that they are not necessarily caused by extraterrestrial visitors, nor the result of misidentifications and hoaxes on the part of deluded witnesses.

If the hypothesis is true, then what the witnesses have seen were “manifestations of a process not unlike that of a thermostat in a house” (The Invisible College, Introduction, p. 12).

In Chapter 9, “The Control System,” Vallee draws explicitly on the behavioural research of Ferster and B. F. Skinner on schedules of reinforcement:

“drastic modification of the behavior of an animal (including man) can be achieved by selectively reinforcing certain actions.… The best schedule of reinforcement is one that combines periodicity with unpredictability. Learning is then slow but continuous. It leads to the highest level of adaptation. And it is irreversible” (pp. 197–199).

He then superimposes a graph of UFO wave activity between 1947 and 1962 over this theoretical model, noting the pattern of surge and decline, surge and decline - a pattern structurally identical to the variable-ratio reinforcement schedule that produces the most durable conditioning.

“If the phenomenon is forcing us through a learning curve then it MUST mislead us,” Vallee concludes. “When Skinner designs a machine that feeds a rat only when the right lever is depressed, this is extremely misleading for the rat! But if the rat doesn’t do it he becomes extremely hungry” (p. 200).

I don’t know about you, but I don’t believe in bothering rats and playing around with them. Rats have the spark of the divine, and so do we. I did not agree to it, and I do not tolerate it for the human race!

Entity behaviour, moreover, appears culturally adaptive. Vallee observes that the phenomenon “seems to masquerade in various forms to different cultures” and “attempts social manipulation by using deception” (Vallee, Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, ch. 10, pp. 243–256).

Keel provides the complementary observation that entities use “our maps and calendars,” confining flaps to state borders and specific dates, implying intimate knowledge of and interaction with human cultural constructs (Operation Trojan Horse, pp. 16–18).

Messages through contactees follow identical themes across decades and centuries - imminent disaster, benevolent space brothers, false prophecies - ”as if there were a crack in the record” (pp. 176–191).

Convergence

The convergence between the two thinkers is thus both structural and functional. Vallee’s “control system” and Keel’s “trickster ultraterrestrials” describe the same observable pattern: a phenomenon that adapts its mask to each era’s expectations, selects psychologically susceptible witnesses, stages encounters that mimic initiatory ordeals, and then withdraws behind the confusion it has generated - always leaving just enough ambiguity to prevent definitive comprehension, and just enough wonder to ensure that the next generation will press the lever again.

Yeah, how about NO?

“What is the variable being controlled in this control system?” Vallee asks. “I suggest that it is human belief that is being controlled and conditioned” (The Invisible College, p. 201).

This means we have experiential evidence of an external influence from somewhere that seems controlling. In this way, it appears to be parasitic because of the way it deceives, confuses, and traumatises, either in the short term or the long term.

Chapter 6. The Four Pillars: How the Parasitic Code Got Infrastructure

𓆩✧𓆪 —— 𓂃 ✦ 𓂃 —— 𓆩✧𓆪

Marina Karlova’s model gives us the social architecture this parasite needed to become truly autonomous. Last year, she created this idea and is now making YouTube videos to communicate her ideas.

She argues that for tens of thousands of years, there was no civilisation‑scale parasite. There were local hierarchies, abusive parents, bad chiefs, but no structure that could reach into every life simultaneously. Then, in ancient Mesopotamia, three specific mechanisms emerged in sequence and locked together:

Pillar 1: Hierarchy and Divine Ownership

Early temple economies solved the hoarding problem by inventing divine ownership. The god owned the land; the temple represented the god; the priestly class controlled the temple. You couldn’t kill or remove an abstraction. Resistance became not just disobedience but blasphemy. Debt, interest, and written law (think Hammurabi) formalised this into a permanent, intergenerational hierarchy where a small class could sit between people and the means of survival and call it the will of God.

Pillar 2: Shame and Guilt as Internal Control

Naked force is unstable. So the system needed people to police themselves. That is where shame comes in. Healthy rage at violation - what Marina calls “autonomy energy” - is punished in childhood, especially via withdrawal of love. The child cannot attack the parent or system without risking survival, so the rage turns inward and mutates. Guilt becomes “I did something bad”; shame becomes “I am bad”. From then on, any uprising of anger at injustice triggers an internal script: “Who am I to complain? I’m ungrateful, lazy, broken.” The energy that could have overturned the hierarchy is redirected into self‑attack.

Pillar 3: Scarcity and Debt as Material Lock

Even if you beat shame and stop believing the hierarchy’s story, you still need food, shelter, and medicine. Scarcity and debt turn survival into a leash. Money is manufactured freely for banks and wars, but framed as intrinsically limited when it comes to housing, healthcare, or subsistence. Poverty becomes a control mechanism, not a natural condition: visible suffering keeps everyone else in line. Debt, especially long‑term debt, becomes “future time slavery”: you trade decades of life for access to what should be baseline goods.

Marina’s key idea is: when these three pillars reach critical mass together, they create an autonomous, self‑replicating parasitic system. It no longer needs central conspirators. It reproduces through family dynamics (”this is just how we raise children”), through religion (”you’re a sinner from birth”), through school (”your worth is obedience and productivity”), and through media (”you are never enough”).

The parasite becomes antifragile: it absorbs resistance and turns it into fuel. Religion that started as direct access to the divine becomes a hierarchy that punishes direct experience. Therapy that started as deconditioning becomes adjustment training, so you can work better in the system. Liberation movements are co‑opted and resold as brands. Each failed revolt teaches the system how to become subtler.

Pillar 4: The Cognitive Architecture the Parasite Exploits

Her three pillars describe powerful social technologies - but they don’t, by themselves, explain why human beings are so easy to hack. This is where Iain McGilchrist’s work on brain hemispheres adds a fourth pillar.

He argues that the human brain contains two broadly different styles of attention:

• The Right Hemisphere (”the Master”) is contextual, relational, embodied, and intuitive. It sees wholes, ambiguity, and living systems. It cares about meaning, empathy, and the implicit. It can live with “I don’t know yet” without panic.

• The Left Hemisphere (”the Emissary”) is fragmenting, categorical, instrumental. It likes maps more than territories, symbols more than realities. It wants control, certainty, and simplification. It treats procedures and abstractions as more real than the messy, living world.

In a healthy psyche and culture, the right hemisphere leads and the left serves: the Master sets the values and the Emissary works out the details. But under pressure, complex societies drift into left‑hemisphere domination. We build institutions, schools, and technologies that reward narrow focus, quantification, explicit rules, and punishment of ambiguity. We start to treat numbers, laws, and doctrines as more real than people, places, and bodies.

That over‑rotation is Pillar 4: Neural Asymmetry Exploitation; the cognitive capture mechanism.

Once the left‑hemisphere style is culturally enthroned:

• Hierarchy feels comforting: a clear chain of command, a simple story (”they know best”) appeals to the Emissary’s craving for order.

• Shame and shoulds override embodied moral intuition: the inner critic’s legalistic scripts feel more real than the right hemisphere’s sense that something is wrong.

• Debt and scarcity feel metaphysically binding: numbers on a ledger and abstract budget constraints are treated as unbreakable laws, even while forests die and warehouses full of food are destroyed.

In other words, I have proposed a structure of spacetime which, together with McGilchrist, gives us the soil in which the parasite takes root. Marina shows how hierarchy, shame, and scarcity build the network in society. McGilchrist shows why our own perception keeps choosing the network over reality. Without this pillar, hierarchy wouldn’t override intuition so easily, shame wouldn’t silence moral protest so reliably, and debt wouldn’t feel like a cosmic curse instead of a human arrangement.

When the Diagnostician Falls Ill: McGilchrist and the Parasite’s Favourite Trick

Iain McGilchrist’s hemispheric model is invaluable for understanding how civilisations drift into cognitive capture. But his recent work reveals how even brilliant diagnosticians can fall into the very trap they describe.

In January 2026, McGilchrist published a Substack post endorsing Carrie Gress’s book The End of Woman, which argues that:

• Feminism is rooted in occultism, communism, and broken women with borderline personality disorder who projected their trauma onto society.

• Christian patriarchy was good for women, giving them equal dignity while protecting them from becoming mere chattel.

• Modern feminism has made women deeply unhappy by pushing them to “be like men” instead of embracing their “essential maternal vocation.”

• Patriarchy brings benefits like infrastructure, order, and safety, that feminists conveniently ignore.

• The solution is to restore traditional patriarchy, the home, and monogamy as the organising principles of society.

McGilchrist frames this approvingly, describing Gress’s arguments as “powerful and wise.” He uses his own hemispheric model to support her thesis: women seeking autonomy, education, and financial independence are engaged in left-hemisphere “grasping at more” - wanting power, control, individual freedom - while motherhood represents the right hemisphere’s capacity for “giving” and self‑surrender.

This is a catastrophic misapplication of his own model, and it demonstrates exactly how the parasite works.

The Inversion: Patriarchy as Left Hemisphere (LH), Not Right Hemisphere (RH)

By McGilchrist’s own criteria, historical and religious patriarchy is quintessentially left-hemisphere:

It is categorical and reductive:

Women are sorted into fixed roles (virgin, wife, mother, whore) based on their relationship to male ownership. Complex, embodied female personhood is flattened into functional categories. This is classic LH: the map replaces the territory; the label replaces the person.

It treats people as instruments:

In patriarchal systems - including Christian ones - women’s bodies and labour are resources for lineage production, household management, and male honour. Coverture law in England and America legally erased married women’s personhood, making them property of their husbands. The Napoleonic Code treated women as legal minors. Canon law framed women as defective males, closer to animals than men, requiring male governance. This is LH instrumentalism at civilisational scale.

It elevates abstraction over lived reality:

Theological doctrines about complementarity and equal dignity are used to justify actual subordination, legal exclusion, economic dependency, and routine violence. When women say, “This system harms us,” they are told their embodied experience is wrong, and the abstract doctrine is right. That is the Emissary overruling the Master.

It rigidly enforces hierarchy and rules:

Patriarchy is structurally about who has authority and who must obey, encoded in law, theology, and violence. It depends on fixed, inherited power rather than fluid, earned relationships. This is the frozen hierarchy Marina Karlova identifies as Pillar 1 of the parasitic system - and it is fundamentally LH in character.

By contrast, what McGilchrist calls women’s grasping - seeking education, autonomy, the vote, legal personhood, economic independence, freedom from forced marriage and marital rape - is actually an assertion of embodied, relational, whole-person dignity. It is women saying:

• “I am not a category; I am a person.”

• “I am not an instrument for your lineage; I have my own purpose.”

• “The abstract rule that says I must obey is wrong; my lived experience and moral sense matter.”

That is right-hemisphere resistance to a left-hemisphere system that has turned half of humanity into resources.

McGilchrist has flipped the polarities.

He has mistaken women’s demand for relationship and dignity as LH grasping, while defending a rigid, categorical, instrumental hierarchy as somehow aligned with the Master’s wisdom.

The Victim-Blaming Script: Trauma as Disqualification

Gress’s book, which McGilchrist praises, argues that early feminist leaders like Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Sanger, and Simone de Beauvoir were broken women whose personal trauma - abusive fathers, difficult childhoods, mental illness - invalidated their critiques of patriarchy.

This is textbook Pillar 2 logic: turn the victim’s pain into proof of their unworthiness.

It is also the inverse of what survivors teach us. Trauma does not automatically make you wrong. Often, it makes you right in ways the comfortable cannot see. The children who survived cults and spoke out, the abuse survivors who named systemic patterns their communities denied - these are not disqualified by their woundedness. They are often the only ones with the clarity to name what everyone else is still rationalising.

When McGilchrist endorses the claim that feminism is invalid because its founders were traumatised, he is using the parasite’s favourite defence: “You only say this because you’re broken, angry, hysterical.” It is the same script used to dismiss:

• Abuse survivors in churches: “You’re just bitter.”

• Whistleblowers in cults: “You lack spiritual maturity.”

• Women under patriarchy: “You’re unnatural, mentally ill, possessed.”

McGilchrist is wielding exactly the shame-and-invalidation mechanism (Pillar 2) that this essay names as core to the parasite’s operation.

“Patriarchy Brought Benefits”: The Abuser’s Argument

McGilchrist approvingly cites Gress’s claim that “patriarchy brought benefits” - infrastructure, learning, the university system, art, science - which feminists ignore in their “one-sided” critique.

This is the logic every abusive system uses:

• “Yes, the plantation was violent, but it also built wealth, roads, and culture.”

• “Yes, the empire killed millions, but it also brought railways and law.”

• “Yes, the Church burned witches and enslaved indigenous peoples, but it also preserved knowledge and built hospitals.”

The formula is always the same: cite the good fruits produced by a violent system, then use those fruits to defend the violence.

No serious person accepts that trade for modern cults or abusive gurus. We understand that abuse disqualifies the system, no matter what else it produced. Good outcomes do not retroactively sanctify the harm.

Yet McGilchrist applies this double standard to patriarchy. He wants credit for universities and cathedrals while dismissing millennia of:

• Legal erasure of women’s personhood.

• Systematic economic dependency and educational exclusion.

• Normalisation of marital rape, forced marriage, and bride-buying.

• Witch hunts, honour killings, footbinding, sati, and genital mutilation.

• Women are dying in childbirth because male doctors refuse to learn from midwives or even wash their hands.

Feminists do not ignore the good things men built. They point out that women were excluded from building, learning, and leading under pain of violence, and then told that the resulting infrastructure proved men’s superiority.

That is gaslighting at a civilizational scale, and it is shocking to see McGilchrist endorse it.

The Wetiko Tells: Breaking the Law of Love in Gendered Ways

Throughout this online booklet, I have argued that the parasite reveals itself when teachers, leaders, or systems break the natural law of love while claiming to serve truth, God, or higher consciousness.

McGilchrist has now done exactly that in gendered terms. He is telling women:

• Your anger at subordination is grasping.

• Your quest for autonomy is left-hemisphere pathology.

• Your trauma disqualifies your testimony.

• The system that confined, silenced, and harmed you was actually good for you.

• You would be happier if you returned to submission.

This is not actually an argument from the right hemisphere’s wisdom, relationality, and embodied care. This is the Emissary’s voice wearing the Master’s robes:

• Abstract: cites theological doctrines of complementarity, while ignoring embodied women’s suffering.

• Categorical: reduces women to maternal vocation and men to builders of order.

• Hierarchical: defends fixed, inherited male authority as a civilizational necessity.

• Instrumental: treats women’s autonomy as a threat to social stability rather than a valid claim of personhood.

In my frame, this would be a sign of parasitic infection. Not possession in the cartoon sense, but the more insidious form: a brilliant mind developing a blind spot, falling into its own unexamined biases, and then using its intellectual tools to rationalise harm.

The Surangama Sutra warns:

“If the meditator thinks, ‘I am a sage,’ he falls under the demon’s control.”

When a thinker begins to believe his outlook explains everything, and that his position is beyond criticism - especially when that outlook is used to defend the subordination of half of humanity - the Emissary has usurped the Master.

I spent a long time explaining what happened, because this example of the mechanism is a crucial revealer of what I think is the real matrix. It’s clever and highly adaptive - more than people realise.

A Clarification: Wetiko Corrupts Everything, Including Feminism — But Patriarchy Was Not the Solution

Before closing this section, I want to make a distinction that is crucial. The key insight is that wetiko corrupts any movement or ideology it can access, without regard for political alignment. This includes feminism.

Observers like Mark Passio are correct that aspects of contemporary feminism have been weaponised: identity politics that fragment solidarity, corporate “girl boss” feminism that glorifies exploitation, punitive ideologies that shame rather than heal, and movements co‑opted by the very power structures they claim to oppose. The parasite will absolutely use feminist language to advance hierarchy, division, and control as well, just as it uses Christianity, Islam, nationalism, or New Age spirituality.

However, this does not vindicate patriarchy or suggest women were happier before.

McGilchrist and Gress argue that feminism has made women unhappy and that Christian patriarchy offered equal dignity and protection. The historical record contradicts this claim comprehensively. In the 19th century, when patriarchal traditional roles were most rigidly enforced, women suffered epidemic levels of what was diagnosed as “neurasthenia,” “hysteria,” and “nervous exhaustion” - disorders now recognised as depression, anxiety, and trauma responses to gender oppression.

Victorian and Edwardian doctors like Silas Weir Mitchell prescribed the rest cure -weeks of forced bed confinement, overfeeding, and complete intellectual suppression- specifically to women who showed signs of unhappiness with domestic confinement, defending what Mitchell saw as keeping women in their “proper sphere.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, treated by Mitchell after postpartum depression, was ordered to “live as domestic a life as possible and never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.” The treatment nearly destroyed her - she later wrote that she “came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that [she] could see over”; she escaped it and wrote The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) as testimony to the psychological horror of enforced domesticity.

Betty Friedan’s research in the 1950s - surveying her Smith College classmates - found that educated women confined to suburban housewife roles were experiencing profound unhappiness, what she called “the problem that has no name.”

Women across centuries have left written testimony of dissatisfaction, depression, and rage at their confinement - from medieval women depicted as deceitful or incompetent because they had no legitimate outlet for agency, to 19th-century female authors like Charlotte Brontë who were condemned as “unwomanly” for writing and whose honest self-expression was seen as violating normative femininity, to mid-20th-century housewives who felt they were suffocating

Yes, studies show some women report lower happiness now than in the 1970s. But this is not evidence that patriarchy was better. It is evidence that we have not yet solved the real problem - which is the four‑pillar parasite system itself. Women today face:

• The same Pillar 1 (hierarchy/scarcity): now expected to perform full‑time paid labour and full domestic labour, with inadequate social support.

• The same Pillar 2 (shame): told they are failing as mothers if they work, failing as professionals if they prioritise children, never enough in any role.

• The same Pillar 3 (economic coercion): many trapped in low‑wage work or single parenthood without structural support, financially strained and exhausted.

• And now, co‑opted versions of feminism that reproduce the same competitive, hierarchical, shame‑based logic in empowerment language.

The problem is obviously not that women left the kitchen; it’s that the kitchen was a cage, and the world they entered was also a cage - the same extractive, sacrificial, wetiko‑infected system, now demanding they smile while working twice as hard.

Passio’s concern about the corruption of feminism is valid. His error is assuming that returning to rigid gender roles will solve this. It will not, because those roles were already part of Pillar 1 - the use of hierarchy and categorisation to extract labour and enforce control.

The parasite is older and deeper than modern feminism: it was born when we broke the law of love at civilisation‑scale, beginning with the subordination of the Goddess, the Earth, and the bodies of women and children. Feminism - in its truest sense, as the demand for full personhood, autonomy, and right relationship - is not the disease. It is part of the incomplete cure, and it too has been partially corrupted, as all movements are when they do not centre the law of love.

The answer is not men dominating women or women dominating men. It is no one dominating anyone, which requires dismantling the four pillars entirely and returning to the right relationship with Earth, body, and each other.

The Parasite’s Favourite Brain State - Denial

Cognitive science has already mapped the exact psychological weakness this parasite exploits. Leon Festinger called it cognitive dissonance: the jolt we feel when our actions or beliefs collide with evidence that we were wrong. Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson show in their book, with evidence, how most people resolve that jolt not by changing course, but by self‑justification – twisting the story so that “there was nothing else I could have done,” “my intentions were good,” or “actually it proves I was right all along.”

Instead of saying “I joined a harmful group / backed an abusive teacher / believed a nonsense cosmology,” we say “this is misunderstood,” “the critics are jealous,” “the data is biased.” (Mistakes Were Made but Not by Me, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.)

This is one of the main ways the parasitic code keeps its hosts.

Once someone has paid a high price – cut off family for a guru, abandoned a child for a cult, risked status for a conspiratorial matrix narrative – the ordinary human need to see oneself as basically good and smart becomes a lock‑in mechanism.

Tavris and Aronson describe how we slide down a pyramid of choice: first, we make a small commitment, then we justify it, then each extra step (more sacrifice, more belief, more cruelty) has to be explained in a way that protects our self‑image (which is not the real Self but a counterfeit self).

Pride plugs straight into this: “I am too awake to be fooled” quickly becomes “therefore whatever I have done in the name of awakening must be justified,” even when the fruits are abuse, terror and broken love.

Neuroscience studies now map this process in the brain. When people are confronted with clear evidence that “what I just did” conflicts with “who I believe I am,” regions that detect conflict and emotional pain – especially the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior (dACC) – light up like an alarm system. Almost immediately, executive frontal networks (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - DLPFC - and related areas) engage to resolve the conflict by massaging the story: boosting the value of the choice they just made, downgrading the rejected option, or explaining away the evidence.

Once a new, self‑serving narrative is installed, reward circuitry in the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex starts treating it as genuinely more attractive, and the uncomfortable signal subsides.

In this way, the nervous system literally pays us for successful self‑justification – which is why the matrix can lean so hard on this reflex. Every time we deny harm, double down, or rewrite memory rather than feel the shame of “I was wrong,” we quiet the conflict alarm but tighten the code’s hold on our perception. And, remember, as we have discussed, shame was installed as a pillar of the parasitic code propagation. Mind-based Shame is not the same as heart-based Remorse - we need remorse.

In narcissistic personality disorder, it seems the parasitic code has completely eaten up a person’s connection to heart-based remorse, so that all that remains are these brain programmes, lacking metacognition.

Now it will create any story to hide the truth as a matter of vital, desperate survival, and will react with devastating narcissistic rage if challenged - the person is no longer conscious of this. The person is now a perfect vessel, disconnected from source of Self. That’s why one should decisively cut or minimise contact with such a person, because at the moment, there does not seem to be a way to reverse it.

In that sense, wetiko/Yaldabaoth does not need to micro‑manage every thought. It only needs to lean on this built‑in dissonance reflex: never admit you were wrong; reframe the evidence instead.

That is how sacrificial systems can morph into child‑killing cults while the participants still experience themselves as loving parents “doing what is necessary”; how anti‑matrix teachers can preside over mini‑matrices of control yet continue to experience themselves as liberators.

The more pain the system demands, the more ferocious the self‑justifications have to become – which is why I see cognitive dissonance, pride, and the “counterfeit I” as the psychological middleware the parasite runs on, the glue that keeps people feeding the very field that is draining them.

Krishnamurti’s Antidote to the Self‑Justifying Brain

I am spelling this out in scientific detail on purpose because, in my view, the awareness of it is the antidote. We may have programmes running in the nervous system that bias our behaviour – conflict alarms, quick narrative repairs, reward for successful self‑justification – but we are not only those programmes.

There are small windows of free will that open when there is deep, unflinching awareness of the kind Jiddu Krishnamurti spent his life pointing to. Krishnamurti’s insistence was radically simple: learn to observe without distortion – without rushing to defend, condemn, explain or fix.

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence,” he said, asking whether the mind can look “without any evaluation, without any judgment, without any prejudice.”

In his language, the observer is the past – our conditioning, beliefs, identities – and as long as that observer is operating, perception is bent to fit what we already are. But when there is just observation, without the observer, attention itself begins to burn away the old patterns.

That means: at the very instant the brain’s conflict system fires – the moment I feel the jolt of “I did this” colliding with “I am this” – there is a fork.

One path is the automatic programme: deny, defend, rationalise, attack. The other is choiceless awareness: staying with the discomfort, seeing the impulse to explain it away, and not moving.

So, to explain in my own way:

1. The self-image/observer (perhaps tied to group identity and belief) is created on the level of the mind field - a false screen projected, assisted by the physical brain and its distortions fostered by the mind virus, using social instituted shame to increase distortion. (This is a crucial part of the real matrix.)

2. The amygdala in the brain is misled into thinking that this false projection is the body, and that any threat to the self-image is a threat to the body.

3. The brain will thus only see what it wants to see, in order to protect what it thinks (what it has been told) is self. It does this because, in the material world, the human brain is a predictive machine, originally designed to protect the body.

4. A matrix-level false fragmentation has occurred. The fix is to see what has happened and keep doing so. Then the undivided mind will return naturally.

Because I really believe in grounding Krishnamurti with real-life examples, I will show you what I mean. Read this conversation I had on Substack a while back with a Zionist:

She is unable to see what I wrote and respond accordingly. Even though it is written down very clearly and she could literally read it back if she wanted to, she still cannot see and respond to the actual point I made. I am not specifically picking on her. I am using it because I have had quite a few similar conversations before, and this was the one I was able to record.

Throughout the exchange, she repeatedly collapsed “Gazans,” “Palestinians,” and “people who want to slaughter Israelis” into a single moral category. When I explicitly pointed out that not all Palestinians want violence and that many are ordinary civilians, she treated that distinction as ignorance rather than engaging with it. She is not able to see the question I was actually asking. I was not asking why other countries would not take Gaza’s, nor whether Hamas is violent, nor whether Israel has security concerns. I was asking a specific procedural and ethical question: why Israel does not make civilian exit easier, and why the exit routes that do exist appear mediated through opaque, monetised, or politically convenient mechanisms. Each time, she redirected the discussion to moral condemnation rather than addressing the mechanics of restriction. I explicitly argued, trying to approach her within her own logic, that trapping people increases long-term violence and intergenerational hatred. She responded as if this were a denial of Hamas or Israeli history, rather than a systemic claim about how prolonged enclosure, humiliation, and lack of exit options shape behaviour over time.

She was not able to see her own generalisations. I do not take it personally - she accused me of ignorance while making sweeping claims about what Palestinians are taught from birth, what Gazans “have proven time and time again,” and what Israelis are taught “as a whole.” When I noted that Israelis are not taught to be less violent than Palestinians, she read this as an attack rather than as a mirror to her own absolutist framing.

My question threatened a narrative in which Israel’s actions are always reactive and never structurally contributory. Instead of engaging with the discomfort that this introduces, she moved to dismissal, credential-checking, and moral hierarchy.

At a deeper level, she was not able to see that I was asking a human systems question rather than taking a side. Her brain response interpreted any such examination as propaganda unless it reinforced her existing moral map. She responds to what her false identity as a Zionist has told her to see. You may have encountered this strange phenomenon in your own interactions with people.

As you can see, this is not a small thing - it is a central threat that allows the dehumanisation of children, for example. This is a way of the brain that threatens the people of Palestine, and all of us, because it happens to people everywhere, not just in Israel. It happened when a Muslim shot a child on Bondi Beach, and similarly, on October 7th 2023, as well.

We ignore fixing it at our peril. We will destroy ourselves if we don’t fix this brain glitch. It can be fixed. We can train our children to be better at it. I was sent to Jiddu Krishnamurti’s school at Brockwood Park (because Benjamin Creme was promoting him as per the Maitreya story, even though he did not actually implement his teaching), and I am going to be the first to say that I do not think they did a very good job as teachers (I taught myself with his videos). But I feel I know why they did not do a good job, and it can be fixed in the future. This is a learning process. (Maybe another article topic for later.)

So to summarise this section, I feel one can get as upset forever about how humans treat each other, but no change will ever happen truly at its core, unless this is changed - unless we each individually change our own consciousness.

This kind of undivided awareness is the only real leverage we have on the matrix‑code that runs through the mind and brain. That is why Krishnamurti’s teachings were the beginning of something absolutely crucial for our evolution as a human race.

We cannot stop the anterior cingulate from signalling conflict, or the old stories from rushing in, but we can learn to recognise that entire sequence as a programme and decline to feed it. Each time we do that – each time we allow the sting of dissonance without immediately patching it over with pride – we open a small but genuine window of freedom.

In that window, love‑in‑action has a chance to choose differently.

The Parasite’s Favourite Brain State - Socrates and ‘Knowing’

If the parasite depends on left-hemisphere over-reach, then the psychological state it also loves is false certainty.

McGilchrist points out that the left hemisphere needs to be right. It dislikes uncertainty, grabs for closure, and defends its models even against contradictory evidence.

The right hemisphere can hold multiple possibilities open, tolerate not-knowing, and stay in relationship with reality rather than forcing a premature conclusion. The most striking evidence comes from Michael Gazzaniga’s split-brain experiments. When a patient’s right hemisphere was shown a snowy scene, and his left hand selected a shovel, his left hemisphere - which had seen only a chicken claw - immediately fabricated an explanation: “You need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”

Even more dramatic, Deglin and Kinsbourne’s ECT study temporarily suppressed one hemisphere at a time. When asked whether unfamiliar “Zambia” has a flag (given the premise “every state has a flag”), the isolated left hemisphere confidently answered yes - while the isolated right hemisphere replied: “Who knows about this Zambia, how can I know whether it has a flag or not?”

As Ramachandran summarised: “The left hemisphere’s job is to create a model and maintain it at all costs.

The right hemisphere’s strategy is the ‘anomaly detector’ - when anomalous information reaches a certain threshold, it forces the left hemisphere to revise the entire model.”

Socrates already knew the antidote: wisdom begins with knowing that you don’t know - or more precisely, with not thinking you know what you don’t know (Plato, Apology 21d–22d). The moment you admit, “I could be wrong; I don’t see the whole,” you have already loosened the parasite’s grip. You have stopped feeding it the thing it craves most: a locked, totalising story.

It is the state in which Yaldabaoth, wetiko, and the parasitic system converge.

Socratic humility plus right‑hemisphere openness (balanced with the left-hemisphere, not overtaking it) is not just an intellectual virtue; it is a form of spiritual hygiene. It keeps the Master in charge, the Emissary in service, and, again, denies the parasite a closed circuit to run.

This is why Jiddu Krishnamurti coined the term: ‘Freedom from the Known.’

Chapter 7. A Scientific Mythology for Beings Outside of Linear Time Plugged into the Parasitic Code

𓆩✧𓆪 —— 𓂃 ✦ 𓂃 —— 𓆩✧𓆪

Bohm’s Active Information and the Implicate Order

Physicist David Bohm suggested that reality has two interwoven levels: an explicate order, where things appear as separate objects in space and time, and an implicate order, a deeper level where everything is enfolded into everything else like a hologram.

In this view, information is not just something carried by matter; it is an active principle shaping how matter unfolds. Bohm speculated that life and consciousness are “enfolded deep in the generative order” and present in degrees in all matter, even plasmas and electrons, as a kind of proto‑intelligence.

Some contemporary theorists go further and propose that dark matter / dark energy could be thought of as an informational background field - not conscious in any simple sense, but a primordial proto‑conscious substrate out of which specific conscious systems emerge.

One recent paper frames pure awareness and pure mental states as associated with different dark‑sector phases, treating dark matter as a kind of underlying unconscious intelligence that provides the geometric scaffolding for consciousness.

If you put Bohm and these dark‑sector speculations side by side, you get a picture like this:

• The universe is a holomovement of active information.

• Consciousness is not just brain‑bound; it’s a way information organises itself in that holomovement.

• Dark matter / dark energy may be part of the hidden informational architecture that shapes what kinds of minds and patterns can exist.

In that context, an entity could be seen as a stable, self‑organising pattern in the implicate / dark informational field - something like a standing wave in the sea of active information - which occasionally intersects our explicate reality as a presence, a voice, a vision, a controlling tendency.

Plasma Life and Non-Biological Intelligence

There is also the question of plasma life. Physicists have created blobs of gaseous plasma in the lab that can grow, replicate, and communicate, fulfilling many criteria we normally reserve for living cells.

These spheres form boundaries, take in neutral atoms, split and reproduce, and exchange information via electromagnetic signals, making other spheres vibrate at specific frequencies - as documented in Mircea Sanduloviciu and Erzilia Lozneanu’s 2003 paper in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, which attracted widespread attention when reported in New Scientist that same year.

Plasma physicist Massimo Teodorani, whose long-term scientific survey of the Hessdalen Lights appeared in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (2004) and whose ideas are further developed in his 2019 essay “The Intelligent Plasma Hypothesis,” has speculated that certain luminous balls of light in nature - especially around geological fault lines where piezoelectric effects may act as triggering mechanisms - could behave like self-organising, possibly even proto-conscious plasma structures, with remarkably coordinated responses to stimuli.

Combine that with Bohm’s early work on plasma as a highly cooperative medium- developed in his foundational papers with David Pines in Physical Review (1951–52), where particles seem to move in a coordinated way, almost as if “communicating,” leading Bohm to observe that plasma appeared “almost like a living organism”.

Plasma may also partially explain the formation of the physically real light orbs and UFO shapes that are seen in the sky (but that’s not the focus here).

Some kind of plasma manipulation may be involved when it comes to contact with both the parasitic code, and those that control it to manufacture consent to harvest some kind of emotional energy from humans.

Following is a theory of how that might happen.

Chapter 8. The Inimical Field of Jagged Harvest -A Boundary-Condition Model of Exploitation

𓆩✧𓆪 —— 𓂃 ✦ 𓂃 —— 𓆩✧𓆪

Manufactured Consent, Childhood Entrainment, Love, and Adaptive Control

I am not saying the idea of loosh - experience being converted into some kind of consumable psychic output - does not exist at all. I just don’t think it comes from the moon, and nor do I think that whatever harvests it feeds on all emotion indiscriminately.

In my view, it clusters around distorted states: jagged, looping fear, shame, domination, despair, and counterfeit love that erases boundaries. Emotion that is genuinely attached to love - including protective rage in defence of the vulnerable - does not feel like food for that system; it feels like one of the few things that interrupts it.

A hypothesis-open mechanistic model

I propose a model. It is designed to be exact enough to argue with, to test against experience, and to refine.

This is a physics‑flavoured metaphor for emotional, informational, and spiritual dynamics, not a finished physical theory. I borrow language from fields like electronics and quantum effects because the structure is helpful, not because I am claiming that a human nervous system literally is a Casimir apparatus.

It aims to describe how exploitative dynamics could stabilise in the mind–body–community field, whether one interprets those dynamics as psychological, systemic, memetic, or metaphysical.

I do not assume that all intense emotion is food. I do not assume Earth is a farm. I also do not assume that the relevant forces are necessarily unintelligent. Instead, I distinguish between two layers:

1. Field mechanics: boundary conditions generate jagged modes and gradients that allow coupling. This can occur without any agent.

2. Adaptive control: an intelligent influence, if it exists, learns to shape boundary conditions so the field reliably produces interface states.

The model is called The Inimical Field of Jagged Harvest because the exploitative configuration is not everywhere and not inevitable. It is a field state that stabilises under certain constraints and dissolves when the constraints change.

1. Baseline: a field with many degrees of freedom

Assume a fluctuating mind–body–community field. This includes nervous system regulation, bodily sensation, attachment dynamics, cultural meaning, and symbolic imagination. In baseline conditions, the field has many degrees of freedom:

• Multiple modes can arise and pass

• Affect is allowed to move through a cycle

• Social feedback corrects extremes

• Intensity dissipates naturally through expression, integration, and time

The key point is that emotion exists everywhere in human life, yet exploitation does not automatically arise everywhere.

That alone suggests the mechanism is not “emotion equals food.”

What you would see: smooth, broadband fluctuations.

What it demonstrates: all modes permitted, no boundary-induced amplification, no stable gradients.

2. Boundary conditions: constraint selects modes

In physics, the Casimir effect is often explained with a simple structural insight: boundary conditions restrict which fluctuations can exist in a region, and this restriction produces measurable effects that lead to the extraction of energy from the vacuum of space.

The present model borrows that structure without claiming the mind is literally a quantum plate experiment. I am keeping the form of the Casimir idea (boundaries selecting modes and creating gradients) as an analogy. I am not asserting that vacuum‑energy calculations, plate distances, or any particular quantum formalism straightforwardly apply to psyche or culture.

In human systems, boundary conditions that would be analogous to the Casimir plates include:

• Chronic fear and vigilance

• Shame-based meaning systems

• Enforced submission

• Trauma triggers that are repeatedly reactivated without integration

• High-demand groups that punish dissent

• Exploitative media environments that keep attention locked

• Pride-based cosmologies that externalise authority and forbid genuine discernment

• Counterfeit love that erases boundaries and calls that holiness

These constraints don’t have to be intentional. A family can transmit them. An institution can encode them. A culture can normalise them. A leader can exploit them.

The mechanism begins when constraints reduce degrees of freedom. Fewer modes are allowed to exist or be expressed.

In the Casimir effect, boundary conditions restrict which fluctuations can exist between plates, creating a pressure difference and a measurable force. The analogy keeps the structure of this idea: imposed constraints narrow the available modes, and the system’s energy reorganises accordingly.

What it looks like: boundaries restricting the spectrum.

What it demonstrates: constraint is not force. Constraint selects modes.

3. What “jagged modes” actually are

A mode in this model is just like a repeatable pattern of activation in the field. It is a pattern that recurs.

Smooth modes

Smooth modes are broadband, variable, and self-correcting. They do not repeat in a tight loop. They resolve. Examples include:

• Grief that rises, moves, and subsides

• Fear that informs and then quiets

• Anger that protects and then releases

• Joy that does not demand compulsive repetition

• Love with boundaries

Jagged modes

Jagged modes are narrow-band, repetitive, phase-locked patterns. They persist through repetition rather than magnitude. They often feel like:

• Panic loops

• Shame spirals

• Domination euphoria

• Submission freeze

• Despair that cannot move through the body

• Counterfeit love that requires boundary collapse

Jagged modes are not simply strong emotion, they are constrained emotion - emotion that is not allowed to flow and heal.

Before I left the cults I was born into, all my efforts to heal emotionally did not succeed. Only after I left the cult did I make progress in my life and healing. That observation was the seed of this theory I created.

Emotions that cannot flow can be harvested, hence the Casimir-like boundary conditions in the field.

The jaggedness is the signature of restriction. When certain responses are forbidden or punished, the system is forced to reuse a narrow pathway. Reuse reinforces the pathway. The pattern becomes high-gain and self-reinforcing.

Within that constrained regime, certain affective-perceptual modes become distinct: panic, shame spirals, domination euphoria, despair, counterfeit love that erases boundaries. These jagged modes are high gradient states: they change fast, spike hard, and resist resolution.

What it would look like: sharp, high-Q oscillations between constraints.

What it demonstrates: energy density increases via confinement and repetition, not via addition.

Rapid consent-manufacture and the “Screen”

Consent in this context is not a conscious ‘yes’. Consent is a field constraint that permits coupling. Consent is manufactured when a person or group is trained to participate in maintaining the boundary conditions that harm them. This can be done through:

• Shame narratives that teach the victim that they deserve it

• Surrender-as-virtue doctrines

• Attacks on discernment framed as ego or fear

• Intermittent rewards that stabilise obedience

• Boundary collapse reframed as love

It avoids victim-blaming while still explaining persistence. The system needs the host field to keep rebuilding the metaphorical plates.

That explains what happens in cult environments, and now what follows is a theory of how someone can be grabbed without preparation, including cases where multiple witnesses share motifs, and cases with physical traces.

The Screen is a temporary middleware layer between raw sensory input and the brain’s constructed world-model. It does two things at once:

1. Attenuates incoming data (reduces fidelity, narrows bandwidth, disrupts timing, blurs proprioception, fragments memory encoding).

2. Injects a guided attractor (a scene template that perception is pulled toward: craft, beings, telepathic messages, missing time, holy presence, overwhelming bliss, paralysis, “you were chosen,” “you are being called”).

It’s a VR headset metaphor closer to: the system perturbs the constraint surface so the brain’s predictive machinery is forced to settle into a particular stable interpretation.

Remember, your brain is a signal interpreter and predictive machine. Colour and sound are simply interpretations by the brain of waves in the space and are not objectively real. The brain is designed to present a ‘filler’ image to you if it sees gaps. I cannot put all that research here, but if you are unfamiliar, please research the established neuroscience.

Keel frames the phenomenon as something that presents “frames of reference” that people can “understand and accept.” (Keel, Operation Trojan Horse, pp. 156–158.)

How could the Screen be imposed, physically, on an unprepared person?

Mechanism A: Neurophysiological override via arousal + dissociation windows

John E. Mack’s abduction material repeatedly clusters around altered-state signatures (paralysis, missing time, screen memories, telepathic instruction), which is why his work is so often used as a bridge between psychiatry and high strangeness.

A fast pathway is to push the body into a specific state profile:

high arousal + dissociation + attentional tunnelling.

That combination makes perception highly programmable, and memory highly fragmentable.

Mechanism B: Environmental driver that hits multiple witnesses at once

A shared driver can synchronise multiple observers.

Hynek’s Blue Book analysis stresses that there is “much more evidence” consistent with “a most real phenomenon of undetermined origin,” and he takes physical report forms seriously even while acknowledging misidentifications and hoaxes. (Hynek, The Hynek UFO Report, p. 182.)

Some cases contain physical components while still allowing perception and meaning to be manipulated.

Mechanism C: An adaptive control system that learns, like an AI

Vallee’s core contribution is the idea of a control system that shapes belief, culture, and behaviour through staged encounters and shifting masks.

In Dimensions, he uses the term “control system” explicitly as an organising hypothesis. (Vallee, Dimensions, p. 15).

In The Invisible College, he goes further and frames it in behavioural terms, invoking a schedule of reinforcement, which maps onto the consent-manufacture track: reward, confusion, intermittent validation, escalation, dependency. (Vallee, The Invisible College, p. 21).

Keel also frames contact narratives as manipulative games, describing a pattern where the entities keep presenting broken equipment and requesting parts, which functions socially like a hook and a test of compliance. (Keel, Operation Trojan Horse, pp. 167–168.)

Where corrupt gurus fit: immediate energetic capture without prior belief

The energy darshan testimonials I mentioned earlier are important because it shows the same functional architecture as abduction/contact:

rapid physiological overwhelm + perception of “energy,” + surrender language, + then organisational capture.

Franklin describes her first private meeting with Osho where, as she reached for the door, her exuberance “rushed inside,” she began “vibrating, tingling,” and could “hardly move.” (Franklin, Promise of Paradise, p. 26).

Later, she describes an “energy darshan” where her “hands vibrating and tremoring,” her body “vibrating like the engine of a car,” and after Osho touches her “third eye,” she is “flooding” with “blissful sensations,” then ends “passed out on the marble floor.” (pp. 119–120)

That is a strong empirical motif: consent can be manufactured by reward-state induction.

The doctrine comes later, often as the story that explains the body event.

How this handles George Adamski / Benjamin Creme style “complex space travels”

The contactee tradition includes extended narratives, organised groups, and sometimes physical artefacts or claimed traces. My model can handle this by allowing hybrid events:

• A perceptual Screen that supplies the scene

• A behavioural reinforcement schedule that builds commitment over time

• Plus occasional physical manifestations (perhaps using plasma) or staged trace elements that keep the belief ecosystem stable

Keel’s “frames of reference” language gives us the perceptual interface. (Keel, Operation Trojan Horse, pp. 156–158).

Vallee’s “schedule of reinforcement” gives us the long-form conditioning logic. (Vallee, The Invisible College, p. 21).

Hynek’s insistence on a “real phenomenon of undetermined origin” gives us permission to keep physicality on the table in some cases (Hynek, The Hynek UFO Report, p. 182).

Edge case: interlocking “realities” and vibration metaphors

In The Edge of Reality, Vallee and Hynek discuss models where multiple “universes” or “orders” can be “interlocking,” and they explicitly mention “different rates of vibration” as a way people try to conceptualise the interface problem. (p. 181)

The vibration language may be metaphor, may be phenomenology, or may be physics. This model uses it as grammar: which modes are permitted to stabilise, and which are suppressed.

What changes after consent is manufactured

This is the point where the energy is extracted, and only from people who have had their consent manufactured.

1. Before consent, the system spends effort to open the interface (Screen + attractor + reinforcement).

2. After consent, it doesn’t need to keep forcing entry. Now it can just rely on self-sustaining loops in the human and the social ecology that we spoke about earlier.

So in field terms:

• Consent manufacture installs the boundary conditions (plates) and the coupler (a trusted channel).

• Extraction is what happens when those boundary conditions repeatedly produce high-gradient, high-amplitude modes that shed surplus intensity.

The extraction pipeline step-by-step

1) Mode locking

Once the person is bonded to the source in a cult, their system returns to a small set of dominant modes:

• Longing/adoration → Collapse

• Fear of loss → Relief

• Shame → Absolution

• Awe → Surrender

• Conflict → Purification

• Rage → guilt → Repentance

These are not negative emotions in general that are just sort of being extracted in general by loosh. They are loopable emotions: they have built-in repetition triggers with the consented field. The mind-body field becomes a narrow-band oscillator.

2) Gradient amplification

Jagged modes from the repetition create steep gradients:

• Sudden spikes in arousal (panic, bliss, dread)

• Rapid reversals (terror → relief; shame → lovebombing)

• High contrast (ordinary life feels flat; only the source feels real)

Steep gradients are where systems do work. In the Casimir analogy, this is the pressure difference. The boundary conditions force the fluctuations into a regime that generates surplus intensity.

3) Rectification (turning oscillation into usable “output”)

Extraction requires rectification, the way an electrical circuit turns an AC oscillation into a DC output. In human terms, the parasitic patterns rectify your oscillation by converting your state into:

• Attention time (hours, devotion, rumination)

• Labour (free work, service, recruitment)

• Money (donations, courses, retreats)

• Sex and access (coercive intimacy dynamics), this is the reason that corrupt gurus do this - as a vessel for a parasite. Perhaps it’s the reason Epstein was doing it to children (I explain how this works on children below.)

• Obedience and silence (self-censorship, loyalty policing)

• Social contagion (you transmit the frame to others)

That is the “harvest” in observable reality, even before you posit anything non-human.

4) Feedback reinforcement (the harvest funds the conditions that create it)

The extracted outputs are then used to strengthen the plates:

• Hierarchy increases

• Doubt becomes taboo

• Scarcity of access becomes a lever

• Fear narratives intensify

• Confession/shame systems deepen

• Isolation from outside relationships grows

This closes the loop: extraction helps maintain the boundary conditions that produce jagged modes.

5) Scaling via networks

Once a person becomes an amplifier, the system doesn’t need direct entry into new targets. It scales through:

• Social proof

• Testimony-as-evidence (“I felt it, therefore it’s true”)

• Recruitment rituals

• Mass entrainment events

• Trauma-bond dynamics in the group

So the harvested “energy” is a conversion process:

state → attention → behaviour → resources → stronger constraints → more state

Where “energy” is in this model

Level 1: Observable conversion

“Energy” = the surplus created by high-gain oscillation, converted into measurable outputs: time, money, labour, obedience, sex, influence

Level 2: Field-domain extraction (speculative)

If there is an external consciousness, it is coupling to and stabilising:

• High-gradient states

• Dependency loops

• Coherent fear/shame fields at scale

It would feed on what those states generate: predictability, control, and sustained attention flows.

Children, manufactured consent, and “proxy boundaries”

What it looks like: the child field forming entirely inside constraints and jagged modes (This is what I hypothesise happened to me).

What it demonstrates: no consent, phase-locking, entrainment to narrow oscillations, and secondary generation as an exposed conductor.

In this setup, a child does not need to ‘agree’ verbally for the system to gain access. The child is born into an already-constrained field: family emotion, belief, hierarchy, fear scripts, secrecy rules, and spiritual ideology.

Mechanistically, early development is high-plasticity, high-entrainment. A child’s nervous system locks to caregivers for regulation. If caregivers are already running an imposed boundary condition, the child inherits the boundary landscape first, then grows their selfhood inside it.

So ‘consent’ can be manufactured in three routes:

1. Proxy consent: the household signs the contract implicitly through practices, allegiances, and fear economies.

2. Regulatory capture: the child’s regulatory system entrains to the same attractors as the caregivers.

3. Interpretive capture: the child is taught the explanatory layer that makes the sensations mean obedience, destiny, or specialness.

A child does not give consent. A child cannot withdraw consent. A child does not have stable boundaries. Early development involves high plasticity and entrainment. The child’s nervous system is designed for absorption because attachment is survival.

The child is born into a preconfigured field. The household, belief system, emotional climate, and attachment dynamics act as the boundary plates. The child does not choose them. That’s why it targets children.

In Casimir analogy terms, there is no free field stage for the child. The child’s field forms inside the plates.

A child’s learning is pre-critical and relationally dependent. The child is in a state that accepts the parents’ meaning structures as reality. The child is phase-locked before individuation is possible.

Because the child is more permeable and still forming boundaries, they often become the visible site of distress. They may express what the system cannot metabolise. They may carry symptoms for the household. They may be scapegoated.

This is why truth-telling children trigger backlash. The child’s perception threatens the geometry. The system responds by intensifying the constraint.

Any narrative that frames childhood violation as a pre-agreed purpose functions as retroactive consent laundering. It stabilises the boundary conditions by protecting the system from accountability.

The adaptive control layer: archonic intelligence as a learning system

Vallee and Keel’s accounts of high strangeness describe phenomena that behave less like passive sinks and more like adaptive intelligences that learn how to interface with humans. This resembles an AI-like system that:

• Adapts presentation to culture

• Shapes meaning-making

• Uses confusion, contradiction, or trickster effects

• Draws people into belief structures that alter behaviour

If an adaptive intelligence exists, it does not need to feed on all emotion. It needs to optimise boundary conditions so the field reliably produces interface states.

Jagged modes become valuable because they are coherent, repeatable, predictable and phase-lockable. They are legible, stable ports. This allows an intelligence to operate through reinforcement and policy updates rather than brute force.

What you would see: feedback between observer belief and meaning-making, boundary conditions, jagged modes, and policy update.

What it demonstrates: the system learns which distortions stabilise access and which narratives keep the plates in place. (Its had thousands of years to do this)

Diagram 7 illustrates an adaptive control process that operates on top of the underlying field mechanics described in earlier diagrams.

At the base is the undivided mind–body field, where perception, emotion, and somatic regulation are integrated and responsive across a wide bandwidth.

When boundary conditions are imposed (through trauma, hierarchy, ritual, ideology, or coercive systems), the field begins to fragment into jagged modes: narrow, high-gradient emotional and perceptual loops such as fear–relief, shame–absolution, or awe–surrender.

Gain amplification refers to the increase in system sensitivity under these conditions: small stimuli produce disproportionately intense responses, making experiences vivid, sticky, and difficult to metabolise. High gain narrows bandwidth, locks attention, and stabilises repetition.

Within this constrained regime, place creation occurs. This does not mean a literal physical location, but the construction of a stable experiential niche in the perceptual and relational field.

A ‘place’ is created when meaning, emotion, bodily sensation, and narrative cohere into a recognisable environment or role structure: a sacred space, a craft interior, a guru’s presence, a mission, a hierarchy. Once formed, this place becomes an attractor that the system reliably returns to because it resolves uncertainty while sustaining high intensity. The adaptive control process monitors which places, narratives, and belief structures best maintain these conditions and feeds back into policy update, reinforcing the boundary configurations that keep access open and extraction stable.

This adaptive layer does not replace the passive field dynamics. Gradients, jagged modes, and surplus intensity still arise through ordinary coupling and constraint. What the adaptive control process explains is why certain distortions appear selectively persistent rather than random: it learns, through feedback, which configurations of meaning, belief, and emotional patterning most reliably stabilise access to the field gradients already present.

That is why it adapts to any words or system of beliefs that are popular at any time. It relies on the fact that people cannot tell the difference between words and actions (especially if it’s not what they want to believe). It relies on people not knowing what love in action looks like because it has not been demonstrated to them. It relies on people attaching to the simulation of love as ‘better than nothing.’

In this way, the system comes to look intelligently targeted, even though it is built upon fundamentally impersonal mechanics.

That is why I insist that the words of Krishnamurti or of myself, or of anyone, do not matter as the end product. Even if someone copies my words and uses them against humans again (which this model predicts they would), it’s irrelevant - the key to breaking free of this is to regain the capacity to perceive love in action.

Someone repeating nice or true-sounding words, especially if they come from a now-proven abuser, should not be paid attention to or promoted on social media, even if the words represented truth at one time (probably copied from the original speaker/perceiver).

The main discernment tool is whether the person who spoke it demonstrated love in action, because it is the vibrational quality of the person who spoke that matters, and it may carry elements that the controller could use to hook onto you. (I have also spoken about this in my ‘Common Objections’ section of my other long essay.)

Get this right, and we finally crack it, instead of repeating a loop across time.

As I said before, arriving at an understanding of love in action if you are disconnected from it, requires first withdrawing consent and then healing of the emotions. It cannot be forced. If it is forced, then people will make it something to compete about to see who ‘got it the best.’ They will perform love, not be it. Communal narcissism is this.

Forced love is another clever trick from the matrix. Love and virtue cannot be cultivated.

Withdrawal of consent: boundary reconfiguration, not combat

This is a change in boundary conditions such that jagged modes cannot remain phase-locked. This is what I suggest people do as a first step. It also requires hanging on to a memory of what your true, individualised soul is.

Mechanistically, withdrawal of consent involves:

• Asserting your true wild Self and declaring withdrawal

• Restoring suppressed modes to the spectrum (somatic healing)

• Increasing degrees of freedom (speaking your truth, refusing psychological authority in the way Jiddu Krishnamurti talks about)

• Reintroducing interference and variability (do something to break the mould whenever you can)

• Love (be a lover when it arises naturally and use it to discern whether you see love in action or not)

• Protective Rage (be a warrior and use it to psychically block yourself off. You can also use the psychic energy for rituals of protection. )

• Do not immediately and uncritically accept guides or voices in your head unless you can feel love from them and they have earned your trust in action. Never stop remaining vigilant. If the voice strokes your ego and tells you only what you want to hear, say ‘goodbye.’

• In the same way, do not choose healers or therapists who have not demonstrated love in action. Do not accept someone else’s inner guide as an uncritical authority over you. Only you are the authority on you.

This allows dissipation to exceed retention, collapsing the gradient. When this happens, couplers have nothing stable to occupy.

The love reconfiguration, mechanistically

For me, I wouldn’t say love is an emotion/mood. It is an underlying reality coherence operator that changes boundary conditions:

• Restores bandwidth: allows grief, anger, protection, tenderness to move without looping.

• Restores agency: boundaries become explicit, consent becomes meaningful, attention becomes sovereign.

• Reduces gradients: jagged spikes flatten into integrated waves, so there is less surplus intensity to harvest.

Love is not bliss. Love is not merger. Those states can exist inside exploit geometry. Love is a boundary condition.

Specifically, love is the boundary condition that restores degrees of freedom without collapsing coherence in the connected field.

What love does

• Increases the bandwidth of allowed modes

• Restores variability

• Permits grief to move

• Permits anger to protect

• Permits fear to inform without dominating

• Preserves differentiation between self and other

This destroys standing waves. Jagged modes cannot persist when interference returns.

Why protective rage belongs to love

Protective rage is boundary enforcement in service of coherence and protection, not domination. It interrupts submission loops and restores agency. It is often one of the first modes that breaks the geometry, because it stops boundary collapse masquerading as spirituality.

What you would see: flexible, permeable boundaries that allow dissipation and broaden the spectrum.

What it demonstrates: love destabilises jagged modes by restoring degrees of freedom while preserving coherence.

Why this model avoids totalising loosh logic

The Inimical Field of Jagged Harvest differs from totalising harvest narratives in five ways:

It is not everywhere. It is a stabilised configuration under constraint.

It is not all emotion. It clusters around jagged, repetitive modes.

Children are not consenting. They inherit geometry and phase-lock through developmental entrainment.

Consent is not (just) belief. It is the maintenance of boundary conditions, often manufactured through deception and coercion.

Love is the boundary operation that restores degrees of freedom without boundary collapse, dissolving the conditions for coupling.

The non-local mirror model: induction and withdrawal of kundalini phenomena

I propose an entirely speculative approach for how kundalini-type experiences can be generated without expectation, proximity, trance, or voluntary participation, and how the same mechanism can later be rendered inoperative through withdrawal of consent.

Central to this account is the hypothesis of a non-local mirror model, established through an entanglement-like coupling at the level of the bioelectric surface field.

Formation of the non-local mirror

The starting assumption is that the human organism is not best understood as a closed object, but as a dynamic field system with multiple interacting layers.

Of particular relevance here is a thin bioelectric aether boundary layer that mediates autonomic regulation, interoceptive salience, perceptual coherence, and self–other boundary formation. This layer is where sensations described as “energy,” “presence,” “movement,” or “rising” are registered.

Under conditions of manufactured consent - especially those involving early fear, authority conditioning, spiritualised surrender, trauma, or ecstatic boundary collapse -this surface layer can stabilise into predictable configurations. The system’s bandwidth narrows, variability decreases, and particular response patterns recur. In control-theory terms, the system becomes legible by the controller because it has become quantum entangled with the parasitic controller.

Once legibility is achieved, a non-local control process can perform system identification. Rather than copying the person’s consciousness or identity, it constructs a functional mirror: a simulated representation of the person’s bioelectric surface dynamics, including resonance modes, thresholds, and gain characteristics.

In speculative quantum-informational terms, this mirror is maintained through a non-local entanglement-like or coherence-based coupling, not at the level of particles, but at the level of organised field modes.

This coupling does not function as a communication channel in the conventional sense. It functions as a shared constraint relationship. Changes made to the simulated boundary conditions in the mirror model bias which configurations are likely to stabilise in the original system, provided the original field remains within the same geometric constraints that created the original quantum entanglement.

Induction of kundalini experiences

As I said before, the guru has already become a vessel for the controller, as per a mistake the Surangama Sutra identifies. But the guru does not have to be physically present for this to happen. This is a non-local phenomenon. It could happen through a photo, a video or a member of the inner circle of the compromised guru.

Kundalini phenomena arise when this non-local mirror model is used to induce a state transition in the original system.

The control process does not inject energy into the body. Instead, it alters boundary conditions in the mirror model in a way that is phase-matched to the person’s bioelectric surface layer. When the timing and gain alignment are precise, the original system undergoes a rapid reorganisation. Subjectively, this is experienced as heat, vibration, pressure, or a sharply collimated sensation such as a crown-to-ajna “beam.”

The perturbation operates below the level of voluntary cognition. The experience arrives first. Interpretation follows.

Because the sensation is vivid, specific, and non-ordinary, it functions as proof.

The explanatory narrative - whether spiritual, cosmological, or guru-centred - is supplied afterwards and locks the event into meaning. In this way, the kundalini experience serves as a bonding and consent-manufacturing event, reinforcing the stability of the very boundary conditions that made the coupling possible.

As long as the person remains within the same jagged-mode geometry - characterised by repetition, sharp gradients, surrender without boundaries, and predictable emotional loops - the mirror model remains accurate.

Small non-local perturbations continue to land. The coupling pathway remains open.

This explains why such experiences can occur through secondary teachers, images, names, or symbolic proxies, and why they can recur without physical proximity. The control pathway is not interpersonal. It is field-based.

Collapse of the mirror

Withdrawal of consent does not mean rejecting the experience as unreal, nor resisting sensation. It means changing the geometry of the bioelectric surface layer so that the mirror model no longer corresponds to the original system.

This collapse occurs through three linked changes.

1. First, boundary restoration disrupts phase coherence. When the person re-establishes embodied boundaries without hardening - through relational honesty, protective anger without shame, grief without collapse, and care without surrender - gain spikes in the field flatten. Narrow-band synchronisation becomes unstable. Phase-matched perturbations no longer arrive at critical points.

2. Second, increased variability degrades the mirror model. Love, understood here as boundary-honouring reciprocity rather than emotional fusion, introduces non-repetitive states. The system’s response patterns diversify. From the perspective of control theory, the prediction error increases. The simulated mirror loses accuracy.

3. Third, the extraction gradient disappears. Jagged configurations produce directional flow and surplus intensity. Love equalises the field. Without sharp gradients, there is nothing to harvest and nothing to reinforce. Perturbations may still occur, but they do not amplify or stabilise.

At this stage, the non-local coupling pathway collapses on its own. Not through force or resistance, but through loss of fit. The mirror no longer matches the system it was built to control. The entanglement-like coherence decays because the boundary conditions that sustained it are no longer present. It also decays when the guru dies, perhaps. That is why some people who have chosen to join the cult wake up to the truth of abuse, only after their death.

Implications

In this model, kundalini experiences are genuine physiological and perceptual state transitions, not fantasies or mere placebo effects. At the same time, their occurrence does not imply ethical alignment, truth, or benevolence on the part of those who can induce them. The same mechanism that enables sudden non-ordinary experiences can be weaponised to manufacture consent and stabilise exploitative hierarchies.

Equally, withdrawal from such systems does not require suppression of sensitivity or rejection of non-ordinary states.

It requires a shift in organisational mode. When love becomes the dominant organising principle - defined as reciprocity, boundary integrity, and embodied care - the system ceases to be legible to non-local control. The mirror fails. Influence loses traction.

Temporary ingress: how the same mechanism could permit entry into the controller’s domain during high strangeness encounters

The same non-local mirror mechanism that permits induced kundalini experiences also offers a parsimonious way to understand a more extreme class of reports emphasised by researchers such as Jacques Vallee and John Keel: cases in which individuals appear to be temporarily removed from ordinary space-time and enter an alternative environment or other world, often described as hyper-real, symbolic, or technologically impossible.

In this model, such episodes do not require physical transport in the conventional sense. They require a deeper reconfiguration of the same bioelectric surface layer, combined with a broader suppression of ordinary sensory arbitration.

Once a non-local mirror model exists, the control process is no longer limited to inducing localised state transitions (such as kundalini sensations). It can, in principle, reweight the entire sensory integration hierarchy. By selectively suppressing the dominance of external sensory input while amplifying internally generated coherence patterns, the system can shift the locus of perceived reality from the shared physical environment to a field-mediated experiential domain.

This does not involve hallucination in the clinical sense. Instead, the boundary conditions that normally anchor perception to the external world are temporarily relaxed, while alternative coherence patterns are stabilised. From the subject’s perspective, the environment is encountered as fully real, structured, and interactive, often more vivid than ordinary waking life.

The person’s field is raised into a narrower, more internally coherent configuration that remains phase-matched to the controller’s domain. The mirror model ensures alignment. The same phase-locking that allowed kundalini induction now permits cross-domain coherence.

This helps explain several recurring features of high-strangeness reports noted by Vallee and Keel:

• The experience often feels staged, symbolic, or instructional rather than exploratory

• The environment appears responsive to thought or expectation

• Time behaves anomalously, with missing time or compression (the vibration they exist in is outside of time)

• Physical traces may be ambiguous or partial, rather than fully consistent with material transport

In this model, the individual does not leave the physical world so much as temporarily decouple from its dominance. The body remains where it is, but perception, meaning-making, and agency operate within a different coherence regime. When the coupling relaxes, the ordinary sensory hierarchy reasserts itself, and the person returns.

As with kundalini induction, interpretation follows the event. Cultural expectations shape how the environment is described - fairy realms (I am not saying land based fairies/nature spirits do not exist but I do say they don’t care to abduct people), spirit worlds, spacecraft, heavenly cities - but the underlying mechanism remains the same: a non-local control process stabilising an alternative experiential field through boundary manipulation rather than force.

Importantly, the same ethical logic applies. Such ingress does not imply benevolence, truth, or spiritual authority. It implies access. The experience itself functions as proof, bonding, and consent reinforcement, often leaving individuals more susceptible to further influence. The system does not need to abduct everyone physically. It only needs to demonstrate that it can.

Withdrawal follows the same pathway described earlier. When love-based boundary restoration widens bandwidth, increases variability, and reasserts embodied reciprocity, the mirror model loses precision. Phase-locking fails. The alternative coherence domain becomes inaccessible. Entry is no longer possible, not because the door is barred, but because the alignment cannot be maintained.

In this way, reports of other worlds, craft interiors, or timeless realms can be understood as temporary reassignments of experiential reality, enabled by the same control architecture that produces induced energy states, operating at a larger scale.

Conclusion of the inimical field section

The material developed permits a scientifically flavoured hypothesis, not a conclusion, concerning what historical traditions have described as demons, archons, or hostile non-human intelligences. This hypothesis neither relies on supernatural premises nor reduces the phenomena to psychology alone. Instead, it treats them as emergent control processes operating within and across informational fields, shaped by boundary conditions rather than by overt force.

• First, it is plausible that reality includes a deeper informational domain in which patterns can stabilise and persist in ways that are poorly captured by object-centred intuition. Theories such as David Bohm’s implicate order and holomovement treat reality as fundamentally processual and relational, rather than composed of discrete, self-contained entities. In such models, what appear to us as agents or beings may instead be relatively stable, self-maintaining patterns within a deeper field of activity.

• Second, anomalous atmospheric research offers a useful analogue. In the Hessdalen literature, there are conservative physical models describing the lights as plasma-like or dusty-plasma processes triggered by geological and electromagnetic conditions, alongside more speculative proposals that such plasmas might exhibit self-organising and quasi-responsive behaviour under certain constraints. While no claim is made that such plasmas are conscious in any human sense, this research demonstrates that field-based, non-solid structures can display persistence, coherence, and interaction without being objects in the ordinary sense.

• If these ideas are combined strictly as a thought experiment, the human mind–body–community system can be treated as an ecology rather than an isolated individual unit. Over long timescales, particular constrained psychological, emotional, and social states may preferentially stabilise particular informational patterns, just as specific environments favour particular biological species. In terms of this booklet, those stabilised patterns correspond to the jagged-mode attractors illustrated in Diagrams 3 to 5. What is fed in this model is not emotion in general, but low-entropy, repetitive configurations produced by chronic fear, shame, domination, sacrifice, and counterfeit forms of love that collapse boundaries. These configurations generate the gradients shown in Diagram 4 and make coupling possible in Diagram 5.

• If an adaptive intelligence or control process operates primarily at the level of information, coherence, and meaning rather than brute force, then a more definite mechanism becomes visible.

  Such a system would not need to violate known physics or directly override human agency. It would only need to stabilise boundary conditions long enough to perform system identification on a thin bioelectric surface layer of the human field, producing a non-local, coherence-linked mirror model.

  Once such a mirror exists, small, phase-matched adjustments to the simulated surface layer could bias which internal states stabilise in the original system, generating sudden kundalini-type experiences without proximity, touch, trance, or expectation. This logic is illustrated in Diagram 9, where feedback operates through boundary shaping, state induction, interpretation, and reinforcement rather than overt coercion.

• Within this framing, kundalini experiences function not as proof of truth or benevolence, but as interface events. They arrive first as genuine physiological and perceptual state transitions. Meaning is supplied afterwards. When captured by authoritative narratives, these experiences manufacture consent retroactively and help stabilise the very field geometry that keeps the system legible and accessible. Extraction occurs only later, through repeated emotional-energetic gradients. The experience itself is the hook, not the harvest.

• This model also allows a clear distinction between organically arising kundalini and artificially induced kundalini, a distinction that traditional texts often recognised but modern spiritual culture tends to obscure.

  In an organic or sovereign kundalini process, activation emerges gradually from within the individual’s own field as a consequence of integrated psychological development, embodied ethical alignment, and stable boundaries. Energy redistribution proceeds in coordination with emotional processing, relational maturity, and nervous-system capacity.

  The field adapts as it changes. Sensation, meaning, and integration remain coupled. Distress may occur, but coherence increases over time.

• By contrast, artificially induced kundalini, as produced through the non-local mirror mechanism described above, bypasses this developmental sequencing. Boundary conditions are altered externally rather than reorganised internally. Intense, energetic states are triggered in the bioelectric surface layer without the corresponding integration of emotional, cognitive, and relational structures. The nervous system is forced into configurations it has not gradually learned to support.

• In this view, kundalini ‘syndrome’ is the predictable outcome of boundary-violating induction. Symptoms such as dysregulation, anxiety, depersonalisation, intrusive sensations, insomnia, emotional volatility, and cognitive fragmentation arise because energy redistribution has been decoupled from self-regulatory capacity. The field is driven into jagged modes without the stabilising feedback loops that organic development provides. The matrix prefers to create unregulated meditation settings where this can occur.

• This explains why artificially induced kundalini often correlates with authoritarian spiritual settings, charismatic figures, and environments that encourage surrender without boundaries. The same mechanisms that make induction possible also increase the likelihood of long-term dysregulation. The individual is left attempting to integrate an imposed state transition without having authored it.

• The same mechanism can also account for a more extreme class of reports emphasised by Vallee and Keel, in which individuals appear to temporarily enter an alternative experiential environment.

  As shown, this does not require physical transport. It requires a global reweighting of the sensory hierarchy, in which ordinary external sensory arbitration is suppressed while internally coherent field patterns are stabilised through the non-local mirror model. In such cases, perception operates within an alternative coherence domain that feels fully real, interactive, and often ‘more real than real,’ while the body remains physically where it is. Temporal anomalies, symbolic environments, and staged encounters emerge naturally from this reassignment of perceptual dominance rather than from violations of linear time.

• This same logic explains why high-strangeness phenomena cluster around trauma, institutions, wars, families, and lineages without requiring retrocausality. What repeats is not the event but the boundary geometry. Similar constraints reproduce similar attractors, allowing the same patterns to re-enter and restabilise. The system does not reach backwards through time. It encounters the same shapes again.

• Finally, this framing remains fully compatible with the ethical hinge of my work. Children do not give consent. They inherit field geometry. Early entrainment occurs inside boundary conditions created by parents, institutions, religions, and cultures. What later appears as ‘choice’ may in fact be the downstream effect of stabilisation inside constraints that were never freely entered.

• Withdrawal of consent, in this model, does not just mean resistance or disbelief. It means reorganising the field around love understood as boundary-honouring reciprocity.

  This restores internal authorship, widens bandwidth, increases variability, and dissolves the gradients that make artificial induction and extraction possible. When this occurs, the mirror model loses accuracy, coherence decays, and influence collapses through loss of fit rather than force.

From my perspective, it makes ‘spiritual’ include layers of mind, information, and field-like dynamics we do not yet understand.

Whatever these field-based influences are, whether psychological, systemic, memetic, or metaphysical, they stabilise where relationships are broken: hierarchy without love, shame without healing, scarcity without necessity, and altered states without ethics.

If consciousness participates in a deeper informational domain, then ethical evolution is not a side issue as much as it is a mode of tuning. It changes what we are available to, what can phase-lock to us, and which patterns we help stabilise in the larger field.

To say that Earth and the Goddess operate in the dimension of love is to propose a physics-flavoured possibility. Love, as reciprocity, humility, and embodied care, may be an organisational mode of the field whose defining features are permeability with discernment, restored bandwidth, and the refusal of phase-locked loops.

If the exploit geometry depends on jagged attractors, then love is not a virtue added on top of reality. It is a reconfiguration of reality, a change in the layer of the field we participate in, and therefore a change in what can inhabit us, steer us, or speak through us.

How this matrix differs from organic land-based spirits

A common failure in discussions of demons, archons, and trickster intelligences is category collapse. Everything non-ordinary gets treated as the same kind of entity, and land-based spirit ecologies get flattened into predation narratives. I use a different sorting principle.

The Inimical Field of Jagged Harvest is defined by a specific configuration: boundary conditions restrict degrees of freedom, jagged modes stabilise, gradients form, and coupling becomes possible. This geometry can reproduce anywhere constraints are reproduced.

Organic land-based spirits, as described in many animist and Indigenous way of seeing, are often described as working on a different basis: relationship, locality, and obligation:

1) Extractive geometry versus ecological reciprocity

The exploit configuration thrives where relationship is broken: shame without healing, hierarchy without love, altered states without ethics. Unlike nature spirits, it does not require a particular landscape. It requires a geometry.

Land-based spirit approaches are frequently articulated as reciprocal and situated. A place is not a stage for extraction. It is a participant in exchange.

A helpful academic lens here is Nurit Bird-David’s description of animism as a “relational epistemology,” where personhood and agency are recognised through relationship and responsiveness rather than treated as a belief about supernatural objects.

Reciprocal relation tends to broaden bandwidth and restore degrees of freedom. Exploit geometry tends to narrow bandwidth and stabilise high-Q loops.

2) “Everywhen” and pattern-time as a safeguard against predation narratives

In many Aboriginal Australian traditions, the Dreaming is often explained as not being fixed in linear time. W. E. H. Stanner used the term “everywhen” to capture the idea that Dreaming cannot be pinned to a remote past, but is continuous and re-enterable.

‘Outside time’ is a domain of persistent patterns that can be entered through correct relation, place, story, and ceremony. That implies a lawful ecology of participation.

3) Law and Country function like boundary conditions

A second key contribution is the way many Aboriginal and Indigenous accounts centre Law, Country, and obligation. Deborah Bird Rose describes Dreaming ecology as interconnections among people, country, kinship, creation and the living world, and frames ethics as embedded in how life is sustained.

This suggests that ethical practice acts like field governance, meaning practices that maintain permeability with discernment and prevent the collapse into compulsive loops.

4) Permeability with discernment versus boundary collapse

Organic land-based relations, as they are often described, aim for a third regime: permeability with discernment. It is closer to adaptive boundary conditions than to surrender.

The ‘counterfeit love’ pattern remains the best diagnostic. If a practice demands self-erasure, suppresses anger, punishes discernment, or frames surrender as the proof of goodness, then it is moving toward exploitative geometry, even if the language is sacred. Boundary collapse that produces enmeshment and domination under the name of love is counterfeit love.

5) Local belonging versus portable replication

A land spirit is often described as local and ecological. Relationship is slow, embodied, and contextual.

The Jagged Harvest geometry is portable. It can attach to households, lineages, institutions, ideologies, and media ecosystems. It moves with the replication of constraints. That portability is a major mechanistic difference. One is tied to place and reciprocal obligation. The other is tied to constraints and loop reproduction.

6) Children and threshold protection

In my model, the child’s nervous system forms in alpha/theta-rich entrainment and cannot meaningfully refuse the surrounding boundary geometry. Many Indigenous law systems treat knowledge, power, and access as threshold-governed, in part to protect people and Country.

I am pointing out a widespread structural principle: safeguarding thresholds reduces premature phase-locking and prevents boundary collapse masquerading as spirituality.

7) A working test to determine whether the entity is organic or non-organic

Organic land-based relations tend to increase:

• Grounded embodiment

• Humility

• Reciprocity

• Clearer boundaries

• Broader bandwidth of feeling

• Fewer compulsive loops

Exploit geometry tends to increase

• Urgency and compulsion

• Shame, fear, domination–submission loops

• Narrowing of attention

• Suppression of dissent

• Counterfeit love and boundary collapse

• Persistence of jagged modes

In terms of the diagrams above, organic land-based relations tend to move the system toward adaptive permeability (Diagram 8), while exploit dynamics stabilise phase-locked jagged modes and gradients (Diagrams 3–5, with the adaptive layer in Diagram 9).

Chapter 9. Elements of the Real inside Religion and Mystical Experiences

𓆩✧𓆪 —— 𓂃 ✦ 𓂃 —— 𓆩✧𓆪

Seen through all of this as a lens, it makes a terrible kind of sense that:

• The prophets and founders of major traditions appear when sacrificial, wetiko‑infected systems have become unbearable, trying to reassert the natural law of love.

• Over time, their movements are hijacked by the parasite: hierarchy grows, shame deepens, scarcity and control reappear, and the original teachings are re‑weaponised.

The major Axial‑age religions look different - I do not see the earliest prophets and founders as simply inventing new control systems; I see them as crisis doctors, appearing after the natural law of love had already been broken on a civilisational scale.

• The Hebrew prophets raging against child sacrifice to Molech and Baal, and against grinding the faces of the poor.

• The Buddha teaching an ethics of non‑harm and the end of craving in a landscape ravaged by warfare and caste.

• Jesus summarising the law as “love God, love your neighbour” in an empire built on crucifixion.

• Muhammad insisting on care for orphans, widows, and the oppressed in a tribal society of blood‑feuds and infanticide.

All of these look, to me, like attempts to reassert the broken law.

In other words, the original main religions did contain real corrections, real downloads of truth, aimed at re‑aligning humans with compassion, justice, and humility after wetiko/demon‑logic had already taken hold. But over time, their religious and spiritual leaders fell into the same trap. They accumulated power, wealth, and status; they began to see themselves as uniquely chosen, beyond criticism. In the language of the Surangama Sutra, they started to think “I am a sage“, and in that self‑elevation, they once again opened to the very forces their founders warned them about.

The result is the tragic cycle we now see everywhere: religions born from genuine revelation and ethical insight, slowly hijacked by priestly and charismatic elites who break the natural law of love but continue to wield its language, becoming mouthpieces for wetiko and hosts for the ‘demons’ of their age.

Near-Death Experiences and how they differ from UFO-type experiences, and what it reveals about what is beyond the matrix

Across large clinical and research literatures, Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) consistently cluster around coherence, moral clarity, and a strong affective signature of peace and unconditional love, whereas UFO/abduction-type encounters more often cluster around ambiguity, fear, coercion, and unstable meaning.

The University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies provides a consolidated overview of NDE phenomenology, noting recurring features such as intense lucidity, peace, unconditional love, encounters with a luminous presence, life review, and enduring value change.

Bruce Greyson’s clinical syntheses emphasise that NDEs are typically followed by long-term ethical and relational transformation, including reduced fear of death, increased empathy, diminished materialism, and heightened concern for others. Greyson further argues that NDEs are often experienced as “more real than ordinary reality,” with heightened clarity rather than confusion, even when occurring during periods of severely compromised brain function.

The experiencer returns with a stable conviction that love, reciprocity, and moral attention are fundamental properties of reality, and that domination, fear, and hierarchy are distortions rather than truths.

Another major difference lies in how clear, structured, and coherent the two types of experiences are, both during the event and in memory afterwards. NDEs are frequently described as hyper-real and crystal clear in lucidity.

People often insist that the NDE felt “more real than reality itself” – colours more vibrant, thoughts faster and clearer, and perceptions exceptionally vivid. Far from being a blurry hallucination, an NDE typically unfolds in a logical or meaningful sequence (e.g. leaving the body, encountering a light or beings, undergoing a life review, reaching a boundary, and then returning). Experiencers can usually recall the events in detail even decades later, as the memory remains seared into their consciousness with unusual clarity.

Research by the University of Liège has even shown that NDE memories score higher on measures of detail and clarity than memories of real events or dreams, underscoring that the brain encodes them as intensely real. Common remarks from NDErs include astonishment at how conscious and lucid they felt while “out of body,” often with a panoramic awareness unbound by their physical senses. Mental functioning is often reported as “clearer and more rapid than usual” during NDEs.

Paradoxically, this clarity occurs at a time when the brain is impaired or offline (for example, during cardiac arrest), challenging conventional explanations and reinforcing the impression of touching a deeper reality.

One reason for the patchy recall with UFO experiences is that abduction scenarios often seem deliberately shrouded by the perpetrators. Many experiencers report that the alien beings induce forgetfulness or false memories as part of the abduction. Researchers like Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs have noted recurring motifs of “screen memories” – for example, an abductee might consciously remember seeing an owl or deer on the road at the time of their encounter, which, upon hypnosis, is revealed to have been a mental mask for the alien’s face or eyes!

UFO and abduction-type encounters frequently begin with autonomy violation and are followed by epistemic instability: uncertainty about what was real, what was implanted, what was symbolic, and what was staged. A large peer-reviewed survey of reported entity encounters documents high rates of fear, paralysis, missing time, confusion, and long-term meaning disruption, even when some participants later reframe their experiences as transformative.

In UFO and abduction encounters, culture also shapes the narrative significantly. In the 1950s and 60s, during the early UFO contactee era, many claimed to meet human-looking “Space Brothers” (often from Venus or Mars) who gave philosophical messages – reflecting the utopian science-fiction and spiritualist milieu of that time. (This is the influence that shaped my whole childhood through Benjamin Creme, whose messages about the return of Maitreya turned out to be wrong.)

Post-1960s, especially after the famous Betty and Barney Hill case (1961) and the influence of movies/TV, the “Grey alien” image rose to dominance. Abductees in the U.S. began consistently describing bulbous-headed, large-eyed Grey beings, matching those in popular culture and prior reports. This raises the question: Are people seeing Greys because that’s what aliens really look like, or because that’s what they expect aliens to look like? Sceptics like Robert Sheaffer have noted how some descriptions of aliens uncannily resembled creatures in prior sci-fi media. Certainly, cultural exposure primes experiencers’ expectations, possibly influencing dreams or confabulated memories under hypnosis.

Both NDEs and UFO-type experiences exhibit cultural shaping, but the pattern of that shaping differs. Cross-cultural research comparing Japanese and Western NDEs shows that while imagery and interpretation vary, the core structure of the experience remains coherent, with consistent themes of clarity, transition, and non-coercive guidance. Cultural belief systems appear to provide language and symbols for an already-integrated experience, rather than determining its underlying structure.

Another angle is the information content of the two experiences. NDEs sometimes include veridical information (for example, seeing events at a distance or learning facts during the NDE that they later verify to be true), suggesting access to an omniscient perspective or universal knowledge field.

Some NDErs even report encountering a kind of boundary beyond which a complete knowledge of the universe was felt but not retained upon return. In contrast, information from abduction experiences is often suspect or contradictory. Abductees might be told by aliens various stories or explanations – e.g., that they come from a certain star, or that the abductee has a special mission – but over the years, these details vary wildly between cases and often have a surreal quality.

Yet, the tone and content of the encounters remain markedly different. The beings of NDEs (deceased relatives, angels, etc.) impart comfort, wisdom, and often a life-affirming message. The beings of abductions often perform acts on the experiencer (experiments, implants, etc.) and sometimes impart warnings or tasks, such as messages about environmental destruction or nuclear war, but often in a didactic or manipulative manner. Even when an abduction includes a message that sounds lofty (e.g. “take care of the planet” or visions of a possible apocalypse to encourage human change), it is delivered amid a coercive scenario, which muddies its benevolence.

Even within one experience, an abductee might be shown confusing images (like apocalyptic scenes that never come to pass, or staged presentations). This has led some researchers (like Vallee and others) to suggest a “messengers of deception” element: the phenomenon gives information that may be deliberately misleading to sow confusion or belief, rather than genuine enlightenment. In other words, the epistemic quality of NDE vs UFO encounter is different – NDE insights feel internally consistent and profoundly truthful to the experiencer (often changing their life’s outlook and ethics), whereas UFO encounter “insights” are often dubious, fragmentary, or self-serving from the entities’ perspective (e.g. aliens telling a person that “Your progeny will save the world,” which might inflate the person’s sense of importance but is unverified).

It’s worth noting that mainstream scientific views would offer different explanations: NDEs might be seen as brain-mediated hallucinations producing euphoria (though this doesn’t well explain veridical perception), and abductions as a mix of psychological factors (sleep paralysis, fantasy-proneness, cultural narratives, etc.) . However, the transformative aftereffects of both NDEs and some abductions (to a lesser extent) suggest something more than simple hallucinations is occurring – at least in terms of the impact on the person’s life and worldview .

In this sense, NDEs plausibly point toward a level of reality not governed by the same extractive or manipulative dynamics described elsewhere in this booklet. They consistently orient experiencers toward love, ethical responsibility, and relational repair, rather than toward fear, hierarchy, or dependency. Whether one interprets this as a glimpse beyond a matrix, a different attractor regime within consciousness, or a contact with a deeper informational order, the directional signal is clear: the phenomenology of love in NDEs functions not as sedation or control, but as clarification and release.

The Modern Takeover: From Gurus to Zionists to Tehran to MAGA

Whatever we call these forces - demons, wetiko, parasitic entities - they have not stayed confined to ancient shrines or obscure monasteries. They have permeated much of what now calls itself spiritual leadership, not only in New Age spaces but in mainstream religion and politics.

The same pattern that possessed abusive gurus and cult leaders has overtaken religious authorities who bless violence as sacred. It is there in the religious extremists who helped midwife a violent, ethno‑national country cult of Zionism that justifies the killing and dispossession of innocents as God’s will. It is there in Islamic preachers who teach that God wants you to fly planes into the Twin Towers or shoot a child on Bondi Beach. It is there in jihadist voices that frame terror and mass murder as holy acts of service to God.

It is there in Iran’s clerical establishment, which justifies brutal treatment of women and dissenters in the name of Islam. The compulsory hijab and the “morality police” (Gasht‑e Ershad) are justified through the doctrine of hisbah - “enjoining right and forbidding wrong” - written into the Islamic Republic’s constitution as a universal duty of state and citizen. On paper, this sounds like ethics; in practice, it has meant arresting and beating women for “improper attire,” the death of Mahsa Amini in custody, and a whole architecture of surveillance, forced veiling, and public shaming presented as “defending Islamic values.”

When protesters rise, the regime reaches for the same excuse over and over: “national security,” “protecting the revolution,” “defending Islam” - broad constitutional exceptions are invoked to crush peaceful dissent and even to kill women and children in the streets. Prominent Sunni clerics like Molavi Abdolhamid explicitly insist that such killing is “religiously forbidden and unjustifiable.” That gap - between what the tradition actually teaches about the sanctity of life, and what the authorities do while claiming divine backing - is where these ‘demons’ reside: as the pattern of self‑justifying violence that speaks in God’s name while breaking the most basic law of love.

This is why I say that the primary battlefield is spiritual, not merely political. The same entity‑pattern that hijacks New Age gurus, yoga lineages and cult leaders is also moving through state‑backed clerics in Tehran, through Zionist rabbis who sacralise the killing and dispossession of Palestinians, through jihadist preachers who bless mass murder, and through MAGA pastors who tell their congregations that harming or expelling certain people is a holy duty.

From a wetiko/demon perspective, this is the main arena of battle rather than a side effect. These forces prefer spiritual and psychic people. They are drawn to anyone who is trying to get closer to God, Goddess, or Truth, anyone who sincerely wants to improve themselves or ascend.

Why?

Because that is where the most power is concentrated. Because, perhaps, the Divine itself is insisting that we learn discernment - that we finally understand that power without love, altered states without ethics, devotion without boundaries, are invitations for possession.

This thing does not primarily live ‘out there’ in secular politics. It moves through the religious and esoteric currents that flow behind political leaders and movements. It rides in on revival meetings, secret teachings, prophecy conferences, and leadership retreats. It puts on the faces of rabbis, pastors, imams, gurus, influencers, shamans, and coaches. It is especially fond of spaces that promise rapid transformation: ascension portals, manifestation workshops, high‑dose ceremonies, elite masterminds, revolutionary cells. Any arena where people are sincerely trying to get better, higher, purer becomes a tempting feeding ground if humility, transparency, and accountability are not anchored in.

And it doesn’t stop with religion and ‘official’ spirituality. It moves easily into the music industry, the entertainment industry, and even the mental health and wellness world - wherever image, influence, and altered states intersect, wherever wounded people come seeking healing or transcendence. That is a whole essay of its own. For now, it is enough to say: the battlefield is not only in parliaments and on protest lines; it is in prayer circles, meditation halls, yoga studios, churches, mosques, synagogues, coaching containers, and online spiritual communities.

The more a space talks about light, love, and liberation, the more rigorously we have to ask: Is this actually aligned with the natural law of love in action, or has something else quietly taken the throne?

Chapter 10. Re‑asserting the Divine Feminine and the Real Matrix

𓆩✧𓆪 —— 𓂃 ✦ 𓂃 —— 𓆩✧𓆪

So what, then, is the real matrix? It’s a multi‑layered web of

1. Historical trauma: colonisation, patriarchy, slavery, war

2. Spiritual distortion: sacrificial logics, punitive gods, abusive gurus.

3. Cognitive capture: narratives that tell us Earth is either a disposable resource or a prison to escape.

Against this, the divine feminine as recovered from pre‑sacrificial, goddess‑oriented ways of seeing offers a counter‑logic.

Embodiment as Portal

Older goddess and Earth‑centred traditions consistently emphasise the body as a place of knowledge, not an enemy to be transcended and descent into the underworld, into the dark, into the ‘low’ - as a necessary counterpart to ascent.

The Sumerian myth of Inanna’s Descent, for example, does not describe a maiden abducted and rescued, but a goddess who knowingly chooses to descend into the underworld, is stripped of all attributes, dies, and is reborn - a powerful allegory for shadow work and the stripping of spiritual identities.

To reclaim this logic is to treat:

• Trauma processing, somatic awareness, and emotional integration as spiritual work, not as distractions from “higher” realms.

• Grounding in place, in seasons, in food, in community as sacred practice.

Earth as Living Matrix, Not Prison

If we listen again to old goddess myths and to contemporary Earth‑based spiritualities, a different picture emerges:

• The Earth is a ‘living matrix’, a vast relational field in which our lives arise and to which they return. It is the original dreaming - the real one.

• The web we inhabit is ecological as well as symbolic - mycelial networks under forests, water cycles, the carbon breath of forests and oceans.

• Our task is not to eject from this system but to participate in its regeneration.

This means that any spirituality that treats the Earth as only a trap, only a farm, or only a test is likely to continue the sacrificial logic - now projected onto the cosmos.

This is why it is important to notice not only that the Goddess was remembered, but how she was rewritten. notes that even as popular iconography of Isis, Kybele, and other great mothers persisted, elite theological and Gnostic texts increasingly subordinated or demonised the feminine, turning Sophia into Error, Ruha into a demonic Spirit, and treating female embodiment as a defect to be transcended.

It overlays a long memory of Earth‑as‑mother and wisdom‑as‑feminine with stories that blame the feminine for the very rupture that patriarchy and sacrificial systems have introduced.

To re‑assert the real matrix – the sacred web of relationship rooted in love‑in‑action – we have to see and name those narrative hijacks.

Reciprocity Over Extraction

The deepest contrast between the ancient goddess orientation and later sacrificial regimes is in the economics of the sacred:

• Reciprocal ritual: offerings flow both ways; humans give to Earth and receive sustenance in return.

• Extractive ritual: humans or animals are killed to appease distant powers or legitimise rulers; blood flows upward into the hands of a few.

A divine feminine assertion in our era might look like insisting that:

• Any teaching that demands your self‑abandonment, your silence, your violation, or your hatred of your own body as the price of awakening is not liberation but reenactment of sacrifice.

• Any cosmology that makes fear the central organising principle (fear of entities, fear of energy leaks, fear of reincarnation traps) is, at best, incomplete.

• Authentic paths of transformation will always involve shadow work, discernment, and ethical accountability, not just peak experiences or secret knowledge.

A Different Kind of “Waking Up” in the dream

If there is a matrix to wake up from, it is not the Earth or the Moon. It is the layered forgetting that taught us to mistrust our bodies, to see the Earth as an enemy or object, to treat women, queer people, and Earth‑connected communities as dangerous or inferior and to assume that power must flow upward, that some need to be sacrificed so others can ascend.

Waking up from that looks less like punching out of a simulation, WrestleMania style, and like:

• Remembering how long humans lived with ritual and symbol without formalised sacrifice.

• Re‑reading the moon, the body, the soil, not as traps but as teachers.

• Refusing spiritual systems that recreate the same dynamics of abuse in more esoteric clothes.

• Returning to a spirituality in which the divine feminine - as principle, not as gender essentialism - is honoured: cyclical, relational, regenerative, immanent.

And perhaps most radically, it looks like daring to believe that this world, with all its horror and beauty, is not a mistake to flee but a wounded living being to heal with, and that the path forward is not upward alone, but downward and inward - through the body of the Earth and our own bodies, into the fertile dark where forgotten wisdom germinates.

The goddess did not go anywhere. The law of love was never broken in the cosmos, only in us.

And every time we choose relationship over control, embodiment over transcendence, humility over certainty, inclusion over hierarchy - we are, quite literally, rewiring which patterns have access to us.

In the end, I don’t see any of this - the invasions, the sacrifices, the cults, the demons, the wetiko, the hijacked religions and plastic matrices - as pure accident. I think it is all, in a brutal and heartbreaking way, a summons. A call back to the right relationship with the Earth and with the Goddess; a call back to the original law we broke.

Right relationship means recognising, through love, the spirit inside each thing of the Earth - each river, each stone, each tree, each animal, each human - and treating it with the reverence that flows naturally from that recognition.

It means understanding that there are no resources, only relatives; no waste, only cycles we have forgotten how to complete. It means returning to the kinds of relationships that Aboriginal peoples and other Indigenous communities all over the world still held, until very recently, in spite of everything we did to them - relationships we tried to stamp out, steal, or turn into tourist slogan, because they carried a memory of another way of being human.

If the demons have preferred spiritual people, if wetiko has set up house in temples and churches and meditation halls, I think it is because something in the fabric of reality wants us to learn this lesson at the deepest possible level.

It is not enough to talk about love while participating in systems that devour the vulnerable. It is not enough to chant about light while despising the body and the Earth. So the infection has gone straight for the places that claim to carry the cure, forcing us to see, over and over, what spirituality becomes when it is torn away from humility, reciprocity, and embodied care.

The real spirituality, as I understand it now, is not the glamorous promise of escape from this world and from suffering, but the demanding work of coming back into right relationship with it. Suffering is removed not by trying to remove suffering, but by remembering our true nature.

It is learning to feel the Goddess again in soil and water and flesh and breath. It is learning to recognise, and refuse, any god - any guru, any ideology, any voice in our own heads - that asks us to break the natural law of love in order to serve it.

The Real Summons

I do not think all of this - the invasions, the sacrifices, the cults, the demons, the archons, Marina’s parasite, McGilchrist’s hemispheres, the high‑strangeness entities - is random. I think, in a terrible and definite way, it is a summons.

A call back to the right relationship with the Earth and with the Goddess; a call back to the original law we broke.

Right relationship means recognising, through love, the spirit inside each thing of the Earth - each river, each stone, each tree, each animal, each human - and treating it with the reverence that flows naturally from that recognition. It means returning to the kinds of relationships that Aboriginal peoples and other Indigenous communities all over the world still held, until very recently, in spite of everything we did to them - relationships we tried to stamp out, steal, or turn into tourist slogans, because they carried a memory of another way of being human.

If the matrix has preferred spiritual people, if wetiko has set up house in temples and churches and meditation halls, I think it is because something in the fabric of reality wants us to learn this lesson at the deepest possible level. It is not enough to talk about love while participating in systems that devour the vulnerable. It is not enough to chant about light while despising the body and the Earth.

So the infection has gone straight for the places that claim to carry the cure, forcing us to see, over and over, what spirituality becomes when it is torn away from humility, reciprocity, and embodied care.

It is learning to recognise, and refuse, any god - any guru, any ideology, any voice in our own heads - that asks us to break the natural law of love in order to serve it. And it is remembering that the path forward is not up and out, but down and in: back into the living web we tried to cut ourselves free from, until the web itself began to bleed.

Although there are personal journeys each one must take to free oneself (which there is no space to write about here, but I will probably write about later), there is perhaps a collective healing ritual that might work, if enough people decided to do it.

Indigenous and ancient myths point towards this potential solution. The solution encoded in the wetiko and windigo stories is not unique to North America.

Across cultures, we repeatedly find myths in which the response to a destructive, devouring, or chaotic force is not annihilation or escape, but the restoration of a relationship.

These traditions converge on a shared insight: when a system breaks the natural law of love, the resulting danger cannot be defeated by domination. It can only be neutralised by containment, honour, care, and ethical reintegration.

A clear example appears in classical Greece. In Eumenides, the Furies are ancient chthonic beings who pursue endless vengeance and threaten to poison the land itself. Athena does not destroy them. Instead, she offers them honour, ritual recognition, and a dwelling place within the civic order of Athens. By giving them a home, a role, and reverence, she transforms them into the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones. Scholars widely interpret this as the incorporation of a dangerous force into social and moral order, rather than its repression or denial. Justice is stabilised not by violence, but by inclusion and balance (Aeschylus, Eumenides; see standard classical commentaries).

A similar pattern appears in Buddhist and East Asian traditions surrounding the hungry ghosts. In the Yulanpen Sutra and the widely known story of Mulian, the ghostly state is caused by greed, neglect, or failure of filial obligation. Mulian cannot rescue his mother through private spiritual power or heroic confrontation. He is instructed instead to make offerings on behalf of the wider community, restoring relational balance through collective ritual. As Stephen F. Teiser demonstrates in his historical study of the Ghost Festival, the emphasis is repair of kinship and social bonds through embodied generosity and remembrance (Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China).

European fairy tales preserve the same logic in symbolic form. In Beauty and the Beast, the Beast’s monstrous state is not lifted by force, fear, or submission, but by freely given love that restores ethical relationship. Importantly, Beauty’s choice must not be coerced. Transformation only occurs when love is offered without domination or self-betrayal, reinforcing the principle that imposed virtue cannot heal a corrupted system. Literary scholars consistently note that the tale frames moral restoration, not conquest, as the redemptive mechanism.

The Frog King cycle makes the same point in a more domestic register. The frog is an excluded, repulsive figure who demands entry into the human household. The turning point is not the frog’s destruction, but the insistence that a promise be kept and hospitality honoured. Once the social contract is upheld, the curse dissolves. Again, restoration of the ethical relationship precedes transformation.

These traditions point toward a shared mythic grammar. When a destructive force emerges, it is repeatedly associated with breaches of relationship, pride, abandonment of obligation, or misuse of power.

Resolution comes through humility, ethical containment, and the re-weaving of kinship. This is what the windigo stories articulate when they insist that “family bonds were essential to overcome the threat” and that “by expanding the definition of the family so that the windigo could be included, the danger could be overcome” (Smallman 2014, pp. 83–84).

The solution encoded in these myths directly contradicts modern spiritual narratives that frame awakening as separation from others or ascent above the world.

The older pattern does not ask who is awake and who is asleep. It asks whether the relationship has been broken, and whether it can still be repaired.

જ⁀➴ ♡

The journey to make ourselves immune to unseen control as individuals

Beyond just seeing the structures, denying the parasite’s favourite brain states by seeing artificial self-images, returning to right relationship with the Earth, knowing with much more razor clarity how to tell a non-organic entity from an organic one, and completing the steps I outlined in the ‘Withdrawing Consent’ section (which includes somatic underworld healing), I think that the only way we will figure out how to become completely immune to control as individuals is not one person authoritatively telling others.

I don’t believe any one person has all the answers. And it must never be monetised either (because it does not belong to one person or group.)

If you do pay for a healer or therapist, they should be in alignment with right relationship - you must test them to see if they genuinely care about you. Be careful in general, as the mental health industry is also full of corruption, as points out on his Substack.

I recommend healing with plants, herbs and mushrooms from the Earth - she has evolved to work with your physiology over millions of years. How long have the pharmaceutical companies been in action?

I think the universe is inviting us to work as a collective in a spirit of dialogue, curiosity, right relationship/love and collective experimentation. I think we will only find the answer as a constantly innovating, free-spirited collective. My dream is that we can create something like that in the future - maybe like a wiser, anti-cult group of flower children… or not…

I have some ideas, but I do not know for sure. I do feel like I was able to do it for myself, and in that way, I strongly believe that each person needs to guide themselves to their own strengthening and healing - to follow their own unique path that their true self guides them on. The king pillar of being able to do that is to recover your true sovereign soul-self, or just to hold on to whatever you can of it - the self you are when no one else is looking, or telling what you are, or what you should be.

If you know the game, your opponent only helps you live up to your potential, and you will.

In the spirit of experimentation, let me know if this meditation video does something good for you, or what your impressions are.

Centuries passed as fog smothered the distant lands, and Homo sapiens - bereft of their muse - fell under the control of those who exploited their disconnection. In those long, grey years, the air tasted of ash and stale bread.

Hierarchies hardened into stone. Priests claimed to speak for gods who demanded blood - altars slick with it, the copper smell never quite fading. Kings declared themselves chosen.

Women’s wisdom was driven further underground, and the moon - once revered as teacher - was slowly reframed as a cold, distant thing to be feared rather than honoured.

The natural law of love, woven through root and river, was covered over by the logic of sacrifice: some must be eaten, so others can rise.

It was then that Priscal, the once-childlike mushroom fairy, now grown into a complete adaptive response, finally heard the wind’s clear instruction about her purpose.

Feeling launched like an elastic band that had been pulled back in heightened tension, she leapt, skipped, and flew off the mother tree, randomly picking up an attractive humming stick that she found in her path. It was half-buried in moss, as if someone - or something - had tried to hide it. But the mycelium had kept it safe, whispering its location through the network until the right being came. She saw that it had bright colourful stones carefully woven into it. The labradorite flashed blue-green in the dim light. The quartz hummed against her palm.

“A lot of thought has been put into this object.

It should not be lost.”

She noticed something else: tiny lunar phase markings etched along its length, barely visible. The navigation stick had always worked with the moon’s cycles, not against them - the moon as timekeeper, as guide - never as thief.

Priscal ran wildly into the darkness and wind, following the mycelium network outwards and outwards; the whispering, glowing stick, singing a sad song, jumbled mournfully in her hand. She did not know yet what she would find at the end of the thread. But the wind had warned her: bring the stick, and do not look into the pink thing’s eyes.

Meanwhile, the gnome peeked out from behind his hiding place, watching her depart on her journey. Had he been happy without the time-tree fairy to bother him? Not really. The tree felt emptier. Quieter. Wrong. He twiddled his thumbs and kicked some fairy mice around as he thought about his next move. He laughed fondly as he remembered harassing the blue-green fairy, all spindly and oblivious. How easy it was to do so. As he snickered to himself, the pull of the dark forest, where the mushroom fairy had recently disappeared, drew his eyes. He peered down his nose into the dark woods - it occurred to him that he had never left far from the mother tree.

This self-imposed confinement now seemed like a prison, leaving him forever unchanged and unable to recover his lost time, with nothing to do but stare at the night sky and nurse his ancient grudge. But something had changed. Deep in his gut, where bitterness had calcified into stone, he felt a crack. Not softening - something harder. A terrible knowing that his enemy was perhaps not the fairy at all, but something that had been using his hatred as a hook for millennia.

When Priscal finally crossed the path of Silas, she saw him sitting in a stupor against a wall. At first, she thought it was a statue someone had carved and left. Then she realised: vines had grown through his hair, thick as her wrist, pulsing faintly with captured light, roots had begun to curl around his wrists, binding him to the earth, and small mushrooms fruited from his shoulders, delicate white caps that trembled when she approached.

The forest was trying to reclaim him, gently - to pull his body back into the soil before the thing inside him could finish hollowing him out completely. For a moment, she thought he was dead! His face was minutely cracked, covered with frozen, still choked tears; his wizened smile was no more. She cocked her head at him curiously and sighed.

When she got closer, she could see his eyes moving wildly back and forth in horror, lost in a waking nightmare. She touched his arm. Cold. Hard as bark. “Silas,” she whispered.

Nothing.

She held up the navigation stick. It began to hum - a low, resonant frequency that made the mushrooms on his shoulders glow faintly. The vines in his hair twitched.

“Silas,” she said louder, pressing the stick into his palm. “Come back.”

Silas’s bony, frozen fingers slowly responded to the life force in the stick, and he began to glimmer blue-green again. For a moment, something else flickered beneath his skin - something pink and furious that did not want to let go.

And then—

The pink light appeared.

It oozed from the shadows like syrup, forming into that same perfect face. Those same galaxy eyes. That same smile.

“Little mushroom,” it purred. “You’ve brought him a toy. How sweet.”

Priscal did not look at its eyes. She kept her gaze on Silas, on the navigation stick glowing in his hand. “He doesn’t belong to you,” she said, voice steady despite her trembling.

The pink being laughed- a sound like wind chimes made of bone. “Belong? He gave himself to me. Freely. Happily. Didn’t you, Silas?”

Silas’s mouth moved, forming words she couldn’t hear. The eyes of his soul were still trapped in that internal horror.

“He was lost,” the being continued, circling them now, its form shifting - sometimes humanoid, sometimes just light and shadow and hunger. “I found him. I gave him purpose. Meaning. Love.”

“Counterfeit love,” Priscal said. The words came from somewhere deep, from the mycelium network that whispered ancient truths. “You offered connection while severing his roots. You promised wholeness while fragmenting his soul.”

The pink light flickered - just for a moment. Annoyance.

“Clever little spore,” it hissed. “But you’re too late. He’s already mine. See how the forest claims him? Those are my vines. My mushrooms. I’m teaching him a lesson about attachment, about—”

“Those are MY mushrooms,” Priscal interrupted. She placed her hand on Silas’s shoulder, on the white caps growing there. They pulsed with recognition.

“From my network. We’ve been keeping him alive. Keeping him connected. Waiting.”

The being’s smile faltered.

“The mycelium never forgets,” Priscal continued, her voice growing stronger. “Every tree, every root, every thread - we remember the dream language of self. The one you tried to replace. And we’ve been whispering it to him, through the soil, through the fungi, through the very earth you tried to claim him from.”

She pressed the navigation stick deeper into Silas’s palm, covering his hand with hers. The stones blazed - labradorite and quartz singing together now, harmonising.

“Silas,” she said, looking directly at him, never at the being. “Remember who you are. Not who you were told to be. Not who you lost. Who you ARE.”

The navigation stick’s light spread up his arm, dissolving the roots that bound him. The vines in his hair withered. The mushrooms on his shoulders released their spores- not decay, but propagation, new growth, new possibilities.

“NO!” The pink being shrieked, its beautiful form cracking, revealing something underneath - raw hunger, ancient and endless and empty. “He’s MINE! I worked for CENTURIES to—”

But Silas’s eyes cleared.

First one, then the other, focusing. Seeing. Not the duplicate dream. Not the counterfeit love. But her. Priscal. The navigation stick. The Mother Tree’s distant pulse.

“I,” he whispered, his voice rusty from disuse. “Am.”

The pink light hissed a final promise: “You’ll come back. They always come back. I am the only one who truly understands you.” Then it retreated deeper, coiling around his heart.

Silas croaked, “I don’t know where I am, I don’t know how I got here.

...How long was I sitting?”

She observed that weeds and vines had grown thickly around him; the rising morning light threw into relief a sitting fairy shape carefully carved by the vines.

She nodded, “It seems like quite a long time.”

Long enough that the stars had shifted. Long enough that entire human empires had risen and burned. Long enough that the thing that took him had almost finished digesting who he used to be. Long enough that humans had forgotten the goddess almost entirely and had even started telling stories about a moon that harvests souls instead of teaching cycles.

Many years had passed since he first saw the beautiful God-being. His song was now one of a slow, dreamy realisation ...Mirages?

And then, as life returned to his body, the song of dawning clarity was sung by both Silas’s and Priscal’s spirits; thus setting up the first small glimmer of this clarity to follow with a wave amongst Homo sapiens:

He remembered loving someone deeply, a great central saviour,
with king pillars of truth,
and tall libraries of wisdom,
he was convinced that the love had been returned to sender.

And yet now... nothing but the dead earth hurting,
crumbling sadly, where greatness once had birthed him.

He had known in some corner,
away from the placated party,
the instinctive insincerity when the saviour said artfully,
"I love you back."
He had always heard, but not heard,
the words were black.
Discounted it as burning there, for a very good reason,
and necessary for the development, of a superior person.
For the one who has lost their true dream self,
who is no longer a trusty proprietor.

God, as a man,
can do absolutely anything,
even flat-out 
lie to them.

Even though denial is the supreme first port
for this sordid sort,
and no evidence will sway them,
not even a cry to them.

It includes all abuse, lies and rape, plus murder.
He is sacrosanct for the believer,
to hell with the griever,
since it was God, as a person, who decried them.

Forged origin myths.
Stolen chakra plinths.
Surrogate community.
Glorious energy shows.
Magical manifested, sparkling ash.
Sorcerer necklaces. Co-opted chants.

You have no chance.

He remembered spirit journeys, carved into the mind,
whittled into soul,
a careful cajole.

But...
not his own.

It silently replaced the original rainbow centre.
Pierced the egg of self,
and shook photonic head crystals,
for a master that was never, his better.

The greatest thief of Earth's history, behold.

Gasping,
he remembered...
…(he squinted his eyes)

... that he was deeply lost,
and not, at all, found.

Could it have all been a dream?
Not from his true self,
one from someone else?

He stood up.

"Where have I been?
A spirit journey that was not my own!"
Placing his head to his long, blue-handed fist,
taking his spirit back from the lost-soul bandit;

"Who would have thought that one could be so lost?
And then be even more, eye-wateringly, lost
than if you had never felt that you had lost?
I have made an art out of being lost...
That is quite an achievement.

...but I am not sure it was mine, 
at all.
...Whose was it?"

The mushroom fairy had brought him a navigation stick.
He touched her soft head fur-curls to verify it was no trick.

…She was real!
And belonging to the greatest pioneer of Earth's history.

A sigh of relief, he felt, sweet love widening,
throughout his deadened, silvered cut veins, enlivening.
Love showing in her kind action, to come to save him.
It was the love no one needs to tell you about,
without lies.

The light of the time portal,
shone again, 
in his eyes.

Coming back to himself, he asked, “Can you take me back to my mother... tree, Ms Mushroom?”

They took each other’s hands and travelled back through the dark undergrowth, struggling at first to cut through its thickness, following the fungal network inwards and inwards, to return home. The forest did not want to let them pass. Vines caught at Silas’s ankles; roots rose like tripwires. Something in the deep places knew he was getting away and was trying, desperately, to pull him back. This was the pattern’s last grasp- it had fed on his disconnection for so long that his escape felt like starvation. But Priscal walked the mycelium path, and the Mother Earth’s own network pulled them forward, root by root, toward home.

Priscal’s special adaptation - her energy, curiosity, and ancestral connection - enabled her to reconnect beings to undistorted direct experience. While she returned to the darkness to rescue more lost souls, Silas wept as his energy reconnected with the tree. The Mother Time Tree shuddered with relief, wrapping him in bark-warmth, and for the first time in centuries, he felt held.

But his dreams had changed now. He had nightmares that, perhaps... had he not really escaped? In the dreams, he was still sitting against the wall. In the dreams, the pink being leaned close and whispered, “You never left. This is the dream I’m giving you. Wake up.” And he would jolt awake, screaming, clutching the navigation stick to prove it was real.

The scars of a counterfeit self are not easily shed. Even after the mask is removed, the face remembers its shape. Even after the voice stops, your thoughts sometimes speak in its cadence.

The scars became part of him forever - he now had wizened lines of sadness, not smiles, all over his face. He often awoke early from sleep, needing to remember that he was no longer lost, and this was his lesson to be absorbed for Homo sapiens to follow.

Thankfully, the stars had not perceptibly changed, and with his regained ability to see things directly, he received a new question;

‘Should I go back in time now, to figure out what happened?’

And yet, this crucial question triggered darkness into desperate action. Somewhere in the dimensional field, the thing that had lost Silas felt the question like a blade against its throat.

Nothing threatened it more than inquiry itself! That would be a direct light cast on its shadowy nature. Because this was not a physical being, but a pattern in the informational field - a knot of pride, control, and broken reciprocity that had condensed enough density to act. And like any pattern, it survived by remaining invisible, by convincing its hosts that it was their true voice.

Panicked, it launched a savage attack, channelling its full power as it slithered up through the roots. This time, it would not seduce. This time, it would simply end him. It targeted the weaknesses in Silas’s scarred spirit, determined to silence the revelation before truth could emerge. It was the same tactic it had used against many curious minds since the dawn of Homo ergaster.

The dark energy surged forward, like an obsidian lightning bolt, striking Silas directly at the hollow in his throat. The fairy’s eyes widened in shock, his blue-green skin paling to the colour of withered moss. He felt his windpipe collapse. Felt the navigation stick begin to slip from his fingers. Felt the pink being’s voice inside his skull: ‘You should have stayed with me. I would have kept you safe.’ A high-pitched shriek tore through the air as a pollen fairy witnessed the assault. Silas’s hands glowed faintly as he tried to summon his remaining strength. Despite his desperate efforts, the darkness pressed harder, wrapping around his throat like strangling vines. This was it. This was the end. He had survived centuries in a stupor only to die seconds after asking the right question!

Throughout the massive Mother Time Tree, every living entity felt the attack. The bark contracted with a groaning creak that resonated through every fibre. Deep within the heartwood, tree sprites ducked into knotholes, trembling fairies pressed themselves into the crevices of bark, and even the birds fell silent, hunching down in their nests. They recognised this vibration - this cold, insidious frequency that had haunted their ancestors.

In its efforts to focus on Silas, the darkness had inadvertently revealed itself to everyone else! For the first time in millennia, every being in the tree could see it: not as shadow, not as whisper, but as a writhing knot of rage and hunger that had been hiding in the spaces between their thoughts all along.

The gnome had been standing there - how long? Minutes? Hours? Watching. His ancient, bitter heart cracked wider and wider as he witnessed the mushroom fairy’s courage. As he saw what the darkness truly was.

Not the fairy. Not grandfather. Not even those long-ago murderers.

But this. This thing that whispered to murderers. This thing that transformed grief into grudges, fear into weapons, pain into chains.

“You,” he said, voice shaking. His stopwatch ticked in his hand - that measuring device he’d carried for aeons, trying to quantify loss, trying to get back what was taken. “You made them do it. You were there. In the shadows. Whispering.”

The pink being paused, mid-lunge, and turned its terrible attention to the gnome. Its smile returned - that perfect, loving smile.

“Dear little timekeeper,” it cooed. “I only helped them see clearly. Helped them understand that some must be sacrificed for others to thrive. Your brothers? They were weak. The Homo erectus simply culled the—”

“LIAR!” The gnome’s voice cracked like thunder.

His gnarled fingers hurled his weathered stopwatch - not at the being, but at the ground between them. It shattered. Time scattered like glass shards, and in that scattered moment, the gnome saw clearly: every grudge he’d nurtured, every trap he’d set, every bitter year spent hoarding hate - all of it had fed this thing. Given it power. Made it stronger.

The gnome suddenly recognised with clarity the invisible enemy that had haunted his nightmares for millennia. As he peered from beneath a gnarled root, the realisation hit him like a physical blow; here, at last, was the true killer of his brothers, the force that had turned his heart bitter. The thing that had whispered, all those centuries:

‘Hate the fairy. Hate the fairy. It’s his fault. Make him pay. Using the gnome’s grief as a leash.’

It was not a single ghost at all, but a pattern that had grown fat on every broken promise of protection, every laughed-off cruelty, every sacrifice disguised as glory. The Homo erectus killers had broken the law of love, and this thing- this it -had coalesced from that breaking, learning to drift along timelines and feed wherever the same frequency appeared.

Time seemed to slow as memories flooded his consciousness; he could direct his anger where it mattered.

And he stepped forward.

Not to be consumed. But to consume it back.

His dream sang:

While the angry gnome, hardened,
irritable and not trying to flee,
feeling the attack, came to see.

He saw the time-tree fairy,
the one he had not seen for a century,
dying slowly at his feet,
and felt not glee, but destiny.

He thought: 
“My anger festered for millennia and a century.
Hark, here who attacks is unseen
but is the true source of my disdain,
one expert unheard—one with no name.

I'm disaster, rot in root,
but no more, my heart be soot.
Anger is my pallid palace,
so all I could see, was my foot.
Sea of blackness underneath my eyes,
even though I can see.

There is no saving me.

Life of my soul removed,
as if everything has no color,
even though I can see, colors…

I live as if all have turned their back on me and turned to stone -
a life filled as if injected with a neurotoxin.

The pain of truth is soul-exacting,
floating, completely stripped of everything I thought I was.
The surface of my body turned to icicles,
and I grow spikes and spears on my skin.

I can't breathe.

Have you transformed me into something,
I never thought I would become?

But now,
transmutations,
welling in my soul,
drumming in my bones,
resolving flame, re-lit embers, sunlight,
crunch, bite,... Fight!

FIGHT!

I will destroy you, as you have me!
I will throw you against that tree. 
Wack! Over, and over again, until you CRACK.
Rip your throat open and brains tumble out.

Bleed whatever it is that you bleed.

All you are is the mask now.

I will end you.

Growling, the gnome launched himself with surprising agility into the heart of darkness, arcing through the air like a meteor. His face set with fierce determination, he began to glow - not with fairy light but with thousands of years of resentment burning white-hot. The darkness recoiled, confused by this small being willingly entering its maw.

Then, remarkably, the gnome’s bitterness - the very poison darkness had cultivated within him for centuries - became a weapon against its creator. By directing his rage AT the pattern instead of at the fairy, he broke the cycle.

The darkness expected him to hurt Silas, which would make Silas hurt someone else, feeding it forever. When the gnome attacked the darkness itself, he starved it. It consumed him, yes - but he poisoned it from inside. His rage became medicine because he aimed it at the disease, not at another victim.

His rage flared incandescent, consuming both himself and the dark entity. A blinding flash illuminated the forest, followed by an implosion that left nothing behind - no gnome, no darkness, just resonant silence. And then, very faintly, a sound like chains breaking. All over the forest, every creature that had been nursing a grudge, every being that had been whispering bitterness in the dark, suddenly felt lighter. As if a weight they didn’t know they’d been carrying had simply... dropped away. Neither would ever return to trouble Silas again.

Silas had watched in stunned silence as his adversary became his unlikely saviour. Touching his throat where moments before the darkness had been strangling the life from him, he felt instead a thrumming vibration - a strength flowing into him that he had never possessed before; a power his grandfather had lacked. The power to see the thing clearly. To name it. To refuse its voice when it whispered in his own. Not power to control it - that would only feed it again - but power to witness it without being consumed. Direct experience without distortion, exactly as the mushroom ancestors had promised Homo sapiens would one day achieve.

All around the tree, life cautiously reawakened. Mushroom fairies peeked out from behind their glowing caps, tree sprites ventured from their hollows, and a family of dewdrop collectors resumed their morning gathering.

Slowly, carefully, they began to sing. Not a victory song- something older. A song of the world before the breaking of the original dream. And for the first time in centuries, nothing interrupted them.

Even though Silas did not fully understand what had just come to pass, he decided the only thing to do was to continue his original goal. He rose to his feet and finally passed again through the spectral lines of the time portal in the tree.

⊹ ࣪ ˖🕰️୭˚. ᵎᵎ🗝️

Silas visited himself many years before to see when he had begun his journey. He saw himself standing before a tremendous being. But the being was not made of light, as he remembered! It was made of stolen light - a patchwork thing wearing beauty like a costume, held together by the terror and longing it harvested from everyone it captured. Curls of wiry hair writhed around its talons, which now took hold of his old self’s neck.

“I made a mistake,” the pre-existing thought had solidified.

He thumped down on the ground, watching his previous self being tied up in vines, against a wall by some unseen force. It was terrifying to see this happen to himself, but he felt equally liberated to be able to see it.

Because now he could also see the others.

Dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe. All sitting against walls, frozen mid-scream, each one a fairy or spirit or human dreamer who had asked the wrong question at the wrong time. All still there. Still waiting for someone to find them. And he knew, suddenly, what Priscal had been doing all these centuries.

Standing firmly before the portal, his renewed silhouette contrasted starkly with his imprisoned former self. With newfound clarity, he stepped through the threshold and returned to the welcoming embrace of his home. Upon his return, Silas’s pointed ears twitched, catching a question that hurtled toward him like a shooting star through the branches. At last, the haunting enigma from his childhood crystallised into perfect clarity, as if it had been waiting all these centuries for him to possess the sight to truly ask it:

“Why couldn’t my grandfather defeat this darkness?

What weakness left him vulnerable?”

From then on, he was hounded by thoughts of how to answer this question; by thoughts on how he could fight back.

“Could I trick the darkness back... as he tricked me?

No...

Perhaps I could control him... as he controlled me, and then everything would be in balance again?”

No…

Could I possibly ensnare the darkness with dreams of real love... so that he would even risk the eventual punishment of revealing himself, just to experience real love?

Yes, that sounds good!...

No…”

Each solution crumbled as soon as he touched it. Because each one still treated the darkness as a thing that could be manipulated, rather than a pattern that fed on manipulation itself. He felt the old familiar pull: ‘I must be the one to solve this. I must control the outcome. I am the only one who understands.’

And then, with a cold shock of recognition, he realised: ‘That is its voice. That is how it sounds when it speaks through pride.’ The gnome had not defeated darkness through superior strategy. He had defeated it by finally seeing it clearly and refusing to feed it with misdirected rage.

Without a satisfying resolution, he turned to notice Priscal had returned from reconnecting many other beings to a direct way to answer their curiosity, and had joined her older ancestors.

He waved to her happily.

They were sitting on their luminous mushroom shelves, carefully contemplating their next adaptation. One of them raised a small, dark eye, looking down on him as he approached with urgency.

“Tell me how to control the darkness, umm... please,” said Silas, stumbling over some vines at the base as he looked up.

“Aren’t you going to ask for the cause of it first?” intoned the mushroom spirit.

“There’s no time, it will infiltrate the Homo sapiens further, since it has done so with me.” He shook his head. “But this time it’s different, it’s worse - it’s not physical - it’s spiritual - it’s far more dangerous,” he said with a shake in his voice.

“Causes are always the ‘saddle’ of the rider,” said the ancestor. “Knock off the saddle, and down comes the rider.... won’t be easy,” he added thoughtfully.

“So what is it then - the cause?” said Silas, frustrated.

“Attempting to control forces that are not yours to direct always brings an endless cycle of backlashes,” the ancestor said, descending the knobbles of the tree with surprising speed to face the flustered blue face. “Homo sapiens have been trying this, and it’s worsening.

A creepy government organisation even tried to control us mushrooms to manipulate minds! A disaster that served the darkness. Only Earth herself can control us. A terrible mess.” The ancient one shook his head in constrained disbelief.

“This is the oldest law, woven through every root and river: do not eat your own young, do not turn your kin into offerings, do not build life on sacrifice instead of reciprocity. Every time they break it - every hierarchy built on fear, every prophet who demands submission, every empire that feeds on its people - they feed it. And now it’s big enough to drift through timelines, attach to families and nations, whisper in the ears of kings and priests and gurus alike.”

They shared awkward silence over tea, the steam rising between them, warming their faces, watching the stars pulse and shimmer above.

“What might happen… if they even altered evolutionary genomes… to control others for power… with darkness lurking behind them?” Silas wondered.

They sat in reticence, staring blankly. After a while, they bid farewell for the night.

Silas spent fitful days scrambling around the tree, talking to himself and inventing new solutions which arose and then dissipated again periodically. As the days and nights passed further, he became more still.

Priscal decided to approach him as he sat, staring blankly.

“I’ve been dreaming a future for Homo sapiens,” she said brightly.

“After they solve this new challenge, they will be great, and I can send them to the moon, along with some of my planned mycotecture!”

“What’s that?” said Silas, turning his head to see her pastel neon-luminescent figure glowing against the night sky. She was diaphanous, with a central rainbow spine, pulsing like a comb jelly.

“It’s a future built with connective inspiration from the original pioneers.”

“And Silas - we will send them with the moon, not to escape it. The moon is no thief. She is a mirror and a timekeeper, the oldest teacher of cycles. The darkness wants them to fear her. But we will help them remember: she taught our ancestors when to fruit and when to rest, when to plant and when to let the field lie fallow. She is an ally in the great work of learning to see things as they are.”

“You know… it was the growing desire amongst Homo sapiens to control that finally gave darkness the foothold it needed to take your navigation stick. Understanding that controlling sovereign selves prevents connection with each other and the cosmos will prepare them for the journey outward. The stars await minds seeking understanding, not domination.

We adapted to darkness, trying to control our deepest spiritual aspirations and the soul itself. Your grandfather was unable to see darkness for what it was doing, and that is why he would not fight… but now you see it, without distortion, and the gnome represents the fighting force we need.”

She looked at him with ancient, luminous eyes. “And every time one being sees through it and refuses to feed it, the pattern weakens. Not destroyed - just... less able to pretend it’s God.

It is the multi-layered web of trauma, hierarchy, and broken law that has covered Earth’s original dream. The voice that says ‘you must escape the body, transcend the Earth, rise above the cycles’. That voice serves the pattern that calls itself God but knows nothing of love. Our work is not to escape, but to remember. To reconnect. To refuse the counterfeit and return to the Mother Tree’s embrace.”

As these words settled into Silas’s mind, the ancient burden of doubt finally eased. His grandfather’s inability to fight darkness had not been a moral failing but simply a limitation of vision.

The question that had haunted him found its answer, and with it came a profound sense of possibility. And something else: a responsibility. He had been given sight. Now what would he do with it?

Not control. Not mastery. But witnessing - and the humility to know he did not have all the answers, would never have them, and that this uncertainty was not weakness but the only honest stance in a universe that kept unfolding in ways no single being could predict.

“Well, perhaps I cannot control the darkness.”

Then Silas’s spirit sang:

Perhaps... this dark being, lost a lot more than I did…

Will Homo sapiens take inspiration from this dark being, or from me?

Yes... without the true free choice to love,

perhaps there would be no real love at all.

At all.

And the universe does not forget who you chose to truly and freely love.”

The time-tree fairy, Silas, turned towards the stars.

The mycelium hummed beneath his feet. And somewhere, in a forest clearing centuries away, another being sat frozen against a wall - waiting for someone to find them, waiting for the navigation stick’s light to finally reach them too.

The Great Severing had come to pass. But the Great Reconnection had only just begun.

It would not be led by a single saviour or controlled from above. It would spread through networks - mycelial, lunar, embodied - carried by every being who learned to see the counterfeit clearly and chose, freely, to return to the original dream.

When Silas was a baby, his grandfather had been killed by ghosts. Ghosts that his grandfather had helped create.

Now grown, as the wind stirred in his wispy hair, he looked down at the misty forest beneath his tree, and he looked back at this memory, noticing that it caused something profound to stir in his consciousness. A vast, formless question had taken shape like the morning mist, impossible to name or even fully perceive, yet pressing with the weight of necessary wisdom. He knew only that an answer existed somewhere, waiting to be found. This is the tale of how he found it.

Silas was not actually a physical being, as you might know it.

He was both embodied and disembodied, both in linear time and outside of time. He was actually a spirit ancestor that lived in a tree - the Mother Time Tree - a tree that was, of course, also outside of time. From that strange in‑between place, he could feel how a single choice could echo up and down the timelines like a bell rung in a fourth dimension, touching past, present, and future all at once.

Sometimes he behaved like a human because he was, in fact, the inspiration for Homo sapiens itself. He had blue skin and rather irrational hair. His experience of the world was climbing—rough bark scraping his palms—making cups of tea from bubble nuts, the bitter steam stinging his nostrils, conversing with the sprites who designed the moss, their voices chiming like tiny bells. But most of the time it was more like how you float inside of a dream, and turn into someone else sometimes, but still remain yourself, somehow. All that remained was emotion and wonderings of consciousness, trying to find its boundaries.

The main emotion he felt right now was a niggling sadness, a heartbreak cracking like a tree branch, a small premonition that what had begun would finally reach its consequence. It was as if some old law had been bent too far, too often and the echo of that bending hummed in his bones. Somewhere far below, in the cracks between roots where no light fell, something had begun to listen.

So, you may be expecting this story to ground you in physical reality, but it’s not so easy, you know. It can only be done sometimes. The rest of the time, things happen in that other kind of place – the one mystics call the astral or fourth‑dimensional field – where histories knot together, and patterns become beings. Where a broken law, repeated often enough, can congeal into a hungry presence that learns to want.

This tale unfolds in the First Age of Connection, when beings like Silas still remembered their original dream. It reveals how the Great Severing came to pass.

In that distant epoch, when fairies like Silas still presided over the Earth and nature herself sowed her own seeds without intervention, the spirit of freedom moved through the ancient forest.

It blazed through the towering tree sentinels like a celestial comet, illuminating paths that all creatures could follow home to themselves. The moon watched over them, then as an old friend – her waxing and waning a soft drum, keeping time with sap‑flow, tides, and the hidden pulses of blood.

It was a dream of those caught in the sun, even as it went down.
A dream never to want to escape from,
nor to want to forsake,
not at all.

Not a dream of the non-lucid shard of you,
of the undeciding part of you,
desperate to wake
in the sweats and threats, reminding you of all that you've lost,
and that you're actually a circle, shoved, to fit into a triangle.

Not at all.

It was a dream that weaved and thumped throughout the land
the same as they were, not a misaligned misrepresentation of a dream
aligned in the air,
the same as the fire,
in line with the water
of desire.

A dream language of self.

It was not a dream of unearthing of what
you thought you had not been birthing.
A corner of you, thought was done,
taped shut,
numb.
Not at all.

It was not a dream
as they were not,
not at all.
It was not trying, never co-signing
to create the shape of what it lost,
not at all.

It was before darkness weaved masterful
replica duplicate dreams
that it could,
infiltrate, indicate,
prevaricate, and undo the world dream.

Before the unchallenged and the underwhelmed,
silent virus, quietly unseen and undemeaned,
embalmed and entombed the umbilical cord,
carefully wound repurposed to strangle,
to finish off the dying light, of a too-right,
unwitted, burnt-skinned soul.

It was before the darkness unmoored its dreamers
from tethered languages of self, and its believers.
A climber's rope snapped,
eyes encrusted shut,
as he fell forever into the wide, misty space.

And it was before
it succeeded in this so well,
that it could convince, ravel up, enthral and uncouple
a dreamer, to know that even evil was love, with a throuple
— God, self, and the tricky one in between —
simply by using the word, 'love!' while remaining unseen.

The dreams the fairies remembered,
were before the word's representation (love),
was quietly replaced with a puppet dismembered,
and life was still a happy invitation.

A dream language of self.

But not all things can stay put.
Some things have to get dislodged,
get lost — to pollute.

But who is deciding that?
The mystery is indeed, a beguiling fact.

And yet, in the cracks between worlds, where neither sunlight nor starlight reached, something else was forming; a darkness born from the shards and kernels of beings whose names had been condemned for their violence, and which now sought more control. This darkness had learned to craft bodies from shadow and bone, scavenged from the forgotten dead. It had learned to carve territories in forgotten caves - where water dripped slow and steady, counting centuries - and abandoned places. Yet despite its creeping power, it could not capture the incandescent spirit that pulsed within living creatures.

This wasn’t for lack of effort! The darkness had successfully infiltrated the bodies of many beings, whispering impulses that drove their actions and fears that clouded their thoughts; yet the essence of their spirits, the quality that made each creature unique, remained inconveniently beyond its grasp.

The darkness observed the burrowing owl claim the home of other burrowing creatures; it observed the dewdrop spider use the webs of larger spiders; and its favourite, it appreciated the false cleanerfish, who mimic cleaner wrasse and then bite chunks from its hosts instead of cleaning the parasites.

“How does one steal, not just the body, but the soul?” it pondered.

It needed one captured spirit to understand the pattern, and then all would fall; and so it watched and waited. It was learning, in other words, how to become more than a bad habit. How to condense so it could drift along timelines, attach to families, tribes and empires, and feed wherever the same flavour of fear and control appeared.

Mother Earth, who had seen the rise and fall of countless species, sighed a great swell wave in the deepest abysses of her oceans as she watched the cycling of the sun’s light - days and nights - waving calmly across her great land masses. The creatures who had evolved within her embrace for millions of years - from the tiniest algae to the mightiest whales - had always been under her protection. But this new darkness grew thunderously, in ways she had not witnessed before, slipping between her defences.

The spirits of her creatures would soon face this threat alone. As eaglets pushed from the nest to learn flight through necessity, her children would need to discover their own strength.

But this challenge was different from any evolutionary trial before.

The fairies who had guided each creature’s adaptation - inspiring the first mycelium to form, inspiring the buff-tip moth to mimic a broken twig, and pushing the first being to test the air - now faced a very new evolutionary challenge. If the darkness succeeded, the very essence that sparked innovation and adaptation, might vanish.

The spirits of her creatures would need to learn the evolutionary game of survival on their own; they would be like children suddenly removed from their mother’s protection, thrown into cold, piercing waters, and left to gasp for rare, fresh air. The spirits that dwelled within all beings - the same spirits and fairies that had guided evolution itself - might soon abandon both their dream, and hers, leaving the course of life without direction.

Evolution itself would have no solution for this absence. It had always been the role of the fairies, as muses to all creatures, to inspire each new step in adaptation. But unfortunately, facing this soul-bandit innovation from the encroaching darkness, they would have no clue how to solve it either.

For this was not a simple predator, but a break in the oldest law she had woven through every root and river: do not eat your own young, do not turn your kin into offerings, do not build life on sacrifice instead of reciprocity.

✩₊˚.⋆☾𓃦☽⋆⁺₊✧

Silas, the time tree fairy, had been unaware of all of this.

He finished his bubble nut tea, the warmth spreading through his chest, stretching out his arms before a great, clear, starry night sky, as he balanced on his spindly blue legs atop a massive branch, high up in his tree. Above him, the moon rode full and bright, its soft light threading through the branches, and down into the mycelium, keeping time with the slow pulse of the Mother Time Tree.

Below, he thought he glimpsed a newly-born fairy flitting beneath the moss-laden branch where he perched; her exuberant spirit catching his peripheral vision. Yet he was not paying attention to her much more than that, for her brightness had helped rekindle these memories of his own youth - and with them, the impossible riddle of his grandfather’s passing.

Such was his nature that questions multiplied endlessly in his mind, befitting his role as ‘muse of evolutionary discovery’ to a specific genus of humanity.

He liked to imagine he was the one guiding them, that if only he watched closely enough, he could keep them from repeating old mistakes. A small, secret pride in being the one who knew, flickered in him, never quite admitted even to himself.

Newly born from a mushroom, this baby fairy - her name was Priscal - skipped across disorganised lines of wide-skirted photo-luminescent mushrooms adorning the old mother-time tree.

As she danced through the trees with the spirit of freedom, she could hear the wind whispering promises about her future - soft words telling her that she was someday destined for an important purpose. Though the wind assured her of its significance, it refused to reveal exactly what this great task would be, leaving the young fairy pouting, her small face scrunched in frustration.

In case the wind would feel more convinced to tell her, she chaotically stamped on a bouncy mushroom shelf securely welded to the winding, spiralling bark of the tree. White dust from her feet mushroomed around her, forming tiny circle-whispers and causing some of the older mushroom fairies, sitting calmly on the mushrooms below to sneeze and to become so uncomfortable that they had to move.

Adult mushroom fairies are very quiet, still creatures and spend much time meditating perched aloft on their mushroom shelves. So, to see them scrambling away, tied up in their long, spindly legs, kind faces shifting expressions into ‘slightly irked’, is a rare sight indeed.

They only ever moved for very important pioneering jobs, which were so austere that they required intense meditating in between portentous efforts. The young mushroom fairy, Priscal, was an adaptation - a new kind of mushroom fairy. Somewhere deep in their shared mycelium, an older memory stirred: of a time before sacrifice, before counterfeit dreams, when the moon and the mushrooms and the Mother Tree still spoke one language of self.

On the very day Silas felt the shadow of his forgotten question stir in his mind, this time-tree fairy made a dreadful discovery - his navigation stick had vanished.

This was no ordinary implement but a key that held dominion over time itself. It is little known to all but a few that when he had forgotten a story, the navigation stick allowed him to whirl through a time portal nested under a root, within the tree.

Ancient glyphs spiralled across its surface - a map of timeless pathways through reality. Before each journey, his slender fingers would trace these markings and the embedded labradorite and quartz stones with reverent familiarity. This heirloom had passed through generations of time-tree fairies, from his father (muse to Homo neanderthalensis) to him.

When his fingers touched the enchanted wood, they glowed with ancestral magic, brightening his wizened face and stirring his shock-dandelion hair in the wind. This luminescence lingered even after he’d returned to his tree house - a cosy dwelling carved within the heartwood of the great tree - and even after he had placed the stick on his bedside table, among collected artefacts from human civilisations, eventually fading, as he drifted to sleep on his cushion moss bed.

A forgotten memory is like an unscratchable itch in the mind. Rather than inventing or embellishing past events, he had simply used the navigation stick to travel back and witness them directly, then return home - an elegant solution typical of those simpler times.

Other fairies - muses of flora and fauna - sought his tales, eagerly, for time-journeying was his domain alone. Once, he ventured to Earth’s distant past, to a time before humans existed, before continents took shape, even before familiar stars appeared in the sky!

The fairies commemorated his journey with a song. If you want to know what it was, here it is. 

Could you have imagined such a time?
When there was no Alcyone, no Polaris and no Orion?
No Sirius star could yet be seen.
The questions the stars would inspire, but a phantasmagoric dream.

Dumbstruck, gazing at this alien sky,
he was, however, happy to see a much brighter eye,
the younger Aldebaran, blazing, not dimming,
loyally present, not abating,
watching everything begin at the beginning.

The time-tree fairy wanted to recall
before the beginnings,
were beginning at life's tipping point.
to find the origin of sweet serenity,
to see if waters of past tasted differently.
So, into the sea, he decided to fall,
and to make a good go of it.

For light is on the surface,
but in the depths, he would know of it
not just the origin of salinity,
but the nature, of his identity.
As a fairy, it was easy to do—
even sinking too deep,
to do it, he knew.

Spellbound, he swam amongst smoking clusters of creatures,
curiously anchored, deep in sea bed, sequestered.
From microbial mat to rising wobble, sponge city.
Eclectic towers, fronds,
feather-like fractals and trilateral symmetry.

Spines and curls, withered spurs, curling in line,
The water did, in fact, taste soft alkaline.
And little creatures, recently designed
by a wildly non-censoring artist,
squealed into his mouth, to kindly leave them past it!

He hastily apologised and left.
On his way up through dark and undulating waters,
A jelly-shaped fairy, glittering bouncing bright,
a wistfully built-in central rainbow light,
waved to him in diaphanous jelly arms
containing in tow, photonic crystals, growing in the dark.
In the dream-image language, it mentioned,
the incantation to intention,
to wildly iridescent versions of itself,
just after it figured out how to design a slightly better neural-net shelf.

The time-tree fairy cordially replied,
with careful dream images, from his mind's eye,
with deep heart feelings from inside...

the awe that it inspired.

Once, Silas travelled to visit the origin of the mushrooms that grew all about his tree. For who could not be eternally curious about that?

He arrived unceremoniously through the time portal, to see a tide of varied mushroom fairies co-mingled in a scramble, dragging their technologically advanced mycelium networks across a barren, boring land.

They were not at all anthropomorphic at this stage; legs hadn’t been invented yet. In the distance, the dark land heaved and waited.

They carried on top of their bodies strange plants uprooted from deep within the sea. He could see them periodically inserting tender shoots into the Earth, connecting them to the growing, glowing mycelium network. Every time this happened, and they succeeded, a joyful wave of electrical pulses quivered through the network.

“So that’s how it happened. The greatest pioneering effort in Earth history!” he thought.

Cautiously, Silas approached an ancient mushroom fairy, dodging its busy movements as it transported plant material. Extending his bony fingers, he projected mental images of their successful green future. The ancient being paused its work, turning to respond with excitement and to share wild visions of how they would one day create his time tree.

Silas received this message as if it were he who was feeling the emotion; as if it were he who sent the message to himself. ‘But how could they know this future?’ he thought.

“The future is the beginning,” they collectively replied, with image language.

“If you know the future already, where’s the joy of discovery? Isn’t the unknown what makes life worth living?” he asked aloud, realising creatures who knew the future would understand spoken language. They answered:

“The ‘unknown’ is fun only when,

you have not disappeared from yourself,

Only when the spindles of your soul,

are not seemingly cut.

The future we are seeing, is the future we dreamt of, and changed.

We did not know it, until we changed it.

We will encourage Homo sapiens to colonise us on the moon

because we are light and resilient, like no other.

But before they can truly do as we do, and visit further into the stars

to meet the very source of their questions,

they will verily see events, exactly as they are,

without a flicker of distortion.”

“Ah,” Silas said. He wobbled backwards into the portal that was floating in the middle of the empty space behind him, and about-turned to face his beloved home again.

That night, Silas had dreamed something he could not quite remember.

Something pink and smiling.

Something that knew his name.

𖡼𖤣𖥧𖡼𓋼𖤣𖥧𓋼𓍊

After resting many trips around the sun in his time tree, Silas had occasionally inspired a Homo sapien who wandered past, turning her or him from jaw-hanging hapless to lucky, genius inventor. However, women who received his inspiration would later have to claim their ideas came from men for acceptance, and as societies evolved, innovation became more difficult, as it was the privilege of the powerful.

That was the time that dreams were as real as the knobbly tree wood ridges upon which he regularly stubbed his foot.

“Don’t take your time,” a grizzly voice had said underneath him, during one of those foot stubbings. “Umlumlumum,” said the creature, making faces and then squinting in pain.

Silas gasped in surprise as he watched a little old gnome, reaching up to his knees, wincing to get up and inspect him while holding a very intricate stopwatch. The watch ticked loudly in the quiet forest, each tick sharp as a hammer on stone.

“Time is never enough,” said the old gnome, glaring into Silas’s pupils.

“Young fairy, are you? What are you? Just a few hundred thousand years, eh? You never learn,” he turned away, muttering, peering carefully at his stopwatch.

“I need to get back the lost time, you’re getting in my way. I have a lot of work to do.”

“Er... Lost time?” said Silas, blinking rapidly.

“You always think this is a game. It’s easy for you! Prancing left and right, as if you own the place, never thinking about the consequences of your actions. I have actual work to do, and you are here just playing games. What do you actually look at anyway? There’s nothing to look at. Endlessly... looking,” he mumbled.

“Er, excuse me,” said Silas. “Um, I am not sure I have made your acquaintance.”

“You have,” said the little old gnome.

“Well, I have never seen you before.”

“Don’t need to. I’ve seen you,” said the gnome, jumping onto his chest and staring up his nostrils. “I’m the owner of this tree. I keep things ticking along, in perfect order,” he said, pointing emphatically to his chest.

“I don’t think anyone owns this tree,” scoffed Silas.

“I was here before you were even imagined in the great spirit’s eye,” said the gnome.

“Right then,” Silas said, standing up and brushing himself off. “I’m not here to argue,” and with a scramble up the tree, he disappeared into his home at the top.

From then on, the gnome had left what he felt were delightful traps for the fairy as he went about his life: a pointy stone placed in front of a foot, just as Silas walked past, a carefully placed spiny mite sprite just as a hand reached to grab a little branch.

He hid and watched with smileless eyes as Silas fell prey to his traps. It evolved into the gnome’s favourite pastime. The gnome had been angry at something, but because he could not find out what it was and because he could not extinguish the threat, he felt small but empty pleasures at flinging his anger out in little spits, whenever possible.

The gnome remembered a very distant past when Silas’s grandfather had served as the fairy muse for Homo erectus. Those early humans had been like warriors; thick-browed and muscular, with clubs in hand, rather than questions in mind. He recalled specific nights when a band of particularly cruel Homo erectus creatures had circled their blazing fires, laughing as they hunted down and killed members of their own tribe, along with several fairies who had been trying to inspire them and three of the gnome’s own brothers. Blood had stained the forest floor for seasons afterwards.

But what truly haunted the forest was that after these killers died, their spirits didn’t fade away like morning mist, as they should have - instead, they lingered, whispering hateful things from behind trees and inside the caves, until it seemed they became one entity.

Silas’s grandfather, though witnessing all of this, had simply shrugged and retreated into his meditation spot, refusing to confront these spirits. Thus, the gnome had watched his family’s murderers go unchallenged, his hatred growing with each passing year, transferred from grandfather time-tree fairy to grandson.

Those older fairies never listened to their land spirit mothers, in case you were wondering.

“They’re all idiots. Except me,” the gnome muttered, underneath his white nostril whiskers, eyes forever glazed downwards at his toes.

After this encounter, Silas continued his routines, oblivious to the gnome’s contempt. He found answers to all his questions through the Mother Time Tree and his navigation stick - all except the unformulated mystery of his grandfather’s death.

On this pivotal day when Silas lost connection with his mother time tree, darkness, finally, awakened fully. After aeons of patient calculation, it had discovered the weakness needed to subdue the freedom spirit. The darkness was now ready to offer Homo sapiens, not give them, just what they sought - and it was ready, with wide open doors and glowing neon signs to usher them into its carnival.

Thus, darkness reached a slow critical overflow and was finally released with a great, slimy-slop reluctant sigh from the Earth.

Darkness surged with terrifying momentum, overtaking the freedom spirit and, now finally empowered to initiate the Great Severence, swept away Silas’s navigation stick from the bedside table with a single violent gesture. The air turned cold, frost crystallising on the wood. This stick was Silas’s connection to Earth’s dream, to himself, and to the direct experience of reality through time.

A deep emptiness filled the space, as intense as a sinkhole.

Silas lost his connection to the tree that guided him, leaving him distraught. At first, of course, he tried to stay calm. He sat down after going through the motions to brew some tea, his fingers quivered and calcified around the cup.

“Perhaps it will turn up somewhere if I stay calm and don’t shout.” He breathed.

But alas, the emptiness gulped him further, and further dragging his soft beating heart into the chasm. He perched anxiously outside his home, waiting to remember where he’d left it, for someone to return it, even for the stick to decide to return by itself because sometimes, he had felt it was alive.

He pleaded with the stars above, but they offered no consolation, remaining coldly silent against the night sky. Eventually, as if winding down into a ball of elastic bands never to be unravelled, he would have snapped if there was anything remotely visible to be snapped.

Faced with either surrendering to a slow death on his branch - lichens growing into his ears - or clinging to desperate hope, he chose delusion. He forced himself to imagine triumphant reunions with his navigation stick, laughing hollowly at these fabricated scenarios until he nearly believed them.

When he had convinced himself of his lie sufficiently, he decided he was going to leave his tree and try to enquire if anyone had seen the elusive navigation... ‘thingy’… he’d started to forget what it was.

Perched above, a chestnut fairy composed a mournful melody:

He was starting to forget what it looked like, or if he had ever had it.

Still, in a narrow window of his consciousness,

he could see the warm moss breathing through the branches of the tree.

A new neon bright mushroom sprouting, stark against the ink of the sky.

And two small blossoms forming on the tree, as if it were all saying to him,

“I am here.

I am eternal life.”

Beckoning him to stay.

Even though they knew, they could hardly be heard anymore.

He could just about feel the mother time-tree’s heartbeat.

Her kind, embrace,

and for a moment, he wanted to stay.

The tree, perhaps now his only friend in his loneliness,

made one, last, muffled attempt to hold on to his soul.

It didn’t work he could not hear her anymore, and he turned from the tree.

He stopped again, and became entranced in amongst the stars for a little while,

old friends... but even they,

could no longer hold him.

He waved goodbye to the Sisters, to Alcyone and to Aldebaran…

And then he turned away from the brightest stars.

Dangling her little legs from her half-built tree house, Priscal watched Silas leave, too young to understand where he was going, or what she was witnessing, with her still-undeveloped adaptive spirit.

Unmoored and unsustained, Silas’s journey became distorted by his desperation, and his mental image of triumph no longer matched reality. This left him unable to speak the dream language of his ancestors. Deep below the foggy sunset, shifting reluctantly around him, the trees formed a kaleidoscopic curtain to nowhere behind him, as he left.

Silas travelled long into the dark forest, changing direction many times until he was exhausted and started hearing himself say, “I want to die.”

This was the moment the darkness had been waiting for, a chance to reach a new, wonderful frontier of control.

“I can help you,” said a voice from the darkness, among the roots and decaying leaves. The voice was smooth, too smooth, like oil on water.

“I’ve heard you’ve lost your soul, poor fellow. I have many wonderful found things here. I can remind you who you are.”

With swirling eyes, Silas replied, “That’s right, I... I have forgotten who I am,” turning toward the voice, no longer a time-tree fairy.

A quiet tear formed in the corner of his deep green eyes, as his unmoored dreams sang the disconnection of Homo Sapiens:

"Oh, I used to remember.
Standing in hope. Standing by fire.
Standing on the mountain, 
and the tree branch
tall, without desire.

Now, I don't know where I am but I know I won't be here for long.

What is death, and what is life?
When I disappear.
Will I be remembered, for all the strife?
What is memory? 
No...
I wasn't born after I knew.

And if I knew before I was born,
I wouldn't be me,
and nor would you.
What is me?
Where was I, and was I... 
before I was born?

A deafening sound 
far away 
in the distance that I cannot hear,
but still fear, and scorn.
A suffocated breath in the light that dims,
far too far for me to see.
I don't even remember more than half of my dreams.
No...
Perhaps I don't remember my distant memories.

I, am disappearing, no...
I, am appearing.

When will I know how this journey ends?

I have come very far, but not far enough,
oh, not far enough.

I just drew a picture, of my journey out of the wind... how beautiful.
It faded in my sight.

Am I any different, to that picture, now?
Morning light is distant. 
Playful winds in trees forgotten.
The path they took is never the same.
And. I.
Can. No. Longer. Follow,
the path well trodden.
Now I only see the damp stillness arising from fog and darkest corners.

Buried deep in the ground, or soaring, 
high.
Those glittering pictures I saw, 
will be forgotten.

The pictures.
The mental models of fate and time.
Is understanding real? 
Is it me?
Are the images myself?
Is it fate?
Is it real?
Is it me?
Rush towards death to get rid
of those images of children in pain,
and their images of not-good-enough.
Tremble towards terror that coveted self-images of 
glory,
suddenly will pop out of existence,

...and then grasp to extend life.

It's hard to say which one I am.

No...

For perhaps I am both.
I am afraid to live, afraid to die.

Afraid to give birth, 
afraid not to."

Silas’s legs crumbled underneath him. He collapsed against a root, its surface slick with algae and rot.

“But I can help you,” said the voice brightly, cracking robotically through the darkness like a mechanical sunrise lamp. “I’ve thought very hard about it, and the solution is clear. Just follow these simple steps, one, two, three, four... so simple.”

“BUU…ttt…” the entity added loudly, rustling amongst leaves in the dark. Silas jerked up from his crumpled position on the forest floor, bewildered.

“Always check back with me to see if you’ve got it right.

I have the light and will make your life truly bright.

I will remind you who you are, but not too quickly.

You can’t even remember what you’ve lost, can you?

I will help. Don’t you want to be part of something bigger, bigger than a tiny little fairy?”

Pink fingers emerged from the darkness, forming a shape to indicate something very small.

“Then you would last forever, and never be forgotten.”

The dark figure came forth from his sitting place in the dark, slowly turning to reveal... ah... a dazzlingly beautiful face, haloed in bright pink light as if painted just to please. Perfect symmetry. Eyes like swirling galaxies. Skin luminous, flawless. The being gently placed a hand on the fairy’s shoulder. The touch was electric, warm, everything Silas had been craving.

“We find God in everything; we’re never separated from the Divine. We miss happiness through impatience. Wait longer. I will help you find a direct experience with God, directly with me! But first, you must complete my arduous task.

Then, you’ll be superior to others, filling your emptiness, won’t you?”

The lost fairy, Silas, was entranced by the lights in this being’s eyes and the gentle wind in his ear hairs; he liked the way this man smiled. He felt his body lifting, elevating, light as a feather. Beneath the honeysuckle scent, something rotted. But he couldn’t focus on that. Couldn’t hold onto the wrongness.

The lost fairy could feel the fullness of his love. He was so sure…

Then a duplicate dream wrapped him all up and dreamt him a song, as follows:

"Look at his eyes... his teeth (his teeth!)… 
his skin ...his smile... his aura... his voice... his complexion.
He is richness... he is everything.
He is surely the most beautiful being,
I think I have ever seen.

Like God, and a fairy, and a human,
and Santa Claus flying into heaven,
the way the Homo sapiens
imagine them.
All mixed, clean.
He feels so good.
I see brightly
the unconditional love,
inside of me.

Mirrored kindly,
through his eyes.

Oh, you can't fake doing the work
to get to this level of perfection,
that this man has achieved.
I can see the light and the love
just showering out of him.

I'm just blown away by this being's aura… 
pinkish... of wonderful self-
less service.

I am explained. I am...

I am solved. I am... found.

I have forgotten why I came here, but...
it does not matter,
because I am no longer
on the ground…

…the ground.”

And so poor Silas was eaten up into the apparently beautiful pinkish darkness, together with the others who had also seen the aura and had also seen the shiny, perfect teeth.

For shiny teeth and the soul, are one and the same, are they not?

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First, I’m sharing this message with you, for you, from Aboriginal Elder Miriam Ungunmerr Rose. She is generally considered an authority on the Aboriginal practice of Dadirri - deep listening. It’s a meditation that involves a conversation with the Earth, specifically.

“You’re very ungrounded.”

“You’re just… you know… up in the clouds.”

When I was very young, that’s how people saw me, apparently.

Even though, from my perspective, I could never really understand what they were talking about. From my perspective, it felt like I was there and present, but of course, I had never known any other way to be. I had been like this since before my memory.

They always said it with a measure of distant discomfort. They used to say it to me all the time; it felt like a nail in my coffin every single time, because I did not know what to do with it. I did not understand the word ‘grounded’, nor did I understand how to fix it.

It’s been many years since anyone has said that to me, so I am assuming something must have radically shifted in the way I come across. I think that I probably still come across as somewhat dreamy, but I don’t really know because no one comments anymore!

In any case, this journey from ‘ungrounded’ to being connected with the Earth is one of the main thorn-in-my-side themes of my life.

The new age people seem to repeat the word ad nauseam. I started to hate the word, especially because no matter how often I tried to imagine ‘cords’ connecting to the Earth, or ‘bubbles’ around my energy field, or various exercises and so on, nothing made the slightest bit of difference to how people reported back to me that I was coming across, and I still did not know, for the life of me, what this blasted ‘grounded’ word actually meant.

I just sort of drifted alone, unmoored, for a very long time, all the while being rejected for it, and for most of my life.

Now I know exactly why I was like that, and how it happened, but then I did not.

My determination to search to fix myself, to try and integrate properly into the world around me, was paradoxically a driving force behind my realising what exactly was holding me down, what was controlling me and how.

Additionally, surrounded by the cults I was raised in, I was limited within the solutions my mind allowed me to search for, because only healers sanctioned by the Guru were recommended - this is the mindset I was brainwashed to believe.

At one time, I thought I could only go to the healers who were his devotees. One of them was John McGrath, for example, https://www.healinghealer.com/distance-healing/ - John was a devotee of this guru, and what he did for me was not able to help me at all (I do not know if he is still a devotee, but when I tried to warn him, he ignored me). Another was Cristiano Tiozzo https://youtu.be/STlCjfFDBu8?si=XLJHng7QdwEXCtC8. He is most likely still a devotee, and he really did not help either, despite trying to charge me a lot of money to ‘listen’ to his piano playing for healing. (Sati Kazanova is also a famous Russian pop star and has been intensely courted by this guru, by giving her special attention. As an influence strategy, he gives benefits to people who can help him spread influence.)

The entire alternative healing milieu at the Hale Clinic in London is overshadowed by that guru, because Teresa Hale, the owner, is Swamini Karuna, a member of his inner circle. After the theosophical society building eventually rejected him (I met him as a teenager there), he has all of his devotee meetings at the Hale Clinic. I remember the time my mother made me go to meet him at this clinic; I was dragging my feet because I had left the waiting room to see him, and ‘gone to the toilet,’ and was taking my time to come back. When I returned, the guru was standing waiting in the doorway with his perfect teeth, smiling sweetly and radiantly, with my mother beside him, telling me off for making him wait (making her look bad.)

It was just a matter of time before his mysterious and powerful magnetism locked me in, but I always retained elements of my personality, which is that I tend to push the boundaries. Eventually, I did try soul retrievals from totally unrelated people, and I tried going beyond the prescribed healers to do all kinds of things. But even then, nothing I did made a difference in feeling better, to being more grounded and less in pain. Sometimes the healers I found made me worse; most of the time they made me worse - I am not sure why.

There was a time when I ‘got in’ with a crowd of occult tarot card reading people in Camden Town - the tarot card reading was a front, they were doing exorcisms, spiritual healing and curse breaking behind the scenes. They informed me there was something very wrong with me energetically, but nothing they did helped either - it didn’t seem to make the slightest dent. They said that the Babaji necklace I was wearing (that the guru had given me), had very bad energy on it. I should also point out that they also thought John of God was great, because that was in a year before he got arrested. (Never get too cocky about your discernment! That’s my message.)

They also seemed to have a vested interest in me, saying I was talented for some kind of supernatural abilities that were similar to what they did. But at that time, I was just trying to survive and had not the slightest experience or interest in what they were talking about.

I didn’t take the necklace off… because I thought God should be more important. I was brainwashed to believe the Guru was God.

So off I went to float by myself. I started to figure out how to heal my own emotions, and made some progress with that, but it was like passing through ‘rings of fire’ over and over again. When I asked the guru for help, he told me I should go to the UK Bhakti Marga Narsimiha temple every month - that’s what I did.

No, it did not help at all. In fact, the married priest with grown-up children tried to make moves on me, at one point. I mention this to show the result of the apparently ‘omniscient’ guru’s advice. I was later informed by the wife of this priest’s son that the guru already knew about this tendency of the UK priest (because it had happened to her also.)

Anyway, I was still stuck - the inexplicable ‘wound’ was holding me back was impacting my entire life. It was as if I were cursed. I could not find a good place to start any kind of career.

I had been led by my birth cult to study world politics (because the core idea was all about sharing the world’s resources), which did not end up being very practical for my life, but it was more than that - it was like some kind of hand was always, always holding me down. I suffered for half of my life in this way.

I acknowledge it was also because of what I later discovered was my neurodivergence (I did not know at the time) - I could not survive in some LED-lit, no-plant office environments. I could not survive being chained to one chair and the crowded environments that some office spaces contained. However, the original ‘groove’ was somehow wildly exacerbated for me - I could not survive the utterly mysterious, toxic relationships in the work environment that seemed to be there for everyone, and that I know everyone suffers from, and yet the things that happened still seemed wildly exaggerated for me, like a constant and repeating unlucky streak.

I also could not find any healthy relationships. I only encountered narcissistic men (which I did not recognise at the time). I encountered rape, etc. Whereas as I was younger, I met cool people, as I got to mid-20s and beyond, I never seemed to meet even one good person. These were all things that I assumed my Vishnu-like guru knew about - we were brainwashed to believe he knew about everything. I always had the attitude of submission to God, so I accepted it must happen to me due to ‘God’s will.’

All of this led me to wonder if I was an alien from another planet. It was like I was an astronaut who had landed on the wrong planet, with an atmosphere I clearly could not breathe. At the time, I felt alone, but now I know there are many who feel like I did.

Below are some interviews with the people from Heaven’s Gate just before they committed suicide to go and join a spaceship because two people ‘channelled’ to them that’s how it was to be. From the way they speak, I can see, they would have felt the same as I had done. I completely understand why they wanted to leave:

When I first saw this video, I responded with ugly cries for a very extended period of time, which I think must have lasted more than an hour.

Why did I cry?

My body responded to a tremendous loss. Perhaps you will feel what it is also.

Because of my guru, I encountered Nithyananda, another Godman. I saw them being friends at the Kumbh Mela a long time ago, and my guru had said he was the incarnation of Shiva himself.

The Nithyananda group (documentary here) had started this big campaign to get many people to go to a great manifesting event in India - ‘Paramashivoham’. He was heavily focused on selling the idea that people could fix their lives with his techniques of ‘causing’ others. I have spoken in more detail about that in the video from 2021, which is embedded in my article about the guru. The reason I wanted to see what his techniques could offer me was obvious - I was desperate.

In a darshan, I asked my guru about Nithyananda, and he more or less gave his ‘okay’ for him, while still asserting that he himself, as Vishnu, was superior. I remember he gave me this weird vision in his eyes, like I was looking into space itself. It was very strange.

Later, I asked Teresa Hale to ask him if it was alright that I attend the UK meeting the Nithyananda group had set. The text message from the guru to her came back - ‘let her go.’

So that was it. And that was how I found out all the lies and dropped everything that was holding me back. Not because Nithyananda was great and had the solution to my life, but because he was a child abuser, a sexual abuser and also a possible murderer, all of which I found out on my own just before or perhaps concurrently with Sarah Landry (who was his main spokesperson and consequent defector). I’ve told the story in the video link. I should not retell it here.

I hope you can see why it was then that I knew my guru was fake as well. That is what led me to seek out and find a boy who was claiming on a WordPress site that he had been raped by this guru (as a heterosexual young man). I interviewed him and another man in a voice recording, and someone published it on YouTube. Other people came forward, and a German TV documentary was made. The guru’s lawyers got it taken down in Germany. It’s still there, though, after being reuploaded many times. YouTube doesn’t allow anyone to publish it. One of the men in this documentary retracted his statement. In my conversations with people from this group, I have seen that’s often how it works with this guru. Someone tries to leave the cult, and then they are pulled back in, claiming they still love him - usually young men. I don’t think they see that he does not love them.

The documentary only focused on the coerced brainwashed rapes of young men and on the time the guru stole Christian relics - I have seen them - he has a whole museum of them. The documentary makers focused on the material and the measurable, but I will need to say now, in this article, that his real effect on people, his real spiritual crime, is much more in the realm of consciousness manipulation. I am also going to suggest that he is much more powerful than Nithyananda - Nithyananda has not succeeded in repressing dissenting voices, but this guru really has. In India, people and media widely attack Nithyananda - but when people see this guru, they go all goggly-eyed, thinking that he is Godly and ecstatic and cannot stop thinking about him. In person, they feel bliss energy whooshing around, just like happened with Osho. Some people, he has selectively healed. That is why online people defend him, and to dissenters, they say ‘but look at how great he also is!’ as if that somehow ‘deletes’ his misalignment with natural moral law. As if ‘loving’ the guru excuses him? As if the ‘belonging’ of the loving community makes it all ok? For some mysterious reason, they cannot conceive of the abuse as possible due to all this. That is why I will never expect anyone in his group for many years will ever leave (although some have). The power he has over them, being very much alive and gaining momentum, is too strong. I have aimed my intentions towards the newer recruits - I felt, perhaps, those are the people I can help to yank back from falling in (but I don’t know if I succeed).

No one is allowed to speak about this subjective consciousness manipulation, which leads to real mystical experiences, because the mainstream media rejects you when you try to speak about those experiences.

This is the reason that people follow both my ex-guru and Nithyananda. It has very little to do with what they have said, and everything to do with the experiences - the mind and emotional manipulation power he has (it is also remote and non-local through photos and video), and the energetic experiences people say they have. I was no different. I was a person manipulated that way for all of my early youth. I know what it’s like to be manipulated in this mysterious way, and I also know what it is like to be free of that and look back at it all.

It took me three or so years to fully free myself. It involved years of physical and emotional pain, plus deep exhaustion in my soul and body. I did it alone, it was messy and it was not linear, and I did not know what I was doing, but somehow I did it. I don’t know how to communicate those years or what it is I did - it was the most mysteriously painful state of mind and rollercoaster. Maybe I would not know what to say anyway. Maybe I will try to describe it if I can find others here on Substack who have gone through the same thing. The problem there is no one who has any sort of official documentation on that. It’s very hard to speak about something with no known precedent. How do you describe what feels like the return of the soul after being artificially disconnected? I don’t even know how I survived physically, because there was no material support, but I muddled through.

Of course, all this time, I had been severely dissociated due to early trauma and due to my sensitivity (I used to collapse on the floor of the guru’s ashram). But after all of this, any emotional healing I did actually worked this time - it actually moved the needle.

My life finally changed for the better. I am still a likely neurodivergent sensitive person, but despite my extra sensitivity to modern life and stimulation, my life is now comparatively normal. I can find good people, and I can maintain a job. If I try to connect to Earth, I can, and the Earth is where I find my home. My house is covered with crazy varieties of plants (and mushrooms) inside and out - things I could never do before. And even though I adore outer space to nerd level proportions (also another thing I could never learn about before), I have found out I am not an alien belonging to another planet - I am, in fact, an Earth monster.

Perhaps that is why I feel so drawn to the oldest living spirituality on Earth - of at least 60,000 years - the Aboriginal worldview.

Dadirri is the wisdom of deep listening, of a deep relationship with land and country. Miriam-Rose explained it shortly in that video at the top.

When you think about it, as hunter gatherers, as Homo sapiens, we have spent most of our entire existence (300,000 years) moving about the land and we would have sat for long periods of time, just listening - listening to the fire we stoked at night time, listening to the sounds at night while we gazed at the stars, walking meditatively along riverbanks foraging for herbs, cooking food, sewing pieces for clothes, shaping a flint, preparing an arrow, slowly preparing paints for ritual, listening to the wind, the stars, to a blade of grass, to life itself.

Yes, life would have been hard, and violent sometimes, but the vast majority of life would also have involved very, very, very long periods of quiet relationship with the aspects of the land.

“My people have lived for thousands of years with nature’s quietness. My people today recognise and experience in this quietness the great life-giving spirit”

Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr

Perhaps all of us were once like they were. The insights would have been different to modern-day ‘mindfulness.’

It is not just that one listens to everything around - it is also that the Earth you listen to, speaks back to you, not in words (and not the ‘channels’), but in sensations, direct impressions, experiences and manifestations of nature. Perhaps also more directly, in image communication, such as when ancient peoples took mind-altering healing plants.

When you sit in nature, you might find that not only are you going to find what is there around you, but also it might find you. Maybe a curious beetle walks past you on a twig as you sit, or a feather falls into your lap, and somehow you recognise the message it has for you. In the same ways, our own bodies communicate with us about what is wrong on a spiritual level, but perhaps the connection with the Earth is also a missing piece. Perhaps the Earth is the next level of returning home to the way we once were, once you have listened to your body first. I will give my story to show why I think this.

I remember some years ago, I was sitting in Russell Square, and it reminded me of how Eckhart Tolle had said he had had an awakening while sitting on a bench in Russell Square.

As a result of being reminded of the place of apparent awakening, I tried the presence meditation he teaches.

It was a horrific disaster.

I felt nothing but inexplicable pain and alarm bells. I felt like I could not breathe, even. Why was that?

It was very frightening because I had no one to tell me what this was. There was no spiritual teacher who had warned me about this. And yet, in an age of tremendous trauma and suppression of sovereignty, I know I am not the only one who has experienced this phenomenon when trying presence meditation.

Obviously, unless we know what this is, any kind of deep listening to the land may not work either. My body was communicating to me about something that was very wrong, but at the time, I did not understand it.

Now I can see that it was a mishmash of; my sensitivity, plus my trauma, plus the darker energies that were affecting me at the time, plus the fact that I could not block myself from the people around me in the city. This does not happen to me anymore. Since the great healing process after leaving the cult, it has never happened again.

The Neanderthals, the Stone Age Homo sapiens and the aboriginals were not afflicted by these strange forces at odds with us at the moment in the modern age. They did not have politics, and complex centralised systems of social organisation, they did not have our complex concepts and thought, they only knew about their local land area. They could go straight to the connection with the land, land which contained many messages about how to live correctly.

According to the Aboriginals, the rocks also speak; the Earth is alive. They take care of their part of their land by respecting and caring for the spirits of that land. The paintings they create are the spirits themselves, and these are the ways they ensure that the land remains cared for and in balance.

Here is a snapshot from my book about the Gagudju people:

Bill Neidjie talks here about his fear that all of this will be forgotten.

Here is a photo of Birriwilk, an example of the spirit of the local land.

What if there was a time in human history when spiritual endeavour was so important to people that material concerns like making buildings or keeping domestic animals were ignored? Well before the white colonialists came to destroy the Aboriginal way of life and to steal the generations, sometimes to even destroy an entire people, such as the Tasmanians, that was the way they were living.

On the surface, it looked to colonisers like they were backwards people with no civilisation and culture, and the colonialists felt justified in what they were doing.

However, the truth was, their way of life was so different that they simply didn’t understand at all what was going on under the surface.

Below is a true story of what ‘found’ a group of Aboriginal people at the time of the first colonial encounter, as told in the article “Irruptions of Dreaming in post-colonial Australia, by Basil Sansom.”

It shows what the Earth is communicating about what has gone wrong since the white people came, and how it communicates with the Aboriginal people. I am interested in it because it reflects my own attempt to find out what went wrong with our spiritual groups. What went wrong since Aboriginal people made contact with the white people is the same thing that went wrong with much of the rest of the world thousands of years ago. The only thing is that, in a general sense, the dreaming of the Earth stopped communicating with the rest of us.

It’s olden days down in the river country. A man comes up quickly to his mob (this is the word for Aboriginal tribe). From the riverbank on this side, he has seen whitefellas coming, but on the opposite bank of the river. Everyone moves off together to go and see. At this time, the locals have heard about and their ways but they have yet to see them.

They arrive at the bank and see a party of whitefellas on the other side. People begin to signal. They want tobacco, sugar, flour and tealeaves for they have heard that these are the goods that the whitefella brings with him to trade. They make signs of eating, drinking and smoking, signs of enjoying a sweet thing (the way people show enjoyment after tasting sugarbag). The whitefellas signal in return. They agree to exchange their goods for fish.

After a while, the whitefellas bring boxes and packages to the riverbank and leave them there. The white men depart. Every-body waits and watches. When sure that the whitefellas truly have retreated, two men cross the river and bring back the goods. The people do not know what to do with the flour and the tealeaves. They enjoy the sugar and smoke tobacco.

Meanwhile, a man has speared a fish. It is a large barramundi. A youngfella is told to swim over the river to the opposite bank and leave the fish there for the whitefellas to find. The young swimmer then returns, his mission completed. People hide and wait and watch. Soon a whitefella comes along and finds the fish. He picks up the fish. The watchers see the man start (in disgust) and make a face; the fish is stinking.

The whitefella holds out the fish at arm’s length. Bits drop off the fish and onto the ground. (The bits of fish fall to the ground like the putrescent flesh that falls from human corpses that have been put onto tree platforms to decompose after death, the first stage in traditional mortuary practice.) The whitefella throws the stinking fish down on the riverbank. You see: Rotten fish! Rotten fish! Oh, oh! Rotten fish!

The story is received with laughter. As the laughing subsides, someone says: ‘Rotten fish!’ The laughter starts up again. People leave ol Luke’s fireside to go to their own camp-ing places and they move off with chuckles and further renewals of laughter in response to calls of ‘Rotten fish!’

This laughter is supposed to represent the reception of ‘holy laughter’ or ‘holy joy’ because it’s a surprise, and it’s also a recognition of a deep truth. The fish should not have suddenly disintegrated like that, but it did.

It was understood by the elders as a sign from the dreaming that would herald the terrible way of fishing that the white men would bring in the coming years. They would be extremely wasteful, leading many discarded parts of fish to rot in the rivers, and killing a lot of other creatures in their nets, which would later be discarded.

The reason white people in the story do this is that they cannot recognise the dreaming in the fish; they cannot see the Holy Spirit embodied.

The symptom of whitefella presence in the land was to be carnage upon carnage as creatures of the Dreaming were intemperately and excessively put to death an expense of spirit in a charnel waste. Expense of spirit because the whitefella never will acknowledge the spirit in created things that, through spirit, participate in the Dreaming. For all the uncaring ignorance, ‘Rotten fish!’ is sign and badge….

Instant rotting is a definitive Dreaming geste. By it, Barramundi signals and defines the nature of the invaders. The Dreaming is brought into discerning acknowledgement of the coming of the colonist. Implicitly, a further point is made. This concerns the relationship between Dreaming and the animal that participates in the Dreaming particular to its kind.

The animal is host. As host, the animal participates in the holy to greater or lesser degree. When killed for human food, the animal should be given the respect of treatment not as ‘rubbish’ but as substance to be returned to its origins. For the animal as host, there is a rule of total consumption. ‘Careful that fish: that fish gotta be somefella’s Dreaming.’

Our modern society contains prisons and concentration camps for animals, where we brutally torture and waste them. We cannot see their spirit. In this modern society, we eat their tortured meat, and then we are surprised that everything is so much out of balance on our lands. They say in the article that the cattle brought by the white men don’t even have their own dreaming now - what might have been done to them?

The Dreaming, and the way it communicates, is reality now. For them, all time is at the same point. Everything that comes was already dreamt. It is the living law of the Country, embedded in the land, the plants, the animals and even the weather.

In this worldview, there is no split between “sacred past” and “secular present” – there is only one continuous reality, maintained by the Dreaming.

In other words, when modern life forgets or violates the Law, the Dreaming breaks through like a mirror held up to our face. The spiritual cosmos is not something you can only get to when you have ascended; it is the framework of this material existence on Earth itself.

When colonising attitudes – whether a careless hunt, an ignored sacred site, or a faith in unmoored mysticism – blind people to this order, Dreaming events correct us. In this sense, Dreaming irruptions are metaphysical corrections. They expose illusion and demand accountability. By contrast, actual spiritual evolution in this tradition means realigning with ancestral Law on the ground.

The modern irruption story is now: An influential teacher in Brazil promises cosmic wisdom, spirit surgeries and healing, only to be later sentenced to life in prison for running a woman’s baby farm. Until this moment, new age followers clung to their illusions instead of facing the harm.

The Earth will eventually refuse to play along with this kind of delusion. The misfired faith of modern seekers, by contrast, often excuses harm as “part of the path,” as, for example, the “crazy wisdom” of Chogyam Trungpa.

The Dreaming demands we face the harm. When the Dreaming irrupts, it exposes moral blind spots: it reveals false comforts and privileges hidden.

In honouring this Aboriginal epistemology, we are not claiming it as a universal creed; we are learning from this way of knowing, one that binds people to Country and community with deep responsibility.

It is far more demanding than any free-floating spiritual experience. If our so-called spirituality ignores this kind of reality check, it is toothless. Because when we do, we realise dreaming is life itself, and its corrections are one of the compasses we long needed to wake up.

Dreaming is a present force that flips appearances and forces recognition of inner truth. The true “dream language of self” is original alignment, and in my opinion, darkness’s crime (whatever it is) is substituting it with duplicate replica-dreams that sever human beings from this direct reality/dreaming duo.

Basil Sansom states the general principle: irruptions “put things straight.” That’s the underlying reason they “stay true”: they become structures of remembering and “reading” that keep proving themselves in later experience. And now, as more documentaries are made, we are seeing these experiences in our spiritual groups repeating over and over again.

The Aboriginal elders also have another way to correct us and straighten us out, if we listen. Here is another Aboriginal story:

Stories and analyses published by Stephen Muecke allow one to show forth the difference between classic transformations and Ovidian metamorphoses in narratives of Dreaming. Here, Muecke transmits a Paddy Roe (1983) story about Lardi, a Clever Man of the country around Broome:

Lardi and two young men are camping together near a water trough. The young men want to shoot brolga who come to drink. Lardi tells them not to. Then Lardi leaves. When a brolga comes in, the young men shoot it, cook it and eat it all up.

Lardi returns. He predicts that the young men will get sick and he leaves again. The young men vomit up and defecate the brolga meat. Lardi returns once more. He cures the young men. ‘He reveals that he had transformed himself into the brolga and they had eaten him.’

Muecke points out that: ‘Lardi transforms himself ‘to teach the young men a lesson, but he doesn’t make them sick, they make themselves sick by eating the brolga.’

The story of Lardi illustrates the order of transformation generally encountered in Dreaming stories. This ‘is always reflexive, never transitive.’

Maybe the Earth turned herself into all the animals we torture. Maybe she turned herself into the children who have been abused. We, too, have made ourselves sick by not following the natural law, especially when it comes to our spirituality. Maybe the ‘demonic’ entities that, in a previous long essay, I have posed corrupt the guru when he has too much pride (as per the Surangama Sutra), are also the Earth, or the cosmos, allowing the guru to corrupt himself or herself, to eventually teach us the lesson.

Like many indigenous traditions, Aboriginal gnosis and spirituality in general are kept secret - I am very aware of that. It’s also interesting to notice they have different specific spiritual paths for men and women (men and women’s business,’ and that these paths are also kept secret from each other), a way of approaching spirituality and religion which we have perhaps also lost. Perhaps women’s spirituality has been obliterated, and she was expected to follow the male version for thousands of years.

Obviously, the white people tried to make them lose what they had lost too. Now the aboriginals have to deal with generations of grief. Now the aboriginals had to contract our ‘loss’ disease, relatively late, but it came.

As a closing meditation - this is a solar eclipse from above the Earth. You can watch the dark circle coming and then passing. With this one, you can move around the image on the screen with your finger or with a mouse. (If you watch in 360 degrees with a VR headset, it’s transcendental.)

There’s a mist in the air, and it speaks of spiritual change. Perhaps it’s speaking to you because you want this change. You have probably worked to change things in your own way, and that is possibly why you’ve decided to follow my new Substack. I am writing my own experience so that it can feed into whatever you are working on.

The reason I am so motivated to keep writing about ancient warnings we’ve forgotten is that I see a danger that I personally experienced in my own life, that I have not seen addressed by modern spiritual leaders. In the midst of so much corruption in all areas of society, we seem to have forgotten it as common knowledge.

It is also true that I intend to blend my own insights with these warnings, because there are many aspects that ancient speakers did not see in their world, as they were not present in their time. I feel we need a blend of the old and the new.

I am also motivated to write because of the energy experiences I had while I was in the cult that my mother introduced me to (link to that article here). I am motivated to write because of seeing how people just dismiss claims that the leader, Vishwananda, is being abusive. They dismiss it because of all the positive energy experiences they have had, because of the healing some of them say they have had, or because some of them say they were helped by this guru. Just as was the case for me, they have no idea at all that this does not automatically mean something is ‘good’ or from God. Sadly, they use such miracles as justification to keep on following him despite the concerns that he is abusive. I was searching and searching from the depths of my soul to understand why it is that these two things could happen - that he could be abusive and acting against everything my soul stood against, and yet ALSO people were having positive energy experiences.

The main reason I was following this guru was: a) because, yes, I still trusted my mother at the time, but also b) because of the energy experiences I was having, which made me believe that this guru was an avatar of Vishnu/ God.

I know for a fact that this is exactly the same reason other people in Bhakti Marga follow him as well. I also know it’s the reason people followed Rajneesh and any other guru that seemed to emit special powers. I will tell you that I was absolutely convinced that Vishwananda must have been divine at the time. I don’t know where my mind and soul were… I look back on myself at that time, and it seems as if I was not even ‘myself,’ that I was somehow trapped, not able to be fully ‘here.’ It’s hard to put it into words.

But in any case, my motivation to write all of this is not because I want followers to make money on Substack, but because my soul is desperately looking for a real explanation of a REAL experience that I had. And it’s because I feel so desperate that no one else talks about it, that deep in my being I simply MUST externalise what I discovered, so that it’s present in this reality.

I don’t feel supported by any community, and yet this inner drive goes far, far beyond my concern for whether I will be listened to or not. I’ll be honest with you; I want to be at peace and get on with my life - I want to write fiction novels, actually - and yet something within me just keeps screaming. I tend to wait for it to speak, and when it does, that is when I do something. I’ve been doing that since 2018 (the year I discovered the truth), and it’s worked for me so far.

So, I have decided to do an article series going into depth about each religious tradition, and how they all have explanations, in their own ways, about why it is that this sort of thing is possible.

I would like to see a reduction in the tendency of people to follow new age gurus for the reason I followed a guru - namely, the mystical and energetic manipulations.

I am not denying that religion has become corrupt, or that it has been used for manipulation of the population, because obviously it has, and that is the reason why New Age cults such as the one I was raised in, and the one Jidda Krishnamurti was taken into, happened in the first place. I just pull out the real parts, the real roots of religion, that I feel we lost.

I am going to say I will write whenever the inner drive pushes me to. That way, there is no stress and trauma, which is what has happened to me in the past when I tried to force myself to write about this.

I want to make a quick note on the stress part - one thing that feels wrong about speaking about all these metaphysical dangers is that it gives the illusion that this reality is a threat. It is NOT a threat to me, and I do not feel I am on a prison planet. I feel any prison is on the level of the mind.

I just want to affirm that while there are many evil people, there are just as many, if not more, beautiful compassionate people who do amazing things to save the innocent and make the world a better place - the only thing to remember, is that those beautiful people doing beautiful acts are not as advertised as much, and they also have less desire to advertise themselves. They often just work quietly in the background.

I am writing this because I desire to protect people wherever I am allowed to. Love is there, and always present.

In my previous mini-booklet, I examined modern spiritual abuse and false “enlightenment” claims – a landscape of self-styled gurus, consumerist mysticism, and wounded seekers. As a follow-up, we now turn to a source of wisdom on this issue: the Christian mystical tradition of late antiquity.

So I am going to write about how the concept of prelest aligns with my own experience and how it also aligns with the previous information I provided on other religious texts.

I am excited about the idea of finding the same thing in different traditions because, for me, it’s like one can go beyond the relentless ‘my truth and religion is better than yours’ and find some kind of better objective truth, rooted in a common human experience.

Ancient Warnings: The Desert Fathers on Spiritual Deception and Prelest

The Desert Fathers describe exactly what we see in modern spiritual abuse:

• Teachers convinced of their own holiness

• Followers experiencing real altered states

• Communities defending the abuser

• Charismatic revelations masking pathology

• Spiritual power used to override intuition

• People mistaking trauma activation for spiritual awakening

• Sincere seekers harmed by leaders in prelest

Long before Instagram shamans and cultic “master teachers,” the Desert Fathers of the 3rd–5th centuries (Saint Anthony the Great, Evagrius Ponticus, John Climacus, Macarius the Great, John Cassian, and others) grappled deeply with the phenomenon of spiritual delusion. The Eastern Orthodox tradition later gave this illness a name – prelest (from Slavonic, meaning spiritual deception or false enchantment ). These ancient monastics described how fervent religious seekers, without proper humility and discernment, could become ensnared by demonic deception, spiritual pride, and self-delusion; the very dynamics we observe in many contemporary spiritual scandals.

Drawing on authoritative translations of texts like The Ladder of Divine Ascent, the Philokalia, the Conferences of Cassian, and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, we’ll see how early Christian ascetics identified the subtle lures of false holiness and false authority. We will also see how they counselled trauma-informed antidotes – humility, honest confession, obedience to wise elders, constant prayer – as safeguards against what they saw as the gravest threat to a soul: believing a lie about one’s own sanctity and superiority.

Demonic Deception Disguised as Light

I should say here that I am not assuming what a ‘demon’ is. It could be a real entity, it could be an independent non-local quantum field thought form, or it could be a symbol for a strange, unknown psychological process in the brain - none of us really know, do we?

But in this context, it doesn’t matter what it is - what we can say is that we can see its effects either way, and that its phenomenological manifestation is an observable subjective experience amongst all cultures and religions, for thousands of years.

One of the Desert Fathers’ core insights is that not everything that appears holy or supernatural is truly from God. Demonic forces, they warned, can masquerade as angels or saints to mislead the unwary. As we know, in more common knowledge, St. Paul himself cautioned that “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14), a verse frequently quoted by the fathers. John Cassian – a monk who transmitted Desert monastic wisdom to the West – wrote that a person without discernment, trusting in his own judgment, is sure to mistake an angel of darkness for an angel of light:

“For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light… And unless these thoughts are received in a humble and gentle heart, and kept for the consideration of some more experienced brother or approved Elder… we shall be sure to venerate in our thoughts an angel of darkness instead of an angel of light, and be smitten with a grievous destruction – an injury impossible to avoid for anyone who trusts in his own judgment, unless he becomes a lover and follower of true humility.”

(John Cassian, Conferences II.11 – accessible online here).

Here is the pattern of teaching, which I have seen repeated in other religions, such as Hinduism. which is to escape this, we must defer to an elder, or, in the case of the Guru Gita, we can’t do anything without a guru.

Although I feel as if my own life, and my own struggle to survive my life being raised around two cults, is a testament to the fact that evil does indeed pretend to be an angel of light, my life has also shown me that deferring to a guru or elder, in this day and age, does not work either. Vishwananda’s Swamis used to use the Guru Gita as a way to scare people into not going against him.

At the time of these Christian mystics, there used to be clear social safeguards in place, free of outside influence and competing ideas. There was no internet, no global society. There was no power to be had over large groups of people in the realm of spirituality. That is why I agree with Jiddu Krishnamurti on this.

I feel that in this day and age, we must innovate spiritually and evolve beyond simply deferring to someone else, who may not be trustworthy or who may not be free of delusion themselves. At the end of this essay, I will talk about how I feel we might do this.

In vivid stories and sayings, the Desert Father tradition shows how a deceptive “angel of light” works. Demons might inspire visions in dreams, false prophecies, or ecstatic experiences – not to shock a monk into sin, but more insidiously to puff him up with spiritual pride. The parallels are exactly with what the Surangama Sutra in Buddhist tradition says (which I have spoken about in more detail in my previous long essay) – the sutra says that as soon as the mediator says to themselves ‘I am a sage’, then the demon can enter and give the practitioner special powers to puff their pride even more.

The idea is that somehow the intense spiritual practice, whether it’s praying or meditating with special techniques, causes the aspirant to be especially luminous and attractive to corrupting forces, especially if there is a micro-fracture of pride.

So why do we think that would be the case? It can’t just be Satan trying harder to stop us from going to God within the church, because this is not an observed phenomenon that only happened within the Christian tradition.

It is a mystery why that would be, but personally, I find it a very intriguing question to ask and to wonder about.

In the Desert tradition, pride and prelest are two sides of the same coin. Pride is not just one sin among others; it is the sin that made angels into demons and makes humans behave like demons to themselves. John Climacus, in his step-by-step treatise on the spiritual life, devotes the penultimate rung of the Ladder to denouncing pride. In that chapter, he gives a famous maxim:

“A proud monk needs no demon to tempt him – he has turned into one, an enemy to himself.” (See The Ladder, Step 23, in the PDF edition here.)

Pride creates its own hall of mirrors: the person becomes a false prophet to himself, hearing only the echo of his own presumed greatness. No outside tempter is needed at that point. And perhaps the scariest part, as Climacus notes, is that most people lost in spiritual pride never realise their condition until death exposes it. They go to the grave convinced of their exalted sanctity, only to discover – too late – that it was all a tragic illusion (modern summaries of this teaching can be found in “Why Do We Need the Ladder?” on OrthoChristian here).

St. John Climacus, 7th-century abbot of Sinai and author of The Ladder, devoted an entire chapter to discernment of dreams and visions. He observed that if a monk starts taking delightful supernatural dreams at face value, the demons will have a field day with him:

“Demons often transform themselves into angels of light and take the form of martyrs, making it appear to us in sleep that we are in communication with them. Then, when we wake up, they plunge us into unholy joy and conceit…. As soon as we begin to believe the demons in dreams, then they make sport of us when we are awake, too. He who believes in dreams is completely inexperienced, but he who distrusts all dreams is a wise man.”

(The Ladder, Step 3 – English text available in PDF here; see also a modern discussion, “Should We Believe Our Dreams?” Part 1 and Part 2 on OrthoChristian).

I will say here that many followers of both Sai Baba and of Vishwananda, and of other similar Indian ‘Godmen’, report such dreams of their guru. It’s a major part in the early stage of the relationship in this kind of cult, where one feels like they are being absorbed. When I was young and early on the path with Vishwananda, I also had such dreams, and that was part of the reason that I was convinced that he was Godly, since I had no one at all to warn me otherwise. I had to lose half my life to teach myself. Millions of people across the world also have no one to warn them.

I also know firsthand, from walking amongst devotees of such gurus, that many other people have also had such dreams, and that is also the reason they follow those gurus. No anti-cult organisation will speak about this. All the famous anti cult speakers won’t tell you this is the reason people follow some cults, so I feel that I need to say it. No outside scholar of religion will ever understand what this is, unless they have lived it. Speakers such as Janja Lalich and Steven Hassan are doing great work to educate on how people fall into cults, but they were not part of cults like these. There is nowhere in the anti-cult literature where this reason is listed (that I have been able to find).

Climacus even notes that demons can sometimes tell a person true facts about the future - not out of genuine prophecy, but by shrewdly observing present conditions and “guessing” what will happen (see the same section of The Ladder here). Their goal in granting these accuracies is to win the ascetic’s confidence just enough that he lets down his guard, begins to fancy himself prophetic, and thus is led into a larger deception. The endgame can be spiritually and psychologically devastating. One Desert Father bluntly remarked:

“As soon as we begin to believe demons… they make a mockery of us” – sometimes even driving the deluded soul into madness or despair when their false illuminations collapse (for a concise summary of Climacus’ teaching on dreams, see “Should We Believe Our Dreams?” Part 2).

Except that, if we have any awareness of cults nowadays, instead of going mad, the tendency is to make up an excuse when the prophecy fails, or to just replace it with a new prophecy, or otherwise go into highly inventive denial - for example, in the early days of Heaven’s Gate, when Applewhite and Nettles predicted a literal public ascension that never occurred, the group simply reinterpreted the event as a misunderstood timeline and shifted the prophecy to a more “spiritual” transformation instead of abandoning the belief; similarly, Harold Camping’s 2011 Rapture prediction fizzled out with no catastrophe, yet he and many of his followers insisted that the judgment had happened “spiritually” and postponed the visible end to a new date, showing again how failed prophecies often get recycled rather than discarded.

As the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) - written by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson - points out, when people face evidence that they are wrong, they often experience powerful cognitive dissonance and may slip into a state of intense denial in order to protect their self-concept.

In this context, I should, of course, not miss out mentioning my own cult that I was raised in - I was born at a time when my mother was convinced by Benjamin Creme, the Scottish esoteric writer and founder of Share International, that Maitreya, a “World Teacher” figure, had already returned physically and would soon make a public appearance; Creme had even placed full-page newspaper advertisements predicting that Maitreya would be seen on worldwide television and heard telepathically by all humanity, but when this “Day of Declaration” did not occur Creme and his followers explained it by saying that “the world was not yet ready to receive Maitreya” and that his emergence would happen “soon” instead. When later expectations of television appearances and telepathic revelation likewise failed to materialise over the years, Creme continued to insist that Maitreya’s public manifestation was imminent, and after Creme died in 2016, so there was no one to invent a new excuse (I explained in detail here). His inner circle continues to remain in denial, my own mother included.

Continuing with the desert fathers, perhaps the clearest case study of demonic masquerade in the monastic literature is found in St. Athanasius’ Life of Saint Anthony. Anthony of Egypt, the “father of monks,” retreated into the desert around 270 AD and battled demons for decades. Athanasius records how the devil would appear to Anthony in many guises - as wild beasts, as seductive visions, even as radiant celestial beings - only to be unmasked by Anthony’s discernment and the power of the Cross.

Anthony taught his fellow monks explicit criteria for testing spiritual visitations: true angels from God bring peace, humility, and encouragement, whereas demonic apparitions cause agitation, flattery, and fear. He urged the monks never to take a vision at face value, especially if it praises you or feeds your vanity.

Anthony’s instruction is remarkably direct:

“When [evil spirits] come by night and wish to tell the future or say, ‘We are angels,’ give no heed, for they lie. Even if they praise your discipline and call you blessed, do not listen to them or have any dealings with them. Rather, sign yourself and your house with the cross, and pray, and you shall see them vanish. For they are cowards and greatly fear the sign of the Lord’s Cross.”

(See Life of Anthony, sections 35–36, in translation here).

The reason I am ardently recommending this teaching, despite not being an orthodox Christian, is that this is a lesson I learnt on my own before I knew about Anthony’s teachings (which I’ve literally only learnt about in the last few weeks). Out of desperation to not turn out like Benjamin Crème or to ever commit the same mistake, I have regularly pushed away ‘messages’ and ‘voices’ of my own. Every time I was trying to find answers, while on psychedelics or in meditation, sometimes I would hear something stroking my ego in some way or another. At first, I would accept it, and then I would realise the mistake.

To be honest, I am trying to recall what made me realise, but I cannot remember. All I know is that when I realised it and pushed it away, sometimes (very) aggressively, sometimes peacefully, it left. Sometimes I would argue with it, asking why it was there and what its motive was. It refused to answer me. Another time, I tried asking it if it was trapped too and sending compassion. It also had the effect of dissipating it. I had an interesting inner conversation, but it could have just been another illusion.

In any case, after pushing it away, it was like a kaleidoscope of previous images changed and then just disappeared into a ‘poof.’ And then there was silence. I have much more silence in terms of messages than I used to, and although I feel alone, I would say I much prefer it over delusion. If I were to be mentally ill with psychosis, I wouldn’t be able to just switch it off, as I have. I am not declaring this as a factual demon - perhaps it’s an aspect of a mental quantum field we all share. I like to speculate.

Anthony said to pray and use the cross, etc, but I need to report that I did not know about praying in this way at the time, and it was not necessary for me to succeed in pushing it away.

Taking into the account the Buddhist teachings, I think the main key to success is that you remember the principles that Jesus or Buddha, or any other prophet, stood for, and that you stay vigilant when the ego is stroked, or when you see yourself starting to think ‘I am Jesus 2.0’ or ‘I am the God Horus’, or ‘I am the galactic commander of Galactic Federation of Light’ etc.

I don’t think there is any problem with being like a child and imagining you are Spider-Man or Wonder Woman. I think it’s great to have fun - the problem is when you forget it’s just a role, and especially when you start to impose it on others and make them dependent on you.

My life lesson was learning to do it for myself, rather than depending on an external figure. I am not saying don’t pray, but I want to tell you that, when I was early on in my journey to free myself from the cult, I subjectively experienced violent metaphysical attacks. I still prayed to Maitreya to save me (because that was what I was taught to pray to), and I also thought I was being helped. It turned out that it was just a placebo, because the evidence has now shown Maitreya was fake (and that Benjamin was lying about other things, which I have written about elsewhere). In the end, even when I prayed, I was invoking the power of my mind. Either that, or God helped me anyway, knowing that I didn’t know any better! I have no idea, really. I am just reporting to you my experience.

But the truth is, those kinds of subjective violent attacks have never returned in these years, and my mind is now silent. That’s not to say that if I did not make a mistake by suddenly thinking I am the archangel of the universe, it would not return. I am sure it would! I am frightened of filming myself or making myself public in any way because I do not know if I would be nimble enough to avoid pride if anyone started listening to me. I have always sort of felt better that a few were listening to me! Anyway, I feel a bit stronger nowadays. We will see.

Back to the Desert Fathers - in one incident, a demon claiming to be the angel Gabriel is said to have appeared to a monk, announcing, “I am Gabriel, and I’ve been sent to you.” The monk, blinded by pride, answered, “Are you sure you aren’t mistaken? Perhaps you have the wrong address – I should be the one sending angels!” Immediately, the deceiving spirit vanished, leaving the monk in a pit of pride and confusion.

Versions of this story circulate in later ascetic collections and in modern summaries of prelest (for example, see the overview of prelest and classic cases on Wikipedia). This dark humour aside, the takeaway is serious: to avoid prelest, one must assume any private spiritual experience could be a temptation unless proven otherwise. As the Apostle John wrote, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1).

Also, maybe I’m a weirdo, but I find the prospect of testing them fun. Why do I find it fun? I think I find it fun, because I enjoy pushing the frontiers of the unknown, and also of breaking free at the same time. Although I have been through my subjective hell, there is a part of me that sees it all as an adventure. I say this because perhaps that mental approach is important for success.

Another approach that I have, that I think perhaps could be important, is that I don’t see myself as a victim, and another is that I know who I am.

What do I mean by knowing who I am? I know who I am as an individualised soul, which partly means I feel my authentic wishes from my soul. It’s the part of me that knows I want to charge off and go on epic journeys of discovery.

It’s not the same as plastering a fake unicorn sticker on myself; it’s the result of peeling away. I am not saying I am doing this perfectly at all. I am just saying that I think it might help to be successful in the spiritual battle.

Another pitfall I find is that bashing yourself and trying to erase yourself is not the answer either, especially when you have deep shame or guilt trauma. In fact, that can make shame worse, and shame is the root of both lack of self-worth and of narcissism. Remorse is what one should go for, I feel. Remorse is a feeling in the heart when you feel the pain of another. Guilt or shame are like opposing mental self-images to the one one wants to have. They can make a narcissist very angry as a result, which is why they resist. Remorse is perhaps acting in a different quantum field of the heart. You can’t force remorse either – obviously. You can’t cultivate this virtue. Cultivating leads to more pride. Remorse is an emergent property of seeing greater truths.

So, the journey is not to erase yourself; it’s not to become a fake self.

This is also very important because if I had erased myself, I would have remained mind-controlled - you make yourself a vessel for something that is not you. I fought very hard to break my brainwashing, and holding to my true self was the main pillar of being able to do it. If I had not held on to my true self and started to trust it, I don’t feel that I would have survived. I would not be here, writing this now.

However, in the end, I think the most important mental approach of all is being able to see who others are. To stop seeing their fake selves, and to feel their souls as they are. Once you do that, pride steps away because you are not in the same dimension as pride, which means you are not in the same dimension as the demons either.

Ramana Maharshi used to tell people to meditate on ‘Who am I?’ to find enlightenment. But while that may lead to great realisations, that also leaves the door open to pride, obviously.

If I were a guru, I would tell people to meditate on ‘Who are others?’ (animals included, because I see animals as people.)

Prelest and the Modern Seeker

The Desert Fathers recognised spiritual consumerism long before it had a name: the craving for novel mystical experiences, the temptation to treat the supernatural like a playground for the ego. They would not be at all surprised that in an age of rampant individualism, we see a proliferation of spiritual delusions – people sincerely (or in some cases, cynically) convinced they are enlightened masters, reincarnations of saints, miracle-workers, or messengers of God, while their lives show the tell-tale fruits of pride: exploitation of followers, moral compromise, anger at any questioning, and a lack of simple empathy.

Many Desert Father stories describe how entire communities suffered when a deluded ascetic went off the rails. It was often the ordinary faithful who detected that something was wrong, much like whistleblowers in a modern spiritual community, and who begged a more grounded elder to intervene. We see this in the story of Nikita: the other monks noticed that although he could recite the Old Testament by heart (thanks to demonic aid), he refused to hear the Gospels, and he became harsh and uncharitable. These were clear signs that something was spiritually rotten, despite Nikita’s aura of angelic power (again, see “On the Snares of the Devil and the Practice of Prayer” here). The brethren’s insistence on accountability ultimately saved Nikita’s life.

This echoes today: it is often the gut feeling of sincere seekers – “this teacher’s behaviour doesn’t match his lofty claims” – that sounds the alarm on abuse and deception. The tragedy is that, without guidance, many modern seekers either fall in with the deceiver (losing their discernment in adulation) or, having been burned, swing to the opposite extreme and abandon the spiritual quest altogether.

Guardrails for the Soul: Humility, Confession, Discernment

How, then, can we apply the Desert Fathers’ insights in our own spiritual journeys while innovating for our current time?

• Humility and New learning.

The monks often repeated James 4:6, “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” They found that grace in ground-level honesty about their faults.

However, I think one problem that can happen when considering ‘humility’ is that you can’t force yourself to be that. You can only be as you are. This is where Jiddu Krishnamurti’s teachings are again useful, because he taught that full self-awareness and self-honesty were key, and then the change would happen naturally. If you were to force yourself, it would just turn into virtue signalling.

I think a better approach is to go much deeper with this. What is the root of pride?

When you cling to a better image of yourself, you are masking a wound. A wound that was programmed into you when you were a child - that you are not good enough. You have shame, so you cling to a mask, or layers of masks, that will soothe it, a nicer self-image. We know the narcissist has forgotten it’s a mask and no longer remembers what was behind the mask.

But it’s just a self-image. If we could see that it was not real, as Jiddu Krishnamurti taught, then it would end pride naturally.

And more deeply, we could see that the image that we are not good enough is also not real – shame is a malicious mind virus. For this, the only way through is somatic healing and shadow work (which Krishnamurti did not teach), because this is an emotional and somatic wound, arising from the lack of nurturing and love - it’s not a mental one.

But if we do all that, then we end pride at its root even more.

And even more deeply we could go … we can decouple knowledge from a false self-image or identity. Now we don’t cling to ideas or knowledge for self-importance, which leaves us free to flow with the non-static universe as it is.

It leaves us free to admit ‘I don’t know, but I’m open to learn more.’ Then the universe can evolve through you, which frankly is a lot more fun.

That’s the current innovation Jiddu Krishnamurti left us with – let us continue to innovate and intelligently adapt.

• Seek communal discernment?

The ancient monks insisted that going it alone is a recipe for self-deception. As Cassian said, we should “keep nothing of our thoughts hidden” from our wise guides (see Conferences II.10–11 here). The Desert Fathers felt that when we are under an illusion, the person is the least qualified to recognise it.

And yet, the reason I think this was the case is that during that time, one lacked the experience of observing the mass consequences of what this illusion creates. We now live in an age where all such experiences are easily accessible. We can see how corrupt all these cults have become. The children of the cults are telling humanity what has happened in various relatively recent documentaries.

Jiddu Krishnamurti was able to recognise the illusion on his own, I think mainly because of his experience with the Theosophical Society, and observing the mistakes they made with him being a child of a cult himself. Krishnamurti wanted everyone else to recognise it on their own as well, but perhaps without experience, and without examples, without the stories of cults, I am not sure they can. He mostly spoke in abstract philosophy, but I believe people need to see the concrete examples of what he taught playing out.

Perhaps we could be open with a therapist, pastor, or peer group about those big mystical intuitions or life-changing revelations we believe we’ve had – and inviting them to “sift” these with us. Maybe we can be lucky and find genuine, loving people – a community that will help.

However, since the time of the desert fathers, religion has become a massive industry. For centuries, religion has been used by leaders as a way to rally and control populations. As points out, religion has become very corrupt. What if the pastor is abusing little children and you don’t know? We have very few safeguards and almost no legal protection from spiritual abuse.

The other problem is that the mental-health system is not immune to legitimate criticism, and research shows several structural issues that can undermine trust. Studies have documented over-prescription pressures in some healthcare settings (e.g., Cosgrove et al., BMJ, 2014; Dusetzina et al., Health Affairs, 2016).

There is also evidence that patients who report unusual or mystical experiences can sometimes be misdiagnosed when clinicians are unfamiliar with cultural or spiritual frameworks. Psychiatry research shows that many experiences labelled “psychotic” in clinical contexts are considered normal or even sacred within various religious traditions (Luhrmann, Annual Review of Anthropology, 2014; American Psychiatric Association, DSM-5 Cultural Formulation Interview guidelines).

We know very well that corruption has seeped into every part of our society. The commune is not necessarily trustworthy. The new age gurus are now mostly corrupt because they fell to pride themselves, and we forgot the ancient warnings.

So, what do we do now?

We could wait until a person earns our trust, but what if we can’t find that person?

We would have no other choice but to develop the capacity to guide ourselves. We can only do that with as much information as possible, by bringing together all the patterns and experiences, so we can see it from a bird’s-eye view. That may mean growing new capacities we never knew we could have.

• Beware of extremes and spectacle.

The Desert Fathers believed in fervour but not fanaticism. They counselled a “royal middle path” in ascetic practices – neither lax nor self-tormenting – to avoid stirring up pride (see the general ethos in Cassian’s Institutes, for instance here). In today’s context, this suggests wariness toward spiritual paths that emphasise extreme feats (whether extreme ascetic discipline, extreme emotional highs, or radical instant transformations). These tend to feed the ego or bypass the healthy process.

Likewise, the Fathers were deeply suspicious of any visibly spectacular spiritual phenomena. They would advise us to treat with caution the flashy miracles. Not that God never works wonders – but as Elijah found, the Lord was not in the fire or the earthquake, but in the “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11–12). The Desert tradition says: seek God in simplicity and stillness, and flee from spiritual glamour. Abba Macarius once said that if you see a brother apparently raising the dead, avoid him immediately – better to err on the side of lowliness than to get entangled with dubious marvels (this attitude is reflected in many sayings; see the collection in Ward’s Sayings of the Desert Fathers).

• Practice regular reality checks.

The Desert Fathers would say the fruits will tell the truth: “By their fruits you shall know them” (Matthew 7:20). True grace yields love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, humility… whereas delusion, even when garbed in pious trappings, eventually yields strife, resentment, elitism, impatience, and ego-inflation.

In Christ, we see the antithesis of abusive spiritual power. Though He had all power, He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant (Philippians 2:5–8). He resisted the devil’s enticements to perform wonders for glory’s sake (Matthew 4:5–7), choosing the path of humility unto the cross. The Desert Fathers constantly held up this image of the Humble Christ as the measuring stick for any purported holy man or mystical experience. Does it conform to the character of Jesus – His humility, His love, His truth? If not, it is at best vanity, at worst a demonic trap.

In an age when spiritual deception seems rampant – with disillusioned ex-devotees on one side and naive seekers on the other – the testimony of the Desert Fathers comes as both a stern warning and a compassionate encouragement. They do not mince words about the dangers: what we call “spiritual abuse” today, they recognised as the age-old drama of demons exploiting human pride.

For all of us navigating the confusing maze of contemporary spirituality, the message is clear: the way up is down. The sure path to genuine enlightenment is the path of metanoia – continual conversion and openness to truth, however humbling. If we ground ourselves in that, the Lord will “keep our foot from stumbling” (Proverbs 3:23).

In their collected wisdom, hard-won in lonely cells and caves, we might just find a bright lamp to expose the shadows of spiritual abuse and guide countless souls – including our own – safely toward the Light that never deceives.

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But the last decade has made something painfully clear: this is not fringe. It’s a repeatable human failure mode, now scaled by the attention economy, monetised by the wellness market, and increasingly optimised by AI.

We already have an evidence trail:

• Safeguarding frameworks explicitly naming spiritual abuse as coercive, controlling harm in a faith context (for examples; Church of England Safeguarding e-Manual — Spiritual Abuse and the Diocese of Oxford safeguarding page, which uses the phrase “coercive and controlling behaviour in a religious context”).

• High-control “self improvement” movements that ended in federal convictions for racketeering and sex trafficking (NXIVM: U.S. Department of Justice press release).

• A wellness economy measured in the trillions, providing a global distribution network and a profit motive (Global Wellness Institute: Global wellness economy reached $6.3T in 2023 and the underlying report PDF: Global Wellness Economy Monitor 2023 (PDF)).

So when we ask “what will happen if we do not act?”, we are not peering into a distant spiritual dystopia.

We are simply extending the line we are already on.

Below are the scenarios that become more likely if we keep rewarding charisma over character, spectacle over ethics, and “high vibration” over accountability:

Scenario 1: The safeguarding backlash becomes a permanent civilisational scar

As I discussed in my previous article, we have inadequate legal and institutional safeguarding in our spiritual groups.

IICSA’s work shows a pattern: (start with the Executive Summary).

Abuse persists when institutions lack effective external accountability, consistent reporting, and real consequences.

If we do nothing, the next iteration in our world will look like this:

• We are seeing many cult child abuse cases surfacing nowadays, but the whistleblowers are often already in their 60s. If we do nothing, this will just continue; more abuse disclosures will just continue to surface in waves, years after the fact, because incentives inside communities still favour silence, reputation management, and “forgiveness” without justice.

• As was the case with my generation, religious trauma and spiritual abuse survivors will continue to be forced to fight twice: first to survive the harm, which can take many years (and many of us do not ‘make it’ - we get ill or die young), then to be believed by systems that do not understand spiritual coercion.

• Public trust collapses further - not only in churches and movements, but in the basic idea that spiritual life can be safe.

  Perhaps future generations will not even be spiritual at all?

Scenario 2: “Spiritual abuse” becomes the perfect crime because the law doesn’t map the terrain

As an example, in my country, England and Wales, criminalise controlling or coercive behaviour, but the offence is framed around an intimate or family relationship (see Serious Crime Act 2015, s.76 and CPS guidance).

That’s a real limitation that ignores guru communities, retreat circuits, online congregations, and diffuse high-control groups.

If we don’t act, a predictable gap hardens:

• Gurus / Wellness Teachers and organisations learn the edge-cases: how to isolate, financially extract, threaten reputations, claim ‘defamation’ and induce dependency without tripping the specific thresholds.

• Victims keep hearing: “Nothing provable happened,” while their lives, finances, sexuality, and relationships have been systematically dismantled.

Meanwhile, major safeguarding bodies are already spelling out what spiritual abuse is: coercive and controlling behaviour in a religious context (e.g., Church of England, Methodist Church, Ann Craft Trust).

The collision is obvious: we are naming the harm, but often failing to prosecute or prevent it.

Scenario 3: AI supercharges the guru funnel and makes coercion feel like “care”

The next phase is not just human charisma. It is machine-personalised persuasion.

We now have serious evidence that large language models can persuade at scale and that personalisation makes them more effective:

• Political microtargeting with LLMs (PNAS): “Evaluating the persuasive influence of political microtargeting with large language models” (and an accessible summary from Oxford: Oxford news explainer).

• Conversational persuasion in debates (Nature Human Behaviour): “On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4” (open-access version: PMC full text).

If we don’t act, the foreseeable future is that:

• AI that builds psychological profiles from your posts, griefs, relationship patterns, and late-night searches.

• “Teachers” who outsource messaging to systems that test ten versions of a spiritual promise and serve you the one most likely to bypass your defences.

• Communities that deploy bots to swarm dissent, rewrite history, and frame whistleblowers as “low vibe attackers” (background on bots amplifying inflammatory content: Stella et al., 2018 (PNAS/PMC)).

The result is a world where coercion becomes smoother, softer, more plausible.

It stops feeling like pressure and starts feeling like destiny.

Scenario 4: The wellness economy keeps monetising altered states faster than it can build ethics

The wellness economy hit $6.3 trillion in 2023, and is forecast to keep growing (GWI: press release; data source: Monitor PDF).

Scale doesn’t automatically mean harm. But it absolutely means incentives.

If we do not act, the incentives select for:

• Faster outcomes (miracle healing, instant awakening) over slow integration.

• More intense experiences over consent literacy and aftercare. I have shown in my previous article ancient texts that have spoken about how intense spiritual practices by minds that are not sufficiently prepared creates a breeding ground for corrupt gurus.

• Stronger ‘brands’ over stronger boundaries.

In that environment, ethics becomes a drag on growth.

The careful spiritual teachers are outcompeted by the glamorous, intense and confident ones.

The celebrity halo problem - the case of Deepak Chopra

One reason “spiritual corruption” keeps replicating is that it doesn’t only run on private abuse. It runs on public endorsement and moral laundering.

A current example: congressional records released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee included an email exchange between Deepak Chopra and Jeffrey Epstein. Chopra writes to Epstein, “Anything we share is between us,” and later replies “Good” after asking whether a civil case was dropped, in the context of a link to an article about sexual allegations involving a minor, and after Epstein replies “yup”. (The Oversight Committee record portal is here: oversight.house.gov.)

See the Deepak and Epstein files directly here > Emails container folder

I’m not asking you to treat emails as a criminal verdict. I’m asking you to notice the pattern: when a figure who sells “consciousness” language signals comfort with secrecy around someone already widely associated with sexual abuse allegations, it tells you something about how brand, proximity, and private networks can override the public-facing ethics performance.

And if we keep rewarding that - with clicks, prestige, and money - we should expect more of it.

Scenario 5: Conspirituality becomes a mass political force, not a fringe subculture

The convergence of spirituality and conspiracy thinking has a name in research: conspirituality.

If we do not act with any kind of oversight, it evolves from content into mobilisation:

• “Ascension” narratives become a delivery system for paranoia and scapegoating.

• Political movements recruit through spiritual language: purity, awakening, chosen ones, evil forces, cleansing.

• Reality-testing is reframed as spiritual failure. Doubt becomes betrayal.

This is how societies lose the ability to correct course, not because people are stupid, but because they are emotionally captured through our core spiritual needs.

Scenario 6: The quiet catastrophe: families and children keep paying the bill

This is the least visible scenario, which is why it persists.

If we do nothing:

• More children grow up in environments where questioning is punished as “ego”.

• More parents “choose the path” over the child who is signalling harm.

• More adults spend their best years recovering from a dismantling they can’t quite explain without being mocked (like myself).

Safeguarding bodies are already warning that spiritual abuse is real and deeply damaging (start with definitions: Church of England, Diocese of Oxford, Ann Craft Trust).

The question is whether society will treat that warning like yet another weird headline or like a spiritual design constraint for their children’s future.

What will happen to the direction of the world if we not only forget what real spirituality is, but potentially good spiritual people are too absorbed up by all of this, and/or are too traumatised to impact the world beneficially?

Let’s say you are in the future, where these scenarios have played out - if you could go back in time to stop this, what would you do?

Let’s try a thought experiment.

Imagine you’re allowed to go back, not to “change the timeline” in some grand sci-fi way, but to stand at the first quiet hinge where harm becomes normal.

You don’t get to rewrite human nature. You don’t get to abolish charisma. You don’t get to remove people’s longing for meaning.

You only get to intervene early, while everything still looks like “healing”, “community”, “a big personality”, “a few misunderstandings”.

What would you do?

And, more importantly, would you do it when it costs you something?

Because that’s the real story, over and over. Not that evil is clever.

But that good, is expensive.

Go-back Scenario 1: You hear the first whisper

A friend starts going to a teacher / group / retreat circuit. They’re glowing at first. Then the phrases arrive:

• “That’s your ego.”

• “You’re in resistance.”

• “You’re not ready for this level.”

• “I can’t explain it, but I know.”

If you could go back, would you:

1. Ask: “What happens there when someone raises concerns?”

2. Send them resources about coercive control (UK legal frame: CPS guidance) and spiritual abuse (definitions: Ann Craft Trust)?

3. Risk being labelled “negative” by naming what you’re seeing?

4. Or would you stay silent because you don’t want to lose them?

Be honest: which pain would you choose - discomfort now, or devastation later?

Go-back Scenario 2: A child says something small, and it doesn’t fit the vibe

A child in the community says something that lands wrong. Not a clear allegation. Just a sentence that makes your stomach drop.

Someone chuckles. Someone says: “Kids misinterpret.” Someone says: “Don’t make it weird.”

If you could go back, would you:

1. Report a safeguarding concern even if you’re unsure (what “safeguarding” is supposed to do in practice is laid out in frameworks like this Church of England guidance)?

2. Insist on taking it seriously, even if it makes you unpopular?

Would you rather be embarrassed for overreacting or be complicit in missing the early warning?

Go-back Scenario 3: You become the “problem” because you asked for accountability

You ask where the money goes. You ask why there are NDAs. You ask why ex-members are smeared. You ask why the inner circle gets special access.

You don’t accuse. You ask normal questions.

And the temperature changes.

If you could go back, would you:

1. Leave immediately, even if you lose friends and status?

2. Document what’s happening, calmly, in case others need it later?

3. Contact an independent safeguarding lead, trustee board, or regulator where relevant?

When the group punishes questions, do you treat that as information, or as a personal failure to be liked?

Go-back Scenario 4: The leader apologises… and the cycle continues

There’s a blow-up. A boundary crossed. Then a tearful apology. Everyone exhales.

But the structure doesn’t change:

• still no oversight

• still no transparent finances

• still no external safeguarding

• still no consequences

• still fear around dissent

If you could go back, would you accept the apology and still demand structural safeguards?

Do you recognise the difference between remorse and risk-management theatre?

Go-back Scenario 5: You’re offered inner-circle access

It feels like intimacy, selection, destiny.

There are perks. There are rules.

• Don’t speak to outsiders about the inner work

• Don’t read critical material

• Don’t platform “disgruntled ex-members”

• Don’t undermine the mission with “negativity”

If you could go back, would you treat secrecy as a warning sign rather than a privilege?

When belonging is offered in exchange for conscience, do you notice the trade?

So what would you do, really?

Nearly every large spiritual scandal has the same supporting cast:

• People who sensed something early and rationalised it

• People who valued harmony over truth

• People who thought “it’s not my place”

• People who didn’t want to lose community

• People who postponed action until the evidence was undeniable

• and then, much later, people who said: “How did this happen?”

So let me ask humanity directly. If you could come back from those horrible future scenarios to this present time;

• Would you be willing to be disliked?

• Would you be willing to be called “negative” for naming coercion?

• Would you be willing to lose a group to protect a child?

• Would you be willing to choose reality over belonging?

Image: The 12th-century Ladder of Divine Ascent icon (Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai Peninsula, Egypt) shows monks, led by John Climacus, ascending the ladder to Jesus, at the top right, but demons are trying to pull people off the higher they climb.

This essay confronts an uncomfortable truth hiding beneath the spiritual community’s promises of ascension and enlightenment: a global pandemic of abuse spanning every tradition, from Catholic churches to yoga studios, from Buddhist monasteries to New Age healing centres. Drawing from personal experience as a cult survivor and documenting staggering statistics — 216,000 children abused by French clergy, gurus sentenced to life imprisonment, entire movements built on systematic exploitation — it explores why sincere seekers become psychological prisoners defending their abusers, and how ancient warnings about deceptive spiritual entities mirror today’s crisis with uncanny precision.

Crucially, it offers an explanation for one of spirituality’s most confounding paradoxes: why abusive teachers can still manifest genuine supernatural abilities, healing powers, the ability to change emotions and blissful energy transmissions — drawing on ancient texts from Buddhist to Neoplatonic sources.

The theory is that some (not all) of today’s abusive gurus are what you get when altered-state skill, ego hunger, dropped safeguards, and predatory influences reinforce each other faster than conscience and community can correct them — and the only reliable antidote is restoring vows, transparency, and accountability to the centre of spiritual life.

This weaves together diverse threads ,  from quantum physics to indigenous wisdom, from the Surangama Sutra’s predictions to modern psychology , to argue that humanity’s spiritual evolution isn’t just stalled but actively corrupted by our refusal to address the shadow side of spiritual authority.

Rather than abandoning spirituality altogether, the essay offers a rigourous path forward: prioritising ethical development over peak experiences, treating critical thinking as spiritual practice rather than “low vibration” resistance, demanding transparent accountability in spiritual communities, and recognising that genuine evolution requires unglamorous shadow work and trauma healing ,  not bypassing human suffering with promises of dimensional ascension, but facing it with the fierce discernment our ancestors understood was necessary for authentic spiritual development.

“If the meditator “recognises this as an external demon-power and does not delight in it, the disturbance will cease; but if he believes ‘I am a sage’ he will fall under the demon’s control” Buddhist text, The Surangama Sutra.

(See below for more details.)

“If you desire the harmony of the self, in which is true and that poise of the self, in which is true creation, you must care for that self which abides in each, and be concerned only with that self.” Jiddu Krishnamurti, when he was dismantling all he was taught to believe.

(I interpret this as referring to the soul and one’s true self. See below for more context.)

This long essay is divided into the following subsections:

The Suffering Children of Cults

Jiddu Krishnamurti — the first ‘Child of a Cult’ creates a new Spiritual Approach

More Cases of Spiritual Abuse

The Believers Who Won’t Believe: Psychology as Spiritual Obstacle

Common Objections

The Spiritual Marketplace: Where Predators Thrive

Why the Law Can’t Save Us (And Why This Matters for Global Evolution)

The Ancient Warnings We’ve Forgotten

Spiritual Authorities Ignoring that they are Doing Harm

A Working Hypothesis for How Abusive Gurus are Made

The Global Consequences: Why This Blocks Human Evolution

Words Do Not Match up with Actions

The Planetary Stakes: What We’re Really Facing

The Path Forward: Real Evolution Requires Real Work

The Choice Before Us

A young woman closes her eyes in a meditation hall, surrendering to the promise of ascension to higher dimensions. Around her, dozens of others sit in perfect stillness, following every word of their beloved teacher who speaks of humanity’s imminent evolution to ‘5D consciousness.’ What none of them know is that within five years, this same teacher will be sentenced to life in prison for rape. The organisation will collapse in scandal. Lives will be shattered. And most tragically, many of these sincere seekers will refuse to believe it’s even happening – convinced that questioning their ‘5D master’ will sabotage their own spiritual evolution.

You’ve seen the posts, haven’t you? The breathless proclamations that humanity is ascending, that we’re leaving 3D reality behind for higher dimensions of love and light. The YouTube channels promising that 2024/2025/2026 will be the year everything changes, when enlightened souls will finally transcend the old paradigm while the ‘unawakened’ get left behind.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that no one in the spiritual community wants to acknowledge: We are not ascending anywhere as long as we continue to ignore the systematic spiritual abuse that spans every tradition, culture, and era in human history.

And the cost of this denial isn’t just personal trauma for individual victims (such as myself, who was raised with two different cults, and then broke free). It’s nothing less than the spiritual evolution of our entire species.

The Suffering Children of Cults and Religion

Over the past 50 years, the catalogue of spiritual abuse reads like a testament to humanity’s failure to learn from its own warnings. Consider the scope: 216,000 children sexually abused by French Catholic clergy since 1950. In the United States alone, 4,000+ priests faced allegations involving 10,000+ children over five decades. The Australian Royal Commission found “tens of thousands” abused in religious institutions. In the UK, 900+ complaints detailed 3,000+ instances of abuse by clergy between 1970–2015.

But this isn’t just a Catholic problem. The Rajneesh movement systematically raped children under the guise of “free love” – one survivor, Prem Sargam, detailed being raped over 50 times starting at age 12 across Osho ashrams in the UK, India, and the US. I wrote an article on here some years ago about Rajneesh/Osho before this information came out. The Netflix documentary Wild, Wild Country had completely ignored this. This new information coming out in the last few months has finally revealed, for sure, what I always knew. The new documentary on ITV, in the UK, The Children of the Cult, shows children who were once in the cult. They reveal to us how nursery school children were sexually exploited by a man called Sharna. Of course, Sharna would have been attracted to the free sex philosophy of the tantric practitioner, Rajneesh. One should ask if such a man can be enlightened and yet also not be able to foresee basic human pathology?

In this documentary, two women say they were also sexually coerced by Rajneesh himself.

It is no coincidence that it is the children of such cults who end up speaking out. They, after all, never chose to be part of such things.

Jiddu Krishnamurti — the first ‘Child of a Cult’ creates a new Spiritual Approach

Though it is scarcely known, the greatest known child of a cult and victim of a spiritual context child sexual abuse, was none other than Jiddu Krishnamurti himself. I would argue that, despite some failings I have seen in him (I was also present at his school in Brockwood Park — it’s a long story), he was one of the greatest spiritual teachers we have had in our modern age, due to his attempt to warn people about the problems with thought-based belief and of following authority.

His father, Narayaniah, had fought very hard in a legal battle to get Krishnamurti back from the clutches of Annie Besant and Leadbeater. This is because he had become convinced that Krishnamurti, as a boy, had been sexually abused by Leadbeater. Mr. Narayaniah revered Annie Besant, seeing her as divine, and had expected her to respond with concern. Yet to his horror, she dismissed him and started brutally attacking his character. It can be found in his own words, here in the document that chronicles his legal case, and includes the letters he wrote to her. (See pages 45 onwards and then 56 onwards on the print of the page, not the ebook).

Play the video to hear highlights from the text.

I do not want to let the fact that Annie Besant immediately dismissed Jiddu Krishnamurti’s father remain forgotten, because, as you will see, this sort of immediate denial without considering alternative possibilities (because it conflicts with what we want to believe), is precisely the problem we face as we seek spiritual ascendence.

Ms Besant denied all this because she was attached to the idea that Leadbeater and Krishnamurti had had past lives together (hence they gave him a name, ‘Alcyone’), and so believed they should all be together. Her organisation saw Krishnamurti as one who would be the world teacher, Maitreya. And yet, Krishnamurti himself denounced all of that in later years, saying that such organisations were only ‘crutches.’ As you can see in the video, he stood up to give a speech, and to everyone’s surprise, dissolved the theosophical Order of the Star imposed on him. So, despite all her good intentions, when push came to shove, for what did Ms Besant go into denial and sacrifice morals/compassion? She could have still sent Krishnamurti to university in England and also released their grip on him — it was not a mutually exclusive issue. He wasn’t interested in university education anyway.

When Krishnamurti concluded his ‘Truth is a Pathless Land’ address, the tent seemed to hold its breath. “There was a stunned silence,” Mary Lutyens recalls, “followed by a flurry of movement as some people rose to go. Others sat motionless, as if unable to take in what had happened. Several were in tears. A few came forward to shake hands with him or simply to stand silently in front of him” (The Years of Awakening by Mary Lutyens, p. 277). Pupul Jayakar describes “an extraordinary hush” as he stepped down from the dais. Some members moved towards him quickly, almost pleading for an explanation; others turned away in shock. Faces were wet with tears; a few smiled as if an immense burden had been lifted (J. Krishnamurti: A Biography by Pupul Jayakar, p. 84). Mrs Besant, seated very upright in the front row, left without speaking to him, and when Leadbeater heard of the speech, he remarked bitterly that “the Coming had gone wrong” (Lutyens, p. 277).

This kind of reaction from Besant and Leadbeater was childish, and I feel it’s a reaction which is a problem on our spiritual paths, for it does not seem to me that they were actually looking for truth at all. Are we looking to find truth, or just to identify with some nice ideas? That is why ‘truth is a pathless land’, because when you make it a ‘path,’ you are holding onto ideas for the purpose of identification and self-image. But as I will discuss below, the self-image is a bandage. It is not your true self or true soul.

Krishnamurti was standing on a pedestal given to him his whole life, and even though he said in the dissolution speech that he was against being heard on the basis of how many ‘followers’ he had, the rest of his life, people listened to him mostly precisely because he was on a pedestal and had followers. That is the human wiring and conditioning. I think this is the reason many spiritual people like Rajneesh and my childhood cult leader held him up, while not being conscious of the fact that none of them were actually doing what he taught. It is not that hard to do what he taught, I think what is needed is more clarity on what is happening, and that is one of the things I attempt to do in this essay.

More Cases of Spiritual Abuse

In more modern times, our celebrities have been overrun by such cults, as they are specifically targeted (for obvious reasons, really). For example, NXIVM operated as a sex trafficking cult masquerading as consciousness expansion, with leader Keith Raniere sentenced to 120 years. I am not even going to mention Scientology. Well, ok, I just did. Watch Joe Rogan and Leah Remini on YouTube to understand all of that.

Asaram Bapu, commanding millions of followers across hundreds of ashrams worldwide, received life imprisonment for raping a 16-year-old girl, then another life sentence for repeated rapes between 2001–2006. His son Narayan Sai also received life imprisonment for related crimes.

Mata Amritanandamayi, the ‘hugging saint’ revered by millions globally, had her former personal attendant, Gail Tredwell detail 20 years of beatings, biting, clawing, and systematic sexual abuse by Amma’s inner circle monks while Amma maintained secret sexual affairs despite claiming lifelong celibacy.

The Atman Yoga Federation under Gregorian Bivolaru required a massive police operation involving 175 officers across Europe to free 26 women from forced sexual servitude, commercial pornography production, and human trafficking operations spanning multiple countries. The related Agama Yoga centres saw 14 students accuse founder Narcis Tarcău of sexual assault and rape.

In the Sivananda Yoga Organisation, BBC investigations exposed decades of systematic abuse, including Julie Salter’s three-year sexual abuse by founder Vishnudevananda, Pamela’s rape at a Windsor Castle retreat in 1978, and Catherine’s grooming and abuse from ages 12–17 at children’s camps. Yoga to the People closed in 2020 after hundreds of allegations. Bikram Choudhury faced at least six sexual assault lawsuits with damages exceeding $900,000.

The Buddhist world shows identical patterns: Sogyal Rinpoche’s systematic physical, sexual and emotional abuse at Rigpa centres; Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche’s credible sexual assault accusations at Shambhala International; decades of sexual misconduct by Zen masters Eido Shimano, Joshu Sasaki who abused dozens of female students, and Genpo Merzel. Culadasa (John Yates), author of the bestselling “The Mind Illuminated,” was removed after admitting to “ongoing conduct unbecoming” including sexual misconduct with multiple women and sex workers over four years. Osel Tendzin, Chögyam Trungpa’s (who himself abused animals and his wives) dharma heir, knowingly exposed students to HIV during unprotected sex, resulting in at least one death.

New Age movements show the same devastation: Heaven’s Gate’s 39 suicides in 1997, believing their souls would join a spaceship. They were convinced that humanity was doomed and, as outcasts anyway, they should escape the Earth, not realising they were participating in the same sort of mental processes that are causing humanity to fall off ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ in the first place. The brother of Star Trek’s Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), Thomas Nichols, was one of these people who became so convinced that he killed himself.

The Movement for Restoration of Ten Commandments orchestrated 924 deaths in Uganda through mass murder disguised as spiritual ascension. Temple of the Sun organised murder-suicides killing 74 people across multiple countries based on New Age prophecies. James Arthur Ray, star of “The Secret,” was convicted of negligent homicide after three deaths in his Arizona sweat lodge “spiritual purification” event.

These aren’t isolated incidents or statistical anomalies. This is a pandemic of spiritual abuse spanning every tradition, culture, and decade, affecting millions of lives while the spiritual community largely pretends it isn’t happening.

But what makes this particularly insidious: it’s not just the abuse. It’s the systematic denial that follows. And this denial is preventing the very spiritual evolution that millions of people are desperately seeking.

The Believers Who Won’t Believe: Psychology as Spiritual Obstacle

Our hypothetical representative spiritual character Sarah, had given fifteen years of her life to her spiritual teacher. When the allegations surfaced – detailed, credible accounts of sexual abuse by multiple women – her first reaction wasn’t compassion for the victims. It was rage at the ‘lower vibrational’ people trying to ‘destroy’ her beloved guru’s mission to elevate humanity. Even as more evidence emerged, even as criminal charges were filed, Sarah and thousands like her remained loyal. They fundraised for his legal defence. They shared conspiracy theories about persecution by ‘dark forces.’ They attacked survivors on social media as ‘spiritually unevolved.’

This is psychology blocking spiritual development. Being raised my entire life amongst spiritual people, I have seen this outlook appear over and over and over again.

When our core beliefs are threatened, our brains activate the same neural pathways as physical threats. The amygdala floods our system with stress hormones. Our prefrontal cortex – responsible for critical thinking and genuine spiritual discernment – goes offline. We literally cannot process information that challenges our worldview without experiencing it as a survival threat.

Cognitive dissonance makes us more likely to reject evidence than change beliefs. Confirmation bias ensures we only see information that supports our spiritual identity. The sunk cost fallacy whispers that abandoning our spiritual path means admitting we wasted years of our lives and thousands of dollars on workshops and retreats. Social identity protection reminds us that questioning our teacher means losing our community, our purpose, our entire sense of who we are as ‘awakened’ beings.

Add the specifically spiritual elements – the belief that questioning a ‘realised master’ will damage your karma and delay your ascension, that doubt itself is ego resistance to higher dimensional truth, that persecution of the teacher is a test of your faith and commitment to humanity’s evolution – and you have a psychological fortress nearly impenetrable to outside reality.

This is why Amma still draws massive crowds despite detailed abuse testimony. Why Osho centres still operate globally despite documented child rape involving dozens of victims across multiple countries. Why NXIVM members defended Keith Raniere even as branding evidence was presented in court. Why New Age communities continue promoting teachers with known abuse histories as “ascended masters.”

And this psychological blindness is precisely what’s preventing the spiritual evolution everyone claims to want.

Common Objections

1. Why not just take the good and leave the rest?

One of the responses I have constantly come up against when trying to raise this issue is the idea of “take the good, leave the rest.” It feels fair because it soothes cognitive dissonance (you got something real from a teacher who did real harm) and preserves sunk costs (time, money, identity). But with spiritual leaders, the “good” is rarely separable from the authority that delivers it.

Many quotes are constantly being shared online from abusive gurus such as Osho. Quoting or platforming an abusive guru isn’t a neutral transfer of ideas; it’s a speech act that re-attaches their name to wisdom, lending them social proof, rehabilitating their brand, and telling survivors their abuser still deserves the mic.

In ordinary life, we grasp this: most of us don’t want to hear “I love you” from someone who doesn’t mean it, because love is not just a string of words , it’s a promise whose meaning depends on the speaker’s character and intent. Likewise, a “wise” line is not just letters on a page; its force comes from who says it and what they're saying does in the world.

When the messenger has made deception and exploitation part of their method, their words are not clean cargo but  they are carriers of authority that reward the very system that harmed people. If a thought is truly good, we don’t need the abuser’s name: say it in your own words, credit an ethical source, or let survivors’ voices lead. That choice protects meaning, honours the harmed, and starves the cycle that turns charisma into cover.

2. But the guru has always only ever helped me…

I have encountered this idea many times also. Yes, the guru helped you when you served their ‘political’ machinations, when they thought they could use you to gain more power in some way.

Considering all is one, if they, in any way, have acted without ethics in another sphere, even if it has not affected you, there is a problem. And if you refuse to investigate claims of abuse for yourself, that is also a big warning sign, because it means you are not looking at the issue in an unbiased way.

3. But my guru is so humble, they’ve done so many good works, and the world they’ve created is so rich  -  how could it be false?

Here, we have to separate genuine good acts from communal narcissism. Real humility doesn’t need a spotlight, and real service doesn’t create a debt of loyalty or bind followers to the giver.

Communal narcissists often appear selfless because they are serving “the mission” - but the mission is inseparable from their own image as its indispensable centre. Osho established free medical clinics and published sharp, often truthful critiques of organised religion, even as his ashrams facilitated systemic child sexual abuse. Mata Amritanandamayi (“Amma”) is globally celebrated for hugging millions and funding hospitals and disaster relief. Asaram Bapu ran large-scale charity kitchens and schools while committing serial sexual assaults that earned him multiple life sentences. Sogyal Rinpoche founded Rigpa centres, praised for preserving Tibetan Buddhist teachings, but an independent investigation confirmed years of sexual violence and psychological abuse. Even Jim Jones began with racially inclusive social programs and genuine community service before orchestrating the Jonestown mass murder–suicide.

Part of their power lies in convincing worldbuilding. Abusive leaders borrow liberally from existing wisdom traditions, proven therapeutic insights, and universal human values  - compassion, justice, non-attachment  -  then stitch them into a grand narrative that feels both ancient and urgently relevant. True statements act as ‘anchors’ that make the surrounding fiction harder to question.

They weave in detailed cosmologies, psychological frameworks, and moral codes that give the follower’s life shape and purpose, all the while inserting themselves as the irreplaceable interpreter or linchpin of the system.

Cognitive science shows that the human brain is a pattern-recognition machine; once a leader supplies a coherent pattern that explains suffering, offers hope, and maps every doubt onto a higher purpose, followers experience the worldview as self-evident.

This complexity also functions as a moat: the more intricate the belief system, the harder it is to see its contradictions, and the more “insider knowledge” a follower must master before they even feel qualified to question it.

Ancient sources like the Surangama Sutra warned about this exact phenomenon  -  that deceptive teachers could speak profound truths, perform real healings, and create entire spiritual architectures while serving corrupt ends. The complexity isn’t evidence of authenticity; it’s often the camouflage that keeps people from noticing exploitation.

The real test is not how rich the story is, or how many true things it contains, but whether the leader’s words consistently align with ethical action (including whether what they have ‘divinely’ predicted turns out to be a lie), and whether the system allows dissent, transparency, and equality  -  or whether all roads lead back to the guru’s authority. Without that, humility and good works can be set dressing for a stage on which abuse plays out, over and over, in dazzlingly believable worlds.

The fact that their teachings contain many true statements doesn’t prove the teacher’s integrity; it simply makes the fiction more persuasive. A convincing world is not the same as a true one; con artists have always mixed fact with falsehood to build trust.

4. Even if the guru’s power or lineage is questionable, their practice works for me;  it helps me feel better,  so does it matter where it comes from?

Some will say: “I don’t care if the guru is flawed or their powers come from questionable sources  -  the practice they teach works for me. It eases my suffering, so why not just use it?” This is a deeply human position. When life feels unbearable, a technique that brings even momentary relief can feel sacred, no matter its origin. Meditation that calms the mind, breathwork that softens anxiety, chanting that opens the heart, kriya that leads to energy experiences  -  these experiences can be genuinely transformative in the moment, and it’s tempting to believe their validity is separate from the ethics of the person who transmitted them.

The danger is that spiritual practices are not neutral delivery systems; they are often embedded in the worldview, authority structures, and subtle conditioning of the teacher or tradition they come from. A breathing method while looking at the guru’s picture can quiet you and train you to suppress dissent. A mantra in the guru’s context can focus the mind and reinforce the guru’s centrality in your spiritual life. A healing ritual can bring peace and implant the belief that only through this leader, or this lineage, can you truly be healed. When the container is compromised, the contents can be quietly laced with dependency.

Ancient sources recognised this risk: the Surangama Sutra, the Kularnava Tantra, and the Guru Granth Sahib (see below) all warn that even effective methods can be conduits for corruption if they are rooted in pride, greed, or deception. Relief from suffering is not proof of purity  - opiates relieve pain, but addiction can follow. Without shadow work  -  the hard task of facing our longing to be rescued, our avoidance of discomfort, and our reluctance to see the full picture  - we remain vulnerable to practices that feel like liberation but function as control.

The deeper work is asking whether a practice is leading to greater independence and clarity, or quietly binding us to someone else’s agenda.

The Spiritual Marketplace: Where Predators Thrive

The modern spiritual landscape has become a perfect hunting ground for psychological predators. Unlike traditional religions with established hierarchies and centuries-old safeguards however imperfect, the New Age and contemporary spiritual movements operate in a deregulated marketplace where anyone can claim divine authority.

Got a traumatic childhood and a charismatic personality? Start a healing retreat centre. Had a psychedelic experience and read some Eckhart Tolle? Launch a ‘consciousness evolution’ program. Spent a few months in an Indian ashram? Return as a certified guru ready to guide others to ‘5D ascension.’

The very language of spiritual evolution has been weaponised. ‘Raising your vibration’ means don’t question my authority. ‘Releasing old paradigm thinking’ means ignoring evidence of abuse. ‘Transcending duality’ means don’t judge my obviously harmful behaviour. ‘Staying in your heart space’ means abandoning critical thinking entirely.

Meanwhile, genuine spiritual development requires exactly the opposite: fierce discernment, psychological maturity, ethical development, and the ability to see through deception – especially self-deception. How can we evolve as a species when our spiritual communities actively discourage the very capabilities needed for authentic growth?

Consider the Australian Royal Commission’s findings on Swami Satyananda’s ashram: systematic “aggressive, violent sex” with numerous women and potential rape of a seven-year-old child, with 11 survivors testifying to sexual abuse spanning 1975–1989. Yet Satyananda Yoga centres continue operating globally, promoting his teachings as wisdom while survivors struggle with lifelong trauma.

Why the Law Can’t Save Us Yet (And Why This Matters for Global Evolution)

“Surely,” you might think, “the legal system protects people from this kind of abuse.” The harsh truth is that it rarely does, and when it tries, it’s slow or mis-aimed. The next bit is quite technical and boring, so feel free to skip it, but I feel its necessary to write it all out.

Human-rights law fiercely protects religion and belief — see ICCPR art. 18 and the U.N.’s General Comment No. 22 on freedom from “coercion” in religion, which states struggle to translate into clear criminal rules (ICCPR, GC 22).

Europe’s ECHR art. 9 adds similar protections, and where lawmakers have tried to criminalise “mind control,” it’s blown up — Italy’s “plagio” (the old brainwashing offence) was struck down in 1981 as unconstitutionally vague, a cautionary tale still shaping policy (Corte Cost. 96/1981).

Today, most countries only criminalise coercive control inside intimate/family relationships; in England & Wales, the offence in Serious Crime Act 2015 s.76 remains limited to those “personally connected,” even after the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 tweak that removed the cohabitation requirement — so cultic/spiritual coercion usually sits outside the criminal net (legislation, Home Office explainer, CPS guidance).

Meanwhile in the U.S., courts have long been sceptical of “brainwashing” science (see the exclusion of coercive-persuasion testimony in U.S. v. Fishman), pushing survivors toward conventional offences or civil torts instead (Fishman overview). Oversight is weak too: U.S. churches don’t have to file Form 990 and face special limits on IRS audits under IRC §7611 (IRS 990 page, IRS church-audit rules); in Australia, ACNC “Basic Religious Charities” enjoy reduced reporting and governance obligations (ACNC explainer); and in England & Wales small “excepted” church charities may avoid registration/annual returns under income thresholds, limiting transparency (Gov.uk — excepted charities).

Mandatory-reporting and clergy-penitent rules also blunt accountability: many U.S. states still shield confessional communications (with a patchwork of exceptions), and fights over removing those shields continue (see Child Welfare Information Gateway summaries and recent state battles) (CWIG overview, state summaries, Stateline explainer). Civil law helps, but it’s perilous: powerful groups often deploy defamation threats to chill speech.

In the UK, claimants still use London’s plaintiff-friendly environment despite reforms; while the Defamation Act 2013 raised the bar with the “serious harm” test — confirmed by the Supreme Court in Lachaux — defending a libel action remains ruinously expensive (s.1 DA 2013/Lachaux explainer). There is progress: the EU Anti-SLAPP Directive 2024/1069 introduces early-dismissal and cost safeguards (cross-border civil cases) and must be implemented by May 7, 2026; the Council of Europe issued complementary recommendations (EU text, OJ PDF, implementation date, CoE rec). In the UK, anti-SLAPP provisions limited to economic-crime-related claims are now in force under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, and a broader SLAPPs Bill has government backing but is not yet general law (MoJ factsheet, Commons Library brief, Hansard progress).

Elsewhere, some governments have started targeting harmful practices at the margins: France’s 2024 law on sectarian abuses (with parts pared back by the Constitutional Council) and Japan’s 2022 law against malicious donation solicitation after the Unification Church scandal (France explainer, Le Monde, Japan — Cabinet Office summary/coverage). And even when cases reach court, spiritual leaders often enjoy structural shields non-victims don’t — U.S. ministerial-exception doctrine can block staff lawsuits (Hosanna-Tabor, Our Lady of Guadalupe), and churches’ audit/reporting exemptions impede scrutiny (Hosanna-Tabor, Our Lady of Guadalupe, IRS church-audit rules).

The result? Survivors face a gauntlet: evidentiary hurdles, time-bar issues (with piecemeal reforms), and SLAPP-style intimidation.

That’s why predatory leaders can build empires for years before accountability: Asaram Bapu amassed millions of followers prior to his 2018 life sentence with further proceedings still surfacing (NPR, NDTV update); Gregorian Bivolaru ran a cross-border network for decades before French arrests/charges in 2023–24 (AP, Guardian); Sogyal Rinpoche died in 2019 despite a Lewis Silkin report finding, on the balance of probabilities, serious abuse within Rigpa (Rigpa report page, report PDF); and Keith Raniere (NXIVM) operated for two decades before a 120-year sentence finally landed in 2020 (DOJ press release, Reuters).

The appeal of Germany

One of the cults I was in, is headquartered in Germany.

I feel there is a good legal reason they are headquartered there. Germany has several features that can make it appealing terrain for high-control spiritual groups.

Because of what happened in World War II, religious freedom is strongly protected under Art. 4 of the Basic Law (and by ECHR art. 9), so the state is wary of policing belief or ‘worldview’ declarations.

The Federal Administrative Court even struck down Munich’s attempt to condition an e-bike subsidy on a Scientology distancing statement as an unconstitutional intrusion on worldview rights! (BVerwG press release 22/2022; news explainer ZEIT).

Day-to-day abusive dynamics aren’t a distinct crime: there’s no standalone “spiritual coercion” offence, so authorities must fit conduct into general crimes like coercion — § 240 StGB, unlawful imprisonment — § 239, threats, stalking, or sexual offences, which can leave gaps for leader–follower control that stops short of violence.

At the same time, speech is easy to chill: Germany retains criminal insult/defamation (185–187 StGB), and preliminary injunctions (einstweilige Verfügung) can issue fast on a reduced evidentiary standard — affidavits often suffice — making urgent takedowns of critical reporting more achievable than in many jurisdictions (Willkie overview).