As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, I was raised in a cult in Northern California where manipulation, totalitarian control, and emotional, physical, and sexual abuse were everyone’s daily reality.

Needless to say, I have spent the rest of my life since then making a study of cults, abusive systems of mass manipulation, thought control, and totalitarianism. I’ve always been fascinated by the question of how and why people get into these situations.

It’s fascinating to explore the parallels between this subject and my exploration of religion, philosophy, esotericism, and altered states of consciousness. We wouldn’t tend to think these two fields are related, but it turns out that they are.

Most cult experts tell us that people get into cults at vulnerable times in their lives when the person’s identity, family structure, social foundations, and support networks are failing.

People get into cults when they leave home to go to college, when they get divorced, when they leave college and go out into the world, and when they’re exploring religions and philosophies to discover their own beliefs.

People get into abusive relationships when the victim is lacking confidence, social support, financial independence, or when they’ve already experienced abuse from someone else.

Strong, confident, supported, connected people don’t get into these situations—or do they?

The population of Nazi Germany fell under the totalitarian system controlled by a few well-educated leaders. The leaders were able to carry out this control on a mass scale—and they were certainly not the only ones. How was this possible?

One of the harsh truths of a disaster like the Nazi Holocaust is that it wasn’t carried out by a nation or an army or even a political movement. It was carried out by individuals. Every cult is made up of individuals—each one acting autonomously to accomplish his or her own agenda.

I once read an absolutely mind-blowing quote by a brilliant man on the internet. I have to unfortunately conceal his identity due to the nature of the environment in which I read this quote.

He said, “Power can only be given away. By the time anyone tries to take it, we’re already in trouble.”

This was such a lightbulb moment for me. It clarified so many things about this process that I didn’t understand before.

No one ever takes power. That would not be possible. Human beings are stubborn. We don’t like anyone telling us what to do. If you hold someone at gunpoint and try to force them to do something against their convictions, people will rebel and fight back. People would rather die than give up that kind of control.

So the very first task of any would-be controller is to convince the victim that they want to be controlled in the way the controller says the person wants to be controlled. This is relatively easy when the person lacks confidence and has no idea how to live their own life. They’re vulnerable to someone who appears to know the answers and offers to either show them the way or do it for them.

The same is true when the process takes place on a mass scale. In the case of Nazi Germany, the German people were coming out of a very dark time in the years after the loss of World War 1. Germany was impoverished, beaten down, and German morale was at its lowest.

The German people were ripe for someone to come along and tell them that they were morally, genetically, and in every other way superior to those around them. The Nazis provided the Germans with a vehicle to materialize this view and that’s exactly what the German people did.

We all go through the same process on an individual basis at the spiritual level. We all ask ourselves, “Who am I? What am I doing here? What does all of this mean? What is my life even all about?”

When we’re young, impressionable, vulnerable, or in a state of change, we’re ripe for someone to come along and pump our heads full of all kinds of answers to these questions. We’re hungry for someone to give us the answers we so desperately seek.

When we lack any internal identity of our own, we seek to validate ourselves through superficial externals like belonging to a group. We wear certain clothes that show we belong to a certain group.
We style our hair a certain way or espouse certain political beliefs.

We celebrate those who belong to our group and denigrate those who belong to any other group other than our own.

We see this a lot with groups and individuals who highlight and emphasis external characteristics over any deeper internal value.

If someone thinks their race, gender, ethnic affiliation, sexual orientation, job, relationship status, or political view is the most important thing about them, they’re really announcing to the world that they have nothing internal that truly identifies who they are.

They’re wearing this fact right out there in their physical appearance to let the whole world know that they have absolutely no clue who they are or what they stand for. That’s why they need this superficial, external affiliation—to tell themselves and everyone else who they are and what they stand for.

People who do have an internal core of identity, character, and personhood don’t need or even want these external affiliations. I recently saw a YouTube creator make an announcement about this on his channel. He stated that he didn’t want YouTube to promote his channel as part of its push to promote “black content creators”. This man didn’t want to be known as a black content creator. He wanted to be known for his content—not his race.

People who have this internal seed of identity have no need to broadcast their affiliations to the world. They value themselves for other, deeper, internal qualities that are far, far more important than what the person looks like, who they’re in a relationship with, or who they vote for.

This core of identity can only be found by searching for it. We have to do the hard work of exploring ourselves and our world. We have to have a lot of hard, painful experiences, learn a lot about ourselves, cry a lot of tears, kiss a lot of frogs, grow a lot, and discover who we actually are on the inside.

The sad truth is that no one can do this work for us. We can sign up for any religion in the world. We could join a cult or a corporate organization or just about any other group on the planet. None of them will give us the answers we seek. Those answers are only found within ourselves. Our own internal landscape is the terrain we have to cross to find these answers.

Joining a religion will never give us those answers. It might make us feel like we’re part of a community of like-minded people, but that’s an illusion. There are no like-minded people because no one else knows what’s in your heart and mind.

No one can give you a relationship with the divine and no one can give you a relationship with yourself. The true seeker always walks alone and that is such a lonely, scary place to be. This is the price of admission. It’s the only antidote to the fear, doubt, and isolation of not knowing who we are and why we’re even here.

If we join a religion, we will never be completely satisfied with those answers because we didn’t discover them for ourselves. We will always harbor some small kernel of doubt in our innermost gut that asks, “Is this really true?”

Some cults use psychological techniques to supposedly explore the individual’s mind and find out what makes them think, act, and feel a certain way. Even some abusive relationships do the same thing. These techniques always turn out to be manipulative because no one outside your own head can understand what’s going on inside it.

We can only put those doubts to rest by exploring and discovering the truth for ourselves. We have to venture out into the wilderness and face ourselves. We have to go to battle against ourselves and win those answers.

Once we do win that battle and cross that terrain, the life waiting for us on the other side is far more fulfilling than anything we could ever have imagined possible. This is where life really starts to work. This is where we lock in with our God-given purpose in life and actually start doing what we came here to do.

Everything on this side of that wilderness leads to confusion, despair, self-destruction, and death. Everything on the other side of that wilderness leads to life, productivity, connection, and happiness.

There is no other way. This is a harsh but unavoidable fact of life. None of us can escape ourselves. To know ourselves and find happiness within ourselves, we have to explore ourselves. No one can do this for us.

What we have to remember always, always, always is that there is nothing more pleasing to God than the true seeker. You may be in doubt right now. You may be in despair right now. You may be full of fear and uncertainty.

There is nothing more pleasing to God than the true seeker. God is saying about you right now, “Look how much this person loves me. Look how much this person desires me. Look how much this person is willing to go through and suffer just to be in my presence.”

The seeker’s path is one of the holiest vocations anywhere in human experience. It’s the genuine desire for truth, the divine, and to be one with God. There is nothing holier than that. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

It will come as a surprise to no one that I’m not a Christian, but I do think Christianity is right and true in many respects. There is a way to follow Christian doctrine that is coherent with the spiritual reality of the world we live in.
 
I’m not going to spend this post going over what I think Christianity gets wrong. That would take too long.
 
As a starting point, let’s begin with my blog post on the common Christian trope that equates the Trinity doctrine with an egg with three parts that make up a whole—the shell, the white, and the yolk—or with the three states of water that make up the totality of water.
 
This three-part theory of the nature of God directly contradicts the notion that God is infinite, universal, indivisible, and all-powerful. The Trinity is the ultimate statement of God’s plurality, which is in direct contradiction to both the First and Second Commandments of the Ten Commandments that we have no other gods and that we not to make or bow down to any likeness to Him on earth.
 
If the egg and water theory are correct, then that’s just further confirmation that we should be worshiping and serving the entirety of the egg instead of only one segmented part of it.
 
It would be ridiculous for us to say that ice is the most important state of water, that we should be elevating it above the states of steam and liquid water, and that we would be lost, damned, doomed, and forsaken if we didn’t recognize the importance of ice above steam and liquid water.
 
Those arguments would only be valid if we venerated the whole rather than the part. It would be just as valid to venerate the eggshell as the yoke. It makes the most sense to recognize the wholeness of the egg as the entity we’re talking about rather than one discrete part of it.
 
The Abrahamic tradition distinguished itself from all the other world religions of the ancient world by essentially inventing a non-dualistic godhead. This godhead was specifically NOT represented by multiple deities or even by earthly forms of the same deity. That’s what makes the Abrahamic tradition what it is.
 
The vast majority of Christians can’t explain this inherent contradiction to the satisfaction of anyone who isn’t already a believer in this doctrine. I have yet to meet any Christian, including members of the clergy, who can explain this in a way that makes Christianity make sense.
 
The good news is that there is an explanation for this that does make Christianity make sense. Like so much about the Bible, the Abrahamic tradition, and all its many moral contradictions, these problems only make sense if we read the tradition non-dualistically.
 
Let’s go back to our egg theory and remove the idea that Jesus was divine and that he was both a part of God and synonymous with God at the same time.
 
Let’s remove the idea that Jesus was God in human form and that he possessed all the power and perfection of God in a human body that was born from a human mother and could be killed like any other human being.
 
Let’s remove the idea that Jesus is the secret key to salvation, that we should be worshiping and acknowledging Jesus as one and the same with God, and that failing to do so is demonic, evil, and the road to eternal damnation.
 
If we remove the key element of Jesus’s divinity from the equation, we’re left with a non-dualistic belief system that actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
 
Jesus is not a divine manifestation of God—not in that way—and Jesus is not a historical figure that early Christians made into something he wasn’t.
 
The Jesus story is another version of a similar story of life, death, and rebirth that appears all over the world in thousands of forms. The story follows the cycle of the seasons and commemorates the renewal of the natural world that makes all life possible.
 
One of these stories is the cycle of John Barleycorn in the Celtic-English tradition. The grain gets planted in winter, sprouts in a rush of vibrant, wild, exuberant, youthful growth in the spring, ripens and matures in summer, and gets cut down and killed in the autumn so John Barleycorn can be reborn the following year.
 
This story parallels the story of the deer, represented by Herne the Hunter. We see parallels in this story to certain Native American myths and rituals that venerate the deer as a divine being. The deer willingly sacrifices himself so the people can survive and be born to new life in the coming cycle.
 
The deer is conceived in the depths of winter, born in the spring, grows up over the summer, and dies in the autumn. These rituals portray the deer as a sentient being who comes to Earth willingly and willingly gives himself for sacrifice as an act of compassion to humanity so we can all live.
 
This story is repeated in almost every culture worldwide. The early Christians used a lot of pagan mythology to market their new religion to the world and this story is no different. The same language of sacrifice, rebirth, and new life has been co-opted by Christianity to this day.
 
So what is this story teaching us about non-dualistic realities?
 
The Jesus story isn’t so much a historical narrative as a representation of the non-dualistic oneness between humanity and God. Jesus is a characterization of humanity in its idealized, God form.
 
From a non-dualistic point of view, Jesus could only be one and the same with God if we all are one and the same with God—which is exactly what non-dualism is. Jesus was one and the same with God because he was human. We all are.
 
Every Bible story is an archetype for the individual and Jesus is no exception. Each of us goes through a process of being born, growing up, and coming the fullness of maturity in our God-given mission.
 
Each of us comes to Earth to carry a message to the rest of humanity. That mission varies for each of us, but the mission always involves helping others, leading them to a deeper connection with God, and making the world a better place.
 
Carrying this message and fulfilling our mission takes lifelong sacrifice that only ends in our deaths. None of us can escape this. We die and are born to the eternal life of the historical legacy we created. This legacy lives after us and continues to spread the message through the people we touched and the works we left behind, whether those works were good or bad.
 
This is the Jesus archetype that applies to every single person on the planet. We all go through this in the cycle of human life. This is the image of God in which we were all created.
 
Each of us is both the manifestation of God and God itself in human form—which is what Christianity says Jesus is/was. This is the divinity we should be worshiping and elevating through the belief in Christ.
 
Christ isn’t the name of a single individual. It’s a state of being not unlike the state described by the word, Buddha. It’s a perfected personification of this archetypal character that represents the individual in our most divine state.
 
So in that sense, Christianity is right and correct and coherent with reality.
 
Most Christians don’t know that this interpretation is in fact canon with Christian historical doctrine. This view has become relegated to the esoteric archives of Christianity, but it’s a valid form of Christian belief supported by many of the tradition’s most venerated church fathers.
 
Unfortunately, most Christians will call you a demonic heretic if you try to explain this to them nowadays. Christians have called me demonic for trying to explain non-dualism to them.
 
To them, placing the human being on the level with God is the essence of Satanism. Most of these people don’t understand their own religion well enough to know that the Abrahamic God was and still is non-dualistic.
 
The whole Abrahamic tradition only makes sense from a non-dualistic point of view. The tradition has too many problems, contradictions, and moral quandaries to work any other way.
 
The Trinity makes sense from a non-dualistic point of view, too.
 
The triangle is an ancient esoteric symbol with multiple meanings in the mystical tradition and this is one of them.
 
The word the Christian world translates as “Holy Spirit” or “Holy Ghost” is taken from the Jewish concept of the Shechina. This is a warm, nurturing, worldly, mother goddess counterpart to the distant authoritarian father godhead portrayed in the Old Testament.
 
The Shechina is seen as living much more closely with humanity, interacting with us more directly, and offering us the more nurturing, loving guidance of God to counterbalance the strict judgment and punishment of the father God.
 
The non-dualistic Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit represents the family triangle of father, mother, and child (represented by the Son). Each of these three offers a face or characterization of God as it manifests in the world (which is what the Christians say the Trinity does).
 
The difference between the non-dualistic Trinity and what most Christians describe is that all three represent humanity, both collectively and individually. None of these realities is separate from us. Each of us IS the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are one and the same with them the same way we’re one and the same with the One, Infinite, Indivisible Holiness of God.
 
This is the essence of non-dualism. The Trinity itself is an archetype for the individual. It can’t be anything else because God is infinite. There is nothing that it is not. There is nothing about us that is not one and the same with God.
 
None of the elements of the Trinity are separate from us. We are each of them and we are the unity of them.
 
Again, this is a canonically valid interpretation with a long tradition in the Christian world. It’s criminal that this tradition has been hidden from Christian believers and they’ve been taught to consider it demonic. This is another example of deliberately hiding the truth to keep people in the dark and lead them astray.
 
Christian believers should be up in arms over this. This interpretation of Christianity could have been used for generations to bridge the gap between Christians and the rest of the world instead of the rest of the world pushing away.
 
Christians could have been using this to find common ground with people and maybe even win them over to Christianity instead of demonizing everyone who might actually have agreed with this. Some of these people might have been able to accept Christianity as their own instead of seeing it as some kind of mental disease based on elitism and paranoid delusion.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.