From: Integral Spiritual Practice
[mailto:integralpract...@e.evolvingwisdom.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 12:01 PM
To: r...@searchsummit.com
Subject: Are you in a cult?
Dear Rick,
Are you in a cult?
Here's the short answer: "You bet." And, worse, it's most likely an
invisible cult!
Okay, you're probably not a member of "a new religious movement or other
group whose beliefs or practices are considered abnormal or bizarre by the
larger society".
But you're almost certainly a member in good standing of the Public Cult of
the World, whose beliefs and practices are bizarre and abnormal by any
objective healthy standard. After all, as the Dalai Lama has pointed out, in
the Cult of the World you:
"...sacrifice your health in order to make money. Then you sacrifice money
to recuperate your health. Then you are so anxious about the future that you
don't enjoy the present: the result being that you do not live in the
present or the future; you live as if you are never going to die, and then
you die having never really lived."
It's a totally crazy way to live, when you look directly at it! But among us
members of the ubiquitous and invisible Cult, it seems the natural order of
things, unremarkable and inevitable. The Cult reinforces and conceals a
great many other unwritten rules, invisible beliefs and unexamined
assumptions too. (One example: the Cult inculcates you day and night with
the message that you're a separate individual who must compete to "succeed"
and build up a big, impressive ego-domain, or otherwise you're a "failure".)
Some of the Cult's beliefs may be crazy (and make you miserable) but as soon
as you start questioning them, you're the one who's risking madness. After
all, you'd be departing from the Public Cult of the World's "consensus
reality" (which is what defines insanity).
One of the strictest rules of the Cult is the taboo against acknowledging
that the Cult even exists. Thus, every day while you're working hard and
focusing intelligently on your priorities, you're also being lulled back
into being oblivious to the Cult and its bondage.
You're being drawn into what consciousness researcher Charles Tart memorably
dubbed "the Consensus Trance". He described it as "a state of partly
suspended animation, of stupor, of inability to function at [y]our maximum
level... [dominated by] automatic and conditioned patterns of perception,
thinking, feeling and behaving..."
Is there any escape from the Cult? Sure, but here's the paradox: to leave
the Cult you'll have to risk being seen as...joining a cult! The official
Public Cult of the World won't provide any support if you want to wake up
from the consensus trance. And if you find someone who has in some sense
awakened and who offers to help you wake up, or if you band together with
others for mutual support in waking up from the trance so you can leave the
Cult....now that's when your family might start to ask "Hey, have you joined
a cult"?
Maddeningly, your family (and critics) will probably be right! Most small
groups, however healthy and intelligent their premises might be, readily
develop "groupthink" dynamics that can easily become unhealthy, and even
dangerously "cultic".
And yet without support and teaching, you're just going to be sucked back
into the consensus trance and the mediocrity of the Public Cult of the
World.
What to do?
Well, you can recognize that the consensus trance and the "programming" of
the Cult is everywhere and that going in and out of trance is a constant,
on-going process. As you do, it will become obvious that waking up from the
trance needs to happen again and again, in many little moments of choice.
This is what I mean by "practice" --- that choice to live deliberately, to
embrace a way of life that's fully alive, always evolving, spontaneously
in-the-moment, self-aware, humorous and free. (This is the core of the
"Integral Spiritual Practice
<http://click.e.evolvingwisdom.com/?qs=25c601ea8e0de1d61695affe716d537855c77
379117f20a921a45c29a6b5363e05cb13fd718cfdc9> " I teach.)
>From this perspective, yes, you're in the big Cult, the one that keeps
re-hypnotizing you back into the consensus trance. The point is this: you
can "leave the cult" now --- in this very moment. May you do so, and may you
keep leaving it, by waking up! Again and again and again --- every day, for
the rest of your life.
To your practice and awakening and freedom,
Terry
P.S. If you'd like to comment on this blog you can do so here
<http://click.e.evolvingwisdom.com/?qs=25c601ea8e0de1d6d814fa7ddb98dce1b67dc
d1b067775bab011d9905329524d43cec6b0fb51020d> .
<http://click.e.evolvingwisdom.com/open.aspx?ffcb10-fe9a16757767047574-fdf61
6717462027f7c117777-fea315707364077f75-fecb167076670c79-fe2617727664027a701c
77-ff981675&d=40026>
