manifestinghumanity

[manifestinghumanity]

I almost threw away a rock today

I even put it all the way into the trash and realized what I'd done as I was walking away.

I'm going to put the rock back outside. Feeling good about learning from choices today.

[manifestinghumanity]

Every day for almost 5 years

I have felt like I am being violated by an invisible, unwanted presence inside my body and mind. I have felt physically violated every day.

The abusers have not made contact with me since I left their group almost 5 years ago, but it's like they're in my mind, screaming, and in my body, feeling incredibly tense, also screaming, thrashing me about and slapping me in the face.

How can anyone justify doing this to another human being? How can the Spartacist League still exist? They rely completely upon brainwashing and extorting people to survive as an organization. They're an abuse machine. That's all they are, and it actually is criminal.

[manifestinghumanity]

Communists, Cults, Thought Reform, Dissociation, and Spirituality - Part 1

Based on it's title, this might sound like an essay that could have been two different essays instead: "Communists, Cults and Thought Reform" followed by "Dissociation and Spirituality". That would be easier except that in my own experience these phenomena have all been interrelated. And this is something I feel I'm finally ready to talk about: I joined a leftist cult about 7 years ago, and they used thought reform techniques (a.k.a. "brainwashing") to create harmful artifacts in my psyche. Since leaving that group 4 and a half years ago I have developed a variant of dissociative identity disorder, and I've found my spirituality again along the way. I think it's a story worth sharing, and I intend to tell it in parts, taking time to reflect and incorporate information from a range of sources.

tw: trauma, cults, abuse, DID, Soviet Union

my emphasis in bold on quotes

It's been a long road, but I feel like I'm finally beginning to understand what happened to me, why I've been struggling to subsist and maintain healthy routines for so long, and why I so often lament feeling like I'm not myself, not being sure what that even means really, and feeling unable to do anything about it. I suffered in silence for years, reeling in disorientation at first and then struggling to comprehend what I was experiencing, feeling extremely distraught and not understanding why. I really was struggling, I was working out my problems, and I began to engage more and more in processing the pseudo-part in my/our psyche that was put there purposely by abusers to cause harm. About 10 months ago, we reached a breaking point which - thankfully - has been followed by many breakthroughs. 2 months ago, I/we started to admit to ourselves that we're a system and have become a DID system because of trauma caused by joining a cult. And this week we began to read about thought reform, its use by cults, and the psychological impact of being involved with such a group.

So I'm sitting here now with an essay by Dennis Tourish of University of Ulster, North Ireland titled "Ideological Intransigence, Democratic Centralism, and Cultism: A Case Study from the Political Left". Originally published in 1998, it's accessible now on the International Cultic Studies Association website. He states in the abstract to his paper that it "argues that the phenomenon of political cultism is more widespread than is normally assumed. In particular, it focuses on the ideological and organizational dynamics of left-wing groupings that fall within the Trotskyist tradition, and argues that these dynamics predispose such groupings to cultic practices."

Three terms jump out immediately as in need of some definition: cult, thought reform, and Trotskyist.

Tourish lists 3 defining features of cults, for which he cites Langone (1988):

"Members are expected to be excessively zealous and unquestioning in their commitment to the identity and leadership of the group. They must replace their own beliefs and values with those of the group."

"Members are manipulated and exploited, and may give up their education, careers and families to work excessively long hours at group-directed tasks such as selling a quota of candy or books, fund-raising, recruiting and proselytizing."

"Harm or the threat of harm may come to members, their families, and/or society due to inadequate medical care, poor nutrition, psychological and physical abuse, sleep deprivation, criminal activities, and so forth."

Most of that sounds familiar to me. My experience was with a group of people who pretended to follow a democratic process within their organization while systematically lying to their membership through layers of bureaucracy and using organizational power to crush dissent through hive-mind-like unity of action. I read literal stacks of propaganda before joining this group. The common amount a member making $50,000 per year would pay as their monthly sustaining pledge was about $1,000 - unless they worked for the organization, in which case they paid $10 per month. All of the money went to the center in NYC (a building they owned in the historic district of Manhattan), and the local functionaries made so little that they were financially dependent upon other members. And I did in fact disrupt or outright ruin all of my friendships during the period of time that I was around this group of people. I did spend long hours staffing their office and selling their newspaper, and I spent all of my free time reading books or essays that reinforced the big larp I was caught up in. And by golly, they did threaten me! That happened too. And I did suffer psychological abuse. That too.

The type of psychological abuse that this group of people inflicted is called thought reform. Tourish borrows a list of 6 characteristics of thought reform programs from Singer (1987):

"Controlling an individual’s social and psychological environment, especially the person’s time."

"Placing an individual in a position of powerlessness within a high-control authoritarian system."

"Relying usually on a closed system of logic, which permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by executive order."

"Relying on the unsophistication of the person being manipulated (that is, the person is unaware of the process), and pressing him or her to adapt to the environment in increments that are sufficiently minor so that the person does not notice changes."

"Eroding the confidence of a person’s perceptions."

"Manipulating a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences to promote new learning or inhibit undesired previous behavior. Punishments are usually social ones, for example, shunning, social isolation, and humiliation (which are more effective in producing wanted behavior than beatings and death threats, although these do occur)."

Wow. Yes, they did all of these things too. I definitely joined a cult 7 years ago, and they consciously used harmful psychological tactics to make me dissociate so that they could exploit me. It's finally been longer since I left the group than the length of time I was there. All things considered though, the past 7 years have been miserable for me.

Despite having cut ties with this group of people and having zero intention of giving them anything ever again, their likenesses have been relentlessly appearing in our mind as dissociated parts of our psyche, stopping us from earning income and then telling us that it's because we "didn't pay" or "won't pay". At the time of writing, this is an ongoing problem.

I remember picking up this organization's mail in Chicago, and people from all over the country were continuing to send them checks. They were all former members of the group, and the few of them who I met were tongue-in-cheek about their continued support. It's also not uncommon for a former member who they encounter at a public demonstration to scream profanities at them from a distance.

This is - apparently, but not surprisingly - par for the course for a Trotskyist organization. It also corroborates the in-person and online experiences I had in my pre-Trotskyist days, trying to work with Maoists or social democrats. These are the three broad categories I would use to distinguish between leftists in the U.S., other than anarchists and old-school Stalinists (mature social democrats?) and excluding mainstream liberals. Their origins are as follows:

The socialist element in the U.S. Labor movement can be traced back to the Socialist Labor Party, formed in 1876. It was associated with the 1st International Workingman's Association founded by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and others in 1864. That organization ended in 1876 and was replaced by a 2nd International with politics leaning ever more towards trade-union activism as a way to organize around the immediate needs of the working class (viz. succeed as politicians). V. I. Lenin - the most prominent leader of the Russian revolution and de facto leader of the Bolshevik party - rallied his supporters against the social democracy of the 2nd international, vying instead for a seizure of power through armed revolution by a bloc between the Russian workers and peasant farmers. Along the way his group called for and formed a 3rd Communist International, but this organization was taken over by the Stalinist bureaucracy 6 years into the revolution. As a result, every Communist Party (CP) branch in the world was - and still is - thoroughly Stalinist.

The events of 1917-1929 in Russia are still of great historical interest to me, and I'll try to restrain myself from printing too many pixels about this here. A series of dialectical transformations took place that took the air out of Lenin's grand daydream of international worker's democracy, created one of the most oppressive and deadly totalitarian regimes in history, and created a new, estranged type of communist politician. I'll expound on these three points:

After the 1917 insurrections and dissolution of the constituent assembly, Lenin's party kept the workers' councils (Soviets) out of power. Instead of allowing the workers to build their new government using the Soviets, the Bolsheviks autonomously built a massive bureaucratic oligarchy on the model of the previous Tsarist state. They even rehired many of the same administrators from the previous regime. This served the triple purpose of preparing the new government to wage a civil war against the monarchists, enabling a rapid economic shift to "military communism", and insulating Lenin's inner circle from the political pressures of a massive, starving nation with an underdeveloped economy and made up of social classes from two different economic systems. However, it turned out to be one of the biggest fails of the 20th century.

As the new state bureaucracy grew, cliques began to form and a new organizational center in the Russian Communist Party coalesced around Joseph Stalin. This coincided with an economic crisis that saw Lenin himself initiate a u-turn on building a planned economy (the NEP). The turn was toward the rural farmer and the old way of life, and it quickly brought about the formation of powerful capitalist trusts (the NEP-men) as a growth on the financial system. This conservative shift alienated Lenin from his base on the left, the same base of support he would have needed to wage an effective political struggle against the rising Stalin. Instead, Lenin became critically ill, began to have strokes and lose the use of his voice, and died of a 3rd stroke in 1924.

3 years later a bloc of old Bolsheviks rallied around Leon Trotsky to wage a belated left-wing struggle against Stalin. The bloc was too small, and by 1929 the repression machine was in high gear - they were all exiled or murdered. From exile, Trotsky presented a new challenge to Stalin on the international stage. He founded a 4th Communist International, called for new revolutions on the Bolshevik model and political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy, and he criticized Stalin's nationalist detours away from international revolution. Stalinist repression against "Trotskyites" in the U.S. Communist Party drove left-leaning communists out of the CP and into the Socialist Party where they embraced entrist tactics, rallying in opposition to the leadership before leaving to start new organizations.

Other than Maoists, leftist groups in the U.S. tend to be descended from that out-pour of young communist politicians trying to escape the CP. Some stayed in the Socialist Party and became social democrats, while others went into the 4th international to get to the left of Stalin. The link below leads to a chaotic chart showing the history of the U.S. Trotskyist movement, beginning with the Communist Party U.S.A.

Most of these groups underwent a series of organizational splits and burned out like old stars. This occurred internationally too, with the 4th International splitting into the ICFI and UCFI. Today the two most relevant ones are the Democratic Socialists of America and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. The Trotskyists of the fractured FI fizzled out or found their way back to social democracy - except for one group I know of that took a somewhat longer route there instead.

As Cannon's Socialist Workers Party leapt toward uncritical praise for the Cuban revolution in 1959, a group of young Trotskyists in that org waged a faction fight against the leadership, calling themselves the Revolutionary Tendency. That group was eventually expelled and renamed itself Spartacist. They attempted to differentiate themselves from the older Trotskyist political leaders as a genuinely revolutionary pole and proceeded to recruit an international tendency which was eventually named the International Communist League. There was an international power struggle... purges... more power struggles, more purges... and by the time I joined their Chicago branch in 2018 the whole thing had been reduced to a dried out political cult with the old bureaucrats battling the young ones in yet another power struggle.

I recall having a much more optimistic - and naive - view of the ICL back then. In retrospect, exposing myself to those people and what they practice was the worst decision I've ever made in my life. Back in 2018 however, I felt like I had finally found my reason for being alive - to be a communist revolutionary - and my whole future hinged upon me joining this one particular group. I had a sub-conscious feeling of certainty that doing so would absolve me of the guilt of living an otherwise privileged life in capitalist society. The journey between there and here has been extraordinary, to say they least. It's been literal torture, yet I feel that my sight has been cleared and that I've been shown a way to find peace within. That's become my goal - or really I've discovered that it's been my goal all along - and I can celebrate this as a tremendous first step.

[manifestinghumanity]

The Spirit that is in everything

It came before everything, and it has never depended upon anything outside of it because there isn't anything outside of it. Everything is contained within it, and yet it is completely empty. It is beyond fullness, and yet its mere reflection is the greatest fullness, the only, the ultimate reality. It is incomprehensible; beyond perfection, idea, memory, form; and yet none of these have any other source but this One.

[manifestinghumanity]

Hello Tumblr

My name is Ory, and I want to begin writing again. I also want to teach myself to draw and to do other arts and crafts, and I will likely post some of those things here along with my writing. I'm hesitant to use random images others have made, but I'll probably find opportunities to work in things that I care about or want to show others. I want to write relatively long pieces (explainers, autobiographical sketches, opinion, philosophy, stories, etc.) along with songs, poems, diary entries, or short sketches of varying genre.

The genre of my writing will likely incorporate those that I read: mythology, theology, mysticism, philosophy, history, political economy, nature, science, poetry, memoir, recipes, music lyrics, and board game rules. It might start out as something similar to a diary, but I aim to develop and refine the writing I produce through consistent practice.

I'm writing for another reason too: I have already learned a great amount during this life, but I feel that until I manifest my learning into something concrete (like a piece of writing), I won't be able to reflect upon and truly assimilate enough of what I've learned. it's time to write it down and work out all the details. I welcome others to read, meditate on, and respond to my thoughts if they so desire. Continued development through study, composition, conversation, and meditation is the goal. I want that not only for myself, but for everyone. This is a path that can only be chosen. Nobody takes it by accident. Rather, each person who comes to awareness does so by the grace of the Spirit who is in everything. I am writing in self-conscious embodiment of that grace, to help souls prepare for their return into themselves.

I have come alive from within my flesh, and I now recognize myself and others as spiritual beings all having the same essence, deriving from the same source. I believe that we all return to that source together, in perfect truth, peace, and love. At once, we will remember all that has happened, know in advance all that happens, and meditate on all things as every person who ever has or ever could possibly exist, all of us the same person, all at once. We will know ourselves together within the essence of the divine, the image of the One invisible Spirit beyond everything, in everything, and within which everything is contained.

Returning my thoughts to the world and its emergent global culture, I see that it is a culture alien, even hostile, to the spirit of humanity. It is a mature form of what is now called "western culture", a culture derived from chaos and blindness, error and ignorance. It is a snare and a cudgel used to trap the light of humanity and beat it down into the depths of the underworld. And yet, it is the culture that those in the "developed" world have been raised on, and which those in the "developing" world have had stuffed down their throats.

Reality is constructed. It is only a representation of being, since absolute being is beyond our bodies' abilities to mediate into perception or understanding. By the time anyone has developed their intellect enough to question the reality and the culture they've been given, they've already absorbed and assimilated it. Seeing that the culture and the concept of reality one has been given are wrong, one is faced with the task of unlearning and replacing them. It would be wrong to go back to sleep, knowing that one is betraying oneself, becoming alien to oneself. Awareness begets change, and one must change for the better if one is to remain human. To change for the worse is to give up one's humanity, and to knowingly do this is the death of the soul.

I want everyone to be free from the conditioned thinking that has been forced upon all of us. I believe that humans can work together to free ourselves from error, pain, anguish, hate, and all forms of suffering and confusion by overcoming alienation (otherness). We do that by recognizing our same essence within others and that essence as truth, by loving, giving up dominion over objects, refusing to dominate people, and letting go of our egos. When you allow your self (your "I") to shrink, it loses its content and you become a mere, empty "I". When you fill yourself again with content, you do so knowing who you are, and you are filled by the Spirit, filled with its goodness and knowing your truest self.