Messing with Your Internal Compass

Comment now » // March 5th, 2010

From Chapter Three: The Technology of Coercion
Cult, A Love Story

One of Limori’s theoretical premises was that we were each developing our spiritual “muscle”. This was one reason given for the need for the weekly meetings and weekend or weeklong spiritual retreats that we attended over the next few years. She told us that we were all spiritual beings and in order to best serve God we needed to strengthen the spiritual skills that we had. We needed to learn how to be in tune with God via psychic communication – “clairaudience”, clairvoyance and the like.

We were told that each of us had these natural spiritual abilities and developing them was a simply a matter of practice and diligence. Unlike sports or music or dance, possessing talent and/or natural ability were not important. We were all capable, she said, of communicating with our higher selves, our guides and, it was implied, God. For every issue (an argument with a co-worker, a recalcitrant child, a decision between a blue dress and a red one) we were invited to “tune in” to see what spirit had to say.

However, as with every authoritarian relationship, because Limori was the teacher, she had the ultimate say about whether the answers an individual received while tuning in were accurate or clear. Clarity was the ultimate goal for everyone of us. Limori herself was the “clearest” of all and we aspired to reach her level of clarity by defeating our ego positions and meditating as much as possible.

But here I had my first experience of a double bind. For while Limori’s approach to teaching us seemed to empower us, it actually served to do the opposite. We were taught that our hearts, the centre of ourselves, always knew The Truth. This mantra was repeated over and over . . . and over again. “Trust your heart,” we were told, “it always knows The Truth.” However, another contradictory mantra was also drilled into us, from the earliest days. “If what your heart knows to be true contradicts what Limori says, then your heart is wrong.”

So, always trust your heart, it is always right, but also be willing to dismiss it because it can be wrong.

This was a means of control cleverly disguised as a spiritual principle and it was incredibly effective. We recited it to each other in Limori’s absence, “always trust your heart”, for it seemed so empowering. The phrase became an integral part of our loaded language (another of Robert J. Lifton’s Criteria for Thought Reform). But inevitably decisions that we made, that felt right for someone when they “tuned into their hearts” could be overthrown by a mere glance from the ultimate authority on The Truth, the clearest one of all, Limori.

Under the guise of learning to trust ourselves and develop our relationship with God, we were actually learning the opposite, to trust no one, except Limori, least of all ourselves. She gradually became the ultimate authority we all looked to for confirmation of our every feeling, thought or spiritual message.

Double binds cause their own unique sensation in my body. I feel as though my brain has slipped a cog. All thought leaves my head and I feel slightly paralyzed, as though time has just stopped. Double binds contradict logic. My body knows this and clearly tells me so, while my brain remains wrapped in knots, trying to figure things out.

Of course, when I was learning to accept double binds as the rule of law in Limori’s group, I knew none of this, but my body did. It never stopped telling me that what I was learning didn’t make sense. However, the sinister, dangerous beauty of authoritarian rule is that at the same time that Limori was manipulating me, she was teaching me to ignore any signals from my body or mind that would contradict her position of power. The analogy I use is that gurus teach us to build a dependence on compass points that are outside ourselves. We become completely dependent on these external references because we are simultaneously being taught that our internal compass is faulty.

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For more on this topic please see Cult, A Love Story.