Personal Meditation No. 147

“Your beliefs are your actions. What you say is just what you think.”

Embrace the Within

My life is a long line of involvement in cults. But first I will have to clear up my terminology and distinguish my denotation from the negative connotation surrounding the term cult. When I talk about cults I mean the OED definition of “a particular form or system of religious worship or veneration, esp. as expressed in ceremony or ritual directed towards a specified figure or object”. This system of worship does not have to be what most folks would typically refer to as church BUT it does have to involve ceremony and ritual as all effective cults do. I do not put a connotation to whether what cults and cultists do as negative or positive anymore. I think there is room for ritual and ceremony in every person’s life and these rituals and ceremonies form the systems by which people organize their lives. The connotation of the term is not lost on me and I do not argue with cultists about their membership in cults anymore. Arguing to a cult member that they are involved in cult behavior does not change their cultist behavior. And you can’t “deprogram” cult behavior in someone that wants to voluntarily embrace the rituals and ceremonies of their cult system. Remember that the person ultimately responsible for changing their behavior is that person. No one else is going to make them change. So I figured I would talk about my life and its long line of cult affiliations.

So, naturally, my introduction to cultism began religiously as a young member of the church my parents attended. This cult wasn’t so demanding of my time as it only incorporated most of my Sunday and an evening during the week. I put a lot more effort into it than that amount of time as the beliefs of that system were ever present in my mind. The next cult that influenced my life was Americanism. As a child I was introduced to the ideas of how important it was to be patriotic and be a good American and how those values were under attack from so many evil actors in the world. This cult was quite demanding and took up a lot of my weekdays for months out of the year. The next cult I became a member of was the Boy Scouts of America. This cult was not as demanding of my time as it only took up weekly meetings to start and then, as I grew older, some of my weekends and a week of summer. What the Boy Scouts of America did was to help integrate the two earlier cults of church and state into one cohesive message of service. What I did begin to see during this time in the BSA was that not everyone I met in this cult was so entrenched into the church cult but the majority were into the Americanism cult.

Those three cults influenced a lot of my early life. I spent a good amount of my life bouncing back and forth from cult meeting to cult meeting and getting those beliefs reinforced through all the ceremony and ritual of each. I am still a member of these cults in some way. A lot of who I am was shaped by those cult influences. It led to my susceptibility to looking to these cults as an answer to the problems I would see in the world around me. Surely one of these belief systems gave a solid answer to solving all of life’s problems. Seriously, how could so many people believe in each of these cults and one of them not bring about a better tomorrow?

So, of course, the answers were somewhere inside Christianity or American patriotism. Why would the answers be anywhere else? Well, I spent a lot of my early days struggling with those questions, rebelling against those cults, and, finally, accepting the cults for what they were, systems of thought. And that is where I am today. An adult that looks back on how the cults of my early days influenced the way I became the adult I am today.

And no one ever argued me out of my beliefs. No one ever “deprogrammed” me. I didn’t have to take a red or blue pill. For me it took understanding archetypes and influence. BUT everyone’s journey is different and everyone gets to choose to be a member of whatever cult they want to join. I don’t force anyone to join my cults. I ask them and allow them to leave as well. When you make cult membership mandatory, when you have to believe like everyone else, then you take away the importance of choice and voluntary membership. You take away the uniqueness and specialness of being a member. And effective cults are selective in their membership. That selective nature is what makes them even more unique and special.

So, embrace the cults that make you what you are today. Embrace whatever ceremonies and rituals get you through life and this season. It is your life and your choice what systems influence your life. Make the most of those choices.

Have the day you want. I hope you find whatever you’re looking for.

#ThinkBetter #BeBetter #NoGodsNoMasters #MyBodyMyChoice #MakeYourselfGreatAgain