The Christmas Class from Hell

After one particular Christmas Class in NY, Sharon was at our "Impressions Class" where we were all required to stand up and say something transcendent about what we had experienced.

She was talking about the evening and at one point stopped and asked "Who made the guacamole?"

Time stopped. I couldn't breathe. I had made it and I was scared out of my mind to admit it because her serious tone of voice made me believe that she had gotten food poisoning from it or something equally horrendous and I was about to be tarred and feathered. I said nothing. The room was that kind of silent where people say you could hear a pin drop. I was internally freaking out. No one said anything. She said again, more loudly: "I asked who made the guacamole?" I had no choice. Trembling, I got to my feet bracing myself against her wrath. Sharon said: "That was the best guacamole I have ever eaten in my life."

And that was always the problem, you never knew what might happen. You could stand up to say something totally innocuous and all of a sudden fifty people who you though were your dear "essence" friends were turning on you and ripping you to shreds. You could stand up to say something deeply emotional and troubling to you and it would be dismissed with a wave of her hand and you would be told to sit down and shut up. A simple question such as "Who made the guacamole?" could rip your insides to shreds. You could stand up excitedly to say you just got the job of your dreams and Sharon would tell you that it was the wrong profession for you and you should really consider waitressing or house cleaning for awhile.

Yes, at one point I was told to forget about Architecture and become a waitress.

One year, after I had been in Boston for awhile, the topic of the Christmas Class came up and J said that I should lead it. I immediately said that I was not interested in the job, had too many other pressing issues in my life at the moment, I was not qualified, did not want to, etc. I already had one foot out of the door and maybe they sensed this and thought that a major responsibility would draw me closer into the fold.  J listened quietly to all of my objections and then said very simply: "Well, now that you have expressed your "NO", you will now be able to say "YES".  I continued to argue but it didn't get me anywhere. Against all my objections and better instincts, I was leading the Christmas Class.

Leading the Christmas Class was one of the "honors" that people aspired to and vied with each other for. I had absolutely no interest in it. When I had been in NY, I had lead the "cooking" committee for a number of years and also headed up cooking for various "classes outside of class" as well as catering private parties for Sharon. I became adept at planning and cooking a sit down dinner for 100 people without the use of a kitchen. Of course, after I stopped doing it, a friend lead the cooking for a "class outside of class".  The meal was horrible and Sharon loved it so much that my friend got an all-expense paid trip to Italy. You just could never tell what would lead to what; it was continually confusing. (The story of my cooking adventures will come later).

The Christmas Class that I headed in Boston, I have come to fondly refer to as the "Christmas Class from Hell". Since I had been in Boston, I had only helped with decorations and that was really the only area that I knew even slightly well aside from cooking. When I arrived in Boston, I never told anyone that I could cook because I didn't want to go throughout that all again and besides, there was already a dedicated "chef" in Boston and I had no interest in engaging in a competition with anyone. Usually the various areas of responsibility for the CC (Christmas Class) were headed by people with a degree of expertise in each area: Food, Decorations, Clean-up, Serving, Presentations, Teacher's Gifts, etc. One of the principles of school was that you really didn't need to know anything at all about anything to lead a group, you just needed to know the ideas of the work and how to apply them and that could get you through anything.

This CC was different from the very beginning. Previously, the "older" students would be in charge of the preparations and the "younger students" would be invited as quests. This time, the idea was that the "younger students" would be in charge of each of the areas and there would be an "older" student assigned to assist them. Lists were drawn up. I was to supervise the ten or twelve "older" students who were advising and working with a group of "younger students" in each area of the preparations. The work commenced.

As I said in a previous post, I am going to continue to call the man who runs the school in Boston Mr. Manchurian Candidate (Mr. MC for short). For some reason, Mr. MC was visibly absent during this whole preparation time for the Christmas Class. Often, he would vanish completely for a period of several months and people might say that he was ill. I thought sometimes that he was sick - sick of school and all of the pretense. The definition of pretense is "an attempt to make something that is not the case appear true". That has got to be quite difficult to do and it must take an incredible emotional toll on one's psyche. In any case, Mr. MC was not around and the "younger" teachers were in charge.

For the first week or so, I would call some of the younger teachers on a daily basis to keep them abreast of the progress that was being made on the party preparations and ask any questions I might have. It was what I would have been expected to do in NY. After leaving lots of messages and getting absolutely no response from anyone, I stopped trying to stay in touch because they clearly didn't care at all what was happening and I assumed that they just didn't want the responsibility (neither did I but that's beside the point.)

What do I remember about those frenzied weeks between Thanksgiving and the Christmas Class? Not a whole lot. I remember that it snowed a lot that winter. I remember driving through a blizzard up Route 3 because I was expected to be at the "space" at all the times that people would be working there on the preparations. I remember being at work (I was a real estate appraiser at the time - another job that school had "suggested") - driving around in the snow and fielding phone calls from the younger students with all kinds of questions.

There were two lists of all the people in school with their contact information. One list for the younger class and one list for the older class. It was "TOP SECRET" and I was the only one allowed to have this valuable information. So, if a call had to go out to everyone (which happened frequently), I was the only one who could do it because no one else could be trusted with the "list". Hence, I really didn't have a lot of help and I was spending hours and hours on the phone. The older students who were supposed to be in charge of the various areas made themselves very scarce and I wished I could do the same. I did not get a lot of help from anyone.

We got through the decorations with relatively little trouble except for one incident where something on a shelf in one of the bathrooms fell and hit someone on the head. The word then came down that everything had to be nailed securely to the walls so that would not happen again. We nailed everything to the walls. Everyone went about their business and as I did not really "report" to my superiors, no one really reported to me. I went around and asked questions and poked around to make sure everything was on schedule.

One of the younger students had an idea to make some orbs out of rope lights to suspend from the ceiling. I allowed (?) her to work on it for quite awhile because she was very excited about trying to make it work and I felt like an indulgent parent. I really hadn't known any of the younger students at all previous to these preparations and I am notoriously bad at remembering names and faces but I did get to know some of them.

I remember being at the "space" for all the work sessions. I really had experience in Boston only with the decorations and that part of it went fairly smoothly although I do remember having to ask that the bathrooms be redone several times. The people who were doing the "presentations" part of the evening were professional musicians. I felt pretty confident that what they were doing was good. I could hear the rehearsals and it sounded fine to me. I tried to stay away from the food preparations as that was also being run by a professional and I only stuck my nose in once or twice to make sure they were on schedule. We were trying something new - having round cafe tables instead of the huge tables for sit down dinners that we frequently did. Doing something new is always dangerous...

Decorating the "teacher's office" was something I had no experience with at all. There was a painted mural on the wall which had been copied from a fresco at Pompeii. Someone mentioned that K had always done the decorations for the teacher's so I called her up and asked if she could help. I also added some things because I had extensive experience with the various preferences of the teachers from New York. Some people wondered how I possibly knew those things (it was a secret that I was from New York).

The night of the party came and it was all a blur to me. It was the usual. Usually Sharon was outrageously late and a dinner that had been planned for 10 pm might not happen until 2 am. Everything was always at the whim of Sharon: when she arrived, what she did, what she ate and drank, who she brought with her from New York, what time she left, what she said (she frequently addressed the whole group)...

I remember that during the presentations, one of the younger students came over to me and said that she though she had seen Sharon across the room complaining or unhappy about something. I told her that everything was going great and not to worry.

So, the class came and went and then we had the "impressions class" several days later. It started out as usual. Someone got up and talked about the party in glowing terms and spoke about how much they had learned from it and how wonderful it had been. Another person then got up and spoke about their remarkable experience and how moving and meaningful the entire evening and the preparations had been. A third person and then a fourth continued to rave about the magnificent evening and what a deep and profound time they had. Each comment was more lavish than the last.

Then Mr. MC said: "Well, let me tell you what Sharon thought of the evening". He then went on to tell us that she had said that it was very simply one on the most awful evenings she had ever had and that EVERYTHING about it was bad and there was not even one redeeming moment.

Of course, then, the rest of the group, unthinking sheep, just jumping on the bandwagon and going whatever the way the wind was blowing, all started to stand up and say how they had the feeling that everything was "off", that nothing was right, that the music wasn't good and the food and the presentations had been awful, and on and on. They also all said that they had known all along that everything was going wrong. So then, they each had to atone for the fact that they said nothing, remained silent and did noting to help. From that point on, no one had anything good to say about the evening because they all had to appear to agree with Sharon in order to appear to be "good students". 

I was sitting there scared out of my mind. If the whole evening was a miserable failure and I was the one who was overseeing it, I was wholly responsible for everything going wrong. I had no idea how it went wrong and I didn't really understand what had happened and I didn't know what to say. I had to stand up and say something. At the very end I stood up. I had prepared myself to take full responsibility for the whole fiasco - what else could I do under the circumstances? After all, it was entirely my fault and I needed to take the blame for everything. I started to make my little speech and I was stopped by K who said that I had done nothing wrong and as a matter of fact, I was the only person who had done anything correctly because I had asked for help. I was floored. Here I was, standing there trying to take the blame for everything. It was made quite clear to us that everyone was to blame except for me. Such a strange twist. Everyone comes out smelling like shit and I am the only one smelling like a rose. 

The people who took the worst beating of all were the "younger teachers" who had supposed to have been keeping an eye on things and had been totally absent. They were told that they needed to apologize to all of us and to Sharon for their total incompetence and lack of attention to the party. I remember the following class that all the younger teachers stood up and apologized to us for their shortcomings. I was particularly moved by J who was having a hard time and as she was talking to us, was constantly hitting herself. Her fist pounding into her leg over and over again as she spoke, berating herself, flagellating herself in front of all of us. It was quite pathetic because she really had nothing to be sorry about but was she just doing Sharon's bidding as they all were. They were all require to stand up in front of both classes and apologize for their egregious sins. Does this sound a bit twisted?

There was one other thing that I remembered about that night. Something was wrong with Sharon's food. I had been cooking for Sharon for years (after the guacamole incident) and she was always happy with my food. The question was asked about who was specifically responsible for this. I can't remember now exactly what the problem had been but at the time I was uncertain if it had been my fault or not and if I should stand up and take responsibility. I didn't but I worried about it constantly.

A few days later, I went into a store and came back outside and was wondering why there was smoke coming out of the exhaust of my car. I then realized that I had locked my keys in my car with the engine running. I knew it was because I was obsessively trying to figure out if I was responsible for the food problem or not. I couldn't think about anything else. My mind was concentrated on only one thing to the exclusion of everything else. I was horrified that I had so lost control of my mind. I felt so guilty for something that I didn't know if I even had done or not. As I sat in the cold waiting for Triple A to come let me into my car, I decided to forget about the whole thing and put it out of my mind. Easier said than done but that decision lifted some of the fog that I had been in for so long.

I also remember leaving the impressions class that night. The "younger students" were having an impressions class after ours and they were all lined up in the hall watching us leave. What could I say to them about the horror that Mr. MC was about to inflict upon them? Even though I left "smelling like a rose", I felt to horribly guilty for everything that had happened. And what actually had happened? Was the party really that bad or was it just time for Sharon to vent her venom on all of us?

The following year, there was no Christmas Class in Boston. We all went to New York. It was nice to see many of my old friends from New York. That was to be my last Christmas Class. By the following summer, I was gone.

Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity.
But silence is impossible.
Silence screams.
Silence is a message,
just as doing nothing is an act.

Let who you are ring out and resonate
in every word and every deed.
Yes, become who you are.
There's no sidestepping your own being
or your own responsibility.

What you do is who you are.
You are your own comeuppance.
You become your own message.

You are the message.

prison writings - my life is my sun dance - leonard peltier

 

Requiem for Whistle Blowers

(Thank you to The Gentle Soul's Revolution for mentioning Greg Jemsek's blog Quiet Horizon from which I have reprinted this article. I highly recommend the rest of his blog as well but this strikes very close to home because I am a whistle blower.)

Remember the first time you did something you weren’t supposed to do as a kid, knew it was wrong, and were scared about the consequences?  If you remember that, you probably also remember that your first thought immediately afterwards was probably something like “How can I make sure nobody finds out about this?”  

It’s a fact of life that we all make mistakes.  It’s also a fact of life that our fear of facing up to our mistakes frequently leads us to making another, more serious mistake:  that of covering up our actions, even though doing so may bring considerable harm to others.  If, in spite of our mistakes, we instead make the effort to make things right, we drop into a universal narrative of reparation:  one that transcends culture, nation, race, or gender.  A narrative that doesn't hide mistakes, but faces them. Staying on the winning side of this narrative is the inspiration behind the vast majority of music, literature, and film we take refuge in to remind ourselves of how high we can soar, how low we can sink, and what we need to consider if we're to sustain our courage during what could be a long journey.  Whistle blowers are one way people are forced to face the mistakes they have made whether they want to or not:  and, at the same time, are given the opportunity to participate in the narrative of reparation. 

That's why most people who heard about Scott Proudy's decision to release his videofile of Mitt Romney's "47%" comments during the recent electoral cycle immediately knew it was important.  Their assessment would have been confirmed once they learned about  Scott Prouty’s conversation with himself in the middle of the night....the one in which he looked in the mirror and recognized he’d see himself as a coward if he didn’t release and later acknowledge this videofile.   Similarly, people old enough to have lived through the VietNam war knew instantly how critical Daniel Ellsberg’s  publication of the Pentagon Papers was in unpacking the hypocrisy of the American government in that war.  We all recognize the importance of such events because we know that if our society is to remain accountable,  how it operates when noboby is looking matters.  We also know that the nastier side of our nature usually requires intervention from outside if destructive behavior is to be stopped.  

So it's unsurprising that the majority of people recognize the importance of a whistle blowing event  - regardless of whether they agree with the whistle blower or not.  The problem that emerges then is that despite this recognition, people also know that our societal institutions are more threatened  by the act of whistle blowing than they are welcoming towards it.  In addition, they suspect - rightly, usually -  that government, corporations, religions, and even the media are also asking themselves   How can I make sure nobody finds out about this? (whatever their "this" is) 

The herculean efforts institutions and individuals make to hide wrong doing reflects three aspects of fear that are important to understand if we are to collectively reverse our pendulum swing towards hyper-individualism back towards a more communitarian perspective.  The first understanding  is that  fear grows stronger in the dark.  The second is that hidden fear eventually strangles conscience.  The third is that both of these factors sabotage community.

This becomes clearer when considering the fear of a whistle blower next to the fear of a wrong-doer.  The fear a whistle blower faces - having his own life and those of loved ones ruined or ended by standing up to an injustice - is a “moment of truth” fear.  It is nerve-wracking, sleepless-night-inducing, riven-with-anxiety fear.  What will I do with what I now know?  How will the larger community I'm a part of respond?  It’s a fear perfectly capable of swallowing a person up in one big gulp.   

As de-stabilizing as whistle blower fear is, it’s a vision of health compared to the fear of those in power.  Why?  Because if a person desperately seeks to remain invisible (the CEOs of tobacco companies before being outed by Jeffrey Wigand) or fervently defends himself with psychopathic bluster  (Dick Cheney on the virtues of going to war in Iraq), he is either losing or has already lost his battle with fear. He may not think so because outwardly it may look as though he has successfuly pummelled his fear into submission.  So much so that he may not even feel much fear anymore:  he may have heart attacks instead, or just be numb to all his emotions.   But this pyrrhic victory  points to that fact that access to his own conscience, and access to a wider community, has been terribly eroded:  sometimes to a point of no return.  Despite this - as Hannah Arendt brilliantly pointed out in her groundbreaking studies on the "banality of evil" -  a person whose conscience and connection to a wider community has been eroded this way still looks “normal” to folks on the outside.  He is often quite "successful" in terms of traditional definitions of that word.  But behind all of this, he likely lives in dread of the kind of fear a whistle blower experiences.  He has no real confidence in his capacity to still be standing at the end of facing such fear, and insufficient courage to find out.  

All of which means that society’s collective concern about the ability of our institutions to make decisions that reflect the common good - including decisions that protect and encourage whistle blowing when something is wrong - is well-placed.  In fact, we’ve structured many of our institutions in such a way that “getting to the top” is usually easier for isolated people without a functioning conscience (studies of the increasing number of pscyhopaths heading up corporations seem to confirm this). 

But changing the course of a meta-narrative always takes time and persistence.  We swing from agony to ecstasy as we do so in part because we can feel fear, and because we impel ourselves to find ways to deal with it.  At our best we keep pinching ourselves out of the trances we fall into despite our best intentions, picking ourselves up off the floor and turning back to our conscience again and again for guidance.  

The way Scott Prouty, Daniel Ellsberg and a whole historical string of whistle blowers would want us to do. 

None Of Us Are Free - If You Don't Say It's Wrong Then That Says It's Right

listen here:

None Of Us Are Free

Solomon Burke and The Blind Boys of Alabama

Well you better listen my sister's and brothers

'Cause if you do you can hear

There are voices still calling across the years

And they're all crying across the ocean, and they're cryin' across the land

And they will till we all come to understand

None of us are free, none of us are free

None of us are free, if one of us are chained

None of us are free

And there are people still in darkness, and they just can't see the light

If you don't say it's wrong then that says it right

We got try to feel for each other, let our brother's know that we care

Got to get the message, send it out loud and clear

None of us are free, none of us are free

None of us are free, if one of us are chained

None of us are free

It's a simple truth we all need, just to hear and to see

None of us are free, one of us is chained, none of us are free

Now I swear your salvation isn't too hard too find

None of us can find it on our own

We've got to join together in spirit, heart and mind

So that every soul who's suffering will know they're not alone

None of us are free, none of us are free

None of us are free, if one of us are chained

None of us are free

If you just look around you, your gonna see what I say

'Cause the world is getting smaller each passing day

Now it's time to start making changes, and it's time for us all to realize

That the truth is shining bright right before our eyes

None of us are free, none of us are free

None of us are free, if one of us are chained

None of us are free

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN 

SOMEONE GUIDED BY PRINCIPLE AND 

SOMEONE GUIDED BY BIAS:

A PERSON WHO IS GUIDED BY 

PRINCIPLE WILL STAND UP TO HIS ALLIES 

AND SIDE WITH HIS "OPPONENTS" 

IF TRUTH AND MORALITY DICTATE IT.

A PERSON WHO IS DRIVEN BY BIAS

 WILL GO TO WAR AGAINST REALITY

 IN ORDER TO DEFEND THE IDENTITY 

OF THE HERD.

Napkins

Every once in awhile a strange funny little story pops into my head that sums it all up. I was folding the napkins and putting them away the other day. Napkins.

It was one of the early years of Christmas class preparations in New York. We were told that there were more people and we needed new napkins. We were each to make one new napkin. We were given very specific instructions about how the napkin was to be made. The fabric was to be durable, not flimsy and should be flowery. Not like a light Liberty of London small patterned fabric but more like a sturdy French Provençal fabric. The example that was given was Pierre Deux, the classic French country fabric and "antique" store on Bleecker Street. I was familiar with the store and their fabric which was very pricey. I found something similar at P and S, the discount fabric store below the old space on Broadway.

The other very specific direction that was given was that the napkin was to be 18"x18" square. I was a good sewer and I made my napkin and brought it in at the required time. 

The following class, there was a somber mood and one of the teachers got up (I forget who) and started lashing into us about the napkins. They had measured them and they were not all precisely 18"x18".  Some of them were 17-1/2"!!! I knew that my napkin was the required 18"x18" so I was not worried. The teacher was indignant: all the napkins had to be re-done! I thought I would be exempt since mine was correct but there was no distinction being made between those people who had done them correctly and those who had not. I wanted to search through the pile of napkins and pull mine out to show that it was correct. No such luck. I was guilty along with everyone else. We were all made to feel ashamed and inferior and wrong. Over a fucking napkin!!!!

Happy New Year 2015

I am so grateful to be free, whole and alive this New Years Eve...

This evening, I thought back to one of the worst New Year's Eves I can remember. That year, New Year's Eve was on a Sunday evening and it had been a CR weekend. I believe that we had been at the house in Mahopac that weekend before we moved to Bethel, Connecticut and then on to Pawling. My best friend was dating someone in school at the time and had been in love with the man for years. He had picked New Year's Eve to tell her that he wanted to break up with her which was an unbearably cruel thing to do. I think that the story was that he was unhappy and Sharon had told him to end it as soon as possible. She was heartbroken. Since it was New Year's Eve, no one was driving and we all took MetroNorth back to the city. That particular weekend, I spent the whole train ride back to NY sitting with my friend who had been sobbing hysterically for hours. I remember getting off the train at Grand Central feeling totally disoriented and everything seemed to be starkly in black and white.

I always felt broken after a CR weekend. All I ever wanted to do after one of those weekends was to go home, order in Chinese food and sleep for about a month. I remember that for the first year that I went to CR, I threw up every weekend. Nerves, stress, no sleep, bad food, too much intense physical labor, too much intense emotional and psychological pressure. You would have thought that I would realize that my body was trying to tell me something. No, I was actually happy the first weekend that I didn't throw up. I felt that I must have passed some sort of test and was now a better and more evolved person. So many self delusions...

Because New Years Eve was on a Sunday that year and given my own feelings, I am sure everyone just wanted to go home to bed as badly as I did.  D felt that we should all promise to go out to a New Year's Eve party that night. Why? To prove that "school" wasn't getting in the way of our lives? One more thing to do at the end of an impossibly long string of things to do? I got home and I decided that since I had not been invited to a party, I would go to Times Square to fulfill my part of the promise. I went out and started to walk there but I got half way there and realized the foolishness of the situation and turned around and went home to bed. In 48 years of living in NY, I never once went to Times Square on New Year's Eve and I have never had the urge to do so. I hate crowds. The possibility for violence once you are immeshed in a such large crowd seems very tangible to me. There are certain things that it is better to stay away from.

I feel an increased awareness of that tonight as I write this:  There are certain things that it is better to stay away from. If I knew then what I know now... I am, however, convinced that the experience of going through school (and coming out on the other side vaguely intact) was necessary for me to be where I am and who I am now. I certainly feel that I found my voice in my public opposition to school.  Sharon was right about "if it doesn't kill you, it will make you stronger." I am stronger now than before. I have had enough experiences that I thought might kill me and know better what to stay away from now. Life is too short. Carpe diem.

And a Happy New Year to all.

Whistleblowers Get the WORST Deals

This is reprinted from the very first post on this blog from October of 2013:
(To read the whole story from the beginning, you have to start with the last post...)

This is a very long story but let me start here in the present moment:

Last week, I was the subject of a deposition. One of the questions was: "What is the name of this  cult."

This is the answer to that question:

It has no name. It has many many names. We knew it as "school."

I will not call it "school" here. I will call it the cult because that is what it is. It's time to call a spade a spade.

If you want information about this group, there is plenty of it out there.

Everyone has their own story.

This is MY story.


So, Yes. I did let that word slip: deposition.
FYI: There have been 5 lawsuits filed against me by the cult.
(Whistleblowers get the worst deals...)
I am not at liberty to discuss them here but if you are interested in the public information that is available about these cases, feel free to look:
Justia Leagle  Casetext  NY State Court Reporter  NY State Court Reporter  Justia   or just look up the cases on WebCivilSupreme

Is there LIFE after "school"? (esoteric freedom.com - Chapter 2)

A few months after I first left school, I was in the New England Mobile Book Fair one day and casually glanced at the bulletin board. I saw an ad posted by a woman who identified herself as N asking for someone to share office space with in a nearby town. I wondered if that could that be the N who had left school awhile before me? With trembling hands, I dialed the phone number and said "I don't know if you are the N who was in school with me but if you are, please call me." The phone rang later and it was her. We arranged to meet for coffee and the rest is history. Ten years later she is still one of my dearest friends. It took me some time after I left to call my best friend from New York but eventually we were reunited again and through her, I saw and spoke to many old friends from New York who had also escaped.

Once N and I resumed our friendship, things took off from there. We broke a school rule and we were still alive! I felt emboldened. We started calling other people we knew who had left and gathered a small group together and started talking about our experiences with each other. This sharing with others was the first step for all of us towards healing. We started meeting on Thursday nights at my house for informal conversations. We kept finding new people. Someone would meet someone in a store and talk to them about leaving school and they would. People called other people. We tried to let people know that there were people able and willing to help them on the outside hoping that would lessen the fear of leaving.

Talking with friends who were also outside the influence of school has been one of the most helpful things since I left. I remember listening to a woman explain how she had sat in class and felt like an apostate because she could not understand what Sharon was saying. She kept thinking: “What the hell is she talking about?” How often had I sat there in class and listened to Sharon or someone else speak and think “What the hell are they talking about?”  I sat for many years and thought that many times but I hid my thoughts and I lied about them, I never stood up and asked the question and I never asked the question in private to my friends. We all had to maintain the illusion that not only did we always understand what was going on but that we were there and awake and truly sincerely striving to become like those people who frequently never made any sense to me. It was all hiding and lying because I never stood up and questioned anything and because I internalized it all and only sought their approval and love. I learned how to stuff myself way down deep where no one could find me least of all myself. It was all mechanical and now I was free to share these feelings with others without the fear of reprisals. Knowing that others had felt the same way about helped me feel solidarity with and compassion for so many others.

Of course, there were always dreams. My husband and I still have school dreams and others do as well. I remember walking down a street in Florence some years ago and noticing the thoughts in my mind, I wondered if I would ever get beyond their influence. There is a whole language and culture to school that is outside most of the norms of our society. I still cringe when my husband uses a school word or refers to a school concept. I remember a dream where I was still in my house in New York and people from school came to help me do some work on it. They started digging in the basement and kept going down and down and down, many floors below street level on and on ceaselessly and I started to wonder if I was ever going to get them out. They were so deeply embedded.

My healing has taken many stages and there may still be more places I need to go. In some ways, there is a part of me that will always be entangled with school because it was my life for so many years. It is a part of me but I want that part to be in the light not in the darkness. I do not want to be in fear of school anymore. I don't actually want to live in fear of anything.

That first year out, we decided to have a non-school Christmas party where no one had to do anything! We had a great time and a lot of people came - from both the younger and older classes in Boston and from New York. I did it for a few years until I felt like I didn't have to do it anymore. The Thursday night evenings stopped after awhile as well. I had done a lot of reading of books about cults at that point. We were always passing books back and forth to each other. I took all my school books and donated them to the library book sale. I sold some of the rare ones on eBay. Each step was important. 

The next step was writing about the group on the internet and the next was to tell the truth to my family and friends and the next was this blog.

I had read a number of blogs on the internet written by former members of what is sometimes called "high demand groups" instead of more common nomenclature of "cults". I felt that I needed to write and reach out to others via the internet in a similar way that others had from other groups. I wrote and posted the website www.esotericfreedom.com

Not being much of a computer geek, I found a website named Homestead that was easy to navigate and would allow me to write and post websites easily. Soon after, I received a letter from Eric M Lieberman of the law firm Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky & Lieberman.  I was surprised because Leonard Boudin had been a noted civil liberties attorney and left-wing activist who represented Daniel Ellsberg and Dr. Benjamin Spock among others. A quick search of the internet revealed that Eric Lieberman was actually an attorney that represented Scientology. Homestead immediately caved into their demands and threatened to remove my website.

With the help of a friend from school who was a computer geek, I moved the website to an offshore server where it has been ever since. I also started a now defunct blog at esoteric freedom.blogspot.com. The blog was a great resource for many people. The conversations were interesting and informative. A lot of people left school because of that blog. I was beginning to feel that I was too tied to it and wanted to move on with my life. A friend who had recently left school offered to take it over and I consented, glad to be out of the day-to-day running of a blog. Eventually, my friend wrote and posted a series of "Dossiers" on different people in school. 

One of those persons who had a dossier written about them, sued me to take down the blog. The blog was taken down without my consent and my Blogger account was removed as well and a lot of valuable information was lost. I eventually had five lawsuits started against me that originated from people in school. Thus began over three years (and still counting) of litigation with the cult that is still not finished. It's been a very sleazy and sordid war that is being waged against me and I don't think that they yet understand that I have no intention of backing down. Might does not make right.

Mr. Twitch always told us: "Do not fear to hate the odious." I don't.

Three have now been settled (hopefully) but there are still two that are ongoing. At some point, I will write a history of the litigation against me. It has been a very difficult time for me but I also have some very good friends who have stood beside me, people who continually thank me for being brave enough to stand up against the group and helped them get free of the cult. Also, I now have a dynamite attorney who I am eternally grateful to. I feel no need to stop fighting against them. 

"No one is free until we are all free."

                                        -Martin Luther King, Jr.

You can listen to my new favorite song here:

None of us are Free

Solomon Burke and the Blind Boys of Alabama

esotericfreedom.com (Chapter 1)

The following is an edited version of a piece I first published in 2007 on esotericfreedom.com 

I left school the weekend of July 4, 2005. I missed my "friends" and I felt a bit disoriented, a little sad and lonely but basically I was all right for a long time afterwards. On the whole, I felt as if a great weight had been lifted off my shoulders. It was a relief to leave. I breathed easier than I had in a long time.

At the beginning of December, I received a phone call from K and it was after that phone call that I plunged very deeply into the darkness of depression. For the first time in my life,  I really understood what it might mean to "loose one's mind" and I knew I was in serious trouble. I decided to go into therapy.

When I received the call on that December morning, my first impulse was to think that since it was so close to Christmas she was calling to ask me to come back to school and would tell me how much fun it would it would be to have me first reappear at the Christmas Class. Or perhaps they just needed more help. If I had said the "right" things, the conversation might have gone that way. Even now, Christmas is still a very difficult time of year for me and for many former students. Our lives were taken over so completely at that time of year.

K first told me that she had wanted to make sure that I had not left school because I felt forced into doing so.  I told her that no, actually, I had been wanting to leave for a long time and the situation turned out to be a blessing.

Five months had passed since I had left school. I was shocked to receive her call but something inside of me had been expecting it. I was surprised someone had not called sooner to lure me back. She asked me why I had not called her in all this time.  Didn’t I need any help?  She had been so worried about me.  I replied that I had left school and that the rule, (as it had been told to me so many times), was that when you left school you were a "pariah" and were not to be in contact with people who were still there. She was saying I should have been in touch?  Was she saying that she didn't expect me to be able to survive without their help. Well, how come if she was such a dear "friend" of mine, she had not called me in five months? If she was so concerned about me, why didn’t she call?  I was the one who left, who was the outcast without any friends or family or support. Was she calling now (after five silent months) because she was so concerned about me or because she had been told to call me by Sharon or Mr. MC? I knew the answer. She would not have called me on her own initiative. She was told to call me.  And as usual, I kept silent. I did not ask that question and I did not ask her the real questions that were on my mind. I did not tell her the real answers to her questions. I told her what she wanted to hear. I told her what she expected me to say as a good student.

She asked me how I had been and what was happening with me. I went into great detail about how well everything had been going, how happy I was, how rich and fulfilling my life had become. I was telling her things that were true but I could feel myself embellishing the truth in order to have her think the best of me. I was stretching the truth in order to gain her approval for what I was now doing. Five months later and I was still groveling at their feet. I told her about my painting class and my job.

She even asked me not to tell my husband that she had called and I did not tell him. I was still marching to their orders, doing exactly what they told me even though I was long gone from school and grateful to have left. The promise to not talk about school after you leave is designed to keep you in a place where you are still following their rules and still under their control. It is not a promise you made from yourself of your own free will but it something you are told to promise. After Christmas, my husband received a call at work with similar intent from Mr. MC. Unlike me, he told Mr. MC that he did not want to talk to him and asked him not to call again. When he told me about this call, I confessed to him about the call I had received from K earlier. I felt shattered that I had still followed a school suggestion and had not told him about the call.

What was truly shocking to me was that even though I had left and had no intention of returning, I was still under their power. Their thoughts were still in my head. I was still saying what they wanted me to say and ignoring the real voice inside me. I was still being a good student and (more or less) doing what I was told.

I felt clearly manipulated.  She told me that she stayed in school because the world is a difficult place.  She said that in school: "At least I have my friends and the ideas." Friends? This is not what friendship is about. Our "friends" were those people who stood by and watched while my husband was violently thrown out of school and said nothing and did nothing to help but instead fanned the flames of the fire.  This is not friendship. Mr. MC was his friend for over 20 years and he stood by silently and did not say one word to help him. He watched as he was brutally victimized. He stood by and did not say a word as my husband was abused and had curses thrown at him by Sharon and his other "friends". The worst part for me was that I said nothing as well - partly from shock and partly because I too was so well trained.  My world was being torn apart and I was losing my balance. I am so sorry that I did not stand up for him then.  I have apologized to him and I can only hope that he forgives me.

I asked K if she had known that my daughter was adopted and she said that she had known. It was supposed to have been a secret. No one was supposed to know the truth. I wondered who else had known and kept silent. She had probably known all along. Why didn't she tell me that she knew so I could stop lying to her?  I had longed for so many years for people I could talk to who I didn't have to lie to. Is that real friendship?

I had spent the last six years of my life lying to my family and everyone I know about my daughter. Most importantly, I had lied to my daughter about who she was and where she came from. I had lied to her school and her teachers. I had lied to her pediatrician and all of the other doctors who were trying to help her. I had lied to my step-children. I had lied to all my friends both in school and out. I was so enmeshed in lies I had no idea what I was doing anymore. This was not creative sincerity, it was lying. I was being eaten alive by the lies. The lying took up a tremendous amount of energy. It cost me my relationships with my friends and family because they knew I was lying and did not understand why. I kept up the pretense at every expense.

My daughter is very dark skinned and tans easily. We made up a story that my husbands grandmother was from Mexico to explain her dark complexion. The school asked for a birth certificate. I made up excuse after excuse and never actually gave them one. How could we go on a trip out of the country?  Her passport would state her real place of birth and she could read - what could we do?  Mr. MC suggested that I try to get her a "black market" passport - a fake passport.  I was shocked that he suggested that I break the law to support the lie but I had no idea what else to do. I had no idea how one goes about getting a fake documents. I do not know any forgers. I looked on the internet. Fake passports are not so easy to do after 9/11 and I did not want to start adding more lies. There is a large Mexican population in our city and I actually made my husband go and ask people if they knew where he could get a passport. There was no solution. I begged Sharon to let me tell my daughter the truth.  Finally, she said I could tell her when she was 18 years old. That was not a helpful solution. I was in despair.

I wouldn't trade my daughter for the world. I love her. I know that we were meant for each other. I never really believed when we adopted her that anything could possibly be really wrong with her that a lot of love and good food and tenderness would not make up for. I had no idea that I was to become the mother of a child with special needs. I had no idea what that even meant. I don't think that any parent with a special needs child expects it or understands it. However, if I had not been so busy pretending she was my natural child, I might have read some books on adoption and what to expect.  I might have joined a mothers group where all the children were adopted and had some support for myself and my daughter. I might have joined an organization of mothers with adopted children instead of the insipid suburban mothers group I ended up joining - where all the mothers were in their 20's or 30's and had the the perfect brand new homes and the perfect husband and the perfect children.

It was obvious to me fairly early on that my daughter was different. My sister-in-law kept saying that she was an active child like her son had been and I believed her. There are no manuals for special needs children. We have gone from doctor to doctor, from evaluation to evaluation, from medication to medication, from therapist to therapist, from school to school and I still don't really have much of a clue how to help her. All I want is to be able to give her the best help that I can get for her.  Whatever I do for her will never be enough,  Everyone has a word for her, a diagnosis but they are just words and I don't know anymore what any of them mean.

Special needs, developmental delay, attention deficit, hyperactivity, sensory integration disorder, visual and perceptive processing delays, cognitive processing problems, language processing delay, difficulty focusing and paying attention, impulsiveness, poor visual discrimination, executive functioning disorder, difficulty recognizing social cues - the list goes on and on. I am not pretending or lying about her anymore. 

Mr. T  had always told us in school that things are not what they seem, but that in actuality, 

everything was really the opposite of what it appeared to be. For the 18 years that I was in "school", my life was the opposite of what it appeared to be. My life was an illusion. It was that way ever since I started school.

In reality, it is school that is not what it appears to be. It may very well be the exact opposite. I was forced to go back and question everything. 

Speaking of Mr. T, (the man who I had known for 18 years and had been so instrumental in my divorce from my first husband, the man who had told me so cruelly when I was in utter despair that "you are born alone and you die alone"), the last time I saw him was that final summer in Montana. I was standing near the bridge and I watched him get out of a car. He looked at me in a puzzled manner and turned and said to Mr. MC something like; "I know that I know that woman but I just can't place her. What is her name?" Later, when we were having drinks before dinner and I was chatting with him. I reminded him about our shared history. He said: "Ah, yes, it's coming back to me now." I was horrified. A man who I had basically trusted with my life, who had in fact changed the course of my life in several ways, didn't even remember my name or who I was!!!

No one should have the right to manipulate other peoples lives. But that he didn't even remember was so chilling and so sickening.

That in itself is a good microcosmic look at school. I don't know what the incident was that caused my ex-husband to leave school a number of years later but when I asked him about why he had left, he said to me very simply: "I realized that school did not have my best interests at heart." How simple and how true. I was so happy for him that he finally got there. Too bad that it took many of us so many years to realize that.

Bounded Choice

I am going to start here where I left off the last post with the words: "I am saddest for those who are still lost in that world where you cannot ask any questions and where there are no real answers."

I realized that my husband's being thrown out of school was in actuality, a blessing in disguise. I got home from Montana and left a short message on Robert's answering machine saying that I would not be returning to school and that I would appreciate it if he didn't call me.

Was he actually thrown out or what it just the universe responding to my request for something to change? I realize in retrospect that they had wanted for him to leave and to keep me because, yes, I had some money, and that's what it was really all about. My husband, on the other hand, insists that Sharon threw him out because he failed to recite Gurdjieff's Five Obligolnian Strivings which she always wanted him to do for her. Maybe it was because having had a stroke, he was a risk to keep around or maybe it was really was because of the children's play that he had "inadequately" prepared. It doesn't really matter now because now we are free.

The Crux of the Matter

I remember one day walking down the street with my daughter and she started asking me questions about where and when she was born. She must have been about five or six. She asked me what it had felt like for me to have her in my tummy. It wasn't the beginning of the end. It was the last straw. I couldn't do it. I could lie to everyone in my life but I drew the line with my daughter. I was done.

This came at a point in my life when I had started to wake up at 4 AM every morning totally terrified. I was starting to crack. There was no going on the way it had been.

It was time for the annual "retreat" in Montana. As a younger student, I had longed to be the "inner circle" that did the special things (I didn't really know what they were) and had special privileges as well as spending a week or 2 in Montana every summer. I had been invited to Montana once years before and then disinvited so I knew about it. The rest that I knew about it was from the older children who came to CR and talked about everything (after awhile they must have realized this because children under 8 were no longer able to go to CR or Montana). It was one of the manipulations that kept you in the cult - you wanted to get into the "in crowd" with the "special assholes" (as they were called).

When I finally did get into the inner circle, I realized what a farce it all was. These people were no different from me. They were no more evolved, no smarter, no more saintly, no closer to heaven than I was. I didn't do anything special to get there either. Neither did they. It was totally arbitrary in some cases and in other cases it had to do with how tightly Sharon wanted to control you. I had always thought that when you got into the inner circle then the true mysteries of school would be revealed to you. What I found out was that there were no true mysteries to school. Being in the inner circle just meant that you had more things to do, more responsibility and paid more money. I finally got there and I had no interest whatsoever in being there.

The first summer I went to Montana, my daughter was very young. The first night, I was trying to put her to bed (not easy) and Sharon knocked on our door. She insisted that I come out on the porch with her to talk when I all I wanted to do was get my cranky daughter to sleep. She took me outside (you didn't refuse if Sharon asked you to do something) and waved her hand vaguely towards the mountains and said "This is what you have been working for all of these years." That's all she wanted to say. Well, yes, the view was beautiful but I could have just gone on a vacation and enjoyed a beautiful view instead of being subjected to Sharon's "work camp" because that's what it was. Endless hours of hard physical work, endless hours of cooking and childcare, no sleep, lots of alcohol. It wasn't a great week. I hadn't worked all those years for the view. I had worked for something else - for my own evolution, to find out the secrets of the universe, to come into grace, to make a more spiritual life for myself, to become the woman that I longed to be - not to see a view (no matter how nice it was.)

Shortly after my daughter started asking questions about her birth, we went for our annual pilgrimage to Montana. When I stepped on the plane, I realized that I could no longer go on the way I had and something had to change. One day while I was out there, talking with Sharon, I said that I really needed to be able to tell my daughter the truth. She said she would think about it. The next day she asked to see me and when I went up to her house, she told me that she had thought about it and I could tell my daughter the truth when she was 18. I said that wouldn't work for me. She said she would think about it. The next day, the same thing but she said I would be able to tell my daughter the truth when she was 8. That wasn't going to work either. She knew I was upset and started asking all kinds of questions about my husband. Things were rocky with him but that was mostly because my whole psyche was rocky and I couldn't hang on to anything at all anymore.

Well, things did change. I have a number of theories about why they changed but it might be a combination of all of them. I worked in the kitchen a lot and frequently Sharon had talks with students at the dining room table and I could hear everything from the kitchen. That summer, she told several couples to get divorced and of course, that's exactly what they did. She wanted me to divorce my husband as well.

My husband had had a stroke a number of years before and I think in some ways, Sharon was afraid to push him physically in Montana in case he had another stroke. She didn't want anyone dying on her property. My husband used that to sleep late and blow off a lot of rules. Everyone did childcare in Montana and my husband had been working with the kids (5 girls) on presenting a little play of a fairy tale. The second to last night that we were there, Sharon started talking at dinner about how my husband wasn't doing a good job with the play and that his work was really shoddy. This happened frequently with Sharon. She would "go off" on a student: berate, belittle, criticize, castigate and generally drag them over the coals. Then everyone would do the same thing. The student being trashed would beg for mercy and make all kinds of promises to avoid the greatest of sins: being thrown out of school. It happened frequently and it was always horrific. Several times, I had just left the room while it was happening. This time it was happening to my husband.

Sharon called him a "cunt". My husband didn't say a word in his defense and that infuriated her all the more. Everyone in the room, teachers and students alike, took their turns verbally flagellating him. It went on for hours. His friends of over twenty years all turned against him because that was the rule of the game. I said nothing. One woman actually stood up and started punching him in the stomach with her fists. She wanted him to react and he wouldn't. Very slowly, two of the female teachers, J and K,  came to stand behind me, one on either side, putting their hands comfortingly on my shoulders to show their solidarity. In the end, he was told to leave and never come back. They told him to sleep on the couch in the kitchen that night so as not to bother me.

Ok, we were out in the middle of nowhere in Montana. Not even walking distance to a town. Where was he going to go? The next morning he was still there. He worked on childcare that morning. After an hour or so, Sharon had someone relieve him on childcare because she said that he wasn't responsible enough to be on childcare and he would poison the children. His own daughter? I was trying to find him and running all over. I asked the person who had relieved him on childcare where he had gone and the guy just shrugged and said he didn't know. This was a friend of twenty some years. I asked if he had talked to him and he said no and shrugged again. I found my husband later hiding out behind our cabin.  I snuck out some food from lunch to bring back to him. He went to dinner that night and the whole thing happened all over again. There was a final meeting for the week. I wanted to go and tell them what I thought about the whole thing but my husband convinced me not to and I realize he was correct. I wouldn't have gotten out alive (psychologically). I also know that you can't win an argument with a sociopath. Later, my husband referred to it as psychological rape. It was.

The next day we were leaving for home. I remember a few comments that were made. One of the teachers, K, said: "Don't worry we will find you a new husband". The audacity. I had a husband and was intending on keeping him. Another teacher, J, said: "When you get home don't let him go home with you. Tell him to stay away for a month and then get together and talk about it." I said that I couldn't do that because that was once done to me and it was unconscionable and I would not do it to someone. We were traveling back to Kalispell in several vans. We stopped at Flathead Lake to do some shopping. We were at the chiropractor’s office.  I had really wanted to go see this particular doctor and I had really wanted him to see my daughter because I thought he might have an intuition about her that might help. 

One of the teachers who was traveling with us said that she felt uncomfortable in the van with my husband. I thought it was absurd. Absurd the way I felt when they said that he was poisoning the children. Was there really anyone there who thought he would harm his own daughter? He had paid to be there just like everyone else. I had paid to be there. We were traveling together as a family – husband and wife traveling with our child.  They had no right to separate us and anyway, where was he supposed to go and how was he supposed to get there? I was angry and I looked to a friend for support (the "friend" that Sharon had given me when I first came to Boston). My dear friend. I looked at both her and her husband and asked: “Does it bother you? Do you object to him traveling with us in the car?” Her answer stopped me cold. She said “You can not ask me that question.” I was raw and haggard from several days of sleeplessness and of being on a very emotional knife’s edge. I was about to scream: Yes, I can ask you that question and in fact I did just ask you that question. I knew there was no point in saying anything further. She did not immediately stand up for me or take my side as I thought my loyal friend would do.  If that was not her first impulse then no amount of arguing would change it. I was betrayed. I knew she was immovable. They were all immovable. I just had to hold my tongue the best I could and get the hell out of Montana. 

I got in the van with my husband in search of a car rental place or a bus station but there was no public transportation to be had. He finally said he would be OK and I left him at a bar where he had a few drinks with a guy who later gave him a ride to Kalispell. We were leaving very early the next morning and staying in a motel in Kalispell and I had to wait until everyone was asleep to sneak him into my room. Everyone had said to me that day that he shouldn't even go home on the same plane with us and after I sneaked him in that night, he said he didn't want to be on the same plane with everyone else. I called to change his reservation to a later flight and it cost $100. The woman at the airline asked if I wanted it on the same credit card that I had used for the tickets and I said yes. After I hung up, I realized that I hadn't actually bought the tickets but another woman in the group bought them all together. I felt that I needed to reimburse her before I left school so I wouldn't owe them anything and I did. I realize now that I didn't owe them anything, actually, they owe me.

That was what she said: “You cannot ask me that question.” I think in some ways that sums it all up. That statement sums up those eighteen years of my life and there is no real response to it. There were always the questions that we could not ask. That we could not, should not, would not ask. And yet we asked them all the time, at least, I asked them all the time even if I asked them silently in the privacy of my own heart. I am sure that others asked the questions privately and silently. No one dared to ask the questions aloud. The few that did ask questions received scorn and humiliation but no answers.

My "friend's" daughter was my daughter's best friend. We have never seen them again. My daughter still talks about her ten years later and asks about her. For my daughter, loss is an unfathomably deep chasm. Her life has been scarred by loss after loss. This one I couldn't help but I still feel bad about it. All of the children who have "grown up" in this cult also bear severe wounds even if they weren't actually students.  They suffered most from having parents who were not emotionally or physically available to them because they were always busy doing things for the group. It was worse in New York than in Boston because Sharon is in New York. I lived in New York as an unmarried childless woman and we bore the brunt of it. Sharon urged me as soon as we had gotten home from Russia with my daughter to get an au pair. My daughter had au pairs for the first five or six years of her life because I was out working all day (a school requirement) and every night I was either in class or out recruiting new students. My daughter suffered from that. All the children suffered from that. Had I known anything about attachment and reactive attachment disorder when I first brought my daughter home, I would have been spending all of my time with her. But no, I was trying to pretend that she wasn't adopted and that she was my natural child. 

There are so many "what if's" in relationship to my daughter. If you talked about something like this in school you were always told that you "can't blame school." That was the standard response. The alternative is to blame myself, to live in a world of shame and regret. The responsibility for what has happen is shared by a number of people. I cannot hold anyone wholly responsible. I have to also remember that I was under a spell.  Some people call it brain washing. Janja Lalich, a professor and noted author of books dealing with cults and psychological manipulation, calls it "bounded choice."
Bounded choice is defined as a state in which people "make seemingly irrational decisions within a context that makes perfect sense to them and is, in fact, consistent with their highest aspirations."

My daughter says all the time things like: “Don’t you know her cell phone number? Can you call her? Can we ever see them again?” One day she said, “I have two friends. I used to have two other friends but they are gone.”  When I think getting in touch with my "friend", I can see her standing there saying “You cannot ask me that question” and I know that we are now being shunned and will never speak to any of them again. I also don't really know the nature of the friendship. Was she reporting back to Sharon about me? Highly likely but I will never know for sure.

I remember seeing another friend weep quietly while pulling up weeds in the garden because she could not ask what had happened to a dear friend of hers who had left school. The people that did ask the real questions never got a straight answer that addressed the question. The answer we all got back instead was “you cannot ask me that question.”  So we never asked or we stopped asking after awhile. I think that after eighteen years it was the first time anyone had ever said that to me in such a straight way.  When I think about it further, it is an honest answer – usually no one put it in those words even though that was always the sub-text.  Everything was unspoken.  I am saddest for those who are still lost in that world where you cannot ask any questions and where there are no real answers.