Covert Emotional Abuse (CEA), QAnon, Unification Church, Podcast, Butoh, Butoh, Collections
" ... No athlete, no child, no human being should have to endure abuse in pursuit of their dreams. Yet, as the courageous Senate testimony of world-class gymnasts Simone Biles, Aly Raisman, Maggie Nichols, and McKayla Maroney recently demonstrated, abuse is all too common. Ms. Biles gave voice to the visceral agony of the victims: "The scars of this horrific abuse continue to live with all of us.
It is imperative that children and adults learn to recognize and prevent all forms of abuse in sports and society. Focusing on the egregious sexual abuse and the flagrant failures of USA Gymnastics, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and the FBI are way too little and way too late.
As with other epidemics, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse can be stopped. Together, we can create comprehensive systems of prevention, so that no child has to suffer the injuries and live with the scars of abuse, reopen their wounds in front of the U.S. Senate.
Covert emotional abuse (CEA) is almost always the initial form of abuse, and it all too often leads to physical and sexual abuse. CEA is a tightly woven, almost invisible spider's web meant to ensnare and control the victim. My intention is to make the web, patterns, and shimmering threads of CEA visible so we can see it, stop it, and heal it."
"A Korean cult leader with various sex crime allegations kicks off a relationship with Richard Nixon. Before you know it, a chain of Republican Presidents embrace the Unification Church (AKA "the moonies") and The Washington Times is born. Most recently, a splinter group of the cult — which has been manufacturing AR-15s — ends up participating in the January 6th storming of the capitol. Plus, we speak to Elgen Strait of the Falling Out Podcast about his life growing up in the Unification Church and ultimately deciding to leave it — and how the anti-communist, alt-Christianity promoted by "the moonies" is a blueprint for today's far-right media landscape."
Tricycle: The Dangerous Art of Depersonalization
What psychedelics, psychosis, and mindfulness can teach us about no-self, and why set and setting play such an important role in ego deconstruction.
"In April 2012 a dancer named Sharon Stern committed suicide. Stern was deeply committed to the Buddhist-influenced Japanese dance form of Butoh, in which mastery involves surrendering parts of the self. Prior to her suicide Stern was exhibiting mental instability, including worrisome signs of depersonalization, a condition marked by a sense of detachment from one's body and thoughts. As Stern's devotion to Butoh grew, so did her inability to identify as an individual with a history, personality, or future. She began writing emails in the third person, and as Rachel Aviv detailed in The New Yorker, in one of Stern's last emails to her teacher, she asked, "So the question arises what happens AFTER the deconstruction of your body/mind/ego?"
It's a question that has both inspired and haunted seekers for millennia. The deconstruction of the ego can lead to the type of transcendent oneness that is a hallmark of a profound spiritual experience, or to the type of destabilizing freefall that is a hallmark of severe mental illness or a bad psychedelic trip. As the case of Sharon Stern and others have shown, mental illness or psychedelics aren't the only gateway to destabilization. Contemplative practice can lead there, too. Conversely, just as contemplative practice can lead to radical understanding, so too can mental illness or psychedelics.
A recent revival of scientific research on psychedelics, which was barred from the halls of academia in the late seventies, has allowed researchers to study the brains of people undergoing experiences of ego deconstruction. In How to Change Your Mind, author Michael Pollan explains that while participants are undergoing drug-induced mystical experiences in a lab setting, "imaging tools can observe changes in the brain's activity and patterns of connection. Already this work is yielding surprising insights into the 'neural correlates' of the sense of self and spiritual experience." A similar mental mapping has occurred in research around both meditation and psychosis. By examining how depersonalization unfolds in the brains of meditators, during psychedelic experiences, and through psychosis, we can better understand why depersonalization can be a vector for both the profound and for profound loss, and perhaps learn how such an experience can be better integrated into one's life."
CultNEWS101: Conspiracy Theories Collection (55 articles)
CultNEWS101: QAnon Collection (60 articles)
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