A View of the Training Through
The Student/Teacher/Lover Double-Bind
I’ve always thought of myself as an independent sort, and I am, but I was caught in the web of a student/teacher relationship and couldn’t give up. My tenacity to do good, to solve problems, was very misplaced in this no win situation. The important thing is to know that bridges can be made over differences, but sometimes one must learn when to forget the bridge and head down the river to find another adventure. In the following writing from 2004 I was processing, putting together the puzzle pieces that led to the final public release of the Lessons in Awareness exposé.
2004 A Student's Dilemma
The last 4 years as a student was a crazy making drama in which I questioned my own sanity at times. I didn’t know who or what to believe. This forced me to quest within myself and out into a wider healing world to find answers to issues I could no longer ignore or justify. The founder and I had been intimate partners, we were both happy and declared a lifetime relationship. My search for truth seriously began when I could not agree to continue in a relationship with the founder and her new attraction.
As part of my training I was to help bring in a ‘new consciousness‘ of threesomes. In my research I began to see that the intimate relationship dynamics coming up with the founder began to converge with the dynamics I had been seeing in the training. It was with this feeling that I was driven to deepen my research of power, of relationship, of spirituality and of humanitarian principles. The more I learned the more I tried to talk with her about what I was finding. The relationship dynamics over time became interwoven in my attempts to deal with the training issues I was beginning to identify.
It became apparent that these issues were being held in place by the founder, and therefore could not be fixed by more and more involvement in the organization, by leadership trying to get more people to help, by the board doing more and more organizational patching, or by band-aids of strategic planning. It also became apparent that dealing with these concerning issues was seen as ‘attacking’ the founder and the training.
Only with distance could I see, with deepening grief and alarm, that the incidents I witnessed behind the scene over the years that were so abusive had a calculated effect of eliminating disagreement, exposure or change. People have no idea what went on and goes on behind their back, and if we subscribe to the metaphysical law that thoughts are real, this behavior translates as psychic attack.
I began to realize that the work I had done in many ways to bring this information to the awareness of the founder and hierarchical leadership (Jan)within the organization had been deflected. This put me in a double bind; the love of the story/group/founder vs. the truth that force is used in the name of power and healing. Exposing these problems meant that I would risk alienating those who protected them, including the founder, and this did happen. The founder began to surround herself with those who ‘supported’ her without question.
One morning a few months ago (2003) I woke up understanding the whole construct, methodology and dynamics. The past is now very understandable to me. Since August of 1999 I have kept a daily computer journal with details of this ‘threesome consciousness’ drama with this organization’s leader. This was helpful in holding the amoeba still so I could pin down the justifications and rationalizations that deflected the true issues. I reviewed organizational material, letters of resignation, emails, and board records of severe battles that are long forgotten; the people involved long gone.
There is a serious pattern and spiritual flaw in the training that has done and is doing much harm. When those who question get deflected and leave are called ‘evil’, abusers, or fallen, depending on their behavior, addiction to the battle is reinforced in students, and those who remain are bonded in grief and praise for ‘holding the line’. The pattern is clear: critics are kept in line, conformers flattered, truth seekers sacrificed, and the training dismisses those they have ‘loved’.
The founder is the creator of the energetic construct of the training, and only she could address these issues, the elusive threads of error woven into the structure she created. She became increasingly angry, and my bringing up any issue, no matter how well worded or gingerly, was taken as a personal attack on her. I know now that those who tried to make changes, including myself, were not attacking anything: we were all trying to co-create, to collaborate, to contribute to the physics, health and growth of the organization. In this time period this was confusing and caused much pain, for no matter how stonewalled I felt, I still had faith that we were here to uncover the truth and to heal.
The methods of deflecting this protected place became more and more overt as relationship issues came to the fore. When I would try to talk about it in a different way or from another angle it brought up increasing dynamics of blame. Just about everything became my fault, for not communicating right, for getting angry, being too blunt, wrong timing, not relevant etc., which allowed the very issues I brought up to be lost in a circular conversation, both in relationship and training issues. I wondered if countering another’s reality no matter what they said or did was a teaching technique. I even tried to think it was good that ‘buried’ anger in me came up to be addressed. However, she felt her anger was correct, mine was not. I was seen to be the cause of her anger.
It just didn’t make sense to me to block information that could contribute to the health of the organization. It didn’t make sense to dismiss information rather than educate me if I was wrong. I began to see how the founder’s one way communication, in both personal and training relationships, sabotaged the very essence of the search for truth and healing this organization was supposed to stand for. I went from trying to go along with bringing in the new consciousness of threesomes to being angry that she felt she had the right to force me into this position. She insisted that the development of the threesome consciousness was to “solve humanity’s biggest problem of attractions that would stop sexual abuse of children”. It turned into a disagreement over the ethics/physics/dynamics of this new consciousness. I did become angry in this double bind, that my love was used to attain a position as part of my training, and that it took 3 years to come to the point of her saying it was all a ‘failure’, and making me feel it was my fault.
The path of attaining this consciousness was never clear or co-created; the founders expectations changed over time: First I needed to help the founder with her wounding in this area; our relationship was perfect and she wanted to heal her pattern of serial monogamy. She implied she was just wounded and really not going to follow her attraction. Other times it was expected that I needed to attain the position for the sake of humanity. I was first told I wouldn't have to become intimate with the 'third' leg, but later I it was thought I should, for the sake of the founder who was in pain because of being drawn in two directions.
I felt that if I did not attain that position I would lose the one I love and fail to attain a position that I at one point considered to be of a greater, self-less love. I would swing from ok to not ok with this reasoning. I would justify her actions as ‘cutting edge’ consciousness, as "front line" duty as we called it, then backtrack when I would discover and explain an incongruence in physics or go into turmoil over doing something I did not feel. This was seen as erratic undependable behavior that was hurting the founder, and I was told I had ‘lost the position’ (my level 11 position). It turned out that when I agreed with her I attained the position, when I questioned the dynamics/physics in creating this new consciousness that in any way pointed out that she was not going about it the right way, she said I lost the position. I was told she was right, I was wrong. I see now how I was isolated from being able to share any of this with my peers in the Level Xl years.
Maybe threesomes are the answer to relationships. Choice of intimates is the key. I reasoned with her that in physics force can be used to make particles come together, but the particles then have not come together to bind naturally, a natural resonance. Love, the glue of the universe, must somehow be involved to bring them together. This allows free will rather than force to be the binding factor. If A and B are partners, the C must be acceptable to both to create a threesome. If A relies on B’s love to accept whatever attraction A has chosen, it is force. If A is B’s teacher, a sacred trust position, and insists B be intimate with C for humanity’s sake, it is force and misuse of power. Is using the love and trust of a student to attain this stretch (which she said increased her healing powers) ok?
In her mystical system, this is what is meant by being on the ‘front line’ of spiritual work. Well, of course she had the right all along to pursue another relationship if that is what she wanted, and she was very creative to create a theory that threesomes would solve humanity's problem of attractions, but it couldn’t work as long as she was unwilling to look at her own issues either in relationship or with the training.
This is a very personal example of the elusive dynamics I attempted to address in the last few years. The literature I found describes clearly the dynamics of those who misuse their personal and leadership power. My research led me to the material about prophets, charisma, the charismatic personality, BPD, NPD and group abuse. A few years ago, I dismissed the fact that the organization met all the abuse criteria because of course it was an exception. It was ‘the way’. The end justified the means because people felt they were getting well, so of course the methods were justified. The outside world became less and less exciting as I learned the power story. The world was not as appealing any more, and we jokingly said “so what else is there to do”?
I see how the training splits students from healthy priorities in life and even the ability to think logically. Training methods perpetuate an inner split, a conflicted Self. It was these incongruent splits I was trying to address, for the student's sake and the founder's. Students hold inside the attack/us/them battle when they really need to develop unity consciousness to heal their body and emotions. They hold inside the pressure to convert people in their life because they know the ‘truth’, but it just doesn't feel good. They appear calm and ‘in position” when they really should be letting out an appropriate response to being yelled at, shamed or embarrassed in front of the group. They submit readily to others addressing them with any number of projections when they really should be developing ways to know their own mind. They see abuse but don't speak up. This inner conflict zaps the body of energy and the resources it needs to be healthy. It steals energy and separates one from being able to deepen ones’ passion into the every day acts of family and community. The 'work', the cult mind, becomes their persona.
The information on the sustainedaction.com website, which is the site of ex-apprentices of Carlos Castaneda, demonstrates to me how utterly empty it is to chase mystical awareness, how self-absorbed and selfish it is, how it separates you from the every day reality where there is much to do and many relationships to deepen. To become absorbed in someone else’s ‘out there’ mystical story is not enlightenment. To deepen into ourselves, our everyday lives and our community is to me the most precious enlightenment path of all. Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Amy Wallace is a poignant example of this split.
The material on BPD and NPD describes the person I still love. It was a glue that kept me around until my detective self did this exposé. Through this material I understand why all her relationships have ended in violence. She repeatedly said her past lovers all tried to kill her. Being a gentle soul, I could not fathom at the time that she would ever begin to feel that way about me, and that I could not help her.
For further writings about training dynamics, view my journal at http://plumtree444.livejournal.com/
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