Trapped In The Rabbit Hole

What the hell is this?  Alice in EMOland?

If the women at SRF were this hot, I'd NEVER leave.

We all often wonder what happened to us.  How did our thinking change?  Did our brains become damaged from all that indoctrination?  What effect did it have on our lives?  Did we become permanently, physically changed from the experience that was the Academy for Psychic Studies?

While I am no expert on the subject, I have been looking into the field of memetics.  That's the theory that cultural information can travel from person to person by various interactions such as speech or behavior.  The individual bits of information are called memes.

The theory is that we form our cultural knowledge and our personality makeup through our interactions with others.  Those interactions are composed of an exchange of memes.  Of course, it's not always an even exchange but there's always some kind of knowledge or information being passed from one person to another just from their interaction.

And that exchange does not need to be a conscious one.  Mimetic theory believes the exchange can also happen subconsciously.

Think about it:  you can alter your cultural information based on what you hear from others or what you experience from them.  Your brain's contents can be re-structured because of the new information you receive.

It's not always a bad thing - that is how we acquire our behaviors and moral and social standards (such as our morals and values).  When we interact with our families, our religious leaders, teachers and mentors, we gain our social information network and that helps us get through life.

In the wrong hands, these memes can replace our existing value system and our morals with information that is in conflict with our standing beliefs and values.

So that's what happened to us.  Our regular and normal set of values were replaced by values we couldn't reconcile with the rest of society.  We perverted our sense of service to others with a sense of service to those who wanted control over us.  We gave up our thoughts, our mind, our social values and our very souls to the evil cause that is The Academy for Psychic Studies.

Our thoughts and behaviors were so altered, our friends, our family and all those who came to know us noticed a change.  Not so much a good change but a change anyway.

Looking back, didn't you notice how everyone spoke of personal change both apparent and not?  How many of the faithful few touted their own personal transformation and change in behavior?  Didn't the psychotic leader, Reverend William Duby, tell us a little bit of the "old" us had to die each day?

Or did he say "I'll kill you unless you fall in line"?  I don't remember as my brain was re-wired.

Did our brains become re-wired?  I'm not sure myself, but I suspect it was.  Most of those who have joined the Academy for Psychic Studies became less of their old selves and more of a pseudo-person - someone who had to travel through life with a forced smile, a contrived sense of happiness, a perverse sense of service to their leaders while rejecting those we knew in our former lives and the values we learned from our society.

In fact, at least one of the many ex-members keeps up this pseudo-personality being as happy and reminiscent about their blissful life in the cult while they attempt to forge a life of their own outside the cult.  In body, that person has left the Academy for Psychic Studies.  In mind, that person is still right there.

How about that?

We carried our diminished sense of self wherever we went.  Our sense of belonging was narrowed from a citizen of our country to a slave of the Academy.  Our sense of loyalty was reduced to those who imprisoned us.  We worked for them.  We spoke well of them.  We tried to recruit more people into our great feeling.

It was a whole different world.  They intended that to happen.

That is were the mind control comes in.  By creating this new world, a world where we can shut out the real world, a world where we formed our own society with its own rules our minds were open and vulnerable to the transfer of new societal information.  The leaders transferred memes into our brains and we in turn, transferred them to all who were willing to hear us.

Those people were usually the rest of the victims of the Academy for Psychic Studies. 

So thanks to the way cultural and societal information flows from one person to another, we perpetuated the abuse with our embrace of this new and perverse way of thinking.

Did you ever look back and honestly review how your thoughts were different before you got hooked up with the Academy for Psychic Studies?  Wasn't it different than it is then?  How different is your earlier mindset from today?

Diane Benscoter has a great talk about how cults re-wire your brain.  I've got it here and instead of commenting on her talk, I'd just like to show it to you so you can see for yourself how we were chased down a long, deep rabbit hole on an adventure we never really escaped.  You'll see that our brains were re-wired.

Despite Diane's claim that our brains were permanently changed I have hope.  I think the brain can be un-wired as well as re-wired.  I think with the right kind of help and the right kind of information all of us who were affected by the Academy for Psychic Studies can recover from that experience.

That's not just my hope.  It's a working theory called neuroplasticity.  There's research going on to see if that holds water and there is nothing that says it will prove to be true.  However, there is a lot that shows it could be true and that a brain re-wired for one type of thought and behavior, can be wired again for a different thought and behavior.

It's not quick or easy.  It's not even pleasant for some as there may be some review of their current thought patterns, values and morals that would be painful.  However, I know from speaking with therapists and cult experts, we can all recover and reclaim our lives for the better.  It all takes just one step at a time.

Even if it is many steps, each step brings you closer to freedom and closer to the life you were born to live.