Sometimes it’s hard to remember anything viscerally. A certain pain, a broken heart, some real fear, the raw excitement the first time you saw a mountain, so many things, the thrill of getting your licence or hitting a home run. It seems like we remember ABOUT things easily enough with the right associations or prodding but to recall the actual emotional impact of moments in life is tricky. I don’t know if I’m any different than others, can’t see why I would be, but, to me, it’s easy to remember the facts of my past but the feeling’s two-dimensional and hollow. I have to really try, focus, almost will myself down and into the memory to feel its weight. It’s possible but not easy. And nothing to take for granted.
With that in mind, I consider the question of how well I remember one particular memory, the feeling of liberation I had when I consciously noted without question or guilt that I was finally, after eight years of submission, sometimes sincere, sometimes less so but always at least nominally committed to faith in Rawat and not allowing myself to doubt him. My mind was a hostile entity within. It wasn’t mine to use as I naturally might or saw fit. Rather, it was only mine to surrender.
But then it was over. I knew it. I loved it. I could smoke dope and revel in my dope-fueled imagination. I could read books and see movies again and think and talk about them. I could for the first time in years enjoy simple rambling conversation for the sheer hell of it. It was my mind. MY mind. My mind and I was free to use it as I wanted again - something no one not in a cult would ever question - and I loved it.
So I went back to school and experienced pure delight in all my classes. My mind was free again and I’d never let it get trapped that way again.
So I have to assume that other exes had their own liberation period exhilaration. We all know what it’s like to not be free to think for yourself. We all know the difference when you can again.
Personally, I never want to take this renewed freedom for granted. That means questioning, thinking and talking through issues perhaps a bit more than I might have had I never had a captured mind. Yet, as I’ve been going on about recently, I think exes of all people should be sensitive to the various ways thinking through many issues of the moment is discouraged and replaced instead with a frightening level of acquiescence to so much clearly false political and cultural propaganda.
Of all people, you’d think we’d want to talk about stuff. Argue, debate, enjoy these faculties we once literally shunned as the devil’s mischief.
Yet …… no one wants to talk about things. Not with me anyway. What a rich delicious topic, this Trump is a cult leader thesis but, no, not really. Real discussion? Real debate? Why bother?
Disappointing.
