I Witnessed an Alleged Cult

 Okay, so I only briefly witnessed an alleged cult for like, less than a month. And I didn't even sink a lot of time or effort into it. I'm making this sound way more exciting than it really is. But, only because one of my favorite atheist YouTubers, Telltale Atheist, specializes in revealing the truth about famous cults and the tactics that they use to exploit their members. As a result of absorbing a lot of his knowledge, I've come to truly abhor spiritual cults with a passion. I've also never in my life imagined that I'd ever be close enough to one before I realized that it was in fact, an alleged cult. 

Well, now that I've riled you up with that information, let's begin this gripping (read: entirely boring, but somewhat entertaining) tale. As I've said in a previous post, I've recently become an agnostic and I've been going strong  on that path for about nine months. Now, I don't know how this transformation works for other atheists and agnostics, but I personally am having trouble fully owning my agnosticism. I didn't just stop believing in deities, spiritual concepts or superstitions. I made the decision to abandon religion and spirituality because 1.) the human race will not survive if we continue to endorse practices and beliefs that go against science and 2.) because I wanted to learn how to be okay without a spiritual or religious crutch. Oddly enough, it was really easy to abandon religion. (And I've been indoctrinated with that shit for nearly all my life, including my early life.) But the smaller, harmless, more entertaining practices, such as tarot and astrology, were a little harder to abandon for some reason. (Probably because they're easier and more entertaining ways of predicting events and behavior than probability or psychology are. To be honest, probability was the hardest subject for me to learn in college math.)

Recently, I came to learn about the concept of twin flames. For the uninitiated, a twin flame is like a super soulmate. According to this ideology, you can have many soulmates, but you have only one twin flame. And the difference between your soulmate and your twin flame is that your twin flame mirrors you and triggers you and they're like the other half of your soul, or some jazz like that. First, I heard that term through pick-a-card tarot readings on YouTube. Then, I heard of it on one of my favorite fast psychology YouTube channels, Psych2Go. (You guys, I swear that I'm not a QAnoner. I just really like watching YouTube videos, whether they're about religion, science or internet drama.) Although the twin flame concept seemed like a lot of bunk and I thought I'd be past believing in it, I was in a mentally vulnerable time of my life where I needed it. (I don't feel like going into the reasons for that right now, if that's okay with you, dear reader.) I needed more than just tarot readings and articles to inform me more about it.

So, I looked to a Facebook group in hopes of finding out more about twin flames. This was a level of crazy that I wasn't ready to share with my therapist yet, so I thought I'd get it all out in a Facebook group first. The first group listed was a group titled "Twin Flames Universe: Open Forum". NOW, I wouldn't be a responsible blogger if I didn't give out this disclaimer before proceeding: reader, please do not harass this group or join just so you can spy on them. Please do not heckle them, ask them questions or interact with them in any way. Cults (even alleged cults) are pretty dangerous. Even the small ones. The piping hot tea or the lulz that you'd get out of this group wouldn't be worth the grief that they might potentially give you. This post is a narrative and hopefully, an educational one at that.

Anyways, when I joined this group, I noticed that the theme was a very welcoming and soothing pink. There were quotes about love and union and all the good fluffy stuff that I wanted to get into. But, I'd had bad experiences with spiritual groups before. I had been in spiritual Facebook groups with members that slut-shamed, defended rape, encouraged suicide, condemned people to hell, verbally abused people who were only looking for answers and condemned people who were going through a hard time by bombarding them with toxic positive platitudes. And the admins didn't do shit to regulate or remove any of these comments. So, I wanted to gauge just how safe this group was for me to grow and learn in. I wanted to see how people behaved when they were faced with different opinions and when they were genuinely ignorant of certain key concepts. But most importantly, I wanted to make sure that no sour tin-foil-hat-wearing nutjobs would go and message my family, friends or my partner to tell them what I was researching about at the moment. Here is the introduction post I made:

It will be important later, when I explain the more cultish aspects of this group. Anyways, I was encouraged to subscribe to the website's newsletter in order to receive some free course materials. To be honest, the only free course materials that I consumed were the free welcome pamphlet with the "Mirror Exercise" and five minutes of a really long video. I never ended up reviewing the rest of the materials because I was honestly a little put off by Jeff's (one of the cofounders) demeanor for some reason. I couldn't explain why his excessive friendliness kind of bothered me, especially considering that I'm like a baby, drawn to sparkly, colorful personalities that I wish could emulate or have around in my life. It may have been possible that I thin-sliced his personality early on. Whatever had happened, I wasn't interested enough in the course materials to even check the price on them. (More on that later.) I assumed that the dynamics of the group were pretty normal. That the owners would be glad to have participation and exposure, even if the members didn't immediately (or ever) buy the courses.

Eventually, I was assigned a group moderator to assist me on my journey. They have about 4-5 moderators that are randomly assigned to new members. They friend request them and they're there to help with any questions. Maybe I'm just untrusting or whatever, but I thought that was supremely strange. I find it off-putting when groups have admins or moderators that ask me to be friends with them on Facebook. Not only because I'm an entirely different gremlin on my own profile than I am on a group post. (Look, on my personal time, I rant about politics, share weird memes, make dark jokes and just get mad about daily occurrences. But I'm enough of an adult to read a room and to adopt the appropriate tone in a group so that it can remain cohesive.) But because every admin or mod who has ever friended me has displayed controlling tendencies. It seems as if they want to control my behavior outside of the group as well. Fortunately, my assigned mod was cordial. I won't mention their name out of respect for their privacy. But they messaged me once and that was it. They remained perfectly content to mind their own business and to let me do me.

I also found it strange that the group often made posts announcing when a member had made the step to purchase access to a course. Again, maybe I'm just untrusting and anti-social. But if I had even been interested in the courses when I first joined, I definitely  wouldn't be interested in them anymore after seeing that feature of the group. I tried to convince myself that it was no big deal that mods were assigned to new members. After all, a lot of Facebook groups do the same thing and maybe it was just them being creative in their marketing. I tried to convince myself that it wasn't a big deal that the group put certain group members right in the spotlight. Maybe they were just trying to be nice. After all, crossing the line into calling an organization a "cult" would've been a serious accusation. But, that was a gut feeling that I should've taken more seriously.

My second and last post was a post about a typical twin flame sign that appears to let you know that your twin flame is near you. I'm embarrassed to admit that I honestly take a lot of "signs" as serious indications that I'm on the right path in life. (Butterflies, feathers, loose change, song lyrics that relate to me at the moment, "angel numbers", etc.) I'm trying to put on my big girl agnostic panties and to learn to deal with uncertainty more logically. But in the meantime, these harmless little trinkets of fluffy positive spirituality are a bit hard to let go of, at times. I shared the post with the two swans just to receive validation and to get my feelings out about it, since there is no one I can talk to about this subject. For whatever reason, this lovely member right here believed that I deserved his snark, even though the post is about the swans and not about the "runner/chaser" dynamic. (Quick note: the "runner/chaser" dynamic is the belief that one twin flame chases the connection while the other twin flame runs from it.)

Now, at this point, it may not seem like TFAS (which stands for Twin Flame Ascension School, the name of the organization. I'll be using the acronym in the blog from here on out.) is at all cultish. Aren't cults supposed to love bomb you to reel you in? I'll talk more about TFAS and love bombing later. But although I didn't personally have that experience, I have a bit of an ungrounded theory that you are most welcome to pick apart. The other side of the spectrum of love bombing is negging. Perhaps you've heard that term before in dating circles. It's a subtle but effective form of abuse. The point is to reduce your target's (your date's or your new member's) self-esteem and to compel them to seek validation from you. This is done by pointing out a flaw of theirs, but making it seem as if it's actually endearing or as if they're doing it to help you. For example, "Oh, I just noticed that you've got a huge gap in your teeth. But it's cute, though!" "You sure do talk a lot, don't you? That's fine, I like talking to you, anyways." "Honestly, that sweater makes you look fat. But that's okay. I like chubby girls." You get the picture. Although, logically, negging might be off-putting to any person with strong self-esteem and coping mechanisms, if TFAS is in fact classified as a cult at some point, it will make sense that they'll choose whom they have to love bomb and whom they have to neg. Now, I'm not saying that this particular fellow is surely a member of TFAS's inner circle or that he was doing this on purpose. Maybe he really just is a lunkhead who doesn't know how to read the room or to communicate like a human rather than a cartoon character. But I bring up the negging because it is relevant later on.

I was put off enough by that particular reply to not pose anymore questions in the group. It really is annoying to go to a Facebook group searching for information and to have people shoot you down for asking a simple question. It was especially annoying because sooooo many other members talked about the runner/chaser dynamic (which according to the TFAS ideology, doesn't exist) and none of them got shot down. But, boohoo, who cares? This isn't about me. The point was that my decision to lay low rewarded me with some important information about the group.

A few days ago, the TFAS confounders posted a video about some grand conspiracy theory that is being formulated about them. I watched the video, I read the high school drama posts and screenshots that they put up. And I started diving in to research the group even more. The most prominent sources I want to cite are two articles from Vice, a Vanity Fair article and a YouTube expose series made by an ex-member named Dragon Heart. Check 'em out for yourself:

Vice Article 1:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v747x4/this-youtube-school-promised-true-love-students-say-they-got-exploited-instead

Vice Article 2:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/akwy58/accused-cult-leader-threatened-ex-members-after-vice-investigation

Vanity Fair Article:

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/12/inside-the-all-consuming-world-of-twin-flames-universe

Dragon Heart's first video of her expose series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGGCBQZDBiU

What I found was appalling. Here are just some of the accusations that have been made of TFAS. You tell me whether you think they're cult practices or not:

-Charging exorbitant amounts of money (hundreds and thousands of dollars) for ongoing courses.

-Demanding that students spend time away from work and leisure to be in hours of classes.

-Demanding students to work on marketing and management for free while insisting that the cofounders should be compensated for every bit of work they do.

-Verbally abusing volunteers (definitely not employees) by calling them "rats" and claiming that they have a "little bitch consciousness", just for asking to be fairly compensated for their work.

-Berating students and humiliating them publicly in classes whenever they shared extremely vulnerable details of their lives.

-Putting blame for shortcomings right back on students. If a student wasn't satisfied with a result, the cofounders constantly claimed that it was a "block" and that they hadn't done the "inner work" to get their desired results.

-Cofounders claimed that they were Christ (before turning that around into everyone having Christ consciousness, or some shit like that).

-Love bombing new members, of course.

-Forcing members to cut off contact with family members or friends who didn't support their participation in the group. (It was so heartbreaking to hear Dragon Heart talk about how a current member reached out to her, asking her to check up on a family member for them.)

-Keeping secret watchlists and blocklists of skeptical members.

-Claiming that they could spiritually feel when members were pulling away.

-Claiming that they absolutely guaranteed that they knew who your twin flame was and essentially pushing you to be with them whether you had feelings for them or not. (Eventually, it was claimed that the cofounders backtracked and told certain people that someone else was actually their twin flame.)

-Forcing certain members to be gay or trans!!!!!

-Pushing members to pursue their "twin flame", even if that person had rejected their advances. This allegedly resulted in arrests and restraining orders.

-And most heinously of all, allegedly pushing someone towards committing suicide.

I ended up going through some other videos on Jeff's and Shaleia's (both cofounders and twin flames) YouTube channel to see their side of the story. For whatever reason, Jeff had completely transformed his look by growing out his hair and his beard. Was he going for a Russell Brand-esque guru look or a Jesus look? We'll never know. But the douchery of it all was only compounded by a video of him addressing the "haydurs". The thumbnail shows in posing in front of an expensive car and the whole video has a style reminiscent of Onision: pretending to admit to accusations as what he deems an elaborate form of satire. And when he is called out for being immature in the comments, he merely replies that it was done out of "love".

At that point, I knew that I had no business being in that group anymore, so I left. So why bother to write out this huge-ass post, you ask? Why not mind my own and keep moving if there was no damage done to me? Well, because I'd like to tell you about a concept that I read about in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities"  by Rebecca Solnit. (I'm writing this entirely from memory because the book is buried in a storage box in the garage and I ain't digging it out.) She dedicates one chapter to a concept involving two angels. One is an angel of tragedy, an allegory for tragic events with long-reaching consequences because there wasn't any action taken in time to prevent it. Then, there's the angel of alternate history (again, paraphrasing here) who is rather comedic because he survived. He's an allegory for all the untold stories of people who survived and thrived. The latter angel's story doesn't interest people all that often because he goes on to have a relatively good life due to taking the right actions at the right time.

People admittedly want to hear and validate more sensationalized stories. The stories of people who sunk a lot money into an organization or who were abused for months or years by that organization. It's a bit boring to read about someone who realized that they got into something toxic and immediately got out. I mean, I'm surprised that you've even made it to this point. (If you skimmed over my story and just looked at the key points and references, I don't blame you.) But ultimately, people aren't just stories and characters who are there for our entertainment. Everyone deserves a good life and a safe community to be vulnerable in. If they have enough confirmation that they don't have to suffer a whole lot before they realize that something is bad, perhaps we will help a lot more vulnerable people to get out before it's too late.

And because Jeff and Shaleia live an extravagant life because of the money they are given by their students, who knows what other harm they might do? They could potentially end up building a compound or a camp to take their insidious influence from your phone or laptop screen to IRL. 

If this turns out to be a false allegation after all and there is no evidence to the mountains of claims that ex-members are making, then I will come out and admit that I made a big oopsie and I'll keep my mouth shut about TFAS from then on out. But in the event that all these allegations turn out to be true, it's better to be safe than sorry.