Carl-Richard

And it's really curious, because like I said, me and probably others did not (as far as I can remember) feel personally threatened or exploited in personal interactions with the leader, but despite that, it evolved to a place where a suggested solution was to essentially remove somebody from the surface of the Earth. So we went quickly from what somebody like you guys in the thread (at least earlier) would be very firm is not a cult, to a Manson or Jim Jones situation. All through some odd beliefs and a charismatic leader presenting them as an option with their conviction and trance-inducing charisma.

Officially no, it sort of collapsed, but who knows what sub-groups spawned after it and what their beliefs are (and if so, God bless them). I gave a summary of what happened in this post:

Social group with deviant beliefs compared to the surrounding society, often religious in nature. The way I was rattled without being personally threatened in personal interactions with the leader was that the beliefs were very fear-based, relied on subtle phenomena and paranoid. Normal everyday people were claimed to be carriers of negative harmful energies for example. But even if my experience in the cult was a heavenly experience, I would still be inclined to call it a cult. I would be inclined to call for example a doomsday cult a cult even if their experience in the cult is absolutely a-ok.

I felt existentially threatened and rattled for years after the cult. Why the need to delegitimize people's experiences? Why the need to make denigrating comparisons? Could it be that there are different kinds of cults, different reasons why one would be compelled to call something a cult? Maybe actually study what a cult is on your own without soelly relying on the videos by your cult leader.

Why are you turning what I clarified and added nuance to back into the same black and white issue I clarified, and why are you invoking a should? I gave you exactly the distinction I gave. There is an awful a lot of "shoulds" in this thread when it's really just about what a cult is. You are playing Leo's script well. This is exactly what he would want, people pushing back for him when people call it a cult, suggesting they do a lot of things rather than just have a discussion. I wonder what would've happened instead if he took the MAPLE/Bentinho/Heaven's Gate route and just embraced the concept. "Yeah, of course it's a cult. And?"

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a26cd3e-d82c-83eb-9d2d-85e5e78f0ed3

I knew somebody would hiccup on that sentence. I was talking about the Discord community I was a part of.

I'm saying the experiences of personal abuse, belittling, etc. has been worse. There were other aspects of the cult that were more destabilizing (the very wacky beliefs and eventual doomsday ideations). I stay here for various reasons.

Now you're treating him like a retarded child and not the Tier 2 multi-perspectival construct-aware God that he is. He knows how to treat people with differing opinions, when he wants to.

I went through every single ban reason and the context they occurred in, if you were curious.

You're literally viewing everything through Leo's definition of a cult, of course you think that. I'm saying you can be a cult without being exploitative. Then you want to ask for examples of exploitation, and then I give you that. But that doesn't change whether or not I'm calling it a cult. I was already calling it a cult Say that to the 8 or more people who were banned in a short time frame for merely disagreeing on him being the most awake person in existence or his methods for getting there. Say that to @Consilience when Leo threatened him to kick him out if he didn't "wise up soon". Say that to people who were fond of non-duality like Nahm and were either kicked out on those grounds or threatened to be kicked out. Say that to these countless posts of abuse. In this thread, I gave a definition of a cult and Leo said "you speak of things you don't even understand" and "it is shameful that I even need to explain this to anyone here". In the other cult thread, I asked him about his definition of a cult and what he thought mind control is, and he said I don't understand what I'm talking about and that I'm disrespectful for even considering entertaining the topic and that I don't deserve his teachings. Any normal interaction would be like you're doing here, asking for clarification, going argument by argument, not denigrating, shaming, belittling, etc.

Does a feeling of superiority, ego, vanity, perhaps influence, more generally power, count? You know what rich people want more than money? Feeling like they're right, like their vision is being fulfilled. And if you can get there by making people feel inferior, by playing with their emotions, by denigrating their autonomy, that leaves a certain impression, imprint, on people dealing with it. I would bet the types of interactions you endure on here could be impacting how you deal with people in real life in perhaps not the best way. I've been in what I thought was a real cult and I felt less personally threatened, exploited and gaslit than I've been here. Do you see why I'm so curious about what a cult really is? Do you see why I disagree with Leo's cherrypicked definition from some random MD who (like me) had an experience of what he thought was a cult and decided to tell about it? Maybe step out of the cult a little bit and see that there are other perspectives on this issue than Leo's.

I don't care about calling Actualized.org a cult, I don't care about Leo's histrionic obsession about not being called a cult. I care about finding a good definition of a cult. Your definition seems to not distinguish cults from e.g. criminal gangs, business scams, pyramid schemes (or even individuals manipulating you).

Has he directly denied it? He has denied being "the most developed", but then in a following post, he distinguishes development from being awake (consciousness), conveniently leaving that possibility open. The fact that it was in the past and he does not ever explicitly deny it, even when given the chance (and instead he cleverly refuses to address it explicitly), that sort of leaves you with an impression that nothing changed. Besides, the fact that he would even state such a thing at any point in time. "It was in the past, it's not a big deal, don't worry 🤗". Bro. To him it's the same thing. What is a cult?

We're supposed to just accept and be complacent with AI delivering pictorial monstrosities, human disfigurement, uncanny valley horror pieces, to our PC screens every day. Shaking my head.

Last post: did this sit well with you? Probably not, because you left shortly after (immediately after, rather; because you did not post after that): And yes, you did miss the 2023 era, what you were subjected to was only the beginning. Those who did not leave (or were not banned, unlike e.g. [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]), those who stayed, developed strong coping mechanisms for enduring and justifying such behavior, which continues to this day in a more integrated and socially normalized form which makes it more pernicious in its own way. My Leo thread was a way to demonstrate this and also to inquire whether this is something they think is ok.

Just to be clear before we move the current discussion to this thread per OP's request (link), the point was not to show Actualized.org is a cult. It was to ask what a cult is. Actualized.org was being invoked when trying to figure out what mind control is. Because if you aren't able to distinguish Actualized.org leader's communications from mind control and you don't want to call Actualized.org a cult, that's trouble for your definition of cult involving mind control. Especially when you don't even want to define mind control like Leo is doing. And I believe my most recent points on that were not challenged so you can take me up on that in the other thread. Me personally, I'm fine with calling Actualized.org a cult regardless of the mind control concept (which I believe to be ill-defined) and I don't believe cults need to be particularly destructive, abusive or exploitative to be called a cult. Actualized.org could be heaven on Earth and I would probably still call it a cult given its type of beliefs and practices (being deviant in nature compared to the surrounding society and religious in nature). And if Leo displays some behaviors that could be defined as mind control, it might only be a minor problem relative to other cults, particularly given the format (not being a live in-person thing). But don't be surprised and don't take it so hard when other people want to call you a cult. Cults like MAPLE, Bentinho Massaro's community, Heaven's Gate, explicitly called themselves a cult and they were fine with it (they didn't see it as a negative thing). Maybe you could too. And maybe there are aspects of a cult that can make you feel hurt or destabilized even when the "mind control" is relatively minor (e.g., merely taking on highly deviant beliefs and experiencing alienation from society, friends, family, is not a joke, neither for them or yourself; you can feel like you don't belong and you can come off as threathening or hard to relate to or you might leave them all together; alienating yourself from your friends and family is highly threatening both for them and you). Maybe it would be smart to recognize that, as a community that prides itself on epistemic rigor and self-awareness.

Did you watch the second guitar video I posted? Do you have an example of "using scales in a good way?" Guthrie Govan perhaps?

A piece where he plays more slow (at least in the beginning) and melodic on guitar (the above guitar clip could make you think he was only about speed):

I will add that in the Discord I was a part of, I can't remember ever feeling personally gaslit, shamed or threatened by personal interactions with the leader. But I still felt like calling it a cult, because the beliefs were just that wacky (negative energies, entities, weird practices around that, doomsday tendencies at the end).

Is it a social group with deviant beliefs compared to the surrounding society (often religious in nature). And to have a stringent definition means that it creates a false sense of security about one's own community and one is less wary about the fact that the existing dynamics could in themselves be problematic and if were they to be cranked up a little, could develop into the full-blown cult you're so keen distancing yourself from. The analogy is to have the same sentence from someone who is stopped with a barely illegal BAC vs someone with a definitely illegal BAC who crashes into a lightpole and kills someone. Maybe you shouldn't have the same sentence, but maybe you should call both DUI (and the difference is in the degree, not categorical).

Bro is that my beard? 🤣😂

This community scores on literally all the points that are not "in-person" (except the meditation/chanting one unless you want to stretch it into recommendations to take mind-altering substances to "know what I'm talking about"). Virtually all of Leo's blog posts are about how destructive ("egoic, self-deceived, low-consciousness, stupid, unintelligent, corrupt") the world is and he routinely implies his teachings are an/the antidote (e.g. "Conscious Politics", "Pure Philosophy"). They use highly divisive and emotionally charged language and are highly judgemental, repetitive. I personally am repelled from reading them for exactly that reason. The reaction to this thread is a cult study on its own. Also, in your thread, it was implied I was being disrespectful for having a different opinion and that I "don't deserve his teachings". Emotionally charged communication. Instead of simply addressing my points and showing through argument, Leo will routinely say words like "you don't understand", "you don't know what you're talking about", like in this thread and the other cult thread I linked. It functions to remove my autonomy and belief in my own mental faculties. Statements like "I'm the only authority on epistemology" (see the other cult thread) reinforces that. PMs when I'm acting out and being critical, like here, trying to "talk it out". Happened multiple of times. No incense or eye contact, but a different level of proximity. The emotionally charged communication and autonomy-deriding language happens in a public forum inducing public shaming. Other members will routinely adopt the same style and gang up on you. "You only care about survival, your mind runs on self-deception and self-bias, of course you will disagree with me, that's expected". I would suggest this is a too dichotomous framing. Most sophisticated cults teach you such techniques, that's their appeal. And ironically they tend to use those techniques to protect and validate the ills of the cult. The virtues and the ills coincide, they are not mutually exclusive, and they often work in tandem to maintain the cult identity. That's what make cults so tricky. It's a tug of war between seeing the benefits and the ills. I'm sure you can find autonomy-increasing teachings in MAPLE, as you can in Bentinho Massaro's community, or in the Discord I was a part of. "But it's more ills than benefits in those cases". Well, let's assume you can even make such a distinction, does that warrant a categorical distinction (cult vs not-cult)? If the difference is only in degree, then maybe that's all it is.

Without using mind control on me (i.e. answer plainly without redirecting, without accusing me of not understanding or being purportedly disrespectful for having a different opinion), what is mind control?