{"id":2400,"date":"2026-05-19T10:17:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T17:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/?p=2400"},"modified":"2026-06-26T10:22:53","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T17:22:53","slug":"why-questioning-everything-still-kept-me-trapped-for-11-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/why-questioning-everything-still-kept-me-trapped-for-11-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Questioning Everything Still Kept Me Trapped for 11 Years"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Why Questioning Everything Still Kept Me Trapped for 11 Years\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/B-s3x7ign34?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Why Questioning Everything Still Kept Me Trapped for 11 Years<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Opening<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cYou\u2019re rejecting the difficulties of the Work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cYour resistance is unresolved trauma.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWhat if you being attacked is the Universe trying to teach you a lesson?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These are the kinds of things I heard when I spoke out against a high-control group I\u2019d been in for 11 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Things that sound spiritual, even a little insightful.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But if you really think about what\u2019s being said, what exactly would make any of these statements \u2026 wrong?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What would have to happen for someone to say: \u2018Yeah\u2014this is a problem. Something needs to change\u2019?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s like reality itself has quietly dropped out of the conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the only statements left are, strangely, the ones that preserve the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In this video, I want to talk about how this happens.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because once you understand it, you don\u2019t have to play along.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Reframe the Problem<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Most people assume mind control works through indoctrination \u2014 the installation of false beliefs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But that\u2019s weak. It leaves power on the table.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you have to convince someone to believe something, you&#8217;ve already lost significant control. They can be convinced another way. They can argue back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The more powerful move operates one level deeper \u2014 not on what you believe, but on what feels real enough to form beliefs about in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s what I mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Your mind cannot process all the information flooding it at any given moment. So it filters \u2014 automatically, mostly unconsciously. What feels important moves to the foreground. Everything else \u2014 about 99% of it \u2014 gets ignored. And this is true not just of what you perceive around you, but of which beliefs and skills feel relevant to you in a given moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cognitive science calls this process <em>relevance realization<\/em>. And it matters because it determines how you categorize experience \u2014 whether something is a threat, a misunderstanding, a lesson, or a violation. Which in turn determines what judgment you form, and what action you take.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The two-step mechanism is how sophisticated systems attack that filter \u2014 directly, at the level of perception, before conscious reasoning even begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Step One \u2014 Epistemic Loosening<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The first step is called epistemic loosening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Epistemic loosening is the systematic removal of the constraints that normally bind interpretation to truth, evidence, and consequence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It feels like liberation. Opening your mind. Freeing yourself from dogma. And that feeling isn&#8217;t completely wrong \u2014 epistemic loosening resembles critical thinking. But in practice, they move in almost opposite directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Critical thinking questions assumptions, identifies biases, and uses evidence to make informed judgments. It keeps meaning tethered to something outside you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Epistemic loosening does the opposite. It relativizes everything to the individual. All interpretations are personal. All perspectives are valid. The criteria for a good interpretation isn&#8217;t whether it&#8217;s true, or whether it helps you act \u2014 it&#8217;s whether it resonates, whether it&#8217;s interesting, whether it sounds deep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I watched this happen in real time, in rooms full of intelligent people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Someone would offer a careful, grounded interpretation of a ritual or a teaching \u2014 one supported by textual evidence, one with actual implications for how you might live differently. And the room would be politely interested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then someone with status would offer a different interpretation. No evidence. No real-world implications. Just a striking image, an evocative connection between symbols. And the room would light up. Audible reactions. People leaning forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nobody asked whether it was true. Nobody asked what you were supposed to do with it. The only question, beneath the surface, was: does this sound cool?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s how bullshit becomes a cultural norm. It doesn\u2019t happen through deception. It happens through reward.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And once that norm is in place, meaning starts to proliferate without grounding. Everything becomes potentially significant.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Intelligence amplifies the effect: the more interpretive fluency you have, the better you become at the exact cognitive activity the system is training you in. Fluency and bullshit feel identical from the inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At this stage, meaning is free-floating. It hasn&#8217;t attached to anything yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s the window. And that&#8217;s when step two begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Step Two \u2014 Perspectival Rebinding<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Step two is perspectival rebinding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is where the destabilized meaning-making process \u2014 now unmoored from external reality \u2014 gets quietly re-anchored. Not back to truth. Not back to shared standards of evidence. But to the internal structure of the system itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Here&#8217;s what that looks like in practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>An event stops being evaluated on its own terms. Instead, it gets filtered through the system&#8217;s internal vocabulary:&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What does this reflect about your enneagram type, your blocked chakra, which planet is retrograde, which part of the Tree of Life it corresponds to.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The interpretive apparatus is always running \u2014 but it only outputs categories that exist inside the system. Which means nothing can ever be simply a problem that needs to be addressed. It can only be a symbol that needs to be interpreted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The same goes for power dynamics. Dysfunction gets evaluated not against the standards of the outside world, but against the group&#8217;s internal norms. The mind has been trained to think symbolically about everything \u2014 and it applies that same method to the behavior of the people around it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The biggest, most harmful line of bullshit is that some groups don\u2019t have power hierarchies. They all do \u2014 even it\u2019s implicit.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are always people whose interpretations carry more weight, who when they speak, everyone else gets quiet. In principle, all interpretations are equally valid. But in practice, certain people create gravity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the moment when free-floating meaning starts organizing itself around those people, something important has happened.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Salience \u2014 your felt sense of what matters \u2014 is no longer tracking what&#8217;s true. It&#8217;s tracking who said it, what degree they hold, how close they are to the center of the group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This doesn&#8217;t feel like submission. It feels like discernment. It feels like knowing who&#8217;s worth listening to. Like picking up signal in the noise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But what you&#8217;re actually picking up is the power structure \u2014 and experiencing it as wisdom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The result: what challenges power gets categorized as ego, threat, or immaturity. What serves power gets categorized as growth, depth, and insight. The categories themselves do the work of enforcement. No one has to tell you what to think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>First the system dissolves your grip on reality. Then it becomes your reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Why It&#8217;s Self-Concealing<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The reason this mechanism is so effective is that it&#8217;s self-concealing \u2014 not because anyone necessarily designed it that way, but because of how it functions once it&#8217;s in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Once perspectival rebinding is complete, you evaluate everything \u2014 including the system itself \u2014 using the categories the system provided. You can&#8217;t see the trap, because you&#8217;re using the trap to look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These systems function like a hall of mirrors. Every symbol refers to another symbol inside the system. Crimson refers to a point on the Tree of Life, which refers to a goddess, which refers to a mystical tradition, which refers to a theory of the soul \u2014 and on and on, never arriving at anything outside.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Like in a house of mirrors, you perceive infinite depth, but depth never touches ground.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And because so many of these systems are organized around self-development, every direction you look, you see yourself reflected back. Which feels profound. Which feels like the whole thing is working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The longer you stay, the more you learn to confine your thinking about yourself and the system to the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Smart, self-aware people miss this \u2014 not because they stop questioning, but because their questions now have answers that make complete sense within the frame. And the frame is what they&#8217;re not questioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>External criticism gets recategorized automatically. It doesn&#8217;t get evaluated on its merits. It arrives pre-sorted as threat, ego, immaturity, or persecution. You don&#8217;t decide to reject it. The categorization has already happened before conscious reasoning begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What It Looked Like From the Inside<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>When I was in one of these systems, I was not a follower. I was a leader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was a moral leader. I spoke up for victims. I worked to get predators removed. I advocated loudly for reform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was an intellectual leader. I wrote books and articles. I made videos people found genuinely valuable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was never fully comfortable inside the system, and many of the people with power were never fully comfortable having me there. As my influence grew, I was whispered about, spied on, quietly undermined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And here&#8217;s what I did with all of that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I interpreted it as confirmation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because the religion itself taught that when you were in alignment with your higher self, you should expect resistance from the herd and help from the universe itself.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Learning not to react \u2014 even to laugh at it \u2014 was a sign of spiritual maturity. So the opposition I faced became evidence that I was on the right track. Every obstacle reinforced the frame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I questioned the system constantly. But interestingly, all my questioning eventually led back into it. Because the only path that led out felt like choosing spiritual defeat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And the thing I prided myself on most \u2014 my character, my integrity, my willingness to speak up \u2014 wasn&#8217;t a challenge to the group at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It was a commercial for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because if someone like me could be a leader there, it must be safe. It must be serious. It must be the kind of place that could hold a person who asks hard questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I wasn&#8217;t the maverick I imagined. I wasn&#8217;t reforming the system from within.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was just one of hundreds of people completing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>How You Know It&#8217;s Happened<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>There are three questions worth sitting with about any system you&#8217;re inside \u2014 a spiritual group, a workplace, a political community, even a close relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>First: Can you clearly articulate what would change your mind?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not in the abstract. About the specific claims and practices of this particular group. Another way of asking this: how many times have you updated your expectations of others in this group? Because if you lower the bar enough, pretty soon it will be in hell.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Second: Do your skills and perceptions work outside of here?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Are you becoming the partner you want to be? The friend? Are you developing the ability to recognize people of genuine character, to make better judgments, to act more effectively in your actual life? Or are you becoming very good at navigating the specific dysfunction that keeps turning up in this one place?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If the wisdom you&#8217;re gaining only makes sense inside this group, it&#8217;s not wisdom. It&#8217;s adaptation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Third: What actually happens to your status when you ask hard questions?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not what people say should happen. What happens. If raising legitimate concerns consistently produces social cost \u2014 however subtle, however dressed up as concern for your growth \u2014 the system is enforcing its own categories, not tolerating genuine inquiry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Wider Implication<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>I want to be clear that this mechanism doesn&#8217;t require a cult. It doesn&#8217;t require robes, rituals, or a charismatic leader on a compound somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It requires two things: an environment that rewards unconstrained interpretation, and a power structure that benefits from the resulting confusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That combination is not rare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You find it in workplaces where raising concerns gets reframed as not being a team player. In political movements where questioning the leadership means giving ammunition to the enemy. In therapeutic communities where every boundary you try to draw gets interpreted as unhealed trauma. In relationships where your discomfort is always evidence of your own unresolved issues, never evidence of what the other person is doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The vocabulary is different every time. The two steps are the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Which means the question worth sitting with isn&#8217;t just &#8220;am I in a cult?&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It&#8217;s: whose reality am I using to evaluate my reality \u2014 and how did I come to be using it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Closing<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>What I&#8217;ve described is a mechanism. It isn&#8217;t personal. It doesn&#8217;t require malice at the top or stupidity at the bottom. It can run on genuine belief and good intentions all the way through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But mechanisms have engineers. Systems have architects. And sometimes the people who most eloquently describe the spiritual significance of staying \u2014 who teach you to find meaning in dysfunction, to see endurance as initiation, to interpret your desire to leave as the very thing you need to transcend \u2014 are also the people whose position depends on your remaining inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That&#8217;s a conversation for another time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For now, the mechanism is the thing to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Because once you can name both steps \u2014 once you can recognize what epistemic loosening feels like and what perspectival rebinding looks like from the inside \u2014 you can start to ask something you might not have been able to ask before:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Which step am I already in?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why Questioning Everything Still Kept Me Trapped for 11 Years Opening \u201cYou\u2019re rejecting the difficulties of the Work.\u201d \u201cYour resistance is unresolved trauma.\u201d \u201cWhat if you being attacked is the Universe trying to teach you a lesson?\u201d These are the kinds of things I heard when I spoke out against a high-control group I\u2019d been&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[32,506,505,67,66,488,487,2],"class_list":["post-2400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aleister-crowley","tag-cult-recovery","tag-cults","tag-ordo-templi-orientis","tag-oto","tag-oto-high-control-group-2","tag-oto-high-control-group","tag-thelema"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2400"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2402,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2400\/revisions\/2402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapis-mercurii.org\/lvx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}