how i was spiritually raped and left for dead (part 6)

part 1 is here
part 2 is here
part 3 is here
part 4 is here
part 5 is here


home

when i hold her in my arms.
i can feel her heart
beating.
the faint sound of a distant drum.
calling me
to a faraway place,
she calls
home. ~seekingintongues (1997)
 
it was just past 3 am. i was lying in bed, my wife fast asleep beside me. her tan leg was peaking out from beneath the sheets. i was staring at the ceiling. shadowed bars crossed our bedroom ceiling and wall as the moonlight slipped through the vertical blinds. i couldn’t sleep.

earlier that evening, my wife had told me that bob and his wife wanted to see me the next morning. nothing good could come from this.

i got out of bed and walked to my 5 year old daughter’s room. from the doorway, i could see her, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, wonder seeking angel. her tiny hands and arms were wrapped around kimberly, a fluffy stuffed dog nearly as big as she.

i knew this might be the last time i would ever watch her sleep. i knew it could be the last time i ever shared a bed with my wife.

i should have killed bob when i’d had the chance.

in a few hours i would have to face him. i had gotten my head straight several months ago, when he had sent me to spend a week in isolation at the santan mountains—when he had sent me to find my “true sociopathic male self.” for the first time ever, i would confront him. i had talked to my wife earlier. she said she would back me, but i had my doubts as to whether she could hold up in the face of bob and his wife's head-spinning, confrontational rhetoric. if she folded, they would probably pull her and my daughter out of our house and send them away. this could be the end of my family. it was a risky move.

several months earlier i had created a pretty solid plan to kill bob and his wife. it happened just a couple days into my trip to the santan mountains.

after leaving the little grocery store with my block of cheese, my bananas, and my water, i drove my t-bird to my base at the foot of the santan mountains. i immediately went to work, digging.

since fear was my problem, i had to deal with the source of my fear. like any true believer, i knew my fear was primal. bob had taught us that fear starts at birth. we are torn from the warmth and safety of the womb and launched into a world of bright lights and harsh sounds. this causes us to carry free-floating, primal fear…fear of once again being torn from the womb.

this explanation was consistent with my experiences in recent years. i was carrying a moderate degree of constant fear. when things started to get comfortable, when i felt confident, i feared being “torn from the womb,” so to speak. it had not yet occurred to me that these fears were the direct result of real experiences that had taken place in bob's cult. i didn’t yet realize that my fears were a natural and healthy reaction to the environment in which i had spent most of my adult life.

although from the outside it may seem almost negligent on my part to have been blind to the real source of my fear, i had, for years, existed in an environment where bob’s claims were universally accepted as truth. doubting these “principles” would have been equivalent to doubting the existence of gravity. primal fear was truth.

why had i been unable to conquer my fear, when bob, george and others were able? i had learned the answer to that question as a result of the 1995 purpose/confrontation. it was because of my parents. they were evil. they had abused me as a child. my father was a controlling, corporate big-shot, who like all other corporate big-shots, cheated on my mom and worked long hours rather than take care of his children. my parents didn’t love me.

and although the bob and my peers on staff had loved me unconditionally, standing by me through the destruction, difficulty, and harm i’d brought to them and the program, i still had not let go of my parents. i obviously had been hanging on to some kind of sick and twisted hope that they (my parents)would someday love and accept me. i was a pvssy who still needed his parents’ love.

so, when i say i immediately got to work, i mean i immediately began digging a grave in which i would metaphorically bury my parents, laying to rest, once and for all, the twisted hope of having any kind of loving relationship with them.

i did a lot of digging. i also began to build a zen garden. i began to carve the parts to make a rake for the zen garden as well.

while i was digging and building the zen garden, my thoughts kept returning to the woman from the little grocery store. how could she possibly be happy? how could she be at peace? why wasn’t she consumed with fear? she wasn’t in bob’s program. she hadn’t, at least as far as i knew, cut ties with her family.

as the sun began to set, i decided to hike into the mountains and find some rocks for the zen garden. i walked for several hours. i needed 3 rocks, each about the size of a football. i decided to trust the universe to lead me to the perfect rocks.

deep in the high desert, i found my first rock. when i saw the rock, i had decided that i would know it was the right one if i found a scorpion underneath it. i lifted the rock and there it was, a tiny scorpion poised to strike.

all of this may sound strange, zen gardens, the universal guide, scorpions to mark the “perfect” rocks, but i had been living in an environment where medicine cards and tarot cards were routinely used to make decisions, where past-life regression was the norm, where we believed that we had traveled throughout lifetimes in packs, and where we had chosen our parents prior to birth so we could learn whatever lessons were essential to this lifetime. the scorpion as an indicator for finding the perfect rock was not a stretch.

i didn’t have a light, but i was far from the city and the moon was bright. i could see close objects. looking into the distance however, all i could see was darkness. i had removed my wedding ring and watch as soon as i had arrived at my base. i wanted to be completely unattached to anything or anyone, including time. so i didn’t know what time it was or how long i’d been in the high desert.

shortly after i found my second rock, i realized 2 things. first, the desert floor was covered with scorpions. they were hard to see, but if i took a knee and stared at the ground, i could see their movement, almost as if the desert floor was an ever shifting mosaic. second, i realized i was lost. in my quest for the perfect rocks, two of which i was carrying, i had completely lost touch with what direction i’d been traveling. i guessed it was somewhere between 1 and 3 am. i could probably have tried to figure north by the stars, but that wasn’t a very helpful because the terrain was filled with deep ravines, sharp drops, and sinkholes. there was no way to travel in a single direction, because the terrain demanded that i find passable routes.

also, i had been out for a long time. it had been hot. i didn’t have water. all i had was a pocket knife, a couple of smokes, some matches, and two football sized rocks which had been given to me by the universe.

i sat down, put down my rocks and lit a smoke. what next?

i thought about the woman at the grocery store. i imagined she was sleeping beside her husband. i imagined she had several children asleep in their rooms.

i had had almost no experience in the desert, but i clearly recognized the sound that snapped me out of my thoughts of the grocery store woman. coyotes.

it was hard to tell how far away the coyotes were, but they were close enough to see me. it started with one yap and howl. within a minute there were several howling. i couldn’t see them in the darkness, but i was certain they could see, me. i sat there thinking of what to do next.

would they come after me or was i too big? how do you fight a coyote? should i try to hide? if i run, will it trigger their instinct to hunt…will they chase me? i thought about the discovery channel, a program i’d seen on what to do if you encounter a bear. bob watched the discovery channel. i remember thinking for the first time, “i wonder how much of the stuff that he preaches about evolutionary biology and primal fear is stuff he got from watching the discovery channel. this thought came out of nowhere.

i was in the desert which was crawling with scorpions. i knew that some of these scorpions could deliver a life-threatening sting. i also knew there were black widows holed-up in the rocks and crevices. i assumed there were rattlesnakes on the prowl as well. i was listening to what sounded like a dozen coyotes howling. i had no food or water, no light, and i was lost. but i hadn’t been afraid until i had the thought of bob watching the discovery channel. now i was overcome with anxiety. nearly frozen with fear. i made a mental note, put it out of my mind, and got back to the business of dealing with my current situation…coyotes.

while i was lost in the desert my wife was at home in bed. she was wide awake. we were looking at the same moonlight. when she looked out the sliding glass door in our bedroom, we saw the same stars. we were miles apart, and though i had mentally broken all ties with people and places, we were connected...maybe for the first time in years. she knew i was in trouble. i knew she knew.

somewhere in the night, i had this thought: our love for each other transcends all of this--the “mission,” bob meehan, the “spiritual journey,” my “true sociopathic male self,” meehan’s big stick…fear. before all of these things there was our love. woven throughout the confrontations, the endless hours of work, my jobs at the hospital, bob's residential center, the outpatient program, the counselor training institute, and clean edge productions (coffee shop), was my love for my wife.

bob and his wife called it obsession. they saw it as a threat. they had tried to get me to “report” on her numerous times. they had attempted to convince me to talk about her in a negative light. i never went along. i had seen what they had done to her spirit in the past—how they’d broken her. i had been determined, right or wrong, to protect her from them.

years earlier, before bob, i had stood with her beside a vast beautiful lake in rural michigan, holding hands, staring at the same night sky. i knew then that i would to spend the rest of my life with this woman…that i would always love her.

the coyotes were howling. there were no trees to climb. there was no brush to build a fire. there were only rocks, two of them were my prize possessions, my zen rocks given to me by the universe. there was no way i was giving up those rocks.

i couldn’t hide from the coyotes and couldn’t hope to outrun them. i had a pocket knife, but assumed they would attack en mass, if they attacked at all. i was unafraid.

fifty feet away there was a large rock about the size of a compact car. i figured that if i climbed on top of that rock i could defend myself from the coyotes. i assumed that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for them to get to the top of the rock. if nothing else, it would force them to come at me one or two at a time. i could brace myself and push them off the rock.

i made my way over to the big rock, moving slowly in order to avoid triggering the coyotes’ instinct to chase. as i made my way to the top of the rock, holding my zen rocks, i realized that i was holding two football sized weapons. i climbed back down, set my zen rocks at the base of my perch, and began collecting smaller softball sized rocks to use as weapons. there were scorpions under nearly every one of them. i briefly made the connection, discounting my idea of being led by the universe to my zen rocks. i pushed it aside. the thought made me afraid. if the universe hadn’t led me to my zen rocks, then… it was too much to consider in my brainwashed state. am i on the wrong path? am i spiritually hopeless?


the fear overwhelmed me, but just for a few seconds. i snapped out of it, reclaimed my status as an individual with no attachments to anyone or anything, and spent the next few minutes carrying softball sized rocks to the top of my perch.
the coyotes, who’d stopped howling while i was moving rocks to the top of my perch, began howling again. i waited.
 
us, and them
and after all we're only ordinary men
me, and you
god only knows it's not what we would choose to do
forward he cried from the rear
and the front rank died
and the general sat and the lines on the map
moved from side to side ~ roger waters

the program, they say, is simple, but not easy. killing bob and his wife would be both simple and easy. though i had never considered killing anyone before, this seemed to be the only logical option. if i was to save my family, i would have to eliminate the threat. bob and his wife were the threat. without them, my wife would be free of their manipulative coercion and lies.

i had no fear of george. without the bob's protection, i would b!tch slap him up and down the block. with all of his talk of spiritual superiority, living without fear, inviting only “good” into his life, he was nothing—and i knew he was nothing. any power he had was on loan, borrowed from bob and bob's wife.

i decided that i would need to make it look like an accident. i began thinking about ways in which i might cause a gas leak. i knew that bob never locked his house. he claimed that he didn’t need to lock his house because he didn’t invite bad things into his life. he was under the protection of his “higher-self,” his idea of god.

the idea was that if i could cause his house to fill with gas during the night, he would awaken in the morning, light a smoke…boom! no more bob.

it was late at night, early morning to be more specific. i hadn’t slept the previous night, as i’d been perched atop the compact-car sized rock waiting for the coyotes. i hadn’t eaten since the day before i'd arrived in the santan mountains. i had decided to fast.

i was sitting halfway up the northern slope of an arizona mountain looking down at the lights of phoenix, mesa, tempe, and gilbert. there were millions of lights. i was slipping in and out of the cult mindset.

i was thinking about the woman at the little grocery store. there were millions of people in the city below. were they all lost? how could i accept the idea that, since they weren’t with bob, their lives were meaningless? i also began to think about all of bob’s former followers—d.j., larry, dave, liz, jodi, craid, jill, paul, jim, al, pdap, f-way, adap, ihn, the st. louis hospital, b-way. where were these people and programs? if bob was the spiritual fountainhead of the universe, why did his followers always leave? why did they all hate him? people who he had once held up as spiritual giants, were now viewed as pariahs. they were losers whose “hearts couldn’t take it.”

the entire world consisted of us and them. this idea was clear. bob had made it clear that we were justified in deceiving “them.” we had to be honest and loving toward “us.”

or did we? bob had lied to me. he had lied to others in the program. i had seen him mistreat scores of his followers. he lied without hesitation. i had lied on behalf of the program as well. i had hurt a lot of “us.”

awhile back, i had gone with 2 other bob followers to tell an icecap director that we didn’t want him around anymore. he had a wife and 3 kids to support. under bob’s direction, we sat him down, fired him from his job, without warning or severance pay, and told him not to come around anymore. why? because he had been trying to rent a house in bob’s neighborhood. he wanted to move his family closer to the spiritual epicenter, where a select few were allowed to live in the same neighborhood as bob and his wife. he wasn’t welcome. bob was offended by the idea that this man would be so bold as to believe he deserved to live near him.

“i don’t want to go for a walk and have to worry about running into that broke-d!ck and his fvcked-up idiot kids, heckle and jeckle” he’d said. the god of the spiritual lifeboat decided to toss this man and his family overboard. if he really was the spiritual fountainhead, then he’d sent them to hell on a whim, at his own pleasure. if he wasn’t the spiritual fountainhead…he wasn’t. none of this was real. he was simply a conman.

and who are “us”? did it include the kids and parents in the program? was it just the staff? senior staff? where did the layers of deceit end? how many fronts did bob have? how deep did one have to go before the “truth” was revealed?

if bob wasn’t the spiritual fountainhead of the universe, what the hell was i doing sitting on a mountainside in the middle of the desert?

facing the fact that bob was a fraud was terrifying. it was also liberating. in regard to the former it was terrifying to face the fact that i had wasted well over a decade of my life—that i had no direction, that my efforts to help others were meaningless. with the latter, i was free from having to exist in an environment where every move i made was prescribed, or at least examined under a microscope.
fear. it came to me. “many are called, but few are chosen.” bob was right. i was overwhelmed with fear. leaving the program meant choosing to reenter the womb, rather than choosing to face and overcome primal fear.

there were no coyotes, no physical, “real” threat. just my thoughts, and they were terrifying. i was “in my head,” “complicating things,” “too intellectual,” as bob had often told me. “your intellect is your worst enemy,” he had told me. “your mind is a dangerous place; don't go there alone.” “trust,” he'd said. “have faith. stop thinking.”

i hadn’t slept or eaten. i had spent the previous night, in the “here and now,” focused on fending off the coyotes. now i had too much time to think. i needed to pull it together. i needed to get a grip.
as i stared at the smoke spinning and twisting off the burning tip of my cigarette, i thought about the previous night.

the coyotes.

they had continued to howl as i sat perched atop my compact-car sized rock. i had a pile of rocks in front of me with which to defend myself. i lit my last cigarette and dropped my open pocket knife, point first, into a patch of dirt that had settled in divot on the rock. the dirt was too shallow and after repeated attempts, i had been unable to make the knife penetrate deeply enough to stick.

i thought about my wife and daughter. i would return to them a new man, my true sociopathic male self.

i don’t know how long i sat upon that rock before the howling stopped. at some point, i realized i hadn’t heard the coyotes for at least an hour. i figured they were gone. i’m not sure if it’s true, but i was later told that while the coyotes were howling, i was safe. when they were silent, that’s when i should have been worried.

in reality, i was never afraid of the coyotes. they would either come or they wouldn’t. they might injure me, but they would never kill me. why would they risk injury with prey that was fighting back so viciously? as i would later begin to realize, the only times i was afraid, were those when i was thinking about bob and the program.

thirsty and jonesing for a smoke, i climbed down from the big rock, picked up my zen rocks and started walking. i came to a ravine which i estimated ran east and west along at the base of the southern slope of a rock mountain. the ravine was about 20 feet deep. i found a spot with a suitable slope, sat on my butt, and with my arms crossed, rocks held to my chest, i slid to the bottom of the ravine. it was still dark and though i wasn’t completely sure what i would encounter on my way down, i reached the bottom unharmed.

i traveled east until the ravine opened up. then, i made my way around the base of the mountain.

traveling north (or at least what i believed to be north), i came to a dirt road. rocks in tow, i followed the dirt road. i wanted water and smokes, but other than that i was feeling good. for some reason, i was comforted by thoughts of the woman at the little grocery store. i began to entertain the thought that there was life outside the program.

the sky was starting to get lighter as i emerged from the rock and dirt and i found myself entering an area covered with sagebrush. i saw a house (really more of a shack). there was an old pickup truck with no windows and no wheels. then there were other weathered, sun bleached, houses and shanties. i realized i’d made my way onto what appeared to be an indian reservation. though the sky was getting lighter, it was still dark. it was quiet.

i’d heard that a reservation may not be the safest place for a white guy to wander around alone in the dark. on the other hand, if i came across someone, i might get some water and a cigarette. i might even get a ride back to my car, which i’d abandoned the previous day in a dirt turnaround at the northern base of the santan mountains.

i made my way through the reservation. i was startled once by a dog who began barking as i approached a tall wooden fence that surrounded the back yard of one of the shanties. i hit the paved road which ran along the northern base of the mountains and correctly determined that i was a couple miles east of my car. in my car, i had water and cigarettes. in the center console, i had left my watch and wedding ring. i was determined that i would not open my center console until the end of my week-long search for my true sociopathic male self.

i walked 2 or 3 miles to my car while sun rose behind me. i leaned on the hood while i drank some water and smoked the best cigarette i’d ever tasted. i crushed out my cigarette and put the butt in my pocket.

i looked at the mountains to the south and the orchards, horse property, and civilization to the north. one represented freedom the other imprisonment. at that point, i wasn’t quite sure which was which.
 
and so she woke up
woke up from where she was
lying still
said I gotta do something about where we're going
step on a steam train
step out of the driving rain, maybe
run from the darkness in the night
…
you got to cry without weeping
talk without speaking
scream without raising your voice
you know I took the poison from the poison stream
then I floated out of here ~ bono


sitting in the dark desert night, on the north slope, i noticed that my cigarette had burned all the way to the filter, leaving a long, slightly curved ash. i blew the ash and pocketed the butt. i looked again at the city lights. i looked at the stars. i thought about the vastness of the universe as compared to the insignificance of bob's tribe.

my thoughts drifted again to all that had happened in the last 48 hours.

i had completed the policy and procedure manual, been chastised and hit with a stick, begun digging a grave in which i had planned to metaphorically bury my parents, started building a zen garden, gotten lost in the high desert, waited out the coyotes, and walked for miles.
after returning from my coyote watch, having felt rejuvenated from the water. i had spent the day picking pebbles and other impurities out of my zen garden and digging my parents’ grave. i had also walked.

things had changed over the last 2 days. i was now considering the idea of killing bob. i determined that tampering with the gas lines was too risky. first, they were likely to smell the gas, in which case they would simply leave the house and call the gas company. second, it was too easy to get caught. there were fingerprints, fibers, and cutting tools that could provide forensic evidence. i had been in their house many times, but if evidence was found near a break in the gas line, i would be found out.

fire seemed to be the best way to go. guns and bullets could be traced. anything that could possibly cause a struggle would leave forensic evidence. i had been caught up in the idea that it had to look like an accident. but why?

bob had more enemies than anyone i’d ever known. it was this thought that lead me back to the question, “where were all his former followers?”

as a teenager, i had seen the 60 minutes and 20/20 exposés in which he had been accused of being a cult leader. when his california program went down in flames, he was accused of being a cult leader. his current organization was constantly being criticized as “cult-like.”

as i sat on the mountainside looking down at the city lights, it hit me. i’m in a cult! bob is a cult leader. we’re all being duped. it’s not my parents that are standing in the way of overcoming my fear. in fact, the fear is natural and normal given that my boss, my mentor, is a dangerous, deceptive cult leader who likes to play god with peoples’ lives.

sitting there i realized that bob was the source of all my fear. i also realized i wasn’t alone; virtually everyone in the program was living in fear…fear of bob and his wife.

these people had to be stopped. i refused to let them take my family from me. since my wife was enthralled by them, killing bob and his wife was my only option. i needed a better plan. a simple plan.

i had spent over a decade imprisoned in bob’s cult. my marriage had been torn to shreds. i had lived in a constant state of fear and dependency, fighting for his approval, vigilantly searching for my miracle, the miracle that would insure that i never had to go through another confrontation, that i would be inoculated against banishment, that my family would not leave me, that i would not die.

now i would be free. i could get in my car right now and drive off, turning my back on the cult forever. free from coercion. free from bob’s wrath. free from the endless hours of work with little or no pay. free from the threat of spiritual extinction. free from fear.

forget killing anyone. why bother? i would simply drive away. i had a half tank of gas, no money, and no credit cards, but so what… i was resourceful, creative, and smart. later, after i got myself settled, i would return for my family. i would threaten bob, telling him i would expose him if he didn’t release his hold on my wife. i walked down to my car, sat in the driver’s seat and reached to open the console.

stop. i had, on my own accord, committed to avoid opening the console before the week was up. no attachments to anyone or anything.

i got out of the car and closed the door.

for the past few hours i had vacillated between the belief that bob was a scam artist and the belief that he was the messiah—that he was right, that i was being overcome with every fear imaginable.

was he right? if i took off, his could easily hook my wife up with some guy and quickly marry her off. she had done this with other women in the past. maybe they were doing it right now. was this the fear…overtaking me? jesus christ! minutes ago i had been planning to commit a double homicide.
i needed to get a grip.

i thought about the woman at the little grocery store. i jumped on the hood of my red t-bird climbed to the roof and sat cross-legged looking across the valley

i can drive away right now. disappear. my thoughts drifted.

i lit a smoke.

the woods are lovely dark and deep
but i have promises to keep
and miles to go before i sleep
and miles to go before i sleep ~ robert frost

to be continued