New Age Cult Psychology

By Leo Gura - June 15, 2025

This is good stuff:

One correction I want to make about what she said above is that it is certainly not the case that everyone has equal access to God or Truth. Most people have very low connection to God and Truth, simply because they are not conscious, do not have good genetics, and never cared about truth their whole lives. So a genuine spiritual teacher has way more access to God and Truth their students. However, no one has a monopoly on God or Truth. Everyone is God/Truth. But that does not mean everyone has the same ability to access it. For example, I genuinely understand God/Truth much deeper than most human beings. If this wasn’t the case there would be no point in listening to me. But that doesn’t mean you can’t reach my level of understanding. You can. But it will take lots of work which most people will never do. So in this sense I am objectively valuable to you. That’s just how all teaching works. A genuine teacher knows more than his students — at least at this moment in time. This is proper. But because this is true, a good teacher has an enormous responsibility not to exploit or mislead his students — which is where cult leaders fail hugely by putting their survival agenda above truth.

Fundamentally, cults happen because people confuse and blend social survival with spirituality. This is a huge mistake. Such people never cared about truth for its own sake, they are not doing truth-seeking, they are using spiritual performance and vibes to satisfy basic human social needs like a sense of community, love, belonging, purpose, friendship, sex, shelter, power, approval, and feeling special. None of this has anything to do with truth-seeking. Truth-seeking is about understanding the nature of reality, mind, and self. Truth-seeking has nothing to do with sex, community, friendship, rituals, power, or feeling special. Truth-seeking is not about feeling loved. Truth-seeking is not about being happy or feeling good or helping save the world.

Do not join social groups or communities to do spirituality. All that socializing is just a noisy distraction. Stop trying to combine the satisfying of your social survival needs with truth-seeking or God. Stop trying to combine your sex with spirituality. Real spirituality is not about community, relationship, friendship, or sex. It is about pure truth-seeking. Stop being fooled and seduced by the allure of human connection. I am not telling you to be a recluse. Have whatever relationships you want, have sex, be social — but do not mix it with truth-seeking or Awakening. Don’t fornicate in the temple. If you do spirituality as a communal activity you will end up adopting all their group-think and 90% of your time will be wasted dealing with human noise and drama. Community is the distraction. The whole point of spirituality is to disconnect yourself from human community, which is society at large. Human society as a whole is a large cult that distracts you from truth-seeking. Joining a micro-cult within the macro-cult is just doubling-down on your problem. Your goal with spirituality is to transcend all the human social nonsense, not to create more of it. You are not going to do serious truth-seeking in a New Age spiritual community. New Age spiritual communities prioritize human survival, positive feelings, fantasy over truth-seeking.

Notice this: there’s nothing particularly special about cults. Cults are barely more toxic than society as a whole, when fully seen — it’s just that you never see the toxic underbelly of society as a whole. You don’t see the torture, rape, murder, war, genocide, assassination, cheating, lies, abuse, wage slavery, corporate fuckery, political corruption, etc. A cult is just a proto-society. All societies are built on survival, hierarchy, and power. Cults suffer from the same fundamental problems that all human social organization suffers from: dishonesty, hypocrisy, ego, corruption, sociopathy, narcissism, mental illness, childhood trauma, greed, lust, bullshit, self-deception, politics, power games, human drama, ideology, group-think, exploitation, abuse, grifting. Any time you assemble a large group of selfish, unconscious, ignorant, corrupt, conformist minds — this must be the result. It does not matter what the content of the group is. It could be scientific, orthodox religious, Christian, New Age, occult, left wing, right wing — the content does not matter because the underlying social survival mechanics are all the same. Size also doesn’t matter so much. The one thing all these social groups have in common is that none of them genuinely care about truth-seeking. They always prioritize survival first — which is the #1 thing that keeps you from realizing God.

The emotionally difficult thing is to just do pure truth-seeking on your own. The emotionally easy thing is to skip that in favor of using a spiritual community to help your survival and make you feel good. So just do the difficult thing, since that’s obviously what leads to Truth, not the easy social thing. Social activity does not lead to Truth, it leads to distraction, self-deception, and corruption.

A cult is just a mechanism for low-level survival. Cults are nothing more than corruption. And all of society is corrupt. So of course cults are corrupt. People who warn of cults have no idea how corrupt society as a whole is. All social groups are corrupt because nobody has access to Truth, because they never even cared.

If you want to have sex, make friends, and be social — no problem. Do your truth-seeking alone at home locked in your closet in the dark. Commune with God. Then go out and socialize. Stop bringing God into your human monkey games. Do not make God a tool in your survival. Do not invoke the name of God or Truth to anoint your selfish monkey-stuff. And nothing is more monkey-stuff than socializing. The problem isn’t socializing, the problem is when you fool yourself that your socializing is truthful or spiritual. It’s not. It’s just survival with an icing of spiritual fantasy.

Communal spirituality an S-tier self-deception mechanism. You could write a whole encyclopedia about it.

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