Carl-Richard

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?

If I'm sitting in a meeting or I'm simply interacting with someone and I'm expected to listen, show that I'm paying attention and not talk or do anything actively (simply "being present"), or watching a movie especially in a cinema, and sometimes sitting in lectures, that's the most common occurence.

This made me visualize a GIF that probably doesn't exist where a person gets like a violent shiver or spasm undulating through their body from cringing so hard and the image is glitching and flashing profusely.

My point is MAPLE already called itself a cult, presumably while implying it's not a bad thing. I have trouble distinguishing the Discord "cult" from this forum with respect to Leo's definition (or any salient definition) of a cult. Leo's definition of a cult, which he cherrypicks from one "expert" (an MD with personal experience of what he claims to be a cult, which makes me and you just as qualified as experts), has the trouble of defining what mind control is, what funneling of sex/money/power looks like. This is not a critique I'm making (while I agree with it), this is a critique scholars have been making of Leo's "expert". Consistent with this, scholars seem to agree more or less on a very general definition of "a cult is a social group with deviant beliefs compared to the surrounding society, often religious in nature". This resonates with MAPLE's self-identification as a cult, it resonates with why I want to call the Discord I was a part of a cult, it resonates with why you want to call MAPLE a cult (I'll explain), and it resonates with why people call Actualized.org a cult. For further "proof" underscoring this point, you will feel compelled to call a doomsday cult a cult even if they were the most benign and socially/personally/psychologically non-threatening group of people (no "mind control techniques", you're always free to leave, they don't want your money, no "sexual exploitation", etc.). It is because they are a group with highly deviant beliefs compared to the surrounding society (and it would probably classify as religious in nature). It is when the experience in the cult becomes challenging somehow, that we ourselves want to label it a cult, but it becomes hard to pinpoint exactly why or what changed, because the dynamics are essentially always there in some form. "Mind control", "funneling sex/money/power", is always there in some sense. That's why they're hard to define and why there is always doubt and two sides of the story and why people fall for them at all. They are subtle and pervasive, at least in the beginning. And they can become very severe, without a doubt, but it's like boiling a frog: it starts in water, the water has an existing temperature, and you slowly crank up the temperature so it doesn't notice. For example, MAPLE decided to call themselves a cult (interestingly, Bentinho Massaro's community did the same). Is that a form of mind control (they "devalue" the concept by making it benign)? What about Leo who wants to use a very stringent and non-benign definition of a cult? Is that mind control (by making it very stringent and thus making his community supposedly not fall under the definition and he can point to cults as being something external to his community)? Where does the line go between mind control and simply controlling the narrative, presenting one view over another, in a way that might benefit oneself and one's interests?

@Joseph Maynor Yup, Van Halen was also a pianist before guitar. Allan Holdsworth learned violin after guitar (and tried emulating the sound of a horn on his guitar).

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

What is going down in this video, you might be scared to know.

You're saying a bunch of nonsense aren't ya? Offshoot? Inorganic? We're organic. And this, is a microchip: A.k.a.: https://www.nisenet.org/catalog/media/zoom_microchip_video