is he wearing pants?

I made a new friend this weekend who spent her childhood in EST.  She attended her first training at age 8 and went on from there. She's a perfectly delightful person with great stories to tell about her upbringing in Southern California.  I could listen to her talk all day.

As a kid growing up in San Francisco in the 70s, EST was probably the way I learned the word "cult," not that that was the only occasion I heard it used.  Everybody's parents (not mine) were going to Erhard Seminars Training, everybody was working on the stated goals of EST "to transform one's ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself." 

Then again, there were Hare Krishnas all over the place in those days, sanyasins, Rajneeshes, even into the 80s.  It was all around, the evidence of new philosophies and new outfits. The thing is that this was also the way we kids learned about hypocrisy.  We would talk about how weird it was to preach renunciation by your followers when you yourself owned 93 Rolls Royces.  We watched the adults around us get pulled in, try on new ideas, walk away or stay.  From them, we learned an openness to new ideas.  On our own we developed a kind of skepticism, a kid's knowingness, watching what the grown-ups did and deriving our own lessons. 

Lately, for lots of reasons, I've been thinking about cults, particularly those types of cults which venerate one person, the founder or leader, who is placed on a pedestal from which he or she calls the shots.  I've been thinking particularly of the sad tendency for possibly good ideas about personal liberation or what constitutes a right life, to be highjacked by sex-drive, the way that you so often hear about this or that cult's leader and his ready access to sex with his followers, this new or odd definition of family really being an invitation for incest within that little family. 

It is a child in the Hans Christian Anderson story, "The Emperor's New Clothes," who calls out that the Emperor is not wearing anything at all.  I feel profoundly grateful to have seen and learned what I did as a child, to still have that voice in my own head, whispering when something feels culty, ready to call it out when the Emperor is wearing no pants.

It's still sad, though.  It was a two-fold let-down in those childhood days, growing up in what felt like ground zero for personal development, for freedom, to find that so much of it was bullshit, was rhetoric in service of base personal aims and that the adults fell for it.  We kids knew it long before our streets were lined with hippie burn-outs, grown-ups who somehow didn't get the same lesson we did.  It was so obvious to us.

He isn't wearing anything at all. 

I always hope for it not to be true.  Sadly, sadly, it's all too true, all too often. 

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[Frankie]

powerful, honest words