as i get farther into the cult book, i understand the importance of writing down what you agree, disagree, or want to look more into, as the author says to do. it is so rare to hear somebody talking about what the book talks about, and it engages my experiences when done, that i can forget the things i disagree about with the author entirely and begin believing whatever he says. ch3: - i so much agree with BITE. nobody ever says this. systematic control of Behavior, Information, Thoughts and Emotions. [confused: BITE must mean how we are eating people's spirits like zombies eating brains.] - i don't think it's clear to call all influence groups cults when cults inspire images of people in robes worshiping dead animals, not really a huge thing - i disagree that meditation with belief in eventual levitation or flying is harmful. i believe this is a good thing, without destructive attributes itself, to give people inspiration to spend time becoming more thoughtful. i do not mind that popular science believes that levitation does not happen from pensation: many people hold belief systems that have disparity with popular science, and use this as reason for prayer or dedicated behavior. i have no trouble considering that this belief is _used_ harmfully by some people. i think personally i see the belief as an analogy to how, when you meditate well and long enough, you begin seeing more and more things that others do not ever see: things you can do, reasons people do things, etc etc. this seems it could become a similar super power to flying. personally, i found i develop a comparable feeling to flying when i gain mastery over my body like with skilled free running. - MOVE is mentioned as an example of a cult. it was an activism group for black people. given MOVE was so politically targeted that most members were killed by the police, it seems far more likely that the political targeting (and disreputating messaging) was engaging in any destructive influence than the group. counter ref 62 - similarly i am of course skeptical that a democratic workers collective would be a destructive cult, and worry some around political harm in the label; workers collectives have been repeatedly targeted, sometimes killed en masse by corporations or governments, in our nation's and global history. counter ref 64 fragment: pierce told me "some of us are felons, some of us have families." i mentioned worrying about being tracked with my phone to pierce. he had me turn it on, and then suddenly cory visited, and spoke to me about the red and the blue. he lay down on the floor next to pierce's bed, just waiting. we had an intuitive conversation where he would wait and be silent before each thing he said. [sarah said a fragment of an expression to me, as if people were saying things that only made sense if all taken together as parts of the same sentence] finished writing fragment 2022-08-20 1033 [the interaction seemed very influential and strange. cory would often say he "was just happy to be involved". he said he had come off a long hiking trail, but lived as a homeless person who never left the city. i was in an intense state of mind, near the end of behaving with strong intuition. i think i had taken a jesus emblem with me, and showed a text message to sarah on my phone.] - farther along, the author says that a concern around worrying about mind control is that everything can be seen as mind control, as if this is a struggle normal people have. i have also been exposed to this belief. it is not normal at all. where did it come from? - further: it seems reasonable to say that the only reason it would be unclear whether a group is destructive or non-destructive, after observing it, would be due to influence preventing this clarity. clearly this clarity is needed badly. - in the section regarding childhood sexual abuse, which explains how learned phobias produce an environment for repeat abuse, i became worried for a friend i love, who was sexually abused as a child. this worry shortly became numb and hidden for me, and is hard for me to consider now. - "Put a person into a situation where his senses are overloaded with non-coherent information, and the mind will go "numb" as a protective mechanism. It gets confused and overwhelmed, and critical faculties no longer work properly. It is in this weakened state that people become very open to suggestion." - i'm thinking of how my influence seemed to me to pretend to be the things i was passionate about, kind of starting off with offering a "deal" that if i "really wanted to get involved" i would need to do this or that - somewhat uncomfortable around the recommendation of trusting search results regarding terms like "criminal" or "abuser". i think i have hits around "criminal" as does somebody i respect have "abuser", where these hits are from disinformation in my opinion. one possible difference: if a powerful influence is involved and it is disreputing the person, the hits go near the top; if a powerful influence is involved and it is supporting the person, the hits go near the bottom. anyway it is very normal to do such web searchers, so it's mostly moot. - the book does not yet describe how the sharedness of indoctrination techniques between groups and how this indicates collaboration among the cult leaders. it could be important to remember that we are at a time where power is catalyzing and everyone must protect the freedom of the entire world. - it's hard for me to see forthright faith healing as a human rights violation; death is a needed part of life and truly is the domain of a deity, and the placebo effect is very strong. obviously if the efforts are deceptive or disinformative and non-spiritual in benefit or result, things are different. - maybe what's reasonable to consider here is that the author is describing a horrific lifelong torture that few people can imagine, and it is very hard to convey this to someone who has not experienced it. - the book mentions another book by Harvey Schwartz that mentions wolves and sheep and soldiers, and internalized perpetration. it is about terrorist recruitment of children, but likely the techniques and stories have overlap with other things. my experience had wolf/sheep/soldier themes. it seemed to me a wolf was a mind controller; it seemed to me a sheep was somebody who didn't want to be one; it seemed to me a soldier was somebody who had seen the horrors of these things (and [did urgent work?]) and had ptsd and other things from it. - it looks like the book author's community needs help setting laws to protect people from mind control groups - it would have been hard to help me as i [learned to] identified all things as my own psychological issues