Bonus Sample: Listener Stories: Christina (part 1)
Christina Flinders is our honoured guest today for the first of a two-part tour through her experience with cultic dynamics and conspirituality. Matthew and Julian learn about her family's enmeshment in the cult of Eknath Easwaren, and her subsequent journey through rebellion, self discovery, and political awakening.We'd like to thank Christina for her generosity and lucidity, and her family for supporting her in this. We hope that this will be the first in a series. If you'd like to share your story with us and the Patreon community of listeners here, please get in touch.Show NotesComment from Pratik Joshi on Easwaren's abuse history in IndiaPEOPLE v. RUPPENTHALEknath Easwaran on the Training of Attention
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Thank you.
Okay, so getting to it.
Christina, you sent us a pretty comprehensive written account of your life path in relation to spirituality cults, so thank you for that.
It was fascinating to read.
There's a couple of detours in it that we think are really poignant, but I'll just summarize.
You're going to go through it, but for listeners, we're going to be going through roughly three parts.
Firstly, you grew up in part in the abusive cult of Eknarthaswaran.
It seems like you broke free of that network and then began to take some control back over your sense of self, in part by working in strip clubs where you also then grappled with other forms of coercion and undue influence.
Before, and this is the third part, you found yourself in a southwestern yoga community here in the States that is now getting red-pilled.
So is that a good summary, do you think?
Yeah, that's absolutely accurate.
I hope this is, I get to set a precedent.
First time strip club talk on Conspiratuality Podcast.
Absolutely.
Cool.
So, we want to go through your account in detail, and so when we hear something that we want to ask about or discuss further, we'll just wave or, you know, make eye contact.
So, does that work?
Yep, that works.
Absolutely.
Okay, cool.
All right, Christina, take the floor.
All right.
The story begins as all the good ones do, in the late 1960s in Berkeley, California.
My dad, in his early 20s, had fizzled out of classes at UC Berkeley, was dabbling in political science courses at Merritt Community College in Oakland, doing his best to avoid the draft, and as many were at the time, searching for real answers to the real questions.
This is classic.
Can you say a little bit more about where your dad comes from?
And specifically, was dropping out of Berkeley, was that significant with regard to his family and class background?
You know, he comes from Merced.
He grew up in Merced, California, which is different now than when he grew up.
It was very leave it to beaver, very kind of like a classic middle class family.
My grandmother was a schoolteacher.
You know, I think I don't, he didn't, my dad didn't express any major disappointment from his parents about dropping out.
It was, he was, he was kind of rolling that hippie wave, you know, and just trying to maybe find himself.
And, you know, they did have my, my family, previous generations did have resources and access to education.
So, you know, It wasn't a huge point of contention, I don't think, because he did continue, obviously, with his education.
And perhaps the education he did have access to was unsatisfying in terms of the real answers to the real questions, right?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
There was a huge void, and that's just the sense that I got any time I talked to him about that period.
It's just like, but he wanted more, you know?
So we went for it, so let's hear.
Okay.
So beginning what would be a long and dedicated practice, my dad took part in meditation classes in the Bay Area with teachers such as Swami Chinmayananda, which eventually led him to meet a woman named Jane.
Jane, then in her very early 20s, introduced my dad to her meditation teacher named Eknath Ishwaran, who was then in his 60s, living with Jane and leading meditation classes at the time.
Jane, who would go on to spend the next 20 years of her life with Ishwaran, recounts that this is when the sexual abuse began.
Now, let's just clarify that Jane is a pseudonym.
Yes.
So, this is one of our points of anonymity here.
But when you say that Ishwaran was living with Jane, Jane was living with Ishwaran, does that mean that he's cohabiting with a bunch of students?
Is it an ashram-type situation?
The impression that I got was that yes, cohabitation.
It sounded to me like there were a lot of people living in this house.
I didn't get the sense of an ashram quite yet.
It was more just like Bay Area hippie living.
I think seeds were being planted by Anish Warren's behalf to create a group style lifestyle.
I think he was starting to sink his teeth into that and feel How good that felt for him.
I wouldn't say Ashram quite yet.
But it sounds like he may have already found a benefactor.
Absolutely.
Someone who is willing to pay his way in exchange for his charisma.
Absolutely.
100%.
Okay, so where does he come from?
Okay, so Ishwaran was born in Kerala, India.
He excelled in academia, was a professor of English literature, and came to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship.
Ishwaran, most well known for his translations and interpretations of Indian religious texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, also met with and was highly influenced by Gandhi and his teachings.
I just want to interrupt here to say the pedigree is kind of rare in terms of the gurus that we would normally cover and a lot of the gurus who made headlines because of their outlandish and abusive activities in the 70s and 80s.
This is a Fulbright scholar who met Gandhi?
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
And we'll get to this maybe later on, but you guys talk, you know, on the pod, talk so much about, we talk so much about bypassing.
And what really came to the surface for me in this project was academic bypassing.
You know, we talk about spiritual bypassing, political bypassing, and academic, and that became a major theme as I was Speaking with very highly educated family members.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Can you say a little bit more about that?
Are you saying that people in high demand situations can ignore the peril that they're in if they feel that they're sufficiently intellectually defended or if they have like academic jobs or if they're credentialed or something like that?