Bonus Sample: God Seemed Like A Dumb Reason to Break Up
Today in our Listeners’ Stories installment, Lynn Short joins her partner Justin to discuss how they met, grew up in, and grew out of a branch of “Gnosis,” a theosophical cult founded in the 1950s by Samael Aun Weor in Columbia.
Weor was a classic old-school spiritual pervert, with 60-plus (likely ghostwritten) books to his name, and a passion for meddling in his followers’ sex lives.
Lynn and Justin describe what it was like to wake up to each other again—and to normal lives—after 17 years of practicing non-orgasmic sex and missionary work. A unique and hopeful look into a relationship that survived coercive influence—a bond that didn’t become a trauma bond.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I get this feeling talking to you both that there's been a kind of normalcy restored to your lives, to maybe your sex lives.
Maybe there's a feeling that it's definitely less claustrophobic than when you're in the group and that you can just kind of be people together.
Kind of the way you met.
And so, is that accurate?
And what does it feel like?
Yeah.
I mean, we got together as a couple within the framework of that alchemical chastity thing.
So, it's been a new world since we left.
And, you know, here we are in our 50s and still learning new things about our bodies.
Like, wow!
Wow, did that just happen?
That's awesome!
Yeah, that's been exciting.
A little like teenagers.
Yeah, yeah, having a void open up in my life especially because I spent a ton of time preparing things and suddenly I'm like... Oh, for Gnostic?
Yeah, yeah, and now I'm left without...
You know, something to do, and so I just went whole hog back into bikes.
The first thing I did was a 700-mile mountain bike race, and that became an all-consuming passion for me.
Given the way I'm wired, whatever I'm into, it's going to be some...
Some bizarre extreme version of it, you know, and you know, so looking back it seems to me that you know, okay.
Well, yeah, it makes sense that I that I got into gnosis the way I did and I think it's interesting that, like, you can go a thousand percent into bike riding, but you kind of know what it is.
Yeah.
Like, there's nothing deceptive about it.
Yeah, I don't feel weird at all, and I've kind of become a Pied Piper of, you know, gravel and adventure and bikepacking, you know, locally here.
And it's like, I don't feel weird about this.
And, you know, a community is kind of So interesting, so interesting.
in a way that it never did with Gnosis.
Okay, well, this was my mission to spread the gospel of goofing off in the woods and
having fun, getting lost and that sort of thing.
Don't feel weird about it at all.
So interesting.
So interesting.
How about you, Lynn?
Well, the last couple of years has been like my own project has been deconversion, deconstruction
of all of this thought and a lot of therapy.
And, um, and I need a nerd out.
I need something to put my focus into emotionally, intellectually, like I want to chew on ideas and things.
And so Cult recovery has kind of been that for me and just a lot more reading and then trying to get back into poetry before Gnosis.
I pretended to be a poet and so I'm trying to get back into that because one of the things that The Gnostics tell you is there's only objective art, not subjective art.
Ew.
Oh, yeah.
It's so gross that, you know, only the great masters should do art that you as a person, you probably shouldn't do art.
It's art that contains a teaching that's solely for the consciousness.
Yeah.
Subjective art is egoic art.
So you shouldn't, you know.
Yeah, don't bother.
Don't bother.
So I... Ew!
That is so gross.
It is upside down, too.
It's completely upside down.
Yeah.
Totally, like absolutely, completely upside down.
Yeah.
So those those wheels are rusty.
So I'm looking I'm hoping to there's a local poet here who teaches in the community colleges.
So I'm hoping to take a class from her and like just, you know, at 52, I'm not really wanting to go back to school, but I do want to go take a class.
here and there and do that.
That sounds awesome.
And I can imagine.
Okay, so I wrote and published books of poetry and two novels before I got into... Fantastic!
I should look that up.
Well, maybe not.
But this was before I got into the groups that I was in.
Gotcha.
And being in those two groups dried up What had been a writing compulsion that I had had from the age of 11, 12, something like that.
Yeah.
And part of what was happening was that my brain and my inner voice was just parroting what I had been sort of indoctrinated to learn.
Yeah.
And I think that figuring out how to do that again and to listen to whatever that internal strangeness is, you know, that internal, strange, dirty, egoic thing that you're not supposed to listen to, according to Mr. Samael.
We're all strange.
I think that's really profound.
And I'm really happy that you're going to take a class.
That sounds awesome.
Yeah.
I think one of the things that I have taken away from Gnosis the most is how it's just fine to not be special.
It's fine to just be a person.
Like, the thing that they sold us were...
you're going to be a god on earth and what you are currently is nothing and not important but you have this goal of aspiration which doesn't you know like it's fine to just like the depth and the meaning of just being a person breathing in a space is fine that's enough and i wish more people could come to that on their own without having either gone through a trauma or Maybe they didn't go too far into influencer culture or wellness culture but like couldn't it just be okay that we're people?
Isn't that what the Buddhists taught?
Like just being a person is okay and that our relating together is good and fine and it's enough?
And that's kind of the end point that I've come to outside of Gnosis is that
