Some chase science or philosophy, others the occult. There are endless routes to finding meaning in this world, endless ways to shape your place within it. I grew up in a high-control religion. The experts call it a cult, and I don’t disagree. I was raised Jehovah’s Witness, and from my teens to my early thirties, I lived a double life—physically in, mentally out, what they call PIMO. It was less a journey of discovery than one of rebellion, always with the guilt and shame pressed into me for wanting, adoring, needing, yearning. Even now, after years of therapy, the old torment sits with me, lies with me, shapes me.
But I’ve been out for fourteen, maybe fifteen years. In my late-forties, I can finally say it: I am free of it. Even so, those wasted years—those years controlled and shaped by the cult—have left their scars. And since my teens, I’ve been on another spiritual path, trying to become something else entirely, something not defined by the Watchtower or its rules. I always felt the spiritual pull, the yearning, but it was never for what was in front of me. I could see the hypocrisy from the platform, the logical gaps, the agenda. I didn’t always have words for it, but I saw it.
Now, I look out at the world and it feels like another cult. The cult of ego, ideology, charisma, politics, gender, greed—AI, even. The world is fracturing into tribes, each with its own dogma. And just like before, if you step out of line, say the wrong thing, or fail to toe the party line, you’re out. Shamed, humiliated, made to feel guilty. So I don’t join groups. I don’t pledge allegiance to ideologies. I don’t join in. Maybe I’m missing out. I don’t know.
But for more than thirty years, I’ve been walking this path—sometimes misled, sometimes enlightened. The moments of clarity come and go, and I try to hold on but they always slip away. Still, I think there’s something to take from every path I’ve walked. Something to learn, some way of being, some insight to carry forward. And if I find the right route, the right path, it’ll be mine. I’ll know it when I see it.
I’ve realised that my writing, my thinking, my work, my spiritual practice, my education—they’re all versions of the same search. They’re all attempts to understand what it is to be human, to be influenced, to be controlled, to be manipulated. To find a way to take my mind back from the people and systems and structures that shaped it. To tap into higher or lower states of consciousness, to unlock the unconscious, to find a spiritual path that’s right for me. To know that the things I was taught to suppress—the wants and needs and yearnings—are actually the keys to having more moments of enlightenment, more moments of becoming. And that, I think, is the only way to gain any real understanding.
