The Beginning

I am going to start sharing my experiences with, what looks like from the outside, the desteni cult.

Now first and foremost, the message is the message and I stand infinitely within that, what I do not stand infinitely with are the people and how the people who were involved essentially turned it into the "cult" that people will see it as. So let's talk about these points. 

Self forgiveness...the shit is real. When you're diving through your past and see things that you're unhappy with, the fuck else are you going to do? Get angry? Get sad? Get remorseful? No, you've got to forgive yourself, no one and nothing else is going to forgive you, and any emotions or reactions that come up in relation to that will only cycle the problem. You've got to own it, forgive it, then change.

The one thing that I did learn within that is, even if you write out 1001 self forgiveness statements, it doesn't mean you actually forgive yourself. Forgiveness is a learned practice and the word forgive must actually be lived and expressed wholly within/as yourself. So, writing helps tremendously with introspection, but cannot do the job of forgiving yourself for you. Some members became reliant upon writing, which is always past tense. The change that needs to be applied is in the moments in life that bring up what you're aiming to forgive. Real time change. Not past introspection into what you were going through. So if writing becomes a reliance then change will never actually happen.

Bernard as the cult "leader". Sure you could say that. But what he always said is "Don't fucking follow me". He didn't want anyone to follow him, he wanted you to live the principles for yourself. He wanted you to become your own person and not blindly follow what was happening or being said. So he always stood as stability because he didn't have a "goal" within the group, he just was. And yes there was a polygamy relationship that people view as just another cult thing, but he also said "you don't want 2 women, because eventually they realise they don't need you". So all these outside views can easily be contradicted with his own words. He was a man that I still respect because he didn't bullshit. So let's go into the other people.

When I first visited the farm, I missed my connection flight, resulting in my luggage not being in South Africa at the time of my arrival. I'm a type 1 diabetic and had some supplies in that luggage, fortunately most were with me. When we got to the farm there was a group chat going on either that night or the next, so I'm on the chat with everyone and someone asks me "don't you just feel so comfortable there?". Mind you I still didn't have my luggage and I was wearing someone else's clothes. I replied with "no". This caused a bit of a tizzy within the chat because, again, there was a cult ideology forming within the group. The morning after the chat Bernard had a grin on his face towards me and simply told someone to take me around and introduce me to the animals, which did help me become comfortable. Reminiscing about it, I'm thinking Bernard had that grin because I didn't follow the group and what was trying to be impressed upon myself.

So within the group there was ideas of how you should feel or express yourself in scenarios/situations which is cult shit for sure. The reason this blog is titled CULTure is because every culture is a cult. If you don't follow the culture you get casted aside and ostracized. With that being said, it was still really fascinating to see how ~40 people at our peak could really influence the world. The main youtube channel was banned when Google bought YouTube, our reddit accounts were banned, the language that we used has become common language in the world such as the system, but we fell because we didn't actually fucking get it. We all still wanted our slice of life without realising it, myself included. 

In the next post I will talk about the principles that we all aimed to live