How I Learned About Transpersonal Psychology … and ‘How it [Really] Works’

I learned about transpersonal psychology after I spent slightly over a decade investing in a long-term, professional-level seminary education at the Graduate Theological Union on Holy Hill, in Berkeley, CA, where an interfaith consortium of loosely networked seminaries has been parked for well over a century. 

After several years, I had opened myself up in spiritual direction at the Chaplaincy Institute, which is affiliated with Starr King. The instructors there steered me into Sex Addicts Anonymous, both as a member dealing with problematic behaviors I had self-identified as “addictive,” and as a student of 12 Step spirituality.

I became familiar with a wide body of 12 Step literature, specific to SAA and to twelve-steppery in general. My wife even briefly participated in COSA, a parallel program. It was a relief to find people who wanted to help us, for free—and at the height of the #metoo movement there was no shortage of virtue signaling around this kind of support. 

I built a wide network of contacts, worked with multiple sponsors and accountability partners, attended multiple meetings a week, called into multiple meetings on the side, helped anchor a local meeting near my own house, and really plunged myself into the program to overcome my problematic past and my negative behaviors.

About two years into the program, things went suddenly sideways. My wife and I went through a deeply traumatic experience with our local SAA community, and with affiliate circles online, in which we were aggressively abused by people inside and outside the fellowship for reasons we did not fully understand. 

Because I was the one most-actively involved, and she had remained unaffiliated with any group during my enrollment, I was the one directly targeted, while she was objectified as my “vice” and treated as something to be abused and (preferably) discarded. Still, we both experienced intense forms of abuse.

We were targeted with strange behaviors like complex gaslighting, group misdirection, gross humiliation, and long-term deception meant to cause confusion and a mental breakdown. We experienced intrusions into our home, literature sent with threats and reminders of privacy invasions, things too insane and bizarre to be believed or understood unless you were there to experience them. I was worn down to almost nothing, until I wept dramatically in front of my bullies to satisfy their vindictiveness and their anger.

When the local network finally believed I was broken, I was repeatedly encouraged at 12 Step meetings to yield to the group as my Higher Power, by circles of dozens of people who alternatively threatened me with further trauma, and then treated me like a hero and friend for enduring it, and then resumed the traumatizing.

At the time, members inside the program who were not directly involved in the abuse treated the process like it was totally normal behavior, even a community ritual. 

Several people made comments like, “I had to pay a similar price to sit at this table,” and, “I had to switch sponsors and therapists to get through the worst of it, but I made it, and so can you.” 

One person said, “We lost a baby, but we’re okay now.” 

Because I was emotionally attached to several of the people involved, and had invited them into my life, and trusted them, and saw them as friends, it took me too long to break away.

Before long, I discovered that the off-brand therapists, private seminary, instructors, and the spiritual directors that had led me into Sex Addicts Anonymous—and had normalized the program to my thinking, and had convinced me that the whole thing was really my idea in the first place—were all very well-aware of this culture of abuse, and were closely networked together under the rubrics of transpersonal psychology. Some of them were directly associated with private “spiritual emergency” seminaries affiliated with the masonic lodge. The seminary that had introduced me to these volunteer programs even taught classes on spiritual direction, hypnosis, and emergency, leading and supervising parallel student groups of ‘directors’ that were responsible for ‘transmuting’ the student groups which attended the other half of the school.

We had been pushed into the SAA circle deliberately, after a conservative religious group had surveyed our digital footprint, behind our backs, and discovered our amateur adult content, which contained elements of fantasy exposure, voyeurism, and exhibitionism. The religious hivemind had assessed these fantasy elements literally, and had apparently concluded that we were involved in revenge-porn blackmail for profit.

On this completely false assumption, ministers and professors I thought of as friends and mentors organized an extensive campaign of anonymous retribution—which lasted years—and passed their misinformation on to contacts inside SAA and parallel 12 Step groups. People inside of SAA coordinated with contacts in COSA, and also outside of the programs in parallel groups, from California to Colorado to Texas and beyond, in an extensive humiliation campaign we only gradually became aware of. 

One of the worst aspects of our harassment was the undisclosed surveillance we experienced for month and months, by total strangers who had tracked us both online under false pretenses—dozens and dozens of people in SAA, COSA, and unofficial affiliates used our accountability software, called Covenant Eyes, to track our online movements without our knowledge. They following us into chatrooms to gather data, and to harvest and spread our adult content in increasingly degrading and appalling ways, and shared that information freely with amateur homeopaths all motived to find creative ways to shame us.

How bad did it get?

Eventually—immediately after we filed complaints against the local community, as “karma” for our private lives—different groups attached my wife’s full name and location to her amateur content.

To initiate the sex-shaming campaign—to make us aware of their intention, and to break us and make us compliant—people published extremely degrading humiliation erotica, containing parody characters from SAA and COSA and virtually everyone in our life systems, including our infant daughter, for sale, on Amazon, under our family surname—all as part of a scripted spiritual emergency meant to destroy our marriage and family forever, or to bind us to the Sex Addicts Anonymous community, as social-justice retribution for our past “sins.” Either destroy us, or renew us; life, or death, in imitation of “the Work” of God. The more we resisted, the more they published.

Some of the details of our lives, plugged straight into the erotica series, had been harvested inside the SAA program, or over program-contact lunches. Much of it was harvested from public sources. Some of what was done by SAA members is too horrific to even mention. The lengths people went to land a blow in this mind game was absurd. Sometimes it was as petty as a fake, prank phone call from “Psych” Medical services. Other times, people threatened to ruin our lives if we did not comply with their suggestions. On multiple occasions, while we were out of town, people broke into the house where our young daughters sleep and play, and did things in our bathrooms, and left ‘clues’ in our house, to confuse, frighten, shame, and mislead us about what was going on.

The interfaith therapists, ministers, and spiritual directors surrounding us convinced us not to report these events to the police, or seek legal counsel, because we “couldn’t prove” anything, and it would make life harder for our children to be known for our sins.

We contacted the International Service Organization that runs SAA, and notified the Executive Director of SAA’s careful and elaborate participation in the campaign of abuse—some of which had been coordinated by local New Age ‘gurus’ or homeopaths, who have been embedded in and working with the SAA community for decades.

ISO declined to take any kind of action. The Executed Director deferred all responsibility to the local community. He suggested that I take my concerns to the particular groups that had actively abused my wife for months and had deceptively befriended me for years, or maybe just find a new SAA circle in my area for support.

He resigned shortly thereafter.

Together—after looking into the history and structure of SAA with new eyes and new experience, and at the institutions that had steered us into SAA and COSA—we decided instead that we would accept the consequences of being known for our past. We would tell the truth in public. In my wife’s words, we would do what we could, “to protect the next family.”

While we were being gaslit by various masonic lodge groups, by men and women keeping unusual tabs on us by day and by night, several different New Age books were recommended to me, some directly and some indirectly—eventually I came across Alan Watts, a towering figure of Bay Area interfaith culture, who turned out to be a common source for several of the authors thrust in our direction. We realized that a new generation of gurus have been emulating his style of deceptive pop-culture mind-melt for decades, building their own empires and fiefdoms in imitation of his style.

Watts had been essential in cobbling together a field of professional therapy called “transpersonal psychology” to validate the an interfaith practice, and even helped to establish the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, which (I later learned) had sometimes partnered with the Chaplaincy Institute where I had been enrolled. CIIS was responsible for churning out PhD and psych professionals using transpersonal textbooks that rationalized Jungian gnosticism as a professional medical field; CHI was responsible for finding and training would-be religious workers using transpersonal methods.

Alan Watts and several other magnetic personalities in the mid-twentieth century built an entire hivemind industry of networked professionals, gurus specializing in facilitating spiritual emergencies, indifferently watching and even helping as people collapse in carefully orchestrated rituals of psychospiritual breakdown—gurus who can then guide their clients or victims into new, pre-determined life outcomes. And others have learned their methods effectively.

We had been targeted inside this networked industry, by amateurs who had catastrophically misinterpreted our online footprint, and had disregarded our open-hearted confessions as deceptively incomplete.

Sure, my wife and I decided that we would do the right thing. We would just tell the truth. Like adults. Because we’re adults.

But there is an entrenched industry of publication houses, spiritual certification mills, private colleges offering pseudo-degrees, glossy personalities feigning their enlightened state of mind, and old-money institutions helping to run the spiritual emergency machine—not to mention the volunteer associations of man-children playing The Cosmic Game of Hide and Seek beneath them, using secret handshakes, nods, and winks.

Thes circles of association, these networks, have invested limitless manhours, built entire career platforms, corporations, LLCs, and virtue-signaling nonprofits using tried and true methods of deception and misdirection. It is a fond game and devout practice for them.

It’s not just a New Age gimmick, though it is often dressed up as New Age silliness—it’s a method and style of spiritual direction that is burrowed into the old churches, the new churches, the lodges, the communes, embedded in most places where people stand to make a profit from burning down sinners one way or another, to send them headlong into the arms of the religion they grew up with, or any religion at all. Causing a disaster is the measure of success.

Once I had enough perspective on what was happening, my response was to give my gaslighters the finger in a Zoom meeting. “The dumbest fucking cult in the world,” I think my words were. And I cut the religious volunteers—from the circle of the 12 steps, from the interfaith seminary I had been invited into, from the quirky little churches and groups I had stumbled into along the way—out of my life.

When the dust had settled, I started a blog about spiritual emergencies and shitty seminaries, and when the time expired on that blog, I started this one. My hope is that someone who gets dropped into the spiritual emergency machine in the future will stumble across this blog and realize—”oh, someone is fucking with me, and I should not sell my soul to the transpersonal collective.”

But its an easy mistake to make.

It’s a big machine, with lots of faces, meant to waste a lot of your time and cause infinite despair if you ever admit what you’ve become.

So this blog? It’s just a drop in the bucket, compared to the lodge industry, which—on autopilot—churns out gurus and life coaches and books on soul alchemy and spiritual transformation through the power of lying to your clients.

Their bullshit often Sounds True.

It’s not.

I figure, telling the truth in public for free is probably better than selling your soul to the devil, and then lying to everyone around you for the rest of your life, in exchange for something small and stupid.