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F---ed

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Antigen:

--- Quote ---On 2006-04-10 19:48:00, Anonymous wrote:

"You would have to be smoking the same stuff to understand it.  And, you would have to have had a sub-standard education."

--- End quote ---


That's Programeze for "Fuck! I remember that moment! Shit! Can we please not talk about it? I only want to think about the trauma bonds and comforting simplistic world view I got from that wonderful, wonderful program and oh how I miss it all!"

So thanks  :wave:
There's only one party on Capital Hill and it's the bipartisan spending party.
Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste
--- End quote ---

cleveland:
Marc Polonsky wrote about the same feeling:

http://www.insidersview.info/theseed.htm

Pretty amazing. I had to read Marc's version to recapture the exact feeling.

"The one thing I remember distinctly about my first full day at the Seed was that the morning rap was on "conning." It was a horrifying and awakening experience for me because when people stood up and said things like "I thought I could con the Seed by just saying everything they wanted me to," I realized that the Seed was after a very different, more fundamental kind of change than I had thought. I was scared."

"But for some reason, the only point on which I did not eventually give way to Stan was that I was happy before I came to the Seed. This was enough to enrage him. He would demand, "What about those nights when you lied awake in bed, wishing things were different somehow because you knew you just didn't feel right?" and I would reply that there had been no such nights. And he would tell me what an asshole I was, and so on. It was in fact this very argument that, on the night before I was finally allowed to go home, led him to comment, "You've made some progress but you're not even in the same ballpark as being allowed to go home."

"But that progress I had made had already cost me dearly. I felt like I had betrayed my friends and my sister and that I was no longer the same person. Even if I were to be completely pulled off the program at that point, I could not go back to being the person I had been. I could no longer think clearly or reflect on things in the privacy of my own mind, the way I had used to. My mind was too cluttered and confused and reflexively frightened of being invaded. Stan [oldcomer]had always been asking, "What are you thinking?" when I had least expected it. This "What are you thinking?" ploy of Stan's had been very effective in breaking down my resistance and cutting me off from my internal resources."

"It took me well over a decade to understand what had happened to me, what the Seed had done to my psyche, and what I'd done to myself while I was in the Seed. I strongly suspect that my internal process was very similar to that of many other Seedlings, though I cannot speak for others.

In a nutshell, the Seed forced me to "mean things that were not true." Under the combined pressures of sleep deprivation, lack of privacy, and constant haranguing both at the Seed and in Stan's charge, I eventually, with my words, betrayed everything that was sacred to me at that time in my life. I felt that if my friends on the outside still had any good feelings for me, then I no longer deserved them.

The obvious question, though, is why did I have to mean it? Why couldn't I simply say what I was being forced to say, but hold the words more lightly? Why couldn't I, or anyone else for that matter, simply "con" the Seed?"

"The strategy I believe most Seedlings adopted (including me) was to try and persuade themselves that the Seed had to be right. Maintaining a consistent lie, a conscious subterfuge, under such stressful conditions was a tall order for an unsophisticated young teenager. Also, I saw other Seedlings getting "busted" for conning right and left in the group. (I have no idea how many of those accused of conning were actually deliberately conning, any more or less than the rest of us.)

I remember a moment of horror, on the evening of my seventh or eighth day, when I realized that I was unable to "think" any longer. I had lost the ability to retreat into the sanctuary of my own mind and think things through, because I had grown so accustomed to being intruded upon without a moment's notice. It was as if I'd had a sealed off room in my head that had previously been accessible only to myself, and now even I could not enter. (I think I may known even then, in my heart of hearts, that I would regain access to this room at some point in my life, but it would be a long time, much longer than I could accept at age 14.)

During my time with Stan, I put a great deal of energy into resisting him. I set up a psychic force field, as it were, between us. To keep from being devoured, I had to maintain a certain tension, a precarious balance between overt resistance and total surrender. So I emerged at last from his dominion with a certain meager sense of myself intact. But still, I felt horribly guilty and empty, as if I had been pillaged and broken.

At some point shortly after being allowed to go home, I was sitting in the large warehouse room, in the group, at the Seed, pondering how I still believed myself to be "different" from everyone else there, and wondering what good it did me to feel this way. I could see how it was causing me pain. I could not see how it would ever serve me. My fate, as far ahead as I could see, was locked. There was nothing for me but to be a Seedling. I might as well be one then, and wholeheartedly embrace whatever attendant rewards there were. There were some: I could feel a part of something larger than myself. I could be part of an (albeit self-proclaimed) elite. I could have friends, a community, an identity. Why hold out for some other ambiguous set of rewards that I had already sold myself out of anyway?

And here is where I made a strange decision. I decided to make myself a true Seedling. All the energy I had put into resisting Stan, I now directed at my own resistance. I now became my own primary oppressor, working to deny and even to change my genuine feelings. After all, I already felt that I had betrayed myself (and all of my friends), I was already lost; one step further would not make a difference. I could not see the light at the end of the tunnel.

In one sense this "strategy" worked brilliantly. I moved through the rest of the program very quickly. Perhaps it was only an extension, really, of what I'd been doing in the Seed all along up until then, nothing fundamentally different in kind. Whenever the tension between what I really thought and felt and what I was "supposed to" think and feel became too apparent and unbearable to me, I had to deny the conflict and push it out of mind. I was unable to "ride out" the discomfort of being divided. My choices were either to consciously live a lie, or start working internally against my own emotions. I didn't see myself as capable of the former."

I don't care if you thought the Seed was a great experience and you are a happy ex-Seedling, if you thought the Seed sucked, or if you are ambivalent. I believe that everyone went through a similar internal process, and Marc really captured it.

GregFL:
yes, Marc did capture the experience.

So did you Wally.  I felt many of the exact same things you did during those first couple weeks.  I did not want to surrender myself to the seed, but I morphed over that time to someone who came to the realization that I had to in order to survive and get out the other side to freedom.  It was a terrifying invasive process that I will never forget and never wish on another person.

Stripe:
As the thread title goes, that's pretty much how went for all the children in the crowd.

Society usually looks down on parents who have subjected their children to the danger and disaster that results from a family membership in a cult. The children are viewed as innocent victims and the parents are the criminals, sometimes in the literal sense. An extreme but very realisitic example:  Jim Jones and The Peoples Temple.

On the other hand, when parents voluntarily and willingly subject their children to cult teachings and forced membership, the children who reject the danger and disaster of the cult are reviled and turned away. That's what the message was from Art Barker and The Seed back to the parents.  

Accept the dogma and deny themselves, or reject the dogma and risk total rejection by their family and their new society.  

Yeah, all in all, most young kids were definitely fucked no matter how they chose.

marcwordsmith:
I once performed a slam poem in which I referenced The Seed, and it went like this:

Some people get raped on a floor or a bed
I got fucked in the head instead

By the way, I'm assuming it's okay to spell out profanity here (?)

My question tonight:
It seems most of us here--especially us nonanonymous regulars--all essentially agree about what happened and how completely horrible it was.

But what about the hundreds and hundreds of others? I don't know a single Seedling from my time (late '72-early '73). Most of them, in the years immediately following, acted like it had been no big deal and told me to get over it (in so many words). The guys I was hanging out with the most right after the program--also ex-Seedlings--were extremely scornful of how much I needed to still talk about The Seed a year or more after I graduated. They would say, "There goes Marc again with his favorite subject." And they'd roll their eyes. They'd be genuinely embarrassed if I brought up the subject with different people (especially girls), or if I even allowed myself to be drawn into conversation about the subject with people who hadn't been in The Seed.

Did anybody else experience anything like this? Did it feel like The Seed made a bigger dent in you than in anyone else? There was something extra humiliating about that for me. It was like a new humiliation laid on top of the whole humiliating experience of having had to go through The Seed.

I stopped hanging out with ex-Seedlings about the time I began eleventh grade; it was too painful, so I made new "druggie friends" who were a little kinder and more amazed at what I'd been through. But I knew the other ex Seedlings would be laughing if they knew how much I still talked about it, to these new friends.

I went to the University of Florida when I was 18, and I knew no former Seedlings there. At age 20 I moved to California by myself, largely to put some distance between myself and my family. So from 1976 or so, until 2002 when I discovered this forum, I had absolutely no contact with anyone who'd ever even heard of The Seed, let alone been there.

So again I ask, were we just the sensitive ones who took it too seriously? I'm sure people did con the Seed after all. Or at least they didn't take it so much to heart. Did they have some natural adaptation mechanism--something between allowing themselves to be brainwashed and putting up overt resistance--a survival skill that those of us drawn to this forum were somehow missing?

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