Good talk. I spent my late teens and early twenties in a (thankfully benign) “cult”. We had about fifty families all living in the same neighborhood, studying and practicing a mystical form of Christianity.
To this day, it was the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done. Many of my friends from those days say the same, and we are still bonded to each other in a way that anyone who wasn’t there could never understand. I struggle to explain the superior value of this kind of spiritual unity to my dissident friends.
One of our regular rituals was something called a brothers’ meeting. The exoteric purpose of this meeting was to handle the business of the church. The esoteric was to reveal the motivations of each brother. We had a saying that in the brothers’ meeting “everyone gets found out”.
One of the primary rules was that you never defend yourself in a brothers’ meeting. If someone points out your hidden motive you receive it realizing how difficult it is to see yourself clearly.
This works very well as long as everyone engages in good faith. It doesn’t work quite so well if the leader uses it to advance his agenda. The leader, of course, never attended these meetings, but at a certain point, some of the brothers who desired status realized they could win favor by helping things in his direction. Somehow, pointing out this agenda was not well received.
