After yesterday, I was longing for sadhana this morning. I sang from my heart, and I began to cry. I cried for all the people I have hurt. I cried because I have been hurt. I cried for the people who have hurt others. My mind was consumed with thoughts of how miserable it must be for other people trying to regain their identities and their lost memories after being brainwashed as I had been many years ago. I have almost repaired my hard drive, so to speak, with the Guru's Grace, but there are still some glitches before I can even get to where I was on my spiritual path before I met a Charles Manson-wannabe 14 years ago.
That man talked about and compared himself to the Unibomber, to Jim Jones and, of course, to Charlie Manson. He didn't let me see how dark he was, until I was already in his web. Even now, if I run into him, it is hard to extricate myself from his intensely overpowering and charismatic sway ~ partly because I am still afraid. And I am also still very angry. As Ammachi says, it takes us a long time to get to the bottom of our anger. I've been working on it for years and years, it seems. The rage seems bottomless.
I was in a cult with no name. A cult made up of women who signed their lives away on glossy 8 x 10 photographs, to a mastermind, a black magician, and a psychopath. He doesn't have a signed photograph from me, though, just a shelf full of video footage of his sexual abuse of me. I wonder, in light of my experiences with a megalomaniac, what the Manson girls went through?
My heart broke this morning for those infamous three: Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and most of all, Leslie Van Houten. I wish the parole board would let her go after 17 tries, and a clearly remorseful heart. After all, penitentiaries were originally named as such for the purpose of rehabilitating people, not sentencing them to an eternal hell behind bars.
I wish for Leslie that she could be free. Free of the memories of Charles manipulating her like a marionette. I think of the man who abused me showing me all of those movies: "Blue Velvet", "Sexy Beast", "Dust Devil", "9 1/2 Weeks", "Lost Highway" and movies about the Marquis de Sade. I think of how he took a movie I loved ~ "White Knights" ~ and pointed out how I was like the lyrics in one of the songs from the soundtrack: a puppet on a string... his puppet. The Rolling Stones singing "under my thumb!" on his stereo. I was literally dancing with the devil. People say he doesn't exist. I beg to differ. He lives in Missouri. He said I was like "Thelma and Louise", said he'd help me kill myself if I wanted him too. He would be Charles Manson himself if he could, if Charles hadn't done it first.
Was any of this like what Leslie and the others went through? The midnight violence to my body in cemetries and on the sides of freeways? The threats to kill my cat? Then the fake kindness and compassion. The hugs. The fake love. The listening with only one ear? The fun times...Chinese fire drills and swimming with dolphins all paid for in the night with my soul? The indoctrinations....hours and hours and hours of lectures, grilling, reviewing, recitation of his made-up mantras, the reminders that I was part of a family and had a responsibility to that family? Just because he held me as a cried for one day after my mother died did not make him a saint. Far from it.
If Leslie Van Houten went through that sort of awfulness and more, how do people hate on her? She isn't like Sandra Good who is not behind bars but should be. What a freak of nature she is, just like Charles. Just like the leader of the little cult I was in. God, if I could only go back and tell myself as I was forced to watch videos about the Manson Family and Heaven's Gate, that I was being shown by him exactly what he was doing to me, as he snickered behind my back! Shirley Manson of "Garbage" singing "Stupid Girl". He said that was my theme song.
Psychopaths. They ruin lives. One of them ruined Leslie Van Houten's life. And Sharon Tate's. One of them almost ruined mine. Nice try, I want to say now. Nice try. I have my soul and spirit back. I am a bride (a body) married to her bridegroom (my Soul). Charlie Manson took away those women's moral compasses, but Leslie found hers in the trash heap and fixed it up. Why is she still behind bars? Is there no mercy in this world for a murderess who will never murder again? I truly wish she would have stayed at Paramahansa Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship and not gone to Haight-Ashbury to meet Charlie. I wish I'd never worked in Sauget, Illinois.
It is what it is. My heart breaks for Leslie today. It breaks for the women who are still in the clutches of the man who had me.
Is it not ironic that I cannot seem to forgive my boss for being such a bitch, but I can have compassion for a murderess?
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