30 Questions that may help you decide

                   The Busy Person’s Guide to Indoctrination

I know how it is. Sometimes you’re in a hurry, and you don’t really have the time to investigate all the new people you come across in your life, and some new person catches you in a weak moment, and your hungry, and they seem friendly -- really friendly actually -- and they invite you over to their house for a BBQ and some punch and  then everyone goes out to a lake for some skinny dipping, and then maybe you give one of their friends a ride to the airport, and then, just to be polite, you go to a few meetings with them and you start eating the cookies and then maybe there’s a hike to a ranch, or into a jungle somewhere, and then before you know it, you’re head is shaved, you’re eating porridge and you’re in a cult. I’ve seen it happen.

If you’re worried it may be happening to you, here are some of the warning signs of impending cult membership that I hope will prove to be useful.

Ask yourself these 30 questions:

1.      Do you live in California?

2.      Are you wearing something that has no pockets?

3.      Do you know what happened to your other clothes, the ones with pockets?

4.      What happened to your hair?

5.      Are you in an airport with no luggage?

6.      Are you holding a tambourine?

7.      When people meet you for the first time, do they ask, “Are you in a cult or something?”

8.      Are you always in a group?

9.      Can you tell the members of your group apart?

10.  Is someone in the group known as “The Great Zero?”

11.  Are your clothes weird? I don’t mean fashionably weird, like you are wearing a dress made out of old issues of TV Guide from the 1980’s. (Yes, it would be weird to have a picture of Gary Coleman on each breast, but it wouldn’t necessarily mean you were in a cult.) I mean weird in the way that your clothes may have some magical powers, or you’re wearing a cape that is so  billowy that if try to run away you would trip and fall down. That kind of weird.

12.  Are you counting the days until “they” arrive?

13.  Are “they” late?

14.  Have you tried to contact “them” with a machine made out of aluminum foil?

15.  Did the machine work?

16.  Did you sell your house to help The Great Zero build another machine that will definitely work this time?

17.  Does everyone around you love you? 

18.  Are you expected to have sex with everyone who loves you? Is there a video camera there? That’s normal then.

19.  Is everyone required to have sex with the same person, but not with each other?  Is this your job? Then it's normal.

20.  Have you been asked to sacrifice something like a chicken and/or your bank account?

21.  Is something burning somewhere?

22.  Is someone rather monotonously playing a drum?

23.  A guitar?

24.  A pan flute?

25.  Do you spend most of your day,

a.       sweating under a tarp?

b.      spinning in circles?

c.       dancing until you hallucinate?

d.      sitting with your ankles behind your head?

26.  Do you live on/frequently visit/make pilgrimages to a “Compound?”

27.  A “Center?”

28.  A  “Vortex?”

29.  If you’re a women, are you expected to bear many children?

30.  If you are a man, are you expected to cut off your nuts?

If you answered yes to many of these questions, you may be in a cult. Now before you make plans to run away, you might want to think about it first. Do you remember where you used to live? Do you have anyone to go home to who is not already in the cult with you?

Sometimes the whole family winds up in the cult but they get forgotten about because they have changed their names and work in different parts of the compound. Your wife, Margie, may now be called "Sparkling Intention" and she spends all day hand-feeding the alpacas, and your brother, Mike, now goes by the name of  “Climax” and works in the gift shop. If there are people left at your house, will they let you come back? We don’t want any more bald, homeless, nutcases wandering the streets raving about what “they” did to you. We already have enough Republicans.

So, assuming you can’t leave, perhaps you will be able to mentally leave the cult while still superficially appearing to be a member so that you can continue to take advantage of all the great cult benefits like free housing, delicious vegetarian meals, free exercise, and for the most part, warm human companionship. Naysayers might say that 18 codependent people sleeping in a school bus, eating boiled dandelion greens, and walking 8 miles to “town” in order to shake a tambourine by the feed store hardly constitutes a position with “benefits,” but then again, beggars can’t be choosers. 

If you’re lucky you might be able to make a lateral move over to a cult with better facilities and/or a more attractive leader to have sex with.  Or maybe you had better get that old school bus running again, tell everyone you are going recruiting at Burning Man and make a run for it. It worked for me.