Ryker 14: Skin Deep

There was definitely an emphasis on beauty. Not so much as a path to enlightenment as much as just a general practice. My nickname was Gordo for 8 years because I had gained a little weight. And I had to get up in front of everyone and show how fat I was on a routine basis. Take off my shirt… “Look at him, look at how fat he is” I probably had something like an extra 10 pounds on me. That’s my personal experience and it was humiliating. But it was OK because I took it as part of my work on my ego. The ego needs to be crushed so I just let that happen. At one point, he wanted me to wear a Speedo. I quickly stopped doing that. But definitely there was an emphasis on beauty… not as a spiritual path. I myself, personally, would like to keep myself as attractive as possible just on a regular vanity level. But I wasn’t given anything as a spiritual path to be beautiful or anything like that. To be generally healthy, to work out. But not as a spiritual path.

The emphasis on beauty was a weird facet of his teachings. Basically if I had to sum up his teaching package: it was a promiscuous gay lifestyle in a Hindu climate being led by a narcissist that needs to be adored. Because he definitely needed to be adored. He wore makeup and false eyelashes and painted eyebrow pencil under his chest.. just normally. And again, I am not excluding myself from wanting to look good. I like to keep my body in shape and look attractive, just for general reasons. God knows I’ve done plenty of stuff to look attractive. But… maybe it was his intense vanity and arrogance, or him thinking that his model of living was best for everyone instead of seeing the individual and working with them,… but he wanted to make everyone follow his exact pattern, and I think that’s literally impossible. And intensely unhealthy.

Angelo threw everything in the same bag. Whenever I was confronted by things it was always in the vein of “not doing my work” and “it’s absurd that you want to eat this or want to go there or want to do that”. Everything was always ridiculed. Anything you might want to do, or even something that you weren’t aware you were doing. It was constant ridicule. Very rarely was there an encouragement. It was always a ridicule, ridicule, ridicule. Like I remember when I shaved my moustache, he laughed at me like “Oh my God. You have no idea how ugly you are” And he’d make jokes about it, “You look like you have a white moustache now, you look horrible” And when I shaved my moustache off, it was like, “Sorry, it’s none of your business what I do with my moustache” But Angelo made this huge deal about it. Publicly laughing at it. He did that with everything. But again, I was using that sort of thing to drop my mind. To drop my ego. I mean, that was the whole platform of this community. Drop your mind. Do whatever happens here to let go of your ideas and your thoughts. And that worked to a certain extent. But I see now, that I suppressed a great deal of my own intuition for the sake of “dropping my mind” because I wasn’t taught the difference between my mind (which is something that can distract you) and the genuine intuition that comes from sincere meditation and spiritual practice. Anything that occurred to me (according to Angelo) was my mind. Anything. And that, I’m seeing now, is very unhealthy. And confusing.