conspiracy crash-out

To many voices, too many theories

When I was young, I read every strange book I could get my hands on - philosophies, theologies, psychedelic manifestos. Within the pages of those who had explored before me, I flew through space like a spiritual astronaut.

When, as an adult, I found myself unexpectedly going to church, I approached it the same way. I explored Christianity through the written work of those who were willing to push down walls and posit unpopular ideas and dream into possibilities; I absorbed the writing that felt harmonious to me, and then I let go and allowed myself to be held by feeling.

Years earlier, the internet and social media had opened up a new avenue of this type of exploration. Chat rooms, Tumblr, internet radio stations, personal blogs, and my favorite platform, YouTube, allowed me access to voices. Other people’s voices. All sorts of voices. Voices on the fringes and the edges.

As much as I liked to create, I liked to consume.

I wanted to read or listen to, or see what other people were theorizing and experiencing. I wanted to see all the options on the table. I loved to explore points of view that were not necessarily mine. The weirder the better.

I remember bringing home my copy of Seth Speaks from the used book store when I was in high school and considering the idea of channeling, which seemed radical, but by the time I started watching people channel entities on YouTube was the norm.

Even Ram Dass, whose work spoke (and still speaks) to me on the most important and resonant of levels, engaged with the entity Emmanuel, channeled by Pat Rodegast. At some point, answering the question was Emmanuel “real,” Ram Dass said something akin to, I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve come to understand that doesn’t matter. I’ve heard Darryl Anka say something similar about the entity he channels, Bashar. If the teachings are helping to improve your life, why does it matter if Bashar is real?

I suppose that’s the attitude I took with everything: every spiritual leader, every book, every podcast, every theory. When taking in information, instead of asking myself, Is this true? I asked myself, How does this feel? Does it help? Does it make me more loving? More open-minded or open-hearted? Am I a better person if I adopt it, or a more selfish, fearful person? Is it interesting? Does it light me up? Do I recognize myself in it? Is it fun?

My YouTube subscriptions were robust. I watched psychics, energy healers, new age philosophers, and progressive Christians. Just as I had always read a wide range of thoughts, it was easy for me to listen to a wide range of thoughts and maintain a live and let live attitude. I followed and enjoyed creators I sometimes agreed with and sometimes did not. I was fascinated by people who claimed to be Starseeds, for example, even though I find that concept to be deeply problematic.

I sometimes listened to people talk about conspiracy theories. While I tend to hold such things at arm’s length, I know that some conspiracy theories are true. Governments and people in power sometimes lie, and sometimes the lies they tell are huge. Those in power do not always - or even often - have the best interests of the rest of us at heart. So, I found conspiracy theories of all sorts to be interesting and sometimes engaging, even if I didn’t believe in them.

But one morning, when I was in England with my mother, I felt a shift. I was sitting on the bed beneath the down duvet in our Oxford apartment with my morning coffee. I opened up my laptop and saw that one of the pages I followed on Facebook had a new post up. The woman who ran this page was an energy healer. She was a bit older than I, and I liked the way she talked about collective energies. This post, however, was different. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen from her.

“This morning,” she said, “Buckingham Palace mistakenly released and then quickly retracted an announcement confirming that the queen is a Reptilian.” She went on to cite David Icke as her source, and my stomach dropped.

While I’m not closed off to the idea of Reptilians, the whole idea of an evil Reptilian agenda is based on the antisemitic The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This woman, whose content I had enjoyed, was a Holocaust denier? My rule about conspiracy theories was, I didn’t entertain them if they were dehumanizing in any way. Based on eugenics? Promoted by Nazis? Those, I wouldn’t engage. Quickly, I unsubscribed from this woman’s page.

Around this same time, well-known angel card maven Doreen Virtue made a public conversion to fundamentalist Christianity and disavowed her work. A lesser-known energy healer I followed on YouTube made a similar pivot. This person created gentle videos wherein she held her palms up to the camera and softly repeated I love you, I love you, I love you. I liked her content simply because it was quirky and sweet. All was well until she posted a video declaring that she’d started going to church and would no longer be making Reiki or tarot content because those things, she now understood, were evil.

There was a stirring, something afoot. Mainstream creators were dipping their toes into the woo-woo, and established woo-woo creators were going mainstream. A current of fear seemed to be flowing beneath everything. Psychics began to talk about something called “the event” that would change humanity forever. Those who liked to forecast future events were growing increasingly untethered, wild in their accusations, and conspiratorial.

Then, the pandemic happened.

The last time I drank from the common chalice at church, I stood to pass the Peace, and when I turned to take the hand of the man closest to me, he put his hands in prayer position instead and gave me the Namaste bow. I returned the gesture, realizing that, of course, he was right. It was better not to touch one another. Didn’t that also mean it was better we didn’t drink after one another? There we were, all of us in that room breathing air, knowing the virus was in the U.S. and would soon make its way to us. Attendance numbers had already dropped significantly.

My EFM class decided to go online. We thought we’d meet on Zoom for a few weeks. There was grumbling about it. Some people didn’t want to go online at all. There was a woman in my class who proudly boasted that she intended to take zero COVID precautions, believing that god would protect her. Thankfully, my EFM teacher did not share that viewpoint.

As it turned out, my class never met in person again. Soon, the church building was closed and services went online. I remember thinking that the shutdown offered us an opportunity to reset the way we thought, the way we lived. Suddenly removed from what we had come to rely on as normal, we could dive inward, truly listen to our hearts, and commit to change that would benefit the earth and one another.

All of our institutions, including the church, I thought, could reevaluate, restructure, regroup. Maybe the church as we knew it wouldn’t survive. Maybe it would be reborn into the world as something more inclusive, more charitable, more expansive.

But the tone and energy of the YouTubers I watched shifted in the opposite direction. They began to warn against the vaccine, telling their viewers not to wear masks or put masks on their children. This was not an informed discussion or dissent; it was vehement disinformation. As someone who questions, at best, Western medicine protocols, I struggled at first with my own decision about the vaccine, but I couldn’t abide the sharing of potentially deadly false information. There’s a big difference between saying that you don’t want a vaccine and saying that no one should get that vaccine.

I unsubscribed from anyone who used the phrase the jab or claimed that wearing a respirator violated their personal freedom, but I continued to hold on to a few of my more radically strange YouTube subscriptions. Even though they sometimes seemed unhooked from reality, I still liked to listen to them.

I kept an ear out for the Q-Anon rhetoric, and I watched for it to show up in channeling and intuitive readings. I noticed a trend among spiritual thought leaders who claimed they didn’t watch the news and that their information was coming from their “guides,” but would then regurgitate the latest Q drop, word for word.

One such person, who had amassed a rather large following, was one of the most compelling to watch; her story and approach were unique. I knew she was skating around the edges of conspiratorial thought, but I was shocked when I played her latest video to hear her push back against the Black Lives Matter protests with “all lives matter.” One morning, I opened up YouTube to find four separate accounts, including hers, had posted videos with the same title, “Is Trump the Messiah?”

I watched a few minutes of her video, but a few minutes was all I could endure. I unsubscribed from her and everyone who was floating the idea that Trump was some sort of vigilante outsider come to save us all from the Illuminati.

When the COVID shutdown was over, my church went back to gathering in person, but I did not. I didn’t go back to yoga class. I didn’t go back to eating in restaurants. I continued to watch the COVID numbers and listen to the advice of independent scientists and virologists. I continued to listen to the disabled community. And I continued to feel more and more isolated, more and more out of synch with my community both in person and online. I lost friendships to Covid denial and the adjacent politics. I lost people who died of COVID, and I lost people to spiritual psychosis. I also lost a great deal of my faith and understanding.

Prior to this worldwide shift show, I was obsessed with spirituality and theology. I wrote and posted a lot of words, a lot of videos. I thought this was my domain, my sweet spot, my content. But now, I felt utterly distanced from that version of myself. I became disillusioned and disappointed.

Where was the discernment? Where was the compassion? How could people who taught love and light side themselves with people like Alex Jones? How had we, as a people, become so deeply anti-humanist and anti-science? I unplugged from everything and everyone, not as open-minded, I suppose, as I once believed myself to be.

I set about deleting my old blog posts. Even the language I had used in them seemed foreign and false to me. I was no longer the person who had written those things. I lost my taste for giving intuitive readings. I stopped engaging in my spiritual self-care practices. I no longer wished to be associated with any of the spiritual or religious groups where I had once belonged. As the world rearranged itself, I, too, was being rearranged.

You might call this a crisis of faith or dark night of the soul, but both would imply a desire to return to faith, and I had no such desire. What I wanted was quiet. I needed to separate myself from all of the voices that sought to deliver spiritual news or opinions.

I felt emptied and crushed by everything, all of it, and no platitudes or affirmations could pull me off the remote little island where I found myself, struggling to survive, wondering who I was.

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Notes:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

It’s a Shame About Doreen

Q-Anon

Reptilian Conspiracy Theory

EFM

Seth Speaks

Emmanuel

Darryl Anka

Ram Dass

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I’m Lori-Lyn. I’m a writer, intuitive, and artist exploring creativity, spirituality, and pop culture. I share personal stories, reflections, and slightly woo-woo insights on Creative Living Diaries, where I am also currently publishing (this) memoir of sorts, Cosmic Heart.