While on the topic of mind control, I got started thinking about it from a religious perspective. Not in terms of religion as mind-control (thought I’m sure that’s a worthy angle as well), but in terms of mind-control as being a story people tell to make sense of a complex set of bizarre circumstances and weird internal events.

The idea would be that we have a set of internal somethings which are common to all of us. You could call them archetypes or complexes, you could call them drives, gods, demons, and a bunch more. But what they are is areas of potentiality which exist in our minds, and which become culturally imprinted with the relevant symbol-vehicle.

Again, I do believe in the possibility of mind-control technology, government brainwashing sex-assassin cults, MK ULTRA, Monarch, microwave beams, and fun stuff like that. I’m not so much trying to discredit that as offer an alternative and possibly overlapping view.

The thing is, that experiences of mind control survivors is always so close to being religious or spiritual. You have mysterious voices in your head giving you commands. You have visits and interactions with hierarchies of mysterious beings. You have built-in value systems about right and wrong types of conduct. People involved in the field will often claim that such similarities are intentionally played upon and reinforced by mind control programmers and handlers, in order to discredit those who experience such things.

But what if the whole story-system of mind control is just another of the modern world’s many replacements for religion? It is a story told to organize experience. It is a semiotic set of patterns which may be applied to your internal state. It serves to orient you during points of personal psychic chaos, and creates semi-realistic scenarios to explain what’s happening, why it’s happening, and possibly gives a pathway through it - if a tenuous one.

I tend to think this sort of approach would be valuable for anybody who’s working with ideas in this field, whether you believe this mind control stuff to be literally true, or disbelieve it, or are keeping your options open, like me.