The Spirituality That Made Abuse Feel Like Growth

Added: 2026-06-10

[00:00:00]This video contains my personal interpretations, experiences, and opinions regarding Ordo Templi Orientis, its teachings, and public statements made by its members. All quotations are presented in context to the best of my ability. If I have misstated any factual information, I welcome respectful corrections and will amend errors where appropriate.

[00:00:21]>> That all the crazy politics, and the heartbreaks, and the ecstasy, and the confusion, and all the stupidity, and bull is just a metaphor, an allegorical movie of all the inner trials and tribulations affecting your own unique and private spiritual metamorphosis.

[00:00:43]And survival is the first and last ordeal of initiation.

[00:00:49]>> For years, statements like this sounded comforting to me and empowering. They made the dysfunction I experienced inside the spiritual organization I belonged to feel meaningful. They helped me keep relationships and an identity I was afraid of losing. When I hear these words now, I still feel the power in them, but I also hear something else.

[00:01:09]I hear the kinds of things these statements were helping people live with. The person saying these things is not some fringe internet cult leader.

[00:01:19]It's Lon Milo DuQuette, probably the most beloved and respected figure in the modern occult community. And he spoke those words in front of the members of Ordo Templi Orientis, an initiatory occult organization dedicated to the teachings of Aleister Crowley. DuQuette has been a member of OTO since the 1970s, and he's currently its Deputy National Grand Master in the United States. If OTO has a celebrity, it's him. If it has a spiritual teacher, it's him. Over time, I realized that the words DuQuette delivers inside OTO to members in formal speeches have a specific psychological effect. But first, I need to give you a picture of what OTO is actually like to be inside because the message only makes sense in that context. OTO is rife with interpersonal drama, the kind of cliquishness, gossip, and backbiting that you would expect in a high school drama club. In my experience, emotional immaturity and volatility were common. I witnessed everything from the silent treatment and sulking to angry outbursts and emotional manipulation. Not just from rank-and-file members either, from local and national leaders. OTO combines hierarchy with opaque procedures, which makes it highly political, but also difficult to evaluate from the inside.

[00:02:40]Based on my observations, advancement within the upper degrees often seemed determined less by maturity or competence than by social proximity and personal relationships. If I stopped here, OTO would just sound like an extremely toxic work environment, but the dysfunction I saw and heard about went far beyond this. I saw repeated instances of members monitoring and reporting on one another. Newer members have described the head of the organization in the US showing them social media screenshots people sent him. He has them sorted into supporters and critics. There have been instances where national leadership pressured members to distance themselves from former members and critics. I've heard of instances where members are questioned should they show anything that looks like public support for a critic. And I've seen repeated instances where members facing credible accusations of harassment, manipulation, domestic violence, or sexual misconduct were tolerated or protected when they were socially well-connected. Some remained in leadership positions responsible for the safety of others.

[00:03:46]What disturbed me most was not simply that these dynamics existed, but that they were repeatedly normalized, minimized, or spiritually reframed. For years, I couldn't understand how a spirituality centered on freedom could coexist with this much dysfunction and control. What I eventually realized is that the philosophy doesn't just coexist with the dysfunction. It explains it away. And nobody explains it away better than Lon DuQuette. In his speeches to OTO members, DuQuette explicitly instructs them to reinterpret most dysfunctional aspects of their experience, conflict, politics, confusion, even what he himself calls stupidity and not as problems to be evaluated, but as symbolic expressions of their own inner development. Here's one of the quotes I played at the beginning, but now with more context.

[00:04:39]>> And for you lucky few who for one reason or another will come to realize that all the trials and the ordeals that come along with your membership in this most magical of magical orders are not flaws in the system.

[00:05:01]That all the crazy politics and the heartbreaks and the romance and the pains in the ass and the ecstasy and the confusion and all the stupidity and that your OTO experience will most assuredly heap upon your life that all this magical crap is just a metaphor.

[00:05:33]An allegorical movie of all the inner trials and tribulations affecting your own unique and private spiritual metamorphosis.

[00:05:44]>> Notice what's happening here. He's not denying dysfunction, he's recategorizing it. Politics becomes spiritual. Pain becomes a metaphor. is metamorphosis. These aren't problems to evaluate, they're symbolic reflections of the self. External reality is dissolved into internal meaning. Not only does DuQuette reframe dysfunction as meaningful, he also frames enduring that dysfunction as a spiritual achievement.

[00:06:12]>> And survival is the first and last ordeal of initiation.

[00:06:17]>> That's a quote from a roughly 40-minute-long speech DuQuette gave at Notacon called Survival, the first and last ordeal of initiation.

[00:06:26]Throughout it, he repeats this phrase after stories involving humiliation, betrayal, organizational chaos, alcoholism, boundary violations, and emotional harm. The repetition gradually transforms these experiences from warning signs into evidence of spiritual seriousness. He doesn't interpret suffering inside the system as something potentially wrong with the system itself, but as proof of spiritual depth, resilience, or commitment. That creates a subtle but profound effect. It trains people not to ask, "Should this be happening?" but "Can I survive it?"

[00:07:05]Endurance itself becomes sanctified. And once suffering is framed as spiritually meaningful, accountability becomes much harder to recognize because the very experiences that would prompt a person to challenge the dysfunction or leave get reinterpreted as necessary stages of transformation. This culminates over time in a deeper identification. The boundary between the individual and the organization dissolves.

[00:07:31]>> It's simply because the OTO is not something I belong to.

[00:07:37]It is something that belongs to me.

[00:07:40]It is something that I am.

[00:07:42]>> This is a line often repeated by OTO's upper degree members, especially when newer members point out the shortcomings of the organization. They'll say things like, "The order is you. You're OTO." At that point, criticism of the organization starts to feel no different from criticism of the self. To resist is to resist your own spiritual development. This orientation isn't presented as submission. It's presented as a spiritual principle. That one's task is not to change circumstances, but to transform oneself in response to them.

[00:08:16]>> You know, I I often say there's only one thing I can change with magic, and that's myself.

[00:08:25]>> Underlying all of this is an esoteric spiritual assumption.

[00:08:29]That the real problem is never the world itself, but your relationship to it. God is the universe. I am one with the universe. Therefore, I am God. And everything that seems to happen to me is actually happening because of me. From this perspective, magic isn't the imposition of the will on an external universe, but rather self-changing itself. This is reflected in the title DuQuette gave one of his books, Low Magic: It's All in Your Head. You just have no idea how big your head is. In isolation, this idea seems purely mystical and harmless. If everything is in your head, then nothing is. Nothing follows from it. But within a system where harm and dysfunction are already being reinterpreted as meaningful, its effect is to redirect agency away from intervention. Attention is redirected inward. Action is channeled into self-modification, and the environment is never addressed.

[00:09:29]DuQuette goes on to claim that interpersonal harm shouldn't simply be tolerated. It should be reclassified as spiritually necessary.

[00:09:36]>> Those who meetest jerks and >> [laughter] >> rejoice because of them.

[00:09:45]For in them is strength, and by their means is a pathway opened unto that light.

[00:09:52]>> This reframes bad behavior as spiritually useful. Harm is necessary.

[00:09:57]Conflict is instrumental. Once framed this way, the appropriate response is no longer resistance or boundary setting, but acceptance and reinterpretation. At its limit, this framework dissolves the distinction between the individual, the system, and reality itself.

[00:10:14]>> You lucky few will awaken to the fact that the great order has always been and will be forevermore an order of one.

[00:10:31]And that one is you.

[00:10:34]>> This is the end state of the system of OTO. No external reference point. No shared reality. No outside validation.

[00:10:42]Everything loops back to you, to your interpretation, which has now been shaped to accept power dynamics of OTO as the only reality that matters. It becomes increasingly difficult to sustain an external standpoint from which the system can be evaluated. Over time, the effect of this is subtle but profound.

[00:11:01]Your attention shifts from evaluating the organization toward endlessly reinterpreting your experience inside of it. And once that happens, it becomes very difficult to clearly recognize when something is wrong. These aren't just abstract ideas. People really believe them and use them, not only to justify their own experience, but to attack critics. When I left OTO and spoke out against it, I received many comments, both publicly and privately, that assumed this logic.

[00:11:33]Things like, you hate the difficulties of the task. Maybe the universe is teaching you a lesson. Sounds like you chose to fail your ordeal. You're choosing personal boundaries over spiritual work. You're just having a midlife crisis. Duquette didn't instruct anyone to say these things. He didn't need to. The framework encouraged people to interpret reality in similar ways.

[00:11:56]Nobody has to deny a single fact. They just re categorize them. If conflict hurts you, that's ego. If someone mistreats you, that's initiation. If you want distance, you're resisting growth.

[00:12:09]If you speak out, you're having a midlife crisis. If you leave, you failed the lesson. Every possible response got spiritually recoded. That's when I realized something terrifying. An organization doesn't need to physically trap you if it can train you to reinterpret the instincts that would normally help you leave. None of these ideas are inherently bad. The idea that our happiness depends in large part on how we interpret what happens to us can be found in Buddhism. It's found in Stoicism and modern psychology. But there's a world of difference between the idea that inner freedom is necessary for happiness and the idea that the environment doesn't matter at all. The freedom to think differently about things is not the same thing as agency.

[00:12:58]You can have all the sub objective experiences of insight and self-transcendence even while your ability to act in your own best interest is crumbling into dust. OTO is an environment that by its very nature encourages imagination and endless interpretation. The rituals, the symbols, the robes, the secrets.

[00:13:22]Nobody is even allowed to tell you what they really mean. People are encouraged to come up with personal interpretations of everything. Inside OTO, novelty is often treated as more important than ordinary standards like coherence, justification, or evaluating consequences. All that matters is whether it resonates, which feels anti-dogmatic and liberating. But OTO isn't just saturated with esoteric symbolism. It's saturated with power.

[00:13:52]And when a space saturated with power stops grounding itself in ordinary judgment and accountability, it doesn't stay neutral. It becomes dangerous because your own power of judgment becomes vulnerable. It can be captured and it can be turned against you.

[00:14:08]OTO isn't the only place this kind of thing happens. You find this in spiritual groups that place inordinate emphasis on inner freedom or non-duality. Like when you raise a criticism or concern and the response you get is, "Who is the I asking that question?" You find it in groups that rely heavily on esoteric psychology where everything becomes a function of your shadow or your Enneagram personality type. You find it in toxic workplaces where raising legitimate concerns is dismissed as not being a team player. You even find it in romantic relationships.

[00:14:42]You say something your partner did makes you uncomfortable and then they turn around and say how hurt they are that you're sharing this with them. The specifics change, but the underlying mechanism is the same. First, your interpretive capacity is loosened. You're invited out of an egocentric perspective, but eventually interpretation condenses into something that, strangely, reproduces a familiar power dynamic. It's attractive. You get to keep the relationship and feel like you're growing while doing it. But underneath it all, you're losing your ability to judge and act. All the crazy politics, heartbreaks, confusion, stupidity and is just a metaphor of your own spiritual metamorphoses. These words land differently than they used to. They spoke to something in me, a genuine strength, the ability to transcend my weaknesses, to hold myself together and remain inside a community I genuinely cared about and believed in. But now I hear something else. I hear a way of speaking that slowly trained me to distrust the parts of myself that recognize something was deeply wrong. I hear a spirituality that transformed incoherence into depth, endurance into growth, and the loss of agency into spiritual enlightenment. And I think that's what makes this kind of language so dangerous. Not because it denies reality, but because it feels meaningful. The deepest traps aren't always built out of fear. Sometimes they're built out of meaning.