Now that you know how cryptonarratives work, I’m going to give you a new one for Icarus. This one is my own! I have uncovered a cryptonarrative in this famous myth, which I’ll share with you now.

It’s widely known that Icarus, son of the inventor Daedalus, took the wing-suit invented by his father and flew with it. Daedalus warned him not to fly too close to the sun, or the wax that bind the wings he wore would melt.

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The Story We’ve Been Told!

In the traditional narrative, Icarus ignored his father’s warnings, soaring too high into the sky. The wax melted, and he plunged into the sea and drowned.

As we all know, flying too close to the sun is an idiom for exhibiting too much pride, leading to one’s social downfall. We use it today when someone’s gotten too big for their britches, or when they overestimated their own power and capacity. This is all fine and dandy, healthy and useful. The Icarus story works well to warn us of the folly in pride and the pitfalls of audacity.

But wait a minute! In reality, the higher we fly, the colder it gets, right?

You don’t have to have airplanes to know this. Even in the ancient world, people found that with higher elevation came colder temperatures.

Did people not climb mountains in ancient Greece? What about Mount Olympus?

So why was Daedalus concerned about heat? Perhaps Daedalus, the great inventor, believed that the sun was floating in the earth’s atmosphere and a field of extreme heat surrounded it, but only for those who got too close to it. The ancient Greeks didn’t adopt the heliocentric model of the universe. The Arabs later conducted the astronomical studies that lead to Galileo’s establishment of the heliocentric model in the 16th century.

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Myth and Science

When the mythical Icarus flew high into the sky, did he encounter hotter temperatures or much colder ones? In my counternarrative, Icarus learns the truth of the heavenly bodies. No matter how high Icarus flew, the sun was still far away from him, and temperatures only got colder. So he was never in violation of his father’s directives. Eventually, it got so cold that the wax became brittle and rigid. The wax almost froze, and without its flexible properties, it cracked and broke as the wings and feathers moved. So it was the extreme cold of higher elevations, not heat, that would make the wings disintegrate and have Icarus plunge into the sea.

Icarus didn’t do anything wrong because he was warned about heat, not cold, and everyone just assumed that his wings melted because he got too close to the sun. Since he fell into the sea, the wing-suit couldn’t be examined for signs of melting. The truth of the natural world died with Icarus. Only he knew that the sun wasn’t in the Earth’s atmosphere. He knew that no matter how high he flew, he would never get close to the sun. And only he knows that the cold is the real threat to Daedalus’ wing-suit.

I’d argue that all three of these morsels of knowledge are incredibly valuable. The sun isn’t in the earth’s atmosphere, high elevations are extremely cold, and cold is detrimental to the wax that binds the feathers. All of these valuable secrets die with Icarus.

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Icarus’ Cyptonarrative

Only he who has fallen knows the truth of his undoing. All the rest will make up stories that suit their perspective, filling in the blanks with made up details. They weren’t there with one who flew, so they can’t know the truth. When you fly high, it might be your undoing, but you’ll gain lessons about the nature of reality that only you may come to understand. Even if it sends you crashing down to earth, you’ll gain knowledge of unequaled value.

In the case of the myth of Icarus, the dead can’t speak, so the people of his town couldn’t learn what he’d seen. But, when there’s a modern fall from grace, we can find out what the fallen have learned.

When a person’s pride gets the best of them, or their addiction makes them hit bottom, or a political leader has a scandal and loses high standing in society, none of it’s fatal! We can still talk to these people and hear what they’ve learned.

If we can take anything from Icarus’s cryptonarrative, it’s that we should talk to those who’ve fallen from grace, and mine their stories for some nuggets of insight. Within their stories are great lessons about human nature, and we can learn so much from them on how to prevent such a case from happening again.

We do this all the time with murderers. We love putting every detail of their lives under the microscope to glimpse a few bezels of wisdom. But we’re still afraid to do this with other types of violators of social mores, like sex addicts and other “deviants”. So let’s start talking to them! Let’s talk to all the perverts, pedophiles, cheaters, porn addicts, and philanders, and let’s definitely start talking to the porn-stars and prostitutes too! (Apparently a lot of p-words are used to label people we don’t want to talk to because they’re involved in sex stuff.)

I want to talk to them! Or rather, I want you to talk to them, and I want people to hear what they have to say!

Icarus’ cryptonarrative is that we don’t really know how the fallen fell, until we talk to them, and if we can get the truth straight from the horse’s mouth, we ought to! It’s better than shutting the door on those who’ve fallen from grace. When someone has a great fall, it’s an opportunity for the rest of us to learn. We need to know how people and things got the way that they got, and we need to hear their stories. Use those people to learn what’s really going on in society, and what needs to change!

I’ve got one more thing to say on this topic…

and it’s coming to you tomorrow…

so stay tuned!

I know a thing or two about cryptonarratives from my own experience. I was someone trying to write his own story, but people wrote a different one that made more sense to them. Now that story, which never happened, has become the macro-narrative, and my truth-- the real truth, becomes the cryptonarrative.

I tried to write the story of being a great artist who had a unique take on creative power, but people wrote me as a con artist who was using his body of work to mask his depravity.

I tried to write the story of a great teacher, who had uncovered hidden truths about children, and how to help them believe in their creative selves. People wrote a different story, one where I was a predator in the classroom, like a wolf in the hen house.

If you’d told me that what was really happening in the studio, in the classroom, and in my life would be overshadowed by assumptions, dark fantasies, and people’s nightmares, I’d have called you a fool. But in the classroom, in the art studio, and at home, everyone thought I was performing an act.

A trick.

An illusion.

Like Hugh Jackman in that Christopher Nolan Film!

The Prestige!

Was I the greatest showman of all time?

In the classroom, they thought that all my teaching tricks, techniques, epiphanies and problem solving, wasn’t about making the curriculum more exciting, but meant as a smoke screen. For them it was part of an elaborate ploy to have children let their guard down. Even though I’d built a wonderful relationship with my elementary students, I felt like the staff hated me.

I’ve become more famous than I could ever imagine, based on how a few real and true things were taken out of context and misunderstood by the community at large.

Regarding the themes in my Cryptonarratives series, I can tell you that I’ve experienced lots of them first hand.

1. A false narrative about who I was, that drove a wedge between me and the people around me.

2. Like Narkissos, I was labeled a narcissist.

3. Like Abraham, I thought I needed to make a great sacrifice, but I was very wrong.

4. Like Icarus, It’s possible that pride was my undoing. I was too proud to explain myself to the people around me.

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The False Macro-Narrative of the Narcissist

I’ve been mislabeled a narcissist by a number of people, including my ex-wife who probably first came up with the accusation. The narcissist aspect of my story spread so far and wide that even 7th grade students repeated it to me by accident a few years after my divorce.

People overuse the term narcissist, and use it explicitly to damage and defame people. Only a real psychologist or psychiatrist can identify narcissism. That holds true for any psychological disorder. Lay people shouldn’t be putting psychological labels on anyone. That’s like your best friend deciding that you have cancer or the local barista telling you that you’re a diabetic. Only professional opinions on narcissism, cancer, kleptomania, and diabetes count. Everyone else should probably exercise caution when generating medical opinions from personal experiences and general impressions.

I once had to really challenge this label, and I asked my ex-wife, back when we were together, “Why if I am a narcissist, am I a teacher?”

“I spend upwards of 50 hours a week in the classroom dedicating myself to children and the budding artists within them. How could a narcissist dedicate so much time to others?”

“I had to study art education to get where I am. I’m not faking it. I organized a museum show for 5th graders. Does that sound like something a narcissist would do?”

“On Sundays I volunteer to do service; cleaning at the sufi house. Why would a narcissist do that?”

“I’ve been with you for 6 years, and stayed by your side through a number of job losses and changes, even though you’re older than me and have a higher degree.”

She said “That’s part of your narcissism. You do all that stuff so that people won’t know you’re such a narcissist.”

Well there’s no winning then.

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The thing I hate most about this narcissist label is that it really simplifies my existence and smears my hard work and dedication in every facet of my life. If I was trying to trick people, my commitment to others would be unsustained, and it would be about talk, not action. I wasn’t a big talker in my art teacher days. I was a do-er. And I still am. Teaching art is hard. You’ve got 500 elementary students, or perhaps about 250 middle schoolers, and you’ve got so much work to do to keep track of all the materials, artwork, curriculum, themes, ideas, and discipline. A narcissist would find an easier way to polish their public image.

My ex-wife underestimated how much work my life entailed, because I had a bit of a care free attitude outside of work. I sought out fun and healthy entertainment most of the time. But my ex-wife’s take away was that if I wasn’t showering her with attention, I must be self absorbed. And so like Echo, Narkissos and the pond, her gossip spread to what it’s become today.

I don’t think narcissists are real. I think all people care about other people to an understandable degree. I certainly did. I think that the narcissist theory has a lot to do with an old fashioned version of psychology, which postulates that some people have defective psychologies, like narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths, and that these people can’t be rehabilitated and will never care about other people. I think that some have tried to elicit these emotions out of patients or subjects that they believed to be socio- or psychopathic and when they couldn’t elicit a communication of empathy, they lazily concluded that they were psychologically defective and should be separated from the rest of society.

There’s a theory that the addict is in mourning the loss of their drug, and so, needs time to heal. Addiction creates voids in a person’s soul, and in sobriety, that person must bear the loss, feel the void, and eventually fill it with other things. To be fair, my ex-wife’s malcontent didn’t fit in those voids. It was just an irritant to one mourning the profound loss of time. Perhaps she misread me as a narcissist, when really I was a lover in mourning.

Unlike most people, I’ve taught thousands of children, so I’ve had the chance to get in touch with a lot of minds. I never met anyone who I thought was sociopathic, psychopathic, narcissistic, or generally without feelings. Everyone I encountered and observed had a range desires, emotional attachments, and sensitivities. No one was ‘defective’.

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My great sacrifice, and the misinterpretation of my bad dreams.

Just as one may misread a dream, the signs and symbology of my addiction were completely misread, and unqualified armchair psychologists on the internet decided I must be a pedophile even though I’d never abused a child in 15+ years of teaching in public schools.

The addiction experience is like a dream, but a bad one. Addicts tend to enter a sort of counterfeit trance, where they experience a sense of oblivion, as they’re consuming the drug. They’re not really here, but rather, they go to some place in their own mind where the rest of the world fades away. But other people don’t understand that, and they believe that the data in an acting-out session online represents a person’s desires or intent. That’s simply not the case, and a person has to be well versed in addiction psychology to know that. Just as the gambler isn’t trying to get rid of their car, the porn addict isn’t looking for a way to do the things they see online. They’re just distracted, and looking for more distractions. And they’re looking for a cheap thrill. There’s a few things going on, but these are two really common themes.

Addiction isn’t a how to. It’s a how to forget.

When people who don’t understand addiction build psychological profiles about you and spread them around, what happened to me is the result. It feels meaningful to shed light on these things. We need to learn to do better. Human sexuality is really complex, and just like the symbolic language of dreams, the symbolic language of sexuality can be misunderstood, and people can jump to conclusions based on the unique way they misinterpret the digital data, or search history, of another person.

Let’s just say that actual pedophilia is really rare. I know because I was in anonymous sex addiction meetings for about 13 years and I only encountered about 3 of them, (and 2 of them had overcome their illness.) In contrast, the prevalence of taboo themed porn is growing faster than brain cancer. These two things are not the same. That’s what my experience has taught me. I’d rather not go into granular details, but if there’s one thing I know, it’s that real people aren’t porn, and children certainly aren’t. I don’t find people of any age to be addictive. As long as no one turns a child into a computer with a screen and an internet connection, I should be fine.

By the way, Pedophilia is a Greek word. It means: someone who loves children. Do you love children? Well, then you’re a pedophile. Were all pedophiles because we all love children! Don’t blame me, take it up with the Greeks!

When I was teaching and people were calling me a pedophile behind my back, I actually believed that I was making a great sacrifice, just like Abraham. I was sacrificing my time and devoting my creative gifts and intellect to the community. I thought most of my peer artists were too selfish or careerist to sacrifice in the way that I had. I thought I was noble, self-effacing even, by dedicating so much time and emotional energy to the school communities I served, and if I had known what was really happening, or that I was completely misreading my role in society, I would have thought better of spending so much time in schools, only worsening the rumors tales that were being spun around me.

My Hubris

For years I thought pride caused my fall from grace, and my hubris had tarnished reputation in the eyes of others. I didn’t know that internet insecurity, my porn addiction, and a clandestine narrative were the real cause of my isolation. That would have made much more sense frankly.

I kept teaching all while people were calling me a narcissist and a pedophile behind my back. I became more and more self-reliant as the years went on. I stopped trusting others and believed that only I could fix things. I started to think other people were kinda stupid, because they acted incoherently around me. Nothing they said made sense and it seemed like they weren’t playing with all their cards.

They weren’t stupid, they were just silencing themselves. They were engaged in self-preservation and I was the only one who wasn’t. I placed my faith in the sun, the sea, and gravity. Those were the only things I knew were not lying to me.

Had I known what was going on, I would have worked on these problems and I would have addressed them directly, or at least I would have tried. Perhaps I wouldn’t have moved half way across the world to find the truth. Fate has a sense of humor.

Perhaps I would have quit, as I wouldn’t have been thrilled about trying to explain sex addiction and recovery to my colleagues, my administrators, or my students for that matter. In fact I knew someone around 2015, who was in the program and got outed by a nurse. He mentioned sex addiction and 12-step programs during an intake and the nurse called the school system where he worked. Having to explain himself to his bosses broke him, even though he was sober, and his problem was just porn— something that a lot of adults look at. I thought a fate like that was stalking me, but I was wrong. Mine was a bit worse I’d say.

Now I feel as if I’m the fallen Icarus, and the truth of my experience may die with me if I don’t share it. But sharing my truths in this long-form format is guaranteed to reach tens, or maybe hundreds of people only. It’s not a remedy for a lie that’s lapped the globe a few times over. But it’s a start.

So on my stack I write about the truths which my fall has taught me, and hopefully you’ll help them get around the globe a little faster.

The End

There’s a fascinating cryptonarrative in Fusus Al Hikma on the topic of Abraham’s Sacrifice. It’s covered in the following chapters: The Bezel of Wisdom of Ibrahim, al-ḥikma al-qalbiyya fī kalimati Ibrāhīmiyya (The wisdom of the heart in the Abrahamic words). and the subsequent chapter: The Wisdom of the Heart in the words of Isaac.

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The Signs and Symbology of Dreams

Ibn Al Arabi recounts the origin of Abraham’s decision to sacrifice his son. Abraham dreamed that he was told to sacrifice a ram (or goat), and he saw in the dream “A goat in the form of his son Isaac”. Now, if you speak some Arabic, you’ll know that the words we have for form and appearance are often the same. Bi-Shakl can mean ‘of the form of’ or ‘it looks like’ so you can read the Arabic as “a goat that looked like his son Isaac”.

In Arabic, when someone says bil shalk da, we only know by context whether it means ‘in the form of’ or ‘it looks like’. Form or shape, and appearance, are two completely different things. Context is important in this case. A goat can’t take the form of your son, I imagine, but its face can look a bit human in some way, especially in dreams where the subconscious imagination has free rein.

In other words, the goat in the dream had a humanish face that looked like Isaac, and Abraham believed that the goat represented sacrificing his son. It turns out (from Ibn Al Arabi’s expositions on Abraham and Isaac) that Abraham interpreted the dream incorrectly. Since he wasn’t versed in the symbolic language of dreams, he took the dream somewhat literally.

In the dream, the goat with Isaac’s face was symbolic. It was not meant to signify that Abraham should slaughter Isaac. God intended Abraham to sacrifice a goat or ram, and doing so was meant to symbolize a huge sacrifice, just as great as sacrificing a son. Abraham was never meant to actually sacrifice Isaac. God never intended Abraham to commit filicide. But the dream made Abraham believe that God wanted him to sacrifice his son.

For me, the cryptonarrative uncovered by Ibn Al Arabi’s wisdom is that we don’t fully understand the human mind, or dreams. We are all prone to making assumptions about what dreams, and what the signs and symbols of the subconscious imply. We are given to assuming the worst, and we have a tendency towards morbidity, assuming that death is the ultimate sacrifice.

Dreams mislead us if we don’t know how to interpret them. By extension, our own minds mislead us if we don’t fully understand them. As a spiritual communique, dreams have their own language. Because Abraham’s schema wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand the goat with Isaac’s face, he misread the dream and almost sacrificed his son.

Sufi mystics have studied and cataloged a hidden psychological language in their books on dreams and the language of the subconscious, and they’ve used that language to encode their poetry with secrets about the divine.

Reading through conversations about dreams and spiritual acts reminds me of reading the books of Carlos Castaneda. I’m reminded that all the prophets, Abraham, Isaac, and the prophet Mohammed, were mystics who communed with God through dreams and meditation, and that’s not so different from some of the shaman and naguals in north america, whom you read about in Castaneda’s accounts.

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Goodbye Human Sacrifices!

There are plenty of discussions in these two chapters of the Fusus Al Hikma about the power of God to amplify the esoteric impact of a simple act of sacrifice, making the sacrifice of a goat akin to sacrificing a son, if done in the name of God. For the author, that is what the dream was trying to show Abraham. In this regard, Ibn al Arabi is trying to emphasize that there’s no need to continue the practice of human sacrifice to the gods, or to God.

The story of the Abrahamic sacrifice is all the more important when we come to understand that many Western civilizations used to practice ritual human sacrifice. There’s a history of Ancient Greeks and plenty of other proto-Western cultures, sacrificing men and women to their gods. We never think of the ancient Greeks as beings so primitive, but in plenty of cases they were superstitious, conservative, and barbaric, (wait until you find out how they treated their wives).

The Abrahamic event, with the intervention of Gabriel, marks the end of human sacrifice in the Western world, replacing it with animal sacrifices to appease God. People in the Middle East would slaughter animals for food anyway, so what’s the harm in applying religious significance to it? If anything, it makes the feasting on meat more periodic instead of constant. Since uncontrolled grazing and cattle farming likely created the largest desert the planet has ever known (the Sahara), it might not have been a bad thing to limit animal consumption to a few times a year, especially in the ancient world.

The main narrative on the Abrahamic event ought to be that God doesn’t want us to sacrifice other human beings in his name. God has had enough of human sacrifice and would rather we sacrifice cattle.

And the cryptonarrative would be that dreams and spiritual messages are best brought to mystics who are literate in the language of the subconscious.

Both Abraham and Narkissos’s stories have people drawing incorrect conclusions from the evidence they have available to them, and their way of understanding it.

The next story also involves a father and son, but whereas the prior has a father who misunderstood a message, the second has a son who is assumed to have ignored his father’s advice.

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Now that you know how cryptonarratives work, I’m going to give you a new one for Icarus. This one’s mine!

I have uncovered a cryptonarrative in this famous myth, which I’ll share with you tomorrow!

Stay tuned for the next one!

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So everyone’s a narcissist now!?!?

It would be nice if we could all back off on this new Narcissism trend, and rethink the Narcissus story. Lately it seems to me like every time a jilted lover has a problem they go online and make a post about how their ex, or the person they were trying to talk to, was such a narcissist! Just because someone doesn’t love you anymore, or because they’ve decided to walk away from the relationship, doesn’t mean they’re a narcissist! People walk away for a number of personal reasons, and they have the right to, without being informally diagnosed by a biased ex! And, lets face it! Jilted lovers are not the best judges of their own character or mistakes!

Misunderstanding Narkissos!

When examining the least-known version of Narkissos’ story, we see that he’s lost in his grief, not in vanity. He’s looking into the pond because it’s the only way for him to see and remember his soulmate and twin. When we realize that he’s mourning lost love, we understand how gazing into his reflection in the pond might have brought him comfort in grief. People mourn in strange ways, and if gazing at his sister’s face in the reflection of the water brought temporary solace, who are we to judge?

Perhaps Narkissos imagines Medioluteus in the water, gazing at him and talking to him.

His twin sister is unnamed in historical records, so I’m just going to name her Medioleteus, since the Medioleteus flower is a twin companion to the Narcissus flower.

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Self indulgence or Mourning?

This cryptonarrative is one of mourning the loss of love, not indulging in self-obsession. Although gazing into the pond gives him comfort at first, it inevitably traps him. The crypto-moral of the story is to be compassionate towards those in mourning and show empathy, but we must also urge people to move on eventually, otherwise they’ll miss life’s blessings. Most people are unable to receive love in such a state. But eventually they must overcome their grief and move forward. When other characters misunderstand him or are unaware of Narkissos’ grief, they label him a narcissist and develop reasoning that lays the blame at his feet. When we don’t know what’s really going on, we also tend to invent an explanation that lays the blame at another’s feet.

Perhaps jumping to conclusions and gossip gave us the dominant narrative of the narcissist that we have today. In that rationale, Narkissos is a self-absorbed soul. He ignores the needs of others because he’s in love with himself, which would be the words muttered on the tongues of neighbors. The judgmental narrative that blames Narcissus has become far more popular than the empathetic narrative that qualifies his actions through grief. The persistent acceptance of the narcissistic narrative suggests that people easily accept simpler narratives, as dire as they might be, rather than nuanced narratives that reflect the complexity of the human experience.

I still find this flaw persistent in modern psychology, even after some two thousand years. It’s easier for most people, even though they may have some understanding of the human mind, to believe that another’s psyche is simply defective or devolved. Most people would accept that conclusion, rather than decode the cryptonarrative behind a real person’s actions. The idea of seeking out the nuanced but verifiable reasoning behind the individual’s behavior is lost on most, and instead of probing deeper to understand illness, we tend to stick labels on people and move on with our lives.

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Cryptonarrative #2

The Story of Abraham, Isaac, and the Slaughter of the Goat.

This might be a controversial one because I’m commenting on religion, but I’m just sharing with you the ideas of Ibn Al Arabi, as written in the text The Bezels of Wisdom. If anything I’ve said bothers you, you might take it up with the 12th-century mystic who is respected throughout the Muslim world for his writings and wisdom.

We all know the Biblical, Jewish, and Koranic narrative of Abraham and Isaac, (They are all consistent with one another). Here, Abraham believes that God has asked him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, as a sign of devotion to the one God. The main narrative is that Abraham binds Isaac to an altar and is about to actually sacrifice him, when the angel Gabriel intervenes to replace Isaac with a ram. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, God commends Abraham for his devotion and willingness to sacrifice his firstborn and relieves him of such a dire responsibility. Muslims celebrate the Eid Al-Ahda festival in commemoration of the Abrahamic event, with sheep and cattle sacrificed to feed the hungry throughout the Muslim world.

The mainstream narrative is a story of devotion to God. Yet, the Abrahamic event has a cryptonarrative known to the few who follow the works of the Sufi Master, Ibn Al Arabi. He writes about Abraham’s sacrifice in Al Fusus Al Hikma, known in English as The Bezels of Wisdom. By the way, the fusus (Arabic), or facets in English, are just the flat sides or (faces) of the diamond, and the word probably has the same origin as the word facade.

Ibn Al Arabi was a well-respected Sufi whose knowledge of mundane and mystic Islam earned the respect of the majority of Islamic scholars. During his time, they called him Muyaddin (the reviver of the religion), and today he’s known as Al Sheikh Al Akbar (The Greatest Master).

There’s a wonderful cryptonarrative in Fusus Al Hikma on the topic of Abraham. It’s covered in the following chapters: The Bezel of Wisdom of Ibrahim, al-ḥikma al-qalbiyya fī kalimati Ibrāhīmiyya (The wisdom of the heart in the Abrahamic words). and the subsequent chapter: The Wisdom of the Heart of Isaac.

We’ll uncover the cryptonarrative in my next installment!

So check your inbox tomorrow!

Cryptonarratives in the stories of Icarus, Abraham, and Narcissus:

Part 1: Introduction

In many well-known myths, there’s a narrative that the general public understands, and a second one that’s understood by few. The second narrative, or hidden meaning, is only understood by those who examine the story deeper. I was trying to come up with a good term for this second, more clandestine interpretation, and I settled on the term cryptonarrative. It’s an alternate perspective, or a different version of the existing narrative, that takes some decoding to uncover. Often, the cryptonarrative requires us to see the main character not a as victim of his own nature, but an active choice maker in their fate, with specific motivations for their actions

So come on a journey with me as we uncover the cryptonarratives in a few well known stories from the ancient world.

First, I’d like to start with the legend of Narcissus, and then explore the biblical story of the Abrahamic sacrifice. Finally, I’ll present to you a cryptonarrative for the story of Icarus that is purely my own interpretation.

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Myth and Religion

It doesn’t matter whether you believe that these stories actually happened or not. They’re all part of our modern culture and part of our collective psychology.

While two narratives come from Greek mythology and one comes from the monotheistic traditions, the ancient Greeks were close cultural cousins to the Semitic people in the Abrahamic age. All these stories have a place in contemporary culture because they influenced Middle Eastern, Islamic, and Arab, as well as Judaeo-Christian and Trans-Atlantic culture.

Ancient Greece itself is intertwined with the Islamic, Arab, and Middle-Eastern world, and even though the trans-Atlantic culture claims it as a base, they would not have Greek philosophy if it were not preserved for them by Arab Muslims. If you need further evidence that the Hellenistic system informed the Middle East, you might take a trip to Alexandria, Egypt, or Kandahar, Afghanistan, both named after Alexander the Great. The Greeks held Alexandria for years, and it flourished as a center of science and knowledge. Alexandria held two of the ancient world’s wonders, and it’s where the world was proven round, and the steam engine was invented.

Two of these stories are indeed considered myths, and one of them is religion, but the chances are your worldview is informed by all of them. It’s not my intent to equate myth with religion in terms of relevance, but all three of them have shaped today’s world. Just think about how many times you’ve heard about narcissists and narcissism in the past few years. In politics and current events, people casually refer to a sacrificial lamb, meaning something that has to be conceded for the benefit of everyone. And how often have we heard of hubris— personal pride, bringing down our favorite celebrities? The word hubris itself comes straight from the ancient Greek myth of Icarus.

Both myth and religion shape contemporary culture and cast comparable influence on people today, even if religion holds a higher place in our culture than ancient myth.

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The Story of Narkissos

Narkissos, as the Greeks would have called him, was a handsome young man born of a nymph named Liriope, who was “ravaged” by the river god Cephissus. There are several versions of the myth, and one of them involves a mythical mountain spirit called an Oread whose name was Echo. Echo fell in love with Narkissos, but he rejected her because of her inability to communicate.

Echo was punished by Hera for covering for Zeus while he was having an affair. Echo used her gift for gab to distract Hera, and when the goddess realized what the chatterbox was doing, she punished her by taking away Echo’s agency of speech. Hera cast a curse upon her, which allowed her to only speak the last few words she had heard. Echo could no longer share any original thoughts of her own. She could repeat what she had heard.

Coming back to Narcissus, Echo sees him and falls in love with his beauty, almost to the point of becoming an obsession. Narcissus tries to talk to Echo, but she just repeats everything he says back to her. He assumes she’s just mocking him and he rejects her advances. In the end, unrequited love causes Echo to wither away in despair, as often happens with dejected lovers in Greek myths.

There are the beginnings of a cryptonarrative in the story of Echo and Narcissus. Perhaps Echo feels rebuked because Narcissus is self-absorbed, but from Narcissus’s perspective, she has nothing original to offer Narcissus. She can’t speak to him or connect with him, and she seems more interested in repeating what she’s heard than thinking for herself.

How is Narcissus supposed to know that Echo had been cursed by Hera? How is he supposed to know that her affliction isn’t of her own choosing?

We may think someone’s self-absorbed when they reject us, but perhaps the truth is that we were unable to reach them in the way that was needed. Also, sometimes you make assumptions about what someone wants to hear, not realizing that everything you’re saying is something they’ve heard before.

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What’s the real cryptonarrative for Narcissus?

While there are two mainstream stories of Narcissus (that of Narcissus and Echo, and that of Narcissus and Ameinias), there’s a third that’s rarely talked about.

A “travel writer” named Pausanias recorded a variant of the Narcissus story in the 2nd century AD. This interpretation is the least-popular and least-known of all of them, but it’s the only one that shows empathy for Narkissos, as he would have been called, and forces us to take the main character’s perspective.

In this one, Narkissos is not in love with himself, and it’s not his reflection he sees in the pond. Narkissos is mourning the love of his twin sister, who died under unknown circumstances. Narkissos was in love with his sister, (it’s a Greek myth, so there’s a bit of incest). She was his female counterpart in countenance and beauty. For him, she was a soulmate. Looking into the water, he would see her face instead of his own and perhaps he would imagine her talking to him, or simply gazing back at him. So in this story, Narkissos is lost in his grief, but not in vanity. He’s looking into the pond because it’s the only way for him to see and remember her.

But what did Echo and Ameinias assume? Why do we think he’s such a narcissist?

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My five part Cryptonarratives series continues tomorrow.

If you want to read part 1 first you can read it here.

Where was I? Ah, yes. I was explaining the new cosmology of the Green Lanterns, which started around 2005 and uses the colors of the visual spectrum to represent powerful emotions, or rather motivations, that drive sentient behavior and give the Lanterns their superpowers.

Central Power Batteries

As we talked about in the previous installment, the Green Lanterns get their power from cosmic green energy, which is stored in these green lanterns, which they carry around with them everywhere they go. They use the lanterns to power the power rings which give them superpowers. Well, if you need your little portable green lantern to power your power ring, what happens when the green lantern runs out of power, and where do you refill it? This is one of the weirdest things about the Green Lanterns to have to explain to non-fans, but were it not for these limitations, Lanterns would be overly powerful, so capacity limitations are one of the ways the writers limit their powers and keep things interesting.

The Green Lanterns have a giant power source known as the Central Power Battery located on a special planet called Oa which serves as the Green Lantern Corps’ home planet. The Central Power Battery looks like a massive lantern about the size of a building.

Just like the Green Lanterns, each of the other colored lantern corps has its own planet dedicated to a central power battery that supplies it’s lanterns with power.

Magic Mythical Creatures Made of Light that Live Inside

What happens inside these Central Power Batteries is what we want to get to. Inside each one lives a sort of mythical ghost creature made of light, known as an Avatar or an Entity. But these cosmic beings often escape their central power batteries and when seen outside they’re usually massive creatures of mythic proportions. They're not affected by gravity, so they flight or float through space until they can possess a host body. They bring a massive amount of power to the person they possess, but also overtake their minds. But some of the entities are benevolent, and their joining with hosts can be constructive, while others are more corruptive. It also depends on the host!

The Green Lanterns have a catfish looking avatar called Ion. The yellow lanterns have Parallax. It looks like one of the bad gremlins crossed with a dragon, but with dragonfly wings.

The Red lanterns have a hulking bull glowing in crimson named The Butcher. The avatar of the orange lanterns is a giant serpent named Ophidian. Blue has a giant condor-like bird called Adara. Indigo’s avatar, Proselyte is some type of octo-squid with only four tentacles. And then there’s the Star Sapphires, with their entity known as The Predator.

For a while, the Sapphires were the only ones whose avatar was human in form. Later they replaced him with an animal avatar resembling a quadrupedal dinosaur. But the avatar in human form was a really interesting vehicle for the story because it captures some of our worst fears for women– that there are men out there who simply spell danger or doom for them.

If the other lanterns are in danger of becoming possessed by the spirits of some mythical animals, the Star Sapphires are in danger of being possessed by the spirit of some Man, (the most dangerous creature in the universe).

The idea that there are men out there who would make a woman lose control of her life and her judgement, not just her heart or her body, has become ubiquitous in our culture. We’ve even nicknamed that man Mr. Wrong. We also call men predators all the time, if we believe they’re a threat to women.

Who Was The Predator?

Originally, circa volume 3, the predator was a demon in human form. Then it became a powerful psychic projection from Carol Ferris’s mind. And then it was an entity created by the Zamarons— the alien race who created the Star Sapphires. At times he’s described as an infection inhabiting their central power battery. Eventually, The Predator is retconned into a mythical beast-entity that can possess people and take control of them.

This version was the most interesting because it embodies Carol Ferris’ darkest needs, desires, and fears. Predator was protective, possessive, and obsessed with Ferris, seeking to enslave her.

In Green Lantern Vol. 3, issues #129–#136 (1990–1991), written by Gerard Jones, Carol has been through repeated cycles of being Star Sapphire, losing and regaining control of her mind. At this point, the Predator reemerges as more than just as a projection, but as a separate, controlling entity.

Instead of being a shadowy helper or occasional presence, the Predator becomes a parasite, effectively taking over Carol’s personality.

During this run, Carol loses all independent agency. The Predator acts through her body, making her Star Sapphire again, but with a crueler and more violent edge.

Hal Jordan and other Lanterns confront her, but what they’re really fighting is the Predator’s domination of her mind.

The Predator in Myth and Metaphor

The story arcs with Carol Ferris, the Star Sapphire, fighting a manifestation of her psyche, are really illuminating for me. There's no doubt that the Predator in the comics is a real threat, but he’s also a toxic conception of mental illness that many women hold on to. In Ferris, there's a desire to be possessed, obsessed over, and owned, and then a conflicting desire to resist and break free of that oppressive control.

These desires can be common in human relationships. When men aren't paying attention to their partners, women want them to go after them, but when men pursue them too obsessively, they feel suffocated or even unsafe.

All this is understandable because people need balance. Relationships need a bit of obsession, and a bit of freedom. Men are the same way if you think about it. They don't want a woman who could care less what they do, but they also don't want someone who breaks their shit every time if they so much as glance at another lady. Men and women aren't that different. They look and behave differently but the underlying motivations are the same.

Of course there are examples of predation from males, or rather, situations that we like to describe using predation as a metaphor. The description of ‘predator’ is symbolic when we talk about relationships. A metaphorical description is not real. It reflects how we interpret the behavior, but not how the behavior in fact is.

Courtship is often compared to a hunt, and men are sometimes said to be ‘on the prowl’ like tigers or lions. When women go out to meet men, they often go through elaborate rituals to change the way they look and draw attention to themselves. When we think about courtship, we often draw connections to predator and prey, but we also consider women to be using allure, (literally, a lure). Prey doesn’t intentionally attract a predator, so perhaps a different metaphor is more apt. Perhaps the women are the fishermen and the men are the fish. Or maybe are we both the fish, and the fishermen? Who knows!?

All the metaphors we use to describe courtship are fun and a bit silly, but when it comes to mental illness, obsession, sex and love addiction, or dangerous situations like stalking, it’s a great time to code switch right out of using metaphors and get down to brass tax. That is to say, we should describe things as they are and not use metaphors from the hunting or fishing world. If we resort to using myth and metaphor, we will fundamentally mis-conceptualize what is happening.

It may sound like I’m denying women’s experiences and gaslighting them, but I honestly take stalking and domestic abuse very seriously. In fact I’ve written before about being stalked myself, and being the target of abuse in a relationship, so I don’t want to diminish the importance of these experiences. What I’m criticising in this article is the use of metaphors to compare mentally ill people with animals. We have to confront the artificial constructions that we generally hold about mental illness, in order to understand how to respond to it. Doing so will help us get to the truth of what's behind sexual misconduct in the perpetrator’s mind.

What are they really after?

What is a Predator? It’s a being hunting another being for nourishment and survival. We use it as a metaphor to describe some men, because we think those men are going to metaphorically consume the women they are after. I’ve even heard it said that a ‘predatory male’ feeds off the “energy” of the female, which sounds a lot like Predator in the Green Lantern comics feeding off Carol Ferris’ energy.

We use the word predator because potential violence is involved, and I fully understand that, but from everything we know about sex addiction and obsession, I can tell you that the stalker or the potential 'predator’ is seeking distraction, not nourishment.

Novelty and distraction are the perpetrator’s motivations.

A great example might be Gollum/Smeagul in the Lord of the Rings. His attention has set on a precious object, and he’s a chaser, not a predatory hunter. The target of his attention is little more than a fantasy of perfection, and he uses his pursuit of that fantasy to prevent his attention from setting on himself and what he’s become.

Novelty and distractions are the addict’s motivations. The stalker does not want to assess his life and what his obsession has cost him. This is what we will take a closer look at in part 3 of The Myth of the Male Predator.

There’s an interesting character in the Green Lantern comic series, but it needs some explaining to get to. It is called the Predator, and its place in the cosmology of the Green Lantern Universe is a great jumping-off point for talking about roles we cast upon men who struggle with sex addiction.

By the way this isn’t the Predator in Aliens Vs. Predator and other films. That’s a different guy.

The idea of the ‘predatory male’ has taken the spotlight in our contemporary digital culture, and it has no doubt shaped ideas about men’s mental health. But what if this idea isn’t real, true, or based on any psychological study? What if it's actually based on the myths we hold onto, and our persistent superstitions about sex and the mind?

One thing I know is that most people hold plenty of illusions about what sex addiction is and how it works. They have no idea what motivates sex addicts to pursue self-destructive habits or take risks. Most of the people I meet outside of sex addiction meetings believe that sex addiction is like psychopathy. They think it’s some type of inborn, irreversible, defective state of mind.

I don’t really believe that people are ignorant. but I do believe that most ‘educated’ people have little or no education in the psychology of sex, and we, as a human race, are at the very beginning of a journey into understanding what drives the mind to seek pleasure in toxic ways.

The biggest myth about sex addiction is that it’s a male only disease. When it comes to this topic, we tend to think of the worst outcomes or symptoms. New headlines flash before us and the term Predator pops in our heads. But where does the myth of the predatory male come from?

There aren’t a lot of historical myths where men pursuing women are described as predators. I don’t find them in Greek myths, Ancient Egyptian myths, or others. I think it’s a modern invention.

So let's examine some of the myths we have about sex addiction, and turn our lens toward The Predator, an avatar for the myth of male predation, found in the Green Lantern comics.

Comic Books: Contemporary Mythology

In the Green Lantern comic series, The Predator is a cosmic entity connected to a rival group of super-powered characters known as the Star Sapphires.

The first Green Lantern appearance was in All-American Comics #16, published in July 1940, with a man by the name of Alan Scott becoming the Green Lantern. The issue came out during what’s called the Golden Age of comics. The first appearance of the Star Sapphire (Carol Ferris) was in Green Lantern Volume 2, #16, which came out in October 1962, during the Silver Age. Finally, the first appearance of The Predator, (as Carol Ferris’ dark, alter-ego and psychic projection), came out in Green Lantern, Vol 2, #178, in July 1984.

The late appearance of The Predator, in the 1980s, suggests that the idea of the sexual predator is a rather contemporary. In the comics, this character is associated with hunting, pursuing, sometimes protecting, and always obsessing over a female objective of desire.

Who is The Predator?

The Predator has taken many forms over the years but he’s never been a real person. He’s always been more of a ghost, or a psychic projection, or some sort of spirit. I think at first he was some type of demon. The Predator infects or possesses beings, and he’d always appear as a man, and only possess men, until fairly recently. The most interesting version was from Volume 3, where Carols Ferris’ mind made it manifest materially and it kidnapped Carol Ferris and tried to kill Hal Jordan. Carol Ferris happens to be the super-powered Star Sapphire, and since cosmic forces imbued her with intense and bizarre powers, this is apparently something that her mind can do!

Later, the Predator is retconned as a cosmic entity that ‘loves’ Carol, and always possesses men so that it can stalk and pursue her. Let’s explore all of this more closely.

The Green Lantern Cosmology You Should Know

The Green Lantern universe was retconned in 2005 with a series called Green Lantern Vol 4. In this new version of the cosmology, the Green Lanterns possess one aspect of what’s called ‘The Emotional Spectrum’, a spectrum of light and energy with 7 different colors, modeled after the visible light spectrum.

The different colors represent seven different emotions or motivations, because it’s not like happiness, sadness or the traditional emotions. These cosmic motivations are rage, greed, will, fear, hope, compassion, and love.

The Green Lanterns harness the power of will, (i.e. willpower) represented by green light stored in their green lanterns, hence the name of the comics.

The stories also explore the Yellow Lanterns, which harness the power of fear, and they're each kinda scary. They’re enemies of the Green Lanterns and they’re also known as the Sinestro Corps. Sinestro is my favorite villain by the way, but that’s a story for another time.

There are Red Lanterns which harness the power of rage, and they're incredibly scary– they all spit red-hot fire acid for some reason. Orange Lanterns harness the power of greed, but there’s really only one Orange Lantern left because he was so greedy that he killed all the other lanterns. He wanted the power all to himself, you see.

On the other side of the spectrum are the cooler emotions.

The Blue Lanterns harness the power of hope, and the Indigo harness the power of compassion. These folks don’t really do much in the comics. Blue lanterns amplify Green Lanterns’ power rings, and the Indigo Lanterns can make anyone feel, with alarming lucidity, the pain they are causing others. Their superpower is forcing others to feel empathy, which is interesting, but doesn’t exactly make for an action packed story, so the Blue and Indigo Lanterns never managed to launch their own comics. Instead they pop in here and there.

The Star Sapphires are a different story. In Volume 4 they are essentially the Violet Lanterns, harnessing the violet section of the emotional spectrum, but they retain the name Star Sapphires from the Silver Age of comics. Since the Star Sapphires have been around for decades, Geoff Johns couldn’t change the name if he’d wanted to.

The violet part of the emotional spectrum represents ‘love’, but it can be all kinds of love. It can be romantic love, unconditional love, or even obsessive, unhealthy love. And by the way, because the Violet Lanterns are the Star Sapphires, and the original Star Sapphire was a woman, all the Star Sapphires are women. The are the only corps on the emotional spectrum consisting only of females.

I tell you all this about Lanterns, their colors in the comics so that I can focus on one particular aspect of the light/emotions of the lanterns that holds a lot of power and symbolism, and that will lead us to a character called the Predator.

I’ve got a little more explaining to do regarding the cosmology of the Green Lantern’s universe, but I’m kinda out of space right now. No pun intended.

To make things more readable I’m giving you a few pages at a time, so you’ll just have to wait a few days. I promise we’ll get there in The Myth of the Male Predator. Part 2. Coming soon!

HEADS UP FOLKS! This article is for adults! It mentions psychology, addiction, adult themes, societal taboos. It’s not for kiddos. It’s for adults who want to better understand human sexuality and what’s behind the darkness in their minds.

What will others assume when the addict gets exposed for watching taboo porn?

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Well, it’s high noon and I’m all out of card tricks, so here goes!

Heads up folks! This article is for adults! It mentions psychology, addiction, adult themes, societal taboos. It’s not for kiddos. It’s for adults who want to better understand human sexuality and what’s behind the darkness in their minds.

In all seriousness, I’ve realized a profound hidden truth, that everything that has befallen me is actually my fault!

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I’ve seen it a thousand times with my own eyes– the moment someone’s opinion of me changes. Something flickers in their eyes, they glaze over, and you can feel their heart stop for a moment. As an ominous fear takes hold, they stop seeing who’s in front of them, seeing only the rumor. The mind resets and the body is tense. Their nerves become electrified wires.

All it takes is a whisper or a text. Sometimes I wonder what exactly they’ve been told, but even I’m too afraid to ask. What they’re saying, I’m not really sure, but I know it’s not good.

As people, just how much of what we believe is real, and how much is a lie told to us by someone who came before?

This time in my life is showing me that most of our beliefs are baseless. We are a race of superstitions and assumptions. But I can tell you that my experiences are real, and in my recollections there must be truths we can believe in, so in the hopes that you’ll assume I’m honest, and recounting these memories in good faith, I’d like to share a story with you. But first, an introduction:

They say I’m a child molester, a pedophile, and a predator. And yet, somehow, there’s no proof of any of this. There’s no first-person evidence. This means that they don’t just think that I am those things— they think I’m good at it! Thanks I guess.

They also say I’m a brilliant artist— a visionary, or at least I was. I don’t know if I was a genius, but I was pretty good, especially for someone with such a terrible rumor hanging around their neck. What I accomplished in the face of such low expectations was pretty impressive.

Let’s face it, if it wasn’t for the rumor that I was a horrible sex goblin, I probably wouldn’t have had to become a teacher. I would have made it as an artist without needing a side job. How’s that for irony? Taking the art world by storm was my first choice, a visual arts teacher career was my consolation prize.

I became a capable art teacher in the face of all these social obstacles, and the mistreatment I experienced helped me be more impeccable in the classroom. One of my sharpest talents was crafting an art classroom that cultivated the best in creativity, positive reinforcement, and emotional safety for my elementary school students.

Besides being a teacher, I was a mandated reporter for upwards of 15 years, so I know how simply and how well the system works for reporting abuse. All a child has to do is say that a specific person touched them in a specific place, and an investigation is automatically launched, with the teacher immediately suspended. If any child had said this about me, none of my colleagues would have hesitated to do their job and report to the principals. The principals themselves would not have hesitated to suspend me immediately, followed by a full and proper investigation. There is no room for excuses in the system, whether it’s child services or the public schools.

Across the country, scandals get reported from time to time with teachers caught having inappropriate relationships with minors, (and roughly half of them are women which is another story altogether). This proves that misconduct does get reported, all the time. It never gets swept under the rug.

This is the stuff that bothers me even until today. Why would people believe what they want rather than verse themselves in the procedures and protocols that actually keep their children safe?

The first time I had to report child abuse, it was for a girl from the 1st grade.

Among the students, everyone liked me, even the first graders. I taught them like I was conducting an orchestra and everyone had fun with my role as the maestro de kaos.

But things were actually well structured in my class. They’d come in and there was always a plan to present to them. After I’d show them what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and what they’d need to do it, the kids would all snap into action for 5 minutes like elves in Santa’s workshop. The triangles would get the markers, the squares would get the paper, the circles would get the scissors, and so on. Students knew what shape they were because it was on the backs of their seats. Everyone knew their job, everyone knew their role, and everyone was excited to get going quickly. Synergy.

This is all to say that the kids really trusted me. I was sweet to them, funny, easy going, but classes were extremely well planned and creative. That made children comfortable with me, even though they only saw me once a week. So It makes sense that a child in one of the classes saw me as the safest and most accessible adult in the school.

So, the first time I had to report child abuse, I was talking to a first grader in my classroom at Ambrose Elementary in Winchester. She was a little redhead girl and I remember her exactly. We can call her Mia because that’s not her real name. I must have had to give her a time out or something, because she was sitting on one of the benches and I was speaking with her. The bench area was a part of my classroom where I gave presentations during the first 5 minutes, and then it became a time out area while students were making art projects. Sometimes there would be a conflict between students and I’d give one or both of them a time out in that meeting area. I’d say “take a break” and they’d take a 5 minute break. Then they’d come back and get to work. Easy-Peasy.

Sometimes I’d talk to them before their 5 minutes is up in order to debrief and smoothen their transition back to the table. I was calmly debriefing with Mia when she said to me:

“My daddy wrestles with me and I don’t like it”. Just like that, out of nowhere. By her tone, I heard frustration.

“Sorry, can you say that again?” I said, and she repeated the phrase.

“I said, my daddy wrestles with me and I don’t like it.”

I felt that she knew what she was saying and understood the gravity of the implication, even though she was just 6 years old.

I acknowledged her statement and said I would report it so her teacher or other people in charge could take care of her and protect her. Mia went back to her table and continued making art. I called for some assistance or supervision in the classroom, and went down to the office to report the message.

I pick up the phone: 
      “Ah, hi Judy. Do you think you can get someone to cover me for five minutes. I need to report something to the office real quick.” 
      “Ok, thank you so much”
      “Hi Sally, can you cover my class for about five minutes? I have to go to the office and tell them something, the kids all know what to do. Thanks so much.”
At the office: “Ah, hi there Judy. Can I speak with Dr. Levesque” (the school principal)
      “She’s in a meeting right now, is it important?” 
      “Yes it’s actually super important and it will only take a minute. I have to report something”. Judy let me in and I found the 1st grade classroom teacher and the principal in a meeting together. perfect! So I tell them.
      “I was sitting with Mia in the meeting area and she told me ‘my daddy wrestles with me and I don’t like it’.” 
      “Are you sure” 
      “Yes, absolutely”  
      “Did she say anything else?” 
      “No, that’s all she said.” 
      “What did you say to her?” 
      “I said I’m sorry and I will make sure to report this so we can keep you safe.” 
      “Do you have any other information.” 
      “I really don’t have anything else, that’s all she said and that’s all that happened, but now I’ve reported it, and now you all can take it from here, right?” 
      "Yes, Thank you for telling us.” 

Duty-bound, I reported everything exactly as it happened to my principal and I gave them all the information I had, which was all the information I just wrote here. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for the classroom teacher and the principal to follow up with Mia. I didn’t probe further, because that’s not really in my training.

I told my principal all I knew. She asked if there were any more details, but there weren’t, because it was a simple statement as clear as day. It would be up to better trained staff to get a clearer understanding. I really felt that I had done my part by reporting the information. I went back to class and continued teaching

Mia seemed like she wanted and needed to report this and I’m glad she told me, but what haunts me is the skepticism I was regarded with when I reported it. Maybe because I’m Arab, Muslim, and a man, white folks might find it strange that I’m the one reporting child abuse, but if you know my people, you’d know that we care much more about duty than optics, we’re very truthful, and we feel a strong need to protect children from harm.

Besides, they’d find out the truth anyways. All they’d have to do is follow up. The classroom teacher, principal, and the school psychologist have to sit with Mia and have a meeting. In the conversation they’d say something like “can you point to me on the doll where he touched you”, and you know how the rest goes.

Did Mia get the help she needed? or did she continue to be abused by her father because the staff doubted my report. Can you see now the damage that fear and rumormongering can create?

I didn’t have any political pull when I worked in schools. Most of the time, my colleagues were lukewarm toward me, especially if they weren’t on the same specialists team as I was. In my first school assignment after my masters degree, I remember fondly that the music teacher and I got along great, but everyone else was neutral at best towards my presence. I was a teacher who liked flash, pizzazz, and loved to present art projects with a sense of stylish showmanship. My flare for drama seemed to irritate my colleagues, so I put them down as fuddy duddies, squares with bugs up their butts, conservatives and traditionalists threatened by any curriculum creative, innovative or unconventional. I taught innovative lessons that combined creative skills with culture, and in that way I saw myself as an antiracist educator who was expanding children’s horizons. For me, students were to know that art-making is a worldwide phenomenon, not a feature specific to European or Transatlantic culture. I ensured this by teaching a bit of art history, a bit of Mexican art and the Day of the Dead, and as much about art from other cultures as I possibly can. I wanted my students to know that art wasn’t just for white folks, even when my students were little white folks.

The music teacher liked me though, and was one of my closest colleagues. She was this American lady who was in touch with both her Russian and Scottish roots, and her sessions were often based in cultural traditions as well, so I liked that. I learned about ceremonies like the Maypole from her. She knew lots of folkloric dances and traditions and that made her cool to me. She also had her own creative practice and performed traditional Scottish music regularly in concerts with others. And she’s still doing it!

I have so many stories of where my relationships with colleagues started to sour, and I became bitter toward my educational community. It made me feel like I had to be a lone hero to my students, relying on myself for everything I needed. My bitterness, and feelings of betrayal stemmed from not understanding at all, what was happening to me or around me. I chalked everything up to some inborn prejudice in my colleagues and the community. I thought my colleagues were xenophobic, or maybe my neurodivergence, my ADD, or some deficiency in my personality was rubbing them the wrong way. I knew that I didn’t know what I was doing wrong, and I felt that I didn’t know how to keep from saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Was I just brutally honest, too blunt, or did I have Asperger’s syndrome just like so many of my kids. Was I one of them, a neurodivergent learner in the classroom of life, caught up with a teacher, a boss, or a community that just doesn’t get my kind of mind?

I bring all this up to tell you something else. The rumors people are spreading (with the assistance of hidden tech people all over the world), are going to get someone besides me hurt. There’s nothing worse than distracting someone with a fake perpetrator, so that a real perp can do what they want. The IT people who install MDMs and surveillance equipment on my device don’t know the truth, but they’re too afraid to talk to me and get it from the horses mouth. That’s the mistake I’m trying to rectify by writing my stories.

I reported another incident of abuse later in my career, and they wouldn’t even take my word for it at that stage. I was asked to write an elaborate statement explaining every detail of the event before they would take any action, all because I saw a college-aged staff member (male) kick an eighth grade girl in the butt.

I wrote that letter and thankfully the young man was fired, but the things I’ve had to go through just to be trusted (which has ultimately failed), are absurd. At the end of the day, so many other people have suffered or lost great opportunities just as much as I have from defaming me, because we are all connected. So lets burn the illusions down together.

I find it more offensive that people believe I would misrepresent myself, the facts, or get a way with a lie, than the idea that that I could be some type of hidden monster. Deception and lying are not things I’m given to. Lying to myself?— perhaps, but that’s another story. We all tell ourselves lies for survival. With others I’ve always preferred being brutally honest than sugar-coating anything. And I’m not smart enough to plan a crime, because I don’t understand people or how they think. I’ve always had a blind spot for understanding unwritten social rules. I almost have Asperger’s but that’s a story for another time.

Your Digital Self Isn’t The Real You

Imagine if the person you were involved with was so emotionally insecure and injured that they couldn’t respect your mental privacy. Imagine if they didn’t respect the aspects of self which you choose to keep hidden, or weren’t ready to share. If one is already so damaged at the beginning of the relationship that they can’t respect your privacy, these boundary violations are only going to create more disruption and resentment towards you. Your conduct in real life will be inconsistent with internet data, and your partner’s conception of the real you will become more and more disrupted and distorted.

Reconciling the digital self with the authentic self is too much for the insecure partner to handle, and their conception of reality, as far as the relationship is concerned, will ultimately collapse. There will be endless contradictions between the digital self, which is fundamentally insecure, and the real self, which can …

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One of Millions

I developed an addiction to porn when I was about fourteen. I realized that I was a sex addict in my 20s, but I only discovered recently that I was also a victim of domestic violence. For possibly 15 years, I had been subject to abuse and victimization at the hands of my ex-partner, her jealous ex-husband, and so many others who deformed my character and attacked my reputation online.

I had no conception of what was happening to me as it was happening. I had no sense that I was being victimized because I didn’t even know that men could be victims of domestic violence— not this type of abuse. I had never even heard of cyberstalking at the time.

We live in a world where many women do not think of cyberstalking as a legitimate form of domestic violence. Women tend to believe that in order to protect themselves, planting spyware on their romantic partner’s devices is completely acceptable, especially if the woman doesn’t know her partner very well. Women just want to protect…

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My Inner Comedian thinks it’s Funny

I met my ex’s ex-husband a handful of times. I wasn’t impressed by him but I remember him very well. His bald head. His beady little eyes behind thick glasses. His pasty skin and his grin. He was a staunch republican and a loyal viewer of Fox news. He despised progressivism and balked at notions of social justice. He was deeply Machiavellian; always scheming. Because of his political views, he wasn’t thrilled that his ex-wife’s new partner was Arab and Muslim.

The ex-husband wasn’t talented or charismatic, so at the time I couldn’t see what he was all about. What was his purpose in life? He seemed to live for one purpose only: to irritate my ex-wife.

He used everything at his disposal, including her kid, as a tool to torment her. I witnessed firsthand as he waged psychological warfare through shared custody disputes, late drop-offs, missing clothes, misplaced belongings, bickering at karate practice, and anything else he could think of to make her feel like a bad single mother. He knew her buttons and was determined to push them all.

This was all new for me, and I tried to help, but I was utterly out of my depth. I was a fish out of water.

I couldn’t protect her from her own way of thinking. I also had little influence over her. She was older than me by five years, way smarter than me as an Ivy league grad, and I had no experience with the kind of baby-daddy drama that dominated her life. Suddenly, I found myself thrown into a crash course on what it means to be divorced with shared custody.

I tried to talk with her, work with her, plan with her, and find ways to help her see what was happening to her. She was so easily triggered by his traps that my efforts were futile. I was pretty young at that time, much too young for this type of drama, and much too young to realize that he would ultimately target me as well.

The Disease or The Cure?

While people were calling me a predator behind my back, I was the one person who knew both topics involved (sex addiction and child psychology) better than anyone. I was the one best positioned to educate young people on topics of abuse, sexuality, and addiction; had I not been defamed.

I was labeled as someone for children to be afraid of, even though I’m the one best positioned to protect them from any form of harm. To me that has fantastic irony. Instead of becoming a cautionary tale and a target of mockery, I could have used my own insights to educate students and prevent lots of them from becoming addicts in the future, which was all but guaranteed given the pervasiveness of porn usage amongst middle schoolers of both genders.

I’m far from perfect, and back then I wasn’t the person that I am now. But hurting children is so far beneath me that it’s absurd. That’s more of the ex-husband’s thing. A predator likes bending people to his will. I like giving people a backbone so they can’t be bent. He spends his time meddling in the lives of others, while I spend mine living my own.

My addiction had nothing to do with children. I wouldn’t have gone into education if that weren’t the case. I was also in therapy and every therapist I worked with would have intervened if I were a danger to kids. In fact, I knew many recovering addicts who taught children. There’s something powerful and purifying about the honesty of the 12-step process, and that honesty makes people into excellent teachers.

Because I was awful at communication, I avoided discussing sexual or controversial topics with my teenage students, even when they had genuine questions about sexual health or social justice. I felt unqualified to answer because my own relationship with sexual health and psychology was defined by recovery, not perfection. In other words, I was in recovery, so how could I be asked to dispense advice?

I figured that if I was wise on this topic, perhaps I wouldn’t be in recovery.

From my years in meetings, I have an applied knowledge of sex addiction that trumps the academic insights of most therapists, save those who specialize in treating sex addiction. I’ve spent more than 10 years of my life in meeting rooms full of sex addicts and heard thousands of stories from every type of sex addict there is, with every level of sobriety from newcomers to old timers. And I’ve also read lots of books about sex addiction including the works of Dr. Patrick Carnes whose research on the topic goes back decades.

For my understanding of sex addiction and how to prevent it, I’m the cure, not the cancer. That also goes for any of us addicts who’ve spent years in meetings. We know so much about addiction and how to heal it.

On top of that, as a teacher I have an applied and practical understanding of child psychological development, which is necessary in order to orchestrate an emotionally safe and productive environment. I always used my teaching experience to properly understand the motivations behind children’s behavior. Once I fully understood children and what they’re trying to communicate, I discovered the best courses of action to create a safe and nurturing environment. Like most good teachers, I taught my students to express themselves through their art and creativity, and to use their words. I taught them to help each other and not argue, and to develop their ideas rather than be quickly self-satisfied.

So I’m the very person with the type of expertise needed to address abuse and actually prevent harm to children, because I know enough about sex addiction, and plenty about child psychology. I am literally the safest person for children to be around. I’m capable of preventing even the most minimal of suffering, to say nothing of preventing serious abuse.

But you can see now how someone might invent a story, connecting my very private recovery with the very public work that I used to do, and then distorting the message so that it represents something far more sinister than simply art teacher + recovering porn addict.

If someone tacked onto that narrative the stereotypes about my religious and racial identity, the story could become very compelling, especially to those with a strong bias or limited experience with people from the Middle East.

That’s why I should have been told what was happening right away.

Had my colleagues from a decade ago had the courage to question the narratives that were brought to them, and confront me directly rather than observe me from afar, I would have discovered this person's campaign of defamation much sooner, and it would have been much easier to counteract it then. I probably would not have gotten divorced, would not have quit teaching, and my life would have been radically different had I known all of it.

How many children missed their shot at success because instead of having an art teacher who believes in them, they had an art teacher they were afraid of? I do not know, but it’s a question worth asking. Should my recovery have been kept private or should it have been outed as a porn-addict to the families of every single student I taught?

I didn’t want to share anything about my private mental health, my program, or my therapy, with my colleagues or students. Those experiences were private and sacred, but that need for privacy allowed others to invent their own narratives about me, and draw conclusions informed more by film and media than by real life. The conclusions that most people came to represent an unrealistic and impossible version myself, and sometimes I find it funny.

This hidden narrative affected everything in my life and I want to tell a mini-story that articulates it. It’s safe to say that my ex thought I was a secret pedophile and thought I was going into teaching just to cover it up-- that’s so crazy to me, but that’s what she believed. She was livid about me getting a master’s degree in education because she was afraid I was going to get into some kind of trouble. Our relationship was full of weird tests, but I was put in charge of her teenage daughter often, and never laid so much as a finger on her.

Community Trust

After my first year teaching after grad school, I came out like gangbusters and all the kids really liked my curriculum. I was teaching art for K-5 at a suburban elementary school. The teachers said they’d never seen the students so energized and excited. In the years that followed there was a whole school project - a mural painted by all the students, which was a smashing success and inspired my 500 students from kindergarten to 5th grade. I also instituted a sort of tradition in my 3rd year of teaching. I organized an exhibition outside the school for my 5th grade students. My 5th graders that year were incredibly proud to have an exhibition at a certain well-respected museum. Those were the kinds of things I did out of a genuine desire to get my students to see themselves as artists early on. Despite my psychology, flaws and shortcomings, I was someone who believed in the power of manifestation, and I wanted to do a little manifesting with my students.

But the hidden narrative might have been that I planned things like a school-wide mural and a community exhibition, just to cover up my inhumanity? I’m not sure if I’m really the one with a problem here. I promoted children’s self-esteem and orchestrated great community recognition events for my students so that they would become mentally and emotionally resilient, and more resistant to addiction and hopelessness than I was. At the same time, I was trying to undo my own trauma and reparent myself to compensate for shortcomings in my environment as a teen.

Isn’t this why it’s said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions?

In my second year teaching elementary school, the school told me that they were renovating the copy room, so the space adjacent to my art classroom (located over the atrium) was to become the new copy room. My classroom was very large and the school proposed that a corridor would be formed going from the door of the room over the atrium, where staff would now make their copies, to a door on the left side of my classroom. Essentially 10 percent of my classroom was cut to make a corridor.

I wasn’t at liberty to protest losing a piece of my classroom, so I rolled with it and asked for wire rack shelves to make a divider. I lost classroom space but got more storage out of the deal. A row of shelves now separated my classroom from people coming in and out of the copy room, at all hours of the school day. I used fabric with arabesque designs to give my students some privacy, so they wouldn’t be distracted people moving in and out. But a sheet of fabric doesn’t dampen a person’s footsteps.

Now I wonder if this was also a ruse, and if the community wanted to make sure that they could look in on their children in art class, whenever it was in session, just to make sure they were okay. Occasionally staff members would talk to each other while they were in the corridor that was really my classroom, and my students would listen to travel plans or whose having a baby. We’d all get an ear full as my 5 minute meeting was interrupted by grown up gossip.

I never for a moment suspected that they didn’t trust me, or that I was outed in some way. I just thought that disruption was part of teaching. Sometimes, part of your classroom is taken to make a hallway. Sometimes, you have to talk over your colleagues, sometimes your colleagues won’t warm up to you and it’s up to you to become an example of perseverance. Sometimes you have to be the Phoenix, rising from the ashes again and again. It’s just the way it goes.

But now that I know the power of words, communication, openness, honesty, there’s no more bullshit, no more martyrdom, and no more nonsense. I will not give a pass to secretiveness and unfair treatment in the name of forbearance. There’s no need for secrets, plans or plots. Everything is out in the open and everything I have to say will wipe away misconceptions, misunderstandings, and myths about sex addiction and recovery.

And I have no ulterior motives. I do this because I value transparency, education, and intelligence. I want people to be smarter when it comes to how they deal with sex addiction.

Trying to handicap my teaching efforts was incredibly stupid, and may have hurt others more than me, but the stories I have to tell will fix that. Because as Dr. Manhattan will tell you, nothing is ever really over. People think about time in terms of stories, believing that everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But time continues even after ‘the end’, and nothing stops just because we call it quits. So nothing has ended, and I have endless untold stories to tell you.

In Arabic there’s a saying: ‘let’s talk on the floor!’ It means, let’s speak directly and honestly without formalities. For addicts, hitting bottom, means that life has gotten the worst it can possibly get, and there’s no more illusions about what’s going on.

Let’s take in both of those ideas; hitting bottom, and talking on the floor, as I talk about communications, rumors, the truth, and misunderstandings in this piece.

All my life, I struggled to communicate with the people closest to me. Poor communication often leaves others to draw their own conclusions about what you’re saying, doing, and who you are. In my case, those faulty conclusions led to a lot of trouble. Back then, while I was teaching in classrooms, I didn’t understand the importance of addressing these misunderstandings.

For a long time, I believed that false ideas, erroneous conclusions, and defective thinking were all self-correcting. I thought people would naturally find the right answers about me given enough time. As a teacher, I always tried to guide people’s thoughts, and redirect bad energy into good directions, but it’s much easier to do this when you’re not the target of those faulty assumptions.

Over recent years, thanks to my experience teaching English, I’ve become a much better communicator and I now have the skills to tell this story. And I have nothing to lose.

Who watches the Watchmen?

To understand me a little better, I want to introduce you to The Comedian from The Watchmen by Alan Moore. The Watchmen is one of the most important graphic novels of the 20th century. It satirizes superheroes against the backdrop of US politics and world domination. I wouldn’t want to rob you of any of the joy of reading it yourself, but let's just say that the Comedian, as flawed as he is, discovers a hidden plot so upsetting that it haunts him.

The Comedian’s story shows us that even the most flawed faux-hero, awash in vice and arrogance, can’t accept mass-manipulation or misinformation for the population at large. He’s the Comedian, and he discovers that his entire life's work has been the butt of someone else's joke.

This is how I’ve been feeling for the last 10 years, putting the pieces of my past together. In solving this mystery, I feel as if I’m in the process of uncovering a plot against me so pervasive that it calls into question everything I believed in.

How was someone with white supremacist, far-right leaning affiliations was able to manipulate feminists, liberals of all stripes, and children’s rights activists into furthering an agenda of defamation against me?

As I go wandering through the years, I realize that much of the unfair treatment in my public school career, and the loss of my relationships with friends, and my personal life, wasn’t based on my behavior or performance, but influenced by rumors, orchestrated by a sinister character who entered my life 20 years ago.

Don’t Say It, Spray it.

He was the ex-husband of my ex-partner. They were married when he got into a relationship with a high school student. My ex told me the story: She’d discovered that her ex-husband was having an affair with a sixteen year old who went to the local high school. By the way, since I’m the Comedian in this story, we’ll call him the Joker from now on.

Apparently, the Joker met this teenager smoking weed with class cutters and drop outs in the square. He had a full time job as a financial analyst but only needed to show up to work about 200 days a year, so he had plenty of free time to look for trouble.

When my ex discovered them she was furious and flew into a blind rage. She took a can of spray paint and wrote I f**k high school girls on his car. She’d tell me imagining him having to go to the body shop and get it removed made me laugh. This is the kind of rage my ex had. It would come in waves, and fits, and sometimes it was actually well placed.

I was with my ex for almost a decade. I came into the picture a few years after they were divorced so I knew her ex-husband also. My ex told me that the girl was blackmailing him, and threatening that, if he left, she would tell the police she was actually fifteen when their relationship began. Sixteen is the age of consent in the state, which was horrifying in and of itself. It’s appalling that any blue state could have such backward laws, but that’s another story for another time.

He needed to use me to cover up his own scandal. So, with the help of a little cyber-hacking, he made me out to be something I’m not. He used his daughter as a trojan horse to plant, well, a trojan, on my computer, and when I had relapses, he got the data to manipulate as he pleased. No, there was no child pornography - that’s illegal, but let’s face it, plenty of stuff on the internet can be embarrassing if your search history was read out loud.

These rumors came out against the backdrop of my teaching career. In my early days of teaching, I was a force to be reckoned with. Because I explored my own upbringing and the failures in my development as a child, I was deeply attuned to creating an environment that fostered growth. But little by little I was rebranded by rumors, and made out to be someone that didn’t belong in the classroom. Many of the artists I once knew in Boston heard the rumors he started. Some of them thought they were protecting children by spreading the word, when in reality they were just covering up for a real pedophile.

Sinners, Saints, and Snake Oil - The Church Story

Here’s a story that shows how manipulative my ex’s ex-husband was. When I met my ex, she’d been searching for a new spiritual home. She’d been raised catholic but after graduating from the Ivy leagues, she needed a church that fit her liberal values and strong sense of social justice. She found it! The right church for her was there in one of the most liberal towns in America. The Vineyard Church in Cambridge.

She loved that church so much for its welcoming atmosphere and friendly people. Religious communities can often be places of judgment and shame, but at this church she finally felt welcomed and accepted. Even as a single-mom divorcee, she’d found a house of worship where she could be honest and open with everyone. She’d finally found her church.

That was until her ex-husband followed her there, dragging his new teenage fiancée with him. Soon the welcoming environment she craved was gone, replaced by one of discomfort and polarity, where my ex was wondering which church friends would stick by her side. This was his special brand of psychological warfare. He infiltrated her safe space, presenting himself as a reformed soul seeking community.

He was a sinner who saw the light— hallelujah!

The ex-husband and his teen fiancée volunteered to be church greeters and showed up together every Sunday, in the church lobby, shaking hands and grinning like Cheshire cats. You just can tell when someone’s showing way too much teeth for an honest Sunday morning.

I have no doubt that he bad mouthed his ex-wife in hushed tones behind closed doors and used phrases like “I’ll pray for her” to make her look small in the eyes of the community. He joined lots of volunteer groups and committees, ensuring that wherever she turned, his bespectacled face and gilded dome would be there.

The church, in its eagerness to be a welcoming space for everyone, invited inauthenticity into its halls, and its church goers couldn’t discern the difference between a genuine soul in need and a stalker masquerading as a good Christian.

I think that because the church felt they had to welcome everyone, they weren’t comfortable saying no to someone who doesn’t really need to be there.

More importantly, the church folks shouldn’t be afraid to look under the hood and ask questions. Did no one ask the ex-husband why he was really at Church? Did they ask if he was really trying to get into the kingdom of heaven, or if just trying to make it harder for others to find heaven within?

Continued in The Teacher and the Comedian Part 2.

I’ll be using the chat to post about what’s coming.

Lots of people use the chat to create community, and I would do that except I’m a tiny bit aspergian. I almost have Asperger’s syndrome. This is true! On the ‘Adult Asperger’s Assessment’ or ‘the AAA test’ that you can take, I scored like 5 points short of the qualification line, which is good! I’m not upset about that. I do understand unwritten social rules but not as well as the average person at all. I’m very prone to not picking up on them.

So I have about as much business creating community as a billionaire with Asperger’s buying a social media company!

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Today I write about how infectious the idea is. This testimony explores people, perception, and manipulation, and I use the film Inception as a connective anchor. At times my tone becomes lyrical and obscure so forgive me in advance for any vagaries.

Just like in the film Inception by Chris Nolan, my life has taught me one lesson.

There is nothing more infectious than an idea, and once it takes root in the mind and grows, it’s nearly impossible to excise. Eventually, its impossible for the mind to distinguish the idea from reality itself.

I teach English online, but it’s been a bumpy road. Over the past two years, there have been dramatic changes in my teaching that defied explanation. At first, I was having a lot of fun, and I gained a full schedule very quickly. I had a variety of students from all over the world, and we were getting along great! But after a while, students started to disappear strangely. Students with whom I’d developed a great rapport suddenly went AWOL. Over time, my schedule dwindled more and more, and now I’m lucky if I have three classes per day.

I’ve known for a while that the cause of my dwindling schedule is hacking. I’m under attack from hackers who sabotage my teaching and scare away my students.

Hacking Hackers

On the one hand, I can’t seem to separate my teaching practice from my hacked devices. I have taken my devices to be repaired over and over again, but they just keep getting hacked. These hackers use my identity to hack my students. They reach out to my students, pretending to be me. They pressure my students not to patronize me. They have interfered in classes. They may have planted viruses on my students' computers. And they have often had contact with students who are children.

Because I tried to un-hack myself and failed over and over again, I have all but given up on straightening this out. My hackers are motivated by a false belief about me and want to disrupt my teaching practice as payback for something they think I’ve done. Although their idea of me isn’t true, they won’t let go of it. How can I disabuse them of their illusion?

The Dream / Nightmare

There’s a great scene in the movie Inception where DiCaprio and Page are in a dream, discussing how to plant an idea in the mind of the dreamer. DiCaprio plays a man named Dominic Cobb, and Page plays Ariadne. Cobb and Ariadne are actually together in a dream, in Cobb's subconscious. They’re in downtown Paris, sitting in a café and discussing the role of ‘the architect’ in a dream. Then, a scene begins where they’re walking through the streets of Paris. Ariadne manipulates the dream landscape, and suddenly, all of the pedestrians set their eyes on her as they walk by, making Ariadne feel uneasy.

Ariadne: “Why are they all looking at me?”

Cobb: “Because my subconscious feels that someone else is creating this world. The more you change things, the quicker the projections start to converge on you.”

Ariadne: “Converge?”

Cobb: “They attack like white blood cells fighting an infection.”

Ariadne: “Wait, they're going to attack us?”

“No… just you.”

Ariadne comes to the end of the street where it meets a high traffic underpass that separates her from the riverbank. Wanting to walk straight through to the Seine, she uses her imagination to build a footbridge that would arc over the throughway and take her to the water.

Cobb: “This is great but I'm telling you if you keep changing things like this…”

One of the dream's projections, a young Vietnamese woman dressed in black urban wear thumps into Ariadne while walking by. Ariadne looks back at Cobb.

Ariadne: “Do you mind telling your subconscious to take it easy?”

“It’s my subconscious, remember? I can’t control it.”

What happens to Ariadne in that scene happens to me in real life all the time. In Malta, I didn’t notice it as much, but in Athens last summer, it started. I rode the subway, and a woman sat in front of me and looked right at me. She stared into me as if she wanted to peer into my soul. Later, I went to a concert at a small club, and many of the attendees gathered outside. I was sitting at a street-side bar, waiting for the concert to start, and I felt people looking at me and talking about me. I could see heads turn and eyes fall on me before drifting away. The uneasy feeling was so strong that it made me leave.

In Bangkok, the attention on me was so overt and obvious that part of me was entertained. I was noticed nearly every time I rode the subway, and a few teenagers caught me on video while pretending to film themselves entering the subway with their cell phones. I had met two locals in Bangkok—nice, wholesome ladies—and they wanted me to take them out for lunch. I obliged, and people in the restaurant recognized me, of course, and were visibly disturbed that I was there having a meal with normal folks.

I’ve got lots of stories like this—incidents where complete strangers turned on me like the projections in Cobb’s dream. Except I’m not the dreamer; I’m the architect—and my presence is warping the dream.

Without writing out the rest of the scene, you can see the danger Ariadne is in here: Feel free to jump ahead to minute 4:00. Ariadne’s changes are too drastic and the Parisians gather to attack her. One Parisian in particular almost subdues her.

So, I’m aware that my students are getting hacked by hackers who’ve hacked me, and I also know that these hackers are forcing limits on how many classes my students may take with me. They often coerce students into missing classes, and sometimes they make them quit working with me altogether.

These hackers warn my students against working with me by claiming that I’m a sinister character, and they use defamatory rumors as leverage against my clients. I think they probably threaten my students with reputation damage if they don’t go along with the hackers’ demands. I have even seen cases where they took control of my students’ computers and damaged their projects or their lives. I’ll detail the incidents I’ve witnessed in another story.

There is nothing I hate more than a person who prevents another person from learning.

In another post, I’d love to detail the hacking and provide a timeline of all the methods, ways, and the evolution of said hacking. However, for now, I have to ask that we leave the hacking issue to the side because there’s another aspect of this situation that we’re focused on today.

RUMORS

One way or another, a rumor started that I was a child predator, and this rumor was especially problematic because I worked with children full-time. First of all, I’m not a child predator. I’ve taught thousands of children, so if I were a predator, there would be a mountain of evidence. I’m also not rich or politically connected, especially in the United States, where I lived and taught for around 15 years. I was a substitute teacher for a time, and I was a full-time teacher for many years. Such jobs don’t come with a great deal of political pull. I did my job right and by the book, and I got good at it. I became highly skilled at inventing engaging arts curricula and adept at understanding disruptive behavior and the motivations behind it, allowing me to respond effectively in the classroom. Although there were breaks in my employment—starts and stops—I was never fired from any job for misconduct.

Because I know my life and history, I’m certain that this rumor originated from the ex-partner of one of my ex-partners. It was a rumor fueled by jealousy, revenge, and abuse.

It was intended to hurt my ex by damaging my career and lowering my standing in the eyes of the public. It worked, and she ended up hating me—or so it seemed to me. This was ten years ago, and we eventually divorced because we were constantly fighting. However, she never told me that her ex-husband was targeting me. On some level, she was embarrassed—ashamed that her past was disrupting our relationship. I wasn’t perfect, but I was no child molester!

My complex romantic history and my recovery itself are why I have such difficulty confronting the rumor and the situation I’m in with people I barely know. I don’t know my students very well, and I don’t feel that I can talk to them about a rumor involving addiction, abuse, manipulation, recovery, hacking, and defamation of character—at least not without scaring them off.

Not to mention, I’m teaching online using my devices, and anything I say could be recorded, edited to make me look bad, and used out of context. Furthermore, I don’t know what could happen if my words are misconstrued by students who don’t yet speak English well.

These rumors spread and followed me for years while I was teaching in Boston, yet I had no idea they were the source of disruption to my career and social life. When people, one at a time, turned their backs on me and pushed me away, I just figured they were assholes. Eventually, I started feeling as if everyone was a huge asshole except me and the few people who hadn’t turned on me yet. I didn’t realize there was a toxic narrative I needed to address. Now, in addition to taking care of myself, I must try to dispel people of their illusions about me.

I also thought people wouldn’t believe such extreme rumors and gossip. I expected them to inquire and ask questions. I assumed people would develop a way to distinguish a normal person from a predator. I was naive. People have no reliable system for differentiating good people from bad, and they actually know very little about pedophiles and the kind of abuse that creates them. People just go by what they hear, and if they hear bad news more than twice, they believe it’s true.

Are you a good person or a bad person?

In my life, I’m faced with a lot of people who believe their good by disrupting my life and my work because they think I’m up to no good. When the truth comes out, and eventually it will, they’ll have to take a hard look at themselves.

If a person kills a bad guy - good person . If a person kills a good guy - bad person . If a person kills a good guy because he thinks he’s a bad guy - very bad person.

Most people feel that if someone is a bad person, then it’s okay to harm them. If a good person harms a bad person they are still a good person. But if it turns out that the bad person was actually a good person, and the information was wrong, then the people that harmed them are no longer good people. Those who participated in the system of abuse are considered bad people. This is called persecution, and it’s very easy to gather the ignorant into and under a wave of such persecution.

To illustrate the philosophical weight of this situation, look at Albert Bandura’s Dehumanization Experiment in 1975, where participants were placed in rooms with red buttons that delivered electric shocks to a person or group in another room. I presume there were one-way mirrors between the two rooms.

Participants were told that people in the other room were either "nice," "neutral," or "animals."

Those who heard the "animal" label were more likely to administer stronger shocks.

A variation could have framed them as "criminals" instead of "animals."

This is the experiment we are in. The experimenters forgot to end the experiment, and I essentially discovered what was happening ten years after it started.

The people who spread rumors about me, hack me, and disrupt my life are assimilating themselves into the web of abuse that started in 2005, right after I met my now ex-wife. They’re easily collected as pawns on the chessboard of my personal nightmare, and though these people may be dreaming up something that isn’t real, I can’t seem to wake them up!

People who spread the rumor think they are being good people or protectors, but if they knew the truth, they’d realize that they have become abuser. Sometimes the difference between abuse and reponsability is a simple lie, but if a lie’s all it takes to turn good ones bad, then how good were they really?

These people think of themselves as good Samaritans, yet, because of their ignorance, they are joining a pattern of abuse that has persisted for more than a decade.

In the States, my cultural and ethnic background fits a certain stereotype. For some inexplicable reason, Islamophobic American media loves to talk about child marriage and associate it with Muslims. It’s baffling because I’ve met thousands of Muslims and their wives, and none of them are children. Regardless, I’m not a stereotype.

What I mentioned above, combined with the fact that I changed jobs multiple times and am in recovery, prompts people to fill in the gaps with their own imagination. It takes no effort at all for them to believe that I’m a predator. As long as they don’t know me, or understand how child protective services or the justice system in the United States works, they’re free to adopt the idea that fits their most intriguing fiction. They are easily led to see me as the monster, even though I’m a completely decent person who has served communities and given back for more than a decade.

I deal with a lot of loneliness because I’ve been shunned socially. I can’t interact authentically with most of my friends without risking that they’ll suffer the social penalties I have. Meanwhile, I’m the center of attention when I’m among strangers, which makes me feel uneasy. To top it off, there are a few people in my life who vehemently deny the foul play and try to convince me that I’m acting out of paranoia.

Whether people realize it or not, the purpose of this social ordeal is to try to kill me. Being shunned—a significant feature of my current condition—has killed people. Shunning produces a great deal of social stress, and prolonged stress leads to illness, including cardiac arrest. Isolation also causes depression, and if one is already prone to it, it could lead to suicide.

I think my spiritual work in mysticism, spirituality, and recovery has made me resilient and different from the typical person. I use a particular blend of intuition, strangeness, and humor to cope with my present infamy.

How a Mystic Responds

This next part is a little psychadelic and challenges our notions of reality and sanity. It’s not for everyone so it’s behind a paywall.

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Sister Sage and the Ever Growing Brain

I really like Sister Sage’s character in The Boys. I especially relate to a scene in Season 4 involving Sage and her need to hard reset parts of her brain, even if it makes her into a fool for a few hours.

In this scene, Sister Sage asks the water boy a.k.a. the Deep, to jam an ice pick into her brain via the inner side of her ocular cavity just next to her nose. Sage is requesting a temporary lobotomy because her brain regenerates constantly, and if the Deep doesn’t do this, the pressure on her skull actually hurts. After the Deep adminsters the operation, the brain damage makes her into a fool for a few hours. She doesn’t mind. She enjoyes a few hours of ignorant bliss as a flighty little sex kitten who likes action movies and popcorn.

I may not be a genuis but I’m not a total fool either. Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligence identifies 8 …

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I want to tell you a story about a child named Nicky. This is a story about how we may choose to interpret information we take in.

The source of most arguments is the fact that one person interprets a problem completely differently than another, and that we may not like how another interprets the same problem we are both seeing. We may have the tendency to view a problem negatively but we can choose to view a problem or challenge differently. If we train ourselves, we can start to view certain types of problems positively, and I have found this to be incredibly important in the field education. How you look at a problem affects whether a student becomes happy with your classroom program or swears revenge against it.

When you are a teacher, students and problems are intertwined. This is because when problems arise in the line of duty, they tend to come from or be presented by students, so we risk confusing problems with students.…

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