It was a quiet Sunday on June 3^rd in 1984, when I wrote the following in my diary:

Should I abandon the Rosicrucian teaching or should I continue?  Should I continue my affiliation with the Miami Lodge or should I stop?What am I looking for in the Rosicrucian teaching? Are the goals I am seeking within the same arena as the teachings? If I make an evaluation of three years of affiliation with AMORC, what kind of conclusions will I reach? Right now, I am too confused and materially in distress to proceed with such an evaluation.  But I promise eventually to make an honest evaluation of my affiliation with AMORC. With this evaluation, I will decide if I want to continue on the Rosicrucian path.

It is hard to explain how many times these types of thoughts went through my mind before I said my final sayonara to AMORC. Even back then, if I had been able to be objective, I would have known instantly that AMORC had not delivered on any of its promises. 

Now, I realized that the fuel that was energizing me was not any kind of reliable manifestations of the Cosmic in my life but a combination of factors inherent in the Cult personality that had been so creatively built inside of me, courtesy of the monographs, the rituals, the candle-watching and other hypnotic devices used by AMORC to root my belief in its absolute authority way below my normal, waking consciousness.

So what the diary entry represented was the war inside of me between what Lifton calls my Protean personality (or authentic, real self) and my Cult personality, which was now deeply programmed to project strong powerful, promising messages to my conscious mind based on the promises of the monographs- as well as the terrifying news that I could be instantaneously cut off from the Egregor, the group consciousness, the pool of energy of AMORC directly tying all of us lucky Rosicrucians to the Cosmic.

In my current model of this psychological programming, I see a kind of “embedded” virtual broadcasting chip in my brain that, whether I want to or not, is constantly engaged in a kind of magical thinking- forcing me to attribute any sign of good fortune to my Rosicrucian masters, to my innate connection to the Egregor, to my fortunate membership in a group that contains Sir Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin. It is like having a 24/7 radio transmission in your brain, RADIO AMORC, constantly creating the kind of static that can overwhelm your true analytic processes with disruptive, magical messages.

It was easy to express my questioning of AMORC in my diary but much harder to experience it in myself. Every time I tried to turn myself right, RADIO AMORC would try to turn me left.  And the harder I tried to quit and quit forever, the radio volume would go on louder and louder.

So, if you recognize these signs of division within yourself as a current member of AMORC, I caution you to not give up and not to believe everything you hear in yourself. Try and strengthen your Protean Self with seriousness of purpose, a concentrated effort to reason with yourself (even writing down your inner dialogue) and reading books on cult programming and exit psychology. And, of course, you are welcome to follow my blog.

You CAN turn off RADIO AMORC, but it ain’t easy.