Criminal Orgasms

One Taste Meditation Goes Down

Just this week the founder and CEO of One Taste Orgasmic Meditation were convicted of felony coercion!

According to prosecutors and witness testimonies, they had effectively combined sex and sales into a high-control cult like organization that wrecked many peoples’ lives.

They face up to 20 years each in prison.

This does not surprise me, as we had overlappped at a few conferences in the past. Where a coterie of braless women wearing “powered by orgasm” t-shirts bamboozled biohacker bros left and right.

They even served as the initial inspiration for the nine step Culty Cult Checklist I wrote about in Recapture the Rapture. (shared below)

Because the organization I lead, the Flow Genome Project, focuses on the neuroscience of peak states and Flow states, One Taste’s founder Nicole Daedone took a particular interest in our work.

At one point she invited me to give a neuroscience of peak states workshop.

All in the hopes (I assume) that this would lend a layer of scientific legitimacy to what was, to any clear eyed observer, a glorified clit-diddling operation.

“But it’s not sex. It’s meditation!” they’d fervently insist.

Whatever gets you through the night, right?

#radicalmonogamy

from Stealing Fire

A few years ago I was invited to San Francisco to speak about the overlap between the neuroscience of flow, meditation, and sexuality, and see the cutting edge of this latter domain up close.

Justine Dawson, the CEO of OneTaste and our host for the weekend, escorted us to our chairs in the front row of a packed auditorium, ascended the stage, dropped her pants, and lay back on a massage table.

OneTaste’s founder, Nicole Daedone, entered stage right. Wearing a gray wool dress and a large black apron, she snapped on a pair of latex gloves, dipped her forefinger and thumb into a jar of artisanal lube, and went to work. The reclined Dawson began mewling.

With an entertainer’s flair for the theatrical, Nicole paused, swiveled on a stilettoed black boot, and punched her hand in the air like a rock guitarist.

The audience began calling out words to describe their own experience.

“Tingling in my groin,” one woman announced.

“Heat,” said another.

“Tumescence,” blurted a red-faced software engineer

On the OneTaste website, they describe their central practice as OMing, short for “orgasmic meditation,” and we’d just witnessed a mainstage demonstration by the masters.

A tightly circumscribed, almost ritualized practice, OMing involves stroking the upper left quadrant of a woman’s clitoris for exactly fifteen minutes without attachment to outcome or expectation of reciprocity. Their goal is to create a “turned on” woman— one who is neurochemically saturated, physically open, and emotionally empowered.

And they’re not the first, by any means, to use sex as a trigger for nonordinary states of awareness. From the ancient “wine, women, and song” to the boomers’ “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” erotic techniques have always featured heavily on Promethean playlists.

“The search for personal transformation, including through sex, led to the oceanside hot tubs at . . . Esalen,” explains Patricia Brown in her New York Times article on orgasmic meditation.

“One Taste is but the latest stop on this sexual underground, weaving together strands of radical individual freedom, Eastern spirituality, and feminism.”

Their message appears to be getting traction: OneTaste has centers in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, London, and Sydney, along with a dozen other cities.

They’ve received largely favorable coverage in the Atlantic, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time, and dozens of other publications.

(the clincher is always a female journalist who tries it out herself)

To put this in perspective, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger had to flee the United States in 1914 to avoid prosecution for sharing basic information about contraception.

Yet, in 2015, OneTaste notched a placement on the Inc. 5000—an annual ranking of high-growth companies.

The popularity of orgasmic meditation makes sense once you understand what it can do. “In French literature,” University of Pennsylvania neurologist Anjan Chatterjee explains in his book The Aesthetic Brain,

“the release from orgasm is famously referred to as la petite mort, the little death . . . the person is in a state without fear and without thought of themselves or their future plans. . . . This pattern of deactivation could be the brain state of a purely transcendent experience enveloping a core experience of pleasure.”

Unfortunately, those deactivated brains were really starting to stack up. All those “little deaths” had done a lot of brain damage.

During my presentation on Flow states I asked the audience an interactive question. They were supposed to break up into groups of three and respond to a prompt. It was usually a great exercise.

Except this time.

They just sat there, cross-eyed and drooling. Mmming and oooing and offering flaccid comments about how thing felt in their tummies.

Uh oh, I thought. This is highly unusual. Drain bramage.

When we regathered for the second half of my talk I went off script. I’d only been there for a few hours, but I’d seen and had enough.

The ooey-gooey crowd, the separating of speakers and Nicole from the herd, sequestered to a green room like some mega-watt celebs with hired bouncers escorting us for no particular reason.

Her fawning introductions and standing ovation welcomes.

Her “satsang” like monologues sitting alone onstage in a chair that wasn’t quite a throne, but wasn’t not, either.

It all felt off.

So I killed my slides, grabbed a Sharpie and walked over to a flip chart and wrote

“Ten Signs You Might Be In a Sex Cult”

“Now I’m not saying any of you are,”

The room audibly gasped.

“I’m just saying, if you were, these would be some things to look out for!”

Now I’d really gone and done it.

Not only had I unceremoniously popped their bliss bubble.

I was standing there with a Sharpie in my hand and no idea how many culty cult signs there actually were!

Coulda been 3. Coulda been 33 for all I knew.

But we were up to our tits in ‘em, and it was time to start writing them down for all to see.

As it turns out, there were just enough.

This is the more polished list that went to press in Recapture the Rapture, but honestly, every single one of these was present on that One Taste flip chart. (And in the court room too).

Culty-Cult Checklist: What Not to Do

I. GRABBING THE ONE RING OF POWER— Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Like in Lord of the Rings, don’t be the misguided warrior Boromir or the corrupt wizard Saruman, thinking you will bend the Ring, not that it will bend you. Be like Gandalf and the elven queen Galadriel—wise enough to know better. This one is nonnegotiable.

Here are the top three ways leaders get seduced into claiming more than they’ve earned.

1. Mythologized Origin Story of the Founder—Carefully curated, often repeated tales of exceptional conditions surrounding birth, childhood, or early signs of prodigious talent/insight. Or a Dark Night of the Soul/ Road to Damascus conversion experience that uniquely positions this person to lead. In extreme cases, these are confirmed with self-appointed name change. (In the age of info marketers, this has morphed to include the “I had it all, the big house, fast cars, sexy life, and then . . . I woke up one day in a hospital bed and realized [fill in the blank product or service] that I’m now here to share with you!”)

2. Absolutist Claims of Attainment—In the spiritual, intellectual, sexual, entrepreneurial, or artistic realms— typically reserved for the founder, occasionally extended to their inner circle. Once infallibility is claimed, all dissonance in relation to the founder must be either signs of supplicants’ blind spots and projections or deliberate “crazy wisdom” being offered to liberate the subject—never signs of the founder’s fallibility or humanity.

   

   Alex Grey’s Adi Da

   This often extends beyond the blamelessness of the founder to the completeness and totality of their worldview, which is presumed to be comprehensive and supersedes all other modes of knowing. Two of the most prevalent expressions (often appearing together) are the one-two punch of absolute Enlightenment (with the leader implicitly or explicitly claiming such status) and a dismissal of objective reality as illusory in favor of the power of the mind, visualization, or positive thinking.

3. Ritualized Separation—Keeping the leader distinct from operational tasks, duties, and common mingling. Most often done by adoption of Eastern monastic traditions and terminology (like satsang, which means “sitting in the presence of an awakened guru”) but can also be accomplished by simple celebrity handling such as use of bouncers, greenrooms, and stage settings (which often include ornate seating, lily/lotus flower arrangements, altars, dressing in white or robes, or vestments rather than street clothes) that keep the leader apart from the community except in controlled and/or stylized encounters.

II. CREATING IN/OUT GROUPS—The dynamic of creating an Us and a Them is central for dysfunctional cults to take root. It is how otherwise well-intentioned seekers can get pulled into a reality distortion field where they lose track of their bearings. Any practice, experience, or community that lifts people “up and away”—from their traditions, connections, and culture—rather than bringing them “down and among” their fellow humanity, can be problem- atic. Here are three common viruses that prompt exceptionalism.

1. Messianic Purpose—The micro (of the community) is the macro (of the world) and the value of the work being done within the cloister has significance far beyond the lives of those directly practicing it. This sets up both the potential grandiosity of a world-saving mission and also can be used
   to suppress members’ personal needs and concerns as petty, selfish, or small-minded in comparison (such as compensation vs. volunteer labor). In extreme cases, it may also invoke a “crypto-Puritanism” where those inside the group are considered pure, saved, or gifted, while those beyond the group are tainted, compromised, or in need of redemption.

2. Specialized Language—Often culty cults use novel terms to describe or redefine everyday concepts or introduce pseudo- spiritual or pseudoscientific terms to convey legitimacy on otherwise unprovable truth claims. Over time this increasing lack of interoperability with everyday language or the concepts of mainstream discourse isolates the faithful from friends, family members, and healthy debate. “Quantum” used by non-physicists is a frequent catchall in the New Age scene.

3. Break with Past Precedent—Very rarely do cultic leaders situate themselves within a lineage that would subject them to accountability or critique larger than themselves by others older or wiser than themselves (living or dead). Instead, they tend to declare a “clean slate” even if their own development began within a school or tradition.

   That immunity against precedent extends to charges of cultic behavior, as these leaders will often volunteer extended critiques of past gurus with feet of clay, holding their own transmission up as a corrective exemplar. They may even declare a complete break with the aggregate Human Condition, i.e., that they represent an end to suffering, ego, conditioning, fear, or trauma that has never been accomplished before (or has only been accomplished by Axial Age greats—Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Lao-tzu, etc.).

III. WEAPONIZING PEAK EXPERIENCE AND HEALING—Ecstasis and Catharsis create highly impressionable and susceptible states. While they can be used to enhance sovereignty, they can also rapidly erode it. Unscrupulous leaders make the most of this fact to control their followers in three consistent ways.

1. Tightly Controlled Access to techniques of ecstasy—
   drugs, sex, breath work, music/dance, prayer, charismatic transmission, or sensory deprivation, as well as to methods of catharsis—body work, encounter-type group therapy sessions, personal inquiry, specialized diets, cleanses, etc. Unsanctioned access and insights that contradict the leader’s framing or group norms are often discouraged or suppressed. New or competing interpretations of peak states, healing, or broader philosophy by members are often treated as

   subversive or heretical.

2. An Emphasis on Regressive Practices That Value Feeling over

   Thinking and an inoculation against thinking/discernment as signs of ego, projection, or resistance that is to be trusted less than either the “truths” of catharsis/trauma release or the insights and framing of the leader. Because the very methods of personal discernment (a.k.a. “trusting my gut”) and logical critique are already discounted by the leader, even the most thoughtful and accurate concerns can be ipso facto dismissed as proof of a member’s resistance to transformation—there is no way to crack the facade from within it.

3. Key Decisions and Commitments Encouraged or Forced While in Non-ordinary States—Whether testaments of love, allegiance, atonement, or payment, these groups use the softened boundaries and impaired judgment of euphoric peak states or cathartic release as times to secure emotional, social, or financial commitments.

   Suitably primed members are encouraged to equate the visceral “truths” of the state they are in with the validity of all the prior truth claims of the guru.

   That is, if I am blissed out of my post-orgasmic mind, or shuddering in trauma release, and that is an undeniable reality for me, then I am often compelled by the group to sign off on their entire mythology.

   Key decisions and commitments are encouraged or forced while in non-ordinary states, rather than deferring until a person returns to clearheaded sobriety and can offer full consent.

***

If it were as easy to spot culty cults as rolling down a checklist like this one, most of them would never get off the ground–including One Taste.

Here are a couple of additional edge cases that can dull our discernment and make it harder to know what we’re looking at until it’s too late.

False Positives: Many cultlike communities will initially present with palpable energy, enthusiasm, and growth, precisely because they are harnessing many of the ecstatic and cathartic techniques described above. This can create cognitive dissonance for anyone applying the “by their fruits ye shall know them” filter to see if a community is legitimate.

While the fruits appear to be abundant, it is tempting to conclude that the roots must be healthy.

Using charismatic transmission, encouraging regressive catharsis, controlling ecstatic rituals of bonding, and advocating for magical thinking consistently produce potent effects.

It is not that they don’t work, it’s that they work only too well (until they inevitably don’t).

Talented but Tainted: Often, especially after a scandal or community collapse, pundits will label the leader as a fraud. In this judgment, the guru was only pretending to be spiritual and really only wanted money, sex, fame, or power. Everyone who fol- lowed them was duped.

While those kinds of low-level hucksters are abundant, as NXIVM’s Keith Ranière recently illustrates, at the higher levels of attainment, like Osho or Adi Da, it’s rarely that cut-and-dried.

As often, the leader had some remarkable skills and insights that fueled their own teaching and community in the first place. It was only over time that things visibly degraded/imploded.

This is almost always due to Grabbing the One Ring of Power, which disconnects the leader from their humanity. When a gifted teacher accepts their followers’ golden shadow, and allows themselves and others to believe that they are exceptional and even infallible, the rot invariably sets in.

The frequent use of altered states and regressive emotionality further disconnects followers from their common sense and discernment, making it harder to notice the decline.

These are all red flags and deal breakers. It is exceptionally rare for a leader to endorse any of those three behaviors—claims of infallibility, state-priming, and anti-intellectualism—and not have significant blind spots/ulterior motives. Even if not immediately apparent, they corrode the community over time.

***

But the absolute corkers as we consider this genre—the ones who put the capital C in Culty Cults—were Charlie Manson and Jim Jones.

They bookended the 1970s with gory tragedies, immortalizing Helter Skelter and “drinking the Kool-Aid” as shorthand for people losing their minds (and even their lives) to gurus with feet of clay and hearts of stone.

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Lord Acton once observed. “Great men are almost always bad men.”

For a few decades, that seemed to dampen enthusiasm and heighten skepticism for culty cults.

What had once been a simple academic term describing a community of believers had become an unqualified pejorative—a warning of the dangers of losing yourself when trying to find yourself.

But lately, that tide has turned. One Taste is only one example. We seem to be backsliding down the slippery slope. We’re freshly vulnerable to cultic tendencies. There are a host of reasons for this.

But here are four that seem to be reinforcing each other these days:

#1 Generational Amnesia:

We always forget. If we didn’t we’d likely go mad with grief. Whether the pains of childbirth or the horrors of war, sometimes it’s better not to remember. “Fluidity of memory and a capacity to forget,” anthropologist Wade Davis notes, “is perhaps the most haunting trait of our species.”

But this current rise of culty- cult dynamics all around us seems so much a chapter-and-verse repeat of the cautionary tales of the ’60s and ’70s, it’s hard to understand why we can’t seem to recognize what’s staring us in the face.

Part of that might be exacerbated by the fact that the generation rising to power and prominence right now—the millennials—are the children of the baby boomers.

And like all children individuating from their parents, they tend to assume two things—the first, that nothing their parents did could be cool, relevant, or revelatory, and the second, that anything the kids have discovered is new and has never been done before.

That’s leaving us with a wisdom gap, and we have an entire generation of echo-boomers putting it right in the same ditch, on the same hairpin turns that their parents did.

Never mind the skid marks.

Instagrammers at Burning Man might not even know about Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, and their original 1962 art car and Acid Tests.

Ayahuasceros who first heard about the potion on a podcast might not even recognize the names of Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes or the Beat writer William Burroughs.

Advocates of polyamory might never have heard of Stranger in a Strange Land or the Church of All Worlds that it spawned.

“He who knows only his own generation,” Churchill lamented, “remains forever a child.” As we head into uncertain times, it’s feeling increasingly like a Children’s Crusade.

#2 Techniques of Ecstasy:

We’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating in this inventory. Never at any time in human history any­ where have so many had access to so much, with so few guidelines. The Age of Aquarius gets all the hype for being the era of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll experimentation, but really, that was a relatively small fringe population. It only looms so large in our collective imagination because the media loved to cover it.

Today, industrial-strength marijuana is legally available in most states, tens of millions of users are participating in the psychedelic “renaissance” (an order of magnitude more than dabbled in the ’60s), polyamory and other forms of nontraditional sexual relationships are at an all-time high, breath work, sensory deprivation, ice and sauna bathing, intensive yoga, EDM concerts, immersive digital worlds—pretty much the entire Alchemist Cookbook—are available on demand.

And there’s quite a bit of demand. These are potent and destabilizing tools, especially when yanked out of context. Addiction is as likely an outcome as illumination.

#3 Digital Influencer Culture:

In the past, if you wanted to become an authority in a given field, you had to apprentice to a lineage. If you were a scholar you had to devote yourself to earning a PhD.

If you were a writer, you had to work your way up to the journals of record.

True also for martial arts, yoga, or meditation. Pick your tradition, find your teacher, submit to the practice, and maybe, just maybe, if you proved yourself out, year after year, at some point you’d get the nod and be given permission to assume the mantle of teacher yourself.

All that changed with the advent of the internet. The gatekeepers got disintermediated. Content got democratized. If you had the will, now there were a thousand ways.

While there was a flourishing of creativity and greater inclusion of voices, quality control went out the window.

That kicked off a race to the bottom. The spiritual marketplace got thoroughly commoditized and its incentives flipped. In the past, traditions served an imperfect but vital function of boosting the signal of wise teachers and suppressing the signal of charlatans.

Today, pretenders to the throne can spin up a slick website, push out some digital ads, and start grooming their very own fleeceable flock.

The naive seekers they target cannot tell the difference between the diamond sutra and a rhinestone knockoff.

The money changers have sneaked back in the temple, only now they take Venmo.

#4 Rapture Ideologies:

On top of all that—things have been getting super weird lately—the collapse in authority, global systemic crises, and tangled mythologies— it’s increasingly difficult to tell what’s around the bend.

The seductive pull of Rapture ideologies beckons.

The more uncomfortable and the less certain we are, the more tempting it becomes to find comfort in community.

And the most tempting community to latch on to?

The one that confidently proclaims to know exactly what’s going on and is certain it’s going to be standing on the right side of history

(just as soon as whatever BigTimeCrazyThing that’s gonna happen happens).

That was OneTaste, in a nutshell.

Saving the world one well-rubbed nubbin at a time.

***

We should expect conditions to worsen on the road ahead. The last five years have seen an exponential uptick in all four of these dynamics— Generational Amnesia, Ecstatic Technologies, Digital Influencers, and Rapture Ideologies—overlapping and amplifying each other.

As plagues, fires, famine, and floods (to say nothing of global cabals secretly running the world, or imminent alien disclosure) ricochet around us, it’s hard not to read into things.

Signs and portents abound. Omens of Millennium are everywhere.

Meanwhile the echo chamber of social media is taking our shadows and turning them into monsters. By the clicking of our thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

***

One Taste has gone down, but they were one of thousands, really.

The conditions that supported their rise, the need for meaning and connection that they offered, and the allure of someone to follow remain.

But hey, if all else fails, you can take comfort in this simple and empowering fact:

you can always diddle your giblets for free!

#RIPOneTaste

#metime

#radicalsovereignty