Love was weaponized

A couple of years before I was in Siddha Yoga, I was in a theater workshop in New York City that Arn Weinstein wrote. It had songs by the great composer, William Bolcom. I didn’t know anything about Siddha Yoga then. The show was a musical revue based on the life and the stories of Swami Muktananda. I sang a jolly song in that show, based on some stories Muktananda used to tell. The title of the song was  “A Lie Is All The Truth You Need To Know.”

Two years later, I went to South Fallsburg to hear Marsha Mason tell creative people how to meditate. And shortly after, I fell for it, hook line and sinker.

I deeply loved the guru, and believed I was deeply loved by the guru, even while I was being publicly and privately treated with cruelty and contempt. What I now understand is that the SY gurus’ love was entirely conditional on my complete and total submission. Love was weaponized as a device to elicit and enforce greater and greater submission. And the guru’s love was made equivalent to God’s love. So I believed, without clearly articulating it to myself, that God’s love was fully conditional, the condition being my complete submission to whatever the guru said to me and however the guru treated me – and however others were treated, often even more cruelly than I was. To verify my devotion, I had to accept that criminal activity was God’s love; pedophilia was God’s love; sadistic cruelty and contempt was God’s love.

I am lucky and grateful that this finally became intolerable for me. Love that is conditional on absolute submission is enslavement, not love, and what I learned is that SY, like all cults and all relationships with traumatizing narcissists, offers bondage, not liberation.

Funny how we thought we possessed the truth that would set us free. Ironic that the freedom comes from telling the actual truth about the false truths. A lie is most certainly not all the truth we need to know. A lie is not the truth, period.

It’s good to be free.

Dan Shaw, 2025