The Path of Our Sacred Delusions

By Ed SJC Park

A private investigator is hired to investigate the Path of God Ministry, a fast-growing, non-denominational cult in search of a missing woman named Xan. Cult leader Dan Booker seems to possess an uncanny ability to locate missing bodies making people wonder if he knows or even is the killer. Coincidentally, the investigator’s long-lost love from high school is now a leader in the Ministry. He plans to infiltrate the group and confront Dan about his knowledge of the missing woman. His plan backfires as he becomes brainwashed and must face a horrific secret from his past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781304883148

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The Path of Our Sacred Delusions

The Path of Our Sacred Delusions

by Ed SJC Park

Copyright © 2012 by Ed Park

All rights reserved.

No part of this eBook may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

Cover photo: © Pastie | iStockphoto

First Edition: 2012

ISBN 978-1-304-88314-8

Introduction

Nobody likes to be confronted with unpleasant facts that contradict their given beliefs.  At every single moment of time, we are convinced we are right.  Even when we realize that we were wrong, we now possess equal conviction that we were wrong and now we are right again.  No intelligent being can function thinking that it may not be right at any given moment.  It may have doubt, but it is certain that it is right to be doubtful.  Every day we encounter others who we call delusional, because they believe in things that are so obviously incorrect to us.  Atheists think religious people are delusional and vice versa.  Republicans think Democrats are delusional to think the government will fix everything and Democrats think Republicans are delusional to think corporations will take care of everyone.  Guys think women are delusional to stay in an abusive relationship, and women think guys are delusional to think they can get a supermodel to date them.  What everyone forgets is that our belief system is not designed to be the scientific method and determine the validity of a hypothesis.  Our belief system is designed to give us sufficient information to act on behalf of our instincts.  When our belief system is attacked, it is not a matter of proving us right or wrong but a direct threat to our ability to act on behalf of our instincts.  In other words, if you undermine my belief system, I may starve, get attacked, lose respect, lose friends, become injured.  This is why people defend their belief systems as if they were defending their lives, because they are.

At Harvard, Ted Kaczynski participated in a psychology study that brutally confronted his basic belief systems.  To what extend this contributed to his violence is unknown, but it he was never the same person after the experiments.  Cults often confront our basic belief systems in order to convince us that in our current state of mind, we are incapable of taking care of ourselves, fulfilling our needs and overcoming our fears.  In this fragile state, we are receptive to the cult telling us their belief system and their way of fulfilling our needs and dealing with our threats.  Philosophers love to tackle, argue, and question our fundamental beliefs, but all the while, we should maintain some basic belief systems to provide us comfort and relief, otherwise, we are left vulnerable to the manipulation and control of others.

Some argue that we should live our lives only with knowledge.  Belief is simply a set of assumptions about how things work or how things might work without really knowing.  97% of the universe is an unknown entity that has an effect on gravity, yet we have no idea exactly what it is.  Humans are conceited enough to believe that they know almost everything there is to know, but a truly intelligent person realizes, the more we know, the more we realize we do not know.  The majority of information in the universe is not only well beyond our reach, but we may never, ever know it all.  We do not even have the language to begin scratching the surface of the universe.

Nature unobserved, unsentimentalized, unpolluted with our delusions, is just a bunch of stuff eating itself. - James Parker, The Beast Within Atlantic Monthly

…truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. – Winston Churchill

Chapter 1

At airport bars, bars at hotels near airports, bars at hotels downtown in cities where it seems the only reason there are hotels downtown is some redevelopment effort that only seems to cater to convention travelers and every conceivable amenity to those travelers from drugs stores to restaurants to coffee shops seem parasitically dependent on them, orbited by the same alcoholic, drug-addicted drop-outs of society with some messed up family complex, you can be whomever you want to be.  You can be a doctor attending a proctology convention, you can be an airline pilot, you can be an insurance claims adjuster investigating a fraud, you can be a drug trafficker, you can be an industrial powder coat salesman, a campaign worker during campaign season, a middle-aged divorcee desperately reinventing himself in a new city as an alternative to suicide, a news reporter for the Washington Post following some political scandal, a CIA agent hunting down a loose alien cloaked as a human, a Hollywood director scouting locations for some straight-to-DVD half-artsy, half-formulaic love story, anything you fucking want.  Sometimes I get drunk or bold enough to tell the truth, I tell them I create complex algorithms to automate stock trading.  Sometimes I tell them I’m the second coming of Jesus Christ, and I ask them if they would like to join my cult in Billings, Montana. 

Every now and then, I come across a woman playing the same game, but never too sincerely or effortlessly.  I’ve come across the Mayor of Montreal in Boston, the Queen of Persia in Newark, a gnat biologist in Denver, a political canvasser for the New Fascist Alliance Party in Atlanta, a systems analyst in Chicago who didn’t know the first fucking thing about computers outside of her iPhone which she used to provide me with enough clues to deduce that she was an art student leaving Chicago to visit her family back in Arkansas.  It’s easy to lie to someone who is willing and investing in believing.  Young girls, or I should say young women in their twenties, are skilled liars when it comes to dealing with parents who insist on believing that their daughters are not the dishonest, manipulative, ungrateful, heartless, skanky, sociopathic scumbags they really are.  But, when you get enough practice lying to deaf ears, you get made out quickly by someone who accepts the fact that many people are dishonest, manipulative, ungrateful, heartless, skanky, sociopathic scumbags.  It’s all a game to them, and if they were a little bit more serious and sincere about playing the game, you might get fooled.  But then time takes its toll, and if they haven’t grown up, grown a heart, grown character, grown compassion, grown a frontal lobe, they are no longer bothered by lies, by games.  The lies and games start molding so closely to their body that they forget they’re wearing them, and they forget to take them off, and they forget what they look like underneath, and they become their own lies. 

But lies are illusions, and if you believe you’re 110 lbs, and you’re really 300 lbs, and you’re trying to fit into a dress for a 110-lb woman, you’ve got a serious problem.  And people wonder, how is it possible to live a lie when all evidence around them suggests the truth.  Well, that’s simply when the blind spots in your conscious mind start getting larger and larger, and you do have a lazy brain that is always trying to come up with the shortest distance between observations and perceptions, but it is also a bored and frightened brain that will run around in circles for hours and hours just to escape a most frightening reality.  So the 300-lb woman does her best to shove her fat ass into small clothes, and you see it all the time.  To her it’s not unflattering.  To her, it appeases her fears. 

So what is the point of becoming a compulsive liar myself, at airport bars, bars in hotels by airports, and at bars in downtown hotels?  I suppose I rationalize to myself that there is a slight possibility I could be alerting the wrong person who somehow has ties to the person I’m investigating, but it simply makes more sense that I’m protecting myself, protecting myself from hundreds of encounters over a decade of pointless encounters that are utterly meaningless outside of the temporary relief provided with trivial conversation between two human beings inhabiting the same square meter space at a bar, an island, a temporary shelter, in some strange city. 

I study the evolution of personal conversations and encounters.  I note the questions, body language, signs, cues, flags, progressive delusions, progressive intimacy, progressive vulnerability, progressive defensiveness.  It’s a dance as contrived and elaborate and as beautiful and ugly as any courtship ritual in the wild.  The rule is simple though, and it’s so obvious, you’d wonder how anyone gets away with it without seeming so obvious.  The more needy and vulnerable or the more hostile and defensive, the more desperate the person wants comfort, security, love, warmth, sympathy, intimacy, sex, connection, embrace, holding, understanding.  Yet, they only want it briefly, because either they have come to the conclusion or they just do it unconsciously, they will fuck it all up, and sometimes, you’re just as fucked up, and you have a perfect codependent, co-enabling relationship.  Otherwise, you run away as fast as you can.  And perhaps for this reason, people who travel a lot tend to be overpopulated by proportion with these intimacy and emotional fuck-ups, myself included.

So what really is the point of telling the truth?  It’s not like you’ll ever see me again.

So I was talking to this young woman at an airport bar.  Here’s the usual questions: Where are you going?  Ever been there before?  Vacation?  Business?  Where are you from?  Here’s a list of things to do when you get there (if I’ve been there).

Where you going? She asked.

I’m going to meet an old friend.  She’s in this church or cult or something.

Really?  Wow.  What’s it called?

The Path of God Ministry.

Huh, never heard of it.

It’s not very big, but funny thing, we found each other on Facebook.  Okay, I looked her up on Facebook and found her.

That’s funny.

Yeah, maybe we’ll have to friend each other after this.

She laughed.

So we just lost touch.  We were best friends in high school, and we made plans to go to the same college, and there were times I thought we’d marry and have kids and all.

That’s sweet.

Yeah, well, plans changed.  We seemed to drift apart in high school.  I mean first, we both hit puberty, and well, let’s just say, I think she got the better of it.

She laughed again.

Yeah, she grew taller than me, and basically went from that wallflower you always forget was even in the same junior high school.  I mean, you’re all over those hot girls in junior high who develop early, and sometimes they keep it going in high school, but inevitably, sometimes, they don’t and get fat or just don’t grow the right way.  I was making a mental note to myself of whether I might be possibly offending her.  She may or may not have been one of those early or late developers.  My audience at that moment was more of a dude or at least myself than a young woman.  Sometimes I shouldn’t say whatever’s on my mind, but at least I didn’t tell her that I wanted to fuck her.

"Well, she just turned into this gorgeous girl, and even worse, in junior year, she dyed her hair blonde, and I swear, she went from zero in popularity to the most popular, sought after girl in the school, and even seniors were chasing her.  But that wasn’t the only reason we drifted apart.  We were both pretty smart, and we studied together a lot, and we both had pretty big dreams of going to college,