Check it, my Q & A with Timothy Wyllie, ex Process Church art director, general cosmic fellow, writer of new age books about communicating with dolphins and angels. I was going to run this interview on my Temple of Pei blog but thought better of it: WFMU's Beware the Blog gets around 5000 times the traffic, and this is a voice which much be heard. This is a guy that really lives to the beat of his own drummer. Hope you dig, and remember: As it is, so be it.
During the Process salon at the Anthology Film Archives right around when Love Sex Fear Death came out you mentioned that cults could be a good thing, that there were many benefits to you spending time in one. Could you describe examples of what a good cult experience would be?
The biggest benefit is that one gets to experience a kind of life that isn't available under normal circumstances. This especially applies to reincarnates, who require an accelerated learning curve. Most western societies these days are both risk and pain averse. Cults allow those who need to go through their own pain and anger to do it in a safe situation. Cults can become a microcosm of society, so people in cults can experience a far wider array of possibilities like service, obedience, leadership, as well as what it's like to live without personal possessions, money, and personal freedom. Celibacy for a period is also a necessary psychic/emotional antidote in an over-sexed society. Possibly the greatest gift a cult bestows is when one leaves it. One emerges back into life with the opportunity to follow one's own drummer--free of parental etc influences, and understanding the dire consequences of ever giving away one's power again.
If you were involved in the start of a new cult now in 2011 what would change compared to the Process? What would you focus on?
I wouldn't. I feel cults have had their day. At this point in time and in a spiritual sense, it's every person for themselves. Cults in the sixties and seventies were a kind of clean-up contingency. The were so many reincarnates who needed to work on themselves (and be worked on). The kids these days are different--they don't really need cults the way we did.
Over the years you probably have met hundreds of people influenced by The Process. Any surprises there, was there any indication that you were part of something so huge at the time?
At the beginning, for at least the first five years, we all felt we were onto something big and important. I doubt if any of us could have anticipated its importance as it has been emerging recently.
What teachings of The Process have you retained?
Although TP probably took the concept of personal responsibility too far--it's your responsibility if you are under the wheel of an airplane if it falls off; everything you do, or is done to you is your responsibility--I find it's a very useful POV since it returns the power to you. Blaming an outside force essentially renders one powerless to change it. One can of course always change one's response to it and in that way one regains one's personal power.
The concept that the Universe is responsive to individuals. And that reality is mutable in ways yet to be understood. And that the intuition is a far more trustworthy way of approaching the ineffable, than that of seeking hard evidence.
A line that George Clinton picked up from us: "If you don't like the effect, then don't produce the cause."
