A Rainbow and It’s Ephemeral Beauty

How Taking A Class On Cults Taught Me Invaluable Lessons About Humanity

On a beautiful and slightly crisp winter day on Stanford's luxurious campus, I looked up at the sky. What was once ominous is now scintillating with beauty. Although the rain has made my run less visible and exceedingly wet, it has also resulted in one of the most wondrous and positive sights of all, a luminescent rainbow.

I am in my final year at Stanford, focusing on my studies in the social sciences after getting an undergraduate degree in engineering. One of these such social sciences is an anthropology class on understanding Cults. Mystics and Messiahs is its title, so great I couldn't pass it up. Some might say I grew up in a cult, some might say I fell astray, off the right path of life, the righteous one. Those people have every reason to believe that they are right as I have every reason to believe that they are wrong. Because, in the end, choosing the “right” path comes down to faith and feelings, meanings and mentalities of the world, that now separate me so deeply from the closed-off world I came from and from the outside, golden world of wearing pants and eating pork I am now a part of.

Taking this class on cults seemed like an invigorating journey going in. I was going to approach my religious past with an academic lens. I was going to understand its mechanics and underpinnings outside of my own lived experience. Kind of like when I took my first class on Feminism and Gender Studies at Stanford. I learned what the term misogyny meant for the first time. I knew misogyny existed, I lived, ate, and breathed misogyny my entire life. In my community men literally said during their morning prayers, ‘Thank you god for not making me a woman’. Women were prohibited from singing, wearing pants, playing in sports leagues all for the sake of modesty and purity. And yet, here I was in my FemGen class for the first time experiencing its reification. How validating it was, to learn about my own lived experiences, as a stat on a wall of many. This, misogyny, exists, and it exists and impacts so many men, women, and people systematically. It's not just me. There's a word for it, it's misogyny, and now we can understand how and why it came to be. Academia is cool. 

Walking into my first class on cults, my first thought was, 'you're welcome'. I would be providing an inside scoop on being brainwashed. Unlike in my FemGen class, which was mostly made up of women with shared experiences, no one in my cult class knew what it was like to grow up in a closed-off community. Only I had that experience. I know what it is like to think it is immoral to rip a sugar packet open on Saturday and to attempt to rip it intentionally between the ‘s’ and the ‘u’ because if you rip the letter itself you are breaking a religious law. That seems crazy to most, and yet I know what it is to believe in it wholeheartedly, ‘you’re welcome’!  

I was willing to be open for the sake of furthering knowledge. I was going to be vulnerable for the sake of advancing academia by challenging its depictions on closed communities. However, little did I know that I was going to be the one that took the most away. The first few weeks we spent studying Jonestown and the People's Temple, The Moonies and their Divine Principle, we even spent a week studying Marxism-Leninism through the Bolshevik Revolution in the early 1900s. We passed through time and geography in what seemed like a linear line of close relations between all these vastly different cultures, eras, and ideologies.

The common theme was millenarianism among all these fantastical phenomena, which followed the same three-step formula. One: A revolution (discontentment with the ways things are currently). Two: A leader (usually a messiah). Three: A common goal (salvation or purpose), all which seemed oh so familiar. The one thing I did not account for however, was how these introspections into different fantastical phenomena would cause me to have deep reflections into my own past and bring up lived experiences that I have not thought about since their inception. 

One such memory that arose from my mind uninvited, came after watching an episode of The Vow on HBO. Not an assigned watching, although for this week's homework, our professor has instructed us to watch all 6 one-hour episodes of Wild Wild Country on Netflix, so watching TV for school is a thing. In the latest episode of The Vow I consumed, the right-hand-man to Keith, the cult's leader, was vehemently against his wife in questioning Keith's actions and values. Even though his wife would not stop pushing. In the episode, John, the right-hand man said one sentence that was so relatable it was almost as if it came out of my own mouth. He said, "Why I struggled with doubting Keith was solely because in doubting him, I would be doubting myself and how I spent the past ten years of my life. If Keith is wrong, then so am I, if Keith is corrupt, then everything I would have believed in would be for nothing, my life would turn into something meaningless and I didn't want to go there."

I get it, John. I know what it feels like to question your moral foundations. To question the foundations that you built your own life on, the values you held yourself to every single day in the pursuit of being a decent human being. Imagine those pillars in your mind crumbling to the ground like the destruction of the Roman Empire, instantly, without any protocol to fix the vast damage done. It is scary, it makes you feel like your life is a lie, that you are Truman in the Truman Show and there is no happy ending. That every time you refrained from doing something you thought was bad, like in my case, breaking a branch off a tree on a Saturday, was for nothing. You refrained, and rebuked, and felt guilt, and felt holy, for absolutely nothing. Nothing! Just, imagine.

These learnings from my class made me feel seen as much as they made me feel alienated from my own experiences. One such experience that felt the most alienating was when I saw that rainbow. The ominous sky transformed into lighter shades of blue, a rainbow emerged from a distant hill as I took pause on my chilly, wet run. A rainbow. All the colors of the universe, overarching my peripheral view of reality. Emitting beauty. A beauty that represents so much more than meets the eye. A rainbow, as a flag, representing the spectrum that is sexuality. A rainbow, as a child, representing colored pages and preschool melodies. For me, however, none of those innocent memories came to mind. Rather, a forgotten memory from my childhood. A memory representing the power of our minds and its capabilities that I would not have been able to realize if not for this deep introspective journey I am being forced to trek.

The memory that came to me took me back to when I was eight-years-old. A wide-eyed kid, more curious than ever, like a sponge, sucking up new knowledge at every minute, wanting to do the right thing unabashedly. I was in a car, and it was raining. As the rain came to a halt, and the clouds began to dissipate, what emerged from the chasm in the sky was a bold bright rainbow. I remember looking at this rainbow and a wide smile dispersed across my face. But as quickly as that smile bloomed, it faded away, and what instead spread was the feeling of shame and embarrassment. "How can I forget!" I said to myself. My smile flipped into a frown, as I remembered what a rainbow represented. How can I smile at such a moment like this? I felt shameful, not just for indulging in the ephemeral beauty that is a rainbow, but also for the fact that a rainbow even appeared, I thought about my own sins, and how I can, as an eight-year-old kid, be better.

In my religion, what I understood the rainbow to represent, was God's mercy on his people. His mercy and his endless kindness during times in which our community was being bad. Rain was a method of mass destruction from God. We learned this from the story of the Mabul, the Great Flood, during the time of Noa and his Ark. There were idolaters and sinners, and the world became so wicked God had to wipe out almost all of mankind and animals with one great flood. Rain represented God's punishment on humanity. I was then taught that whenever it rains and a rainbow appears, it means that we are again sinning, but God is showing his mercy with the sign of a rainbow. God wants to wipe us out for our sins but he won't because he is merciful. Therefore, when I saw that rainbow, I felt a feeling of guilt from knowing that I could be better, that I and my people are sinning. The wide-eyed curious girl, the innocence of my kiddish smile was stolen from me. It was turned into guilt, and the warmth from the rainbow’s beauty morphed into a shivering shame.

Standing outside at Stanford and seeing this rainbow, reminded me of my past reality. Of those past emotions. It reminded me how our emotions can be so greatly influenced by our culture to such an extent that beauty can become vile. The power of cults and religions is not something to take lightly. I grew up in America. In the land of the free, and yet my eight-year-old mind was far from it. The only way to help children not be trapped from within themselves is to give them the access to education that they so innocently deserve. Communities like mine control the education system and prevent children from having access to basic secular ideas and teaching. I have never learned geometry. I have never taken proper science classes until I left my community. We need to confront our government and ignite change, for the sake of the children, and for the sake of eight-year-old me.