No One Knowingly Joins A Cult: Know What Signs To Look For

March 8, 2022

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This week’s blog is still related to what I shared last week regarding no longer seeing spiritual teacher, Bentinho Massaro, as a being who is balanced in love and wisdom (something I believed for over six years).

In the podcast where the whistleblowers came forward, the two hosts use an analogy of putting discrepancies from what you believe about someone or an organization on a shelf before something occurs that finally causes your metaphorical shelf to crash.

I’m sharing the process of my “shelf” crashing as well as what I’ve learned about how things of this nature build momentum and are able to go unnoticed or undiscovered for so long in hopes that these insights serve you should you ever encounter a similar scenario (I hope you don’t, but it seems these things are not as rare as I once thought).

There were a handful of one off things that occurred over the years I followed Bentinho’s work that didn’t point to the blatant behavior the whistleblowers revealed, but now jump out supporting what they shared as indicators of him not only failing to be balanced between love and wisdom but further support the lack of pure intent behind the actions they spoke of regarding their direct experience with him.

For me, it it was all about believing he had pure intent. This is what led me to putting these discrepancies on a shelf instead of immediately thinking his actions were out of alignment with love and wisdom.

I think it’s also important to note that months and years passed between these instances so I was still seeing someone who appeared aligned with love and wisdom 98% percent of the time to the 2% of instances that felt off. Of course, with what’s been shared by the whistleblowers, things seem much more obvious now. 

And actually point to textbook techniques used by cult leaders (or sociopaths and narcissists who manipulate groups of people for their own purposes) regarding grooming people to accept certain behavior, creating a sense of being apart of something special that requires a high level or training and commitment (i.e., being committed to a mission of “igniting global awakening”), intentionally targeting high value people to bring onboard and help with “the mission”, intentional social isolation once someone is in his inner circle through a commitment to “the mission”, the mental gymnastics that come into play when you believe someone has pure intent but certain things feel off and the ability to use the idea of an outside force hurting him or the mission to further manipulate people.

Let’s begin…

Sometime around 2015 or 2016 Bentinho posted a picture of his girlfriend at the time where she was in athletic clothes, stretching on a bench. He was standing a few feet away staring at her ass and captioned it with something about her rear. (This pic has been deleted as I couldn’t find it when I went looking for it).

In the comments, people were asking how he could objectify her like that. He responded saying part of his purpose is to do taboo things (in this case, something you wouldn’t normally think of a spiritual teacher doing) as a way of showing where our biases exist, especially when it comes to images of spirituality and spiritual teachers. 

At the time, I reason that the direct path does teach an emptying out of biases as way of coming from a more neutral/accepting place of all of creation so this makes sense that it could be his purpose and intention (meanings he’s still coming from a pure intent to serve others in a true awakening process). But it goes on a “shelf”. 

Fast forward to 2018 and I’m watching Dancing With The Stars where Alexis Ren was on that season. Not knowing who she is, I look her up on Instagram and scroll by a hyper sexualized poise (this is not about her or her free choice to do this) and I notice Bentinho likes this post. 

A bit shocked and confused, I ask myself why he would do that and remember a few years back where another person had commented on one of his posts saying she thought it was odd that he liked posts of this nature to which he replied “it’ll all make sense in the future”. I had no idea what that meant and wasn’t going to follow his trail of Instagram “liking” activity. So I put it on a shelf still believing he had pure intent behind his actions. 

Then, last week, I read an article three of the whistleblowers recently did in which Keilan mentions being in a company strategy meeting with Bentinho where they’re specifically targeting social media influencers to invite to a big New Year’s Eve party as a way of reaching more people to help with their mission of “igniting global awakening”. (If the intent is pure, this doesn’t set off alarm bells).

Keilan shares that Jade (another whistleblower) is invited (targeted?) because of her social media following (she has 75k followers to his 46k) AND her connection to Alexis Ren who currently has 15 MILLION followers (Jade is friends with her sister). 

During this time, Bentinho also mentions to Keilan he wants to date Alexis Ren (all he knows about her is her social media presence which is primarily focused on the images she posts since her captions are very short. In other words, he wants to date someone based on their hyper sexualized presence and 15 million followers). 

This, combined with my past confusion of the pictures he was liking and the one he posted of his ex-girlfriend years ago, as well as the full extent of experiences shared by two of his ex-girlfriends in the podcast, A Little Bit Culty, reveals and supports a lack of pure intent and frames his “unique purpose of being a spiritual teacher who’s here to break taboos” in a new context of GROOMING people to accept taboo behavior from him without questioning his intent.

In Jade’s story she also shares that once she’s in a relationship with Bentinho, he begins to takeover her social media. It begins with him having a heavy hand in “approving” her content and, at a certain point, she’s asked to “break up with her following” and to direct them to his account.

Now the comment he made years ago saying “that would make sense in the future” reveals itself through this strategy of targeting influencers (i.e., high value targets) like Jade to leverage for his and his organization’s own gain. (For a teacher who prioritizes respecting FREE WILL, this seems anything but free from influence and manipulation).

Jade’s mention of Bentinho asking her to “break up with her social media following” also reminded me of a post Bentinho’s longtime right hand person made in 2018, where she publicly declared a break up with her social circle in order to be fully devoted to what was most meaningful and purposeful – devotion to her inner journey and devotion to “the mission”. At the time, I thought her commitment was admirable, but quite drastic (i.e., something I couldn’t see myself personally doing).

Now I realize this was likely a suggested course of action by Bentinho as an intentionally manipulated step towards social isolation within his inner circle.

It was also in 2018 that he began to date two women at once. This definitely highlighted my conservative bias against having a relationship like this, but, being heavily invested in the belief that he was of pure intent, I believed he was in integrity and all three were consenting adults where the two women were agreeing to be apart of this in order to use it for spiritual growth by working through the inevitable jealousies that were bound to arise. Dating two women at once also went on a shelf for me, but I also accepted it as one of his “taboo choices”

Jade reveals another story when it comes to being in a relationship with him and another partner (her time with him/his inner circle was January 2021 – May 2021). She speaks of being yelled at by the other partner on multiple occasions without Bentinho trying to mediate and, at one point, being severely yelled at by Bentinho himself. She speaks of being told she can’t keep up with the training at the level he requires and that she’s “bringing his frequency down” and, thus, will need to live in another section of the property until she can progress on her training and be worthy of being in his frequency. The most horrifying thing she speaks of is being firmly told to take her shirt off in front of others in the community, where he fondled her boobs while staring at the guys who were standing nearby. To convince (coerce?) her into doing this, he also says that pretty much everyone in the community has seen the other partner in the relationship naked. He then asks her to do three handstands naked. Um, excuse me?!

None of this aligns with a teacher of pure intent who is balanced in love and wisdom. 

Once my “shelf” fully crashed with everything the whistleblowers brought forward, it opened me up to question where Bentinho was actually coming from when I witnessed him take a harsh, “tough love” approach to some of the students he has worked with. He alternates between gentle Christ like energy and abrupt, fierce, cutting Shiva like energy when working with people – you never know which energy he’ll use.  

When I believed he was balanced in love and wisdom with a pure intent to help, I thought he was simply choosing to help someone with the energy that best served them. 

Now the supposed Shiva energy feels like intentional abuse. 

This shifting between energy also creates a sense of feeling unsafe (the whistleblowers speak a lot about this as the current running through the inner circle), where people feel like they’re walking on eggshells and are, thus, doing whatever is needed from a perspective of self-preservation. 

This also creates an environment where no one wants to speak out either against him or in protection of someone else because they don’t want to be the target of this harsh energy. 

For a teacher who utilizes teachings that value transparency via self-reflection and self-awareness to wake up to one’s higher nature, this environment seems anything but conducive to doing such work since everyone’s on edge trying to self-protect and maintain favor by him. 

It creates a situation where people believe this sense of unease is for the benefit of their “high altitude” training but unconsciously use every coping strategy to protect themselves against being called out by Bentinho. And in doing so, they’re willing to turn on each other by supporting Bentinho when he decides something is off with someone in the group. 

This is pretty messed up for a teacher who is supposedly balanced in love and wisdom to create and allow such an environment, yet it’s very human for people in a group settings to respond this way…even when they think they’re in “high altitude” training and are beyond such tendencies.

The susceptibility to the mental gymnastics involved in continuing to see someone you’ve chosen to trust and believe in from a perspective of pure intent in spite of the signs that are saying otherwise is scarily eye opening. 

It took hearing the whistleblowers account of their experiences to fully reveal where I was doing my own mental gymnastics to continue to see him with pure intent (granted I never experienced what was going on behind the scenes in his inner circle). 

Another tactic he uses is to make you feel like you’re apart of a rare, elite group (ie. an advanced soul) that thinks so differently from the collective that questioning things as the masses do puts you in a category of lacking the ability to “get what only this rare group of souls is able to get”. He cleverly preys on a desire to feel apart of something special (elite yet meaningful and purposeful) in a way that diminishes questioning while simultaneously increasing the desire for wanting to be apart of this oh so special group. 

This is where the mental gymnastics around “higher reasoning” comes into play. Assuming a pure intent, higher reasoning does make sense regarding many of the things he’s saying/teaching.

But if the intent is tainted, it becomes a playground for a sociopath to create a cult to prey on well-intentioned, good hearted people.

Within the inner circle, Bentinho is also able to cleverly set up a scenario where outside forces are trying to stop the mission (i.e., negative oriented entities are trying to stop their positive oriented mission). It does seem reasonable that someone or an organization based in light (i.e., waking up humanity through a mission to “ignite global awakening”) could also attract people/entities who would want to stop this (i.e., the idea of “attacking light” as I was accused of by someone who messaged me after I shared last week’s post about Bentinho on Facebook). I’m not fully discounting that “attacking light” is a potentiality (it’s what made me carefully consider my choice to come forward in the first place), buuttttt….

It becomes a convenient tool to manipulate people at will when he has the power to say anyone who questions him or their means for going about the mission is either a negative oriented being trying to hurt the mission or (and this gets really woo woo weird…) is being “psychically attacked by a negative entity” as a way of hurting him or the mission, which, according to the whistleblowers, is something he does often.

He’s also able to create a narrative along these lines when someone close to him, especially an ex-girlfriend, leaves the inner circle/organization, so when they speak out about their experience, they’re easily discredited as a scorned lover, someone who couldn’t hack it with respect to the “high altitude training” or someone who was being “psychically attacked” as a way of hurting him and his mission.

In his public teachings there were two different instances over a period of the six years I followed him where I heard him say he was being psychically attacked and asked to reschedule a training session, since it was draining his energy. Everyone responded with love wishing him well as he dealt with that. He also did a general session talking about psychic attacks as something light workers could experience. It was never used against anyone he worked with in his trainings, but this is also a way to groom people to accept the idea of “psychic attacks” being a thing that happens to him and could happen to someone else. In his inner circle he made it seem as if anyone close to him was vulnerable to these types of attacks as a way of a negative entity trying to get to him and, thus, the mission. 

Think about the stress and fear that causes people, especially when they’ve been accused of it (which Jade was during their relationship). And think about the power that has to turn everyone in the group against someone who he says is being psychically attacked. It’s powerful and effective if you’re fully hooked into the belief that these things are true and he’s operating from pure intent.

I’m sure this is the longest blog I’ve ever written. I don’t plan to stay on this topic but I feel it’s important to share what I’ve learned and have been processing regarding all of this coming to light. 

If you want to go down the rabbit hole further, check out the two part podcast on A Little Bit Culty. The two hosts of the podcast were whistleblowers on the NXIVM cult so they have a deep understanding of cults and a succinct way of revealing how they work.

You can listen here.

The article I referenced earlier in my message can be read here (it was translated from Dutch to English using a translation tool so some of the English is not perfect)

The whistleblowers also shared their personal accounts of what happened on blogs you can read here.

Even though I feel I’m in a fairly good place regarding this situation, it’s still been on my mind daily. I haven’t been affected in the same way as those in his inner circle have been. I’m also not as disillusioned regarding the teachings of the direct path as others have been. 

This is because I have other reference points for the teachings including a past friend/mentor/teacher who embodied these teachings from a true state of pure intent. In other words, I can separate the actual teachings from a sociopath’s use of them to serve himself. The most eye opening thing for me is that I never saw or thought a teacher with ill-intent would come along and use them in this way. Now I know. 

Bentinho’s grasp of deeper truths and his ability to speak about them, in many ways, aligned with my teacher who embodied pure intent. I honestly didn’t think those things could be grasped, reached or spoken of without actually being in a state that’s balanced in love and wisdom (which automatically includes pure intent).

I also never worshipped Bentinho or thought of him as the only way to truth as some have. I thought of him as a representative of a state this is available to all of us through a path of awakening. 

What I can say is my friend, Waris (friend/mentor who embodied love and wisdom), never picked up a role as a public teacher, meaning he never gathered people toward him. He also never created the idea of a “mission” that people needed to band together and achieve as something that was special, purposeful or elite. 

He kept it focused on one’s commitment to their individual awakening. He did believe one’s highest contribution could be their awakening, but he never badgered anyone into committing to a path of awakening or pushed them along the path at a faster rate than they were ready for or willing to commit to.  

He also deeply loved humanity and people, regardless of whether they were on a path of awakening or not. That is another discrepancy that jumped out at me regarding Bentinho. He seemed frustrated with humanity and frustrated with individuals. He also appeared to be a victim in his frustration. I never saw this in Waris.

So I still believe in a true state of being balanced in love and wisdom. I doubt I’ll very easily give someone credit for that state again, but I still believe it exists as the core of our true nature. And I won’t go looking for it in another teacher. Instead, I’ll continue on my individual journey with the understanding of the direct path as I know it. 

If you stuck with this message to the end I hope you got something out of it! Ideally, next week’s blog will be shorter and focused on something else.

Always Shine Brightly,

Shanna