Re: Theohumanity, aka Daniel Stacy Barron
Date: September 20, 2016 09:48AM
It's been a long time since this thread was active and I've wrestled in the last year whether to have a voice here or not. But I learned recently that Daniel is appearing to re-engage in teaching and in one way I want to move on and not care, and in another way I'd like to know I did what I could to help people not make the same mistakes I did.
I've done a lot of thinking and extensive writing about what happened, and I'll try to be concise. I'll try to share some of the things that haven't been said here. There's been a lot of understandable emotion but also unnecessary polarity on this board.
Hopefully, someone who's considering having Daniel as a teacher might find this and it may help. He was my teacher for over a decade, I was in the inner circle for most of that, and I knew him better than most. He was like a father to me for many years and I loved him dearly.
First, he's currently going by "Stacy," because he's identified "Daniel" as the abuser part in him and has tried to differentiate that part to heal it. This is classic EBE. He was referring to his "abuser part" right away when the collapse happened, despite the fact that his own teaching said that this is a way of not taking responsibility, and shouldn't be differentiated until later. It's truly fascinating to see how much of his own paradigm he gave up embodying. He even sent at least one tough love email AFTER the collapse, after he saw that tough love=abuse, AFTER he was fired by the board and stripped of his authority.
The question is if differentiation is actually possible. It's my opinion that he is a highly gifted, literally ingenious sociopath, wherein all of his gifts (and there are myriad) exist inside of something structurally diseased.
If you really think about this for a moment, it's actually quite tragic. I've spent many, many months being very angry at him for what he did to me. But none of that was intentional. He can't help it. That doesn't let him off the hook, of course. He truly thinks he's helping people, and is incredibly compelled to do so, and is amazingly gifted. In my last conversation with him, I told him with severity that he would never teach again without the permission of me and all the others that he admitted he harmed. If he were a licensed therapist, he would have lost his license forever.
In his own integrity, he should have agreed to that, but it's clear that he's not. It's obvious that all of his feigned attempts to take responsibility were a ruse, and he truly is incapable of empathy. This is what makes him a sociopath. It's not name-calling, it's a real condition.
It looks to me like Stacy, for whatever reason, is so disconnected from his heart that he's made a life project out of returning to it. Like an android who wants to be human, he's become an ingenious student of what it means to be human. And part of his amazingly brilliant insight about that comes from structurally not being a part of humanity. That's a meta-view, alright, but it comes with a price.
Because he can only pretend to feel empathy, and he's a very talented actor, btw, I'm not kidding, he can't really have a normal conscience. He lacks a filter most people have that stops them from being cruel. This is why it's only ever a matter of time before he snaps in frustration and emotionally abuses and/or publically humiliates someone...after of course, he loves you so much you feel like you're on heroin, so that you're willing to do anything to get back his favor.
This was my life for over a decade. I learned a ton. Was the price worth it? I think so. The more I heal, the more I realize what I have. But the biggest thing I've gained is the realization of how little I trusted myself, and how Daniel was a stand-in for my narcissistic mother.
I've drawn many narcissists in my life and let them hurt me, and the lesson I learned from Stacy was I think the critical turning point for me to stop this cycle.
So anyone who is drawn to Stacy from now on, inevitably will have some lesson to learn as well. Sociopaths are a part of life after all, and life has its own intelligence. Many people tried to warn me about Stacy in the 12 years I was with him and I wouldn't listen to anyone...perhaps because I so needed to learn this lesson myself. Who knows?
So now it appears he is beginning to build his 4th community. I was in the 3rd one that collapsed, but I knew of the other two. It's surprising to me that he's doing it in Ashland again, but then again he always had balls.
I also think it's extremely unlikely that he's enlightened (nor are any of his former followers), btw, because enlightenment appears to bestow a kind of compassion that doesn't have his kind of tough love limits. The ability to embody altered states is not the same as enlightenment, as many spiritual teachers offer. He always told us that his teacher said "Either your not enlightened, or where you are is something new. Hmmm...turns out it was probably the former. His teacher had probably never seen a sociopath using psychic gifts to draft on altered states to simulate enlightenment and god-realization before. It's very compelling, we all fell for it. And as Theohumanity itself would teach, the sociopathic motive for attainment would color all downstream attainments. As Stacy taught, he was forever an "enlightened sentinel" but actually worse, an enlightened sociopath. Something we interestingly never talked about.
The failure of EBE had many lessons for him, and it's apparent that he hasn't learned them, and now is going at it again. If he really had learned his lessons, he would have wanted to reach out and talk with me and many other people like me to understand what he did. This is what EBE teaches. For him to be embodying the paradigm he taught, the aftermath of the collapse of Theohumanity would have looked very, very different, as Wayne suggests above.
But in the end, we all discovered that in fact Stacy embodied his own paradigm the LEAST of all of us, not the MOST, because it was all inside his sociopathy no matter how good his conscious intentions. I can't imagine how crazy-making that must be for him.
How does one relate to a man so brilliant, so energetically gifted, so psychic, so well-meaning, so generous, so hard-working who is also unconsciously driven to destroy the self-esteem of those he loves, while brilliantly justifying it in the name of their own growth?
Mostly these days the answer is compassion, but it took me a lot of work to get there. He destroyed my life, but it was a life I'm learning I didn't really want, and didn't enjoy. It wasn't me. It was a life he wanted me to want, so I'm glad it's gone.
So none of us should really be surprised by the hollowness of his apology, or that he's teaching again. If he could feel what he really did, he wouldn't want to teach again until he healed and he would want to check himself out with people like me, with whom he promised to not teach again.
I have imagined bumping into him many times and the question I always wanted to ask him is "How can a sociopath realize they're a sociopath?"
The answer is of course that they cannot, by definition. So it actually makes perfect sense that he's teaching again, it's consistent and coherent, and I laughed at myself for expecting otherwise. If he didn't want to teach again, in his own integrity, and worked at Albertson's bagging groceries for 5 years in penance and solitude, like Luke in the new star wars movies ostracized himself, and someone had to beg him to teach again, it would be proof that perhaps he's not a sociopath and so qualified to teach.
But lying low for only a year? Talking to no one from your old reich? Please Daniel, your manipulative methods have become soft. You're smarter than this. Move somewhere else, change your name entirely, republish your books under new names. Go all the way sociopath, not half-assed. That would be way more effective. Jeez, you must really be in denial of what you are, but then again, I laugh at myself again:
How can a sociopath realize they're a sociopath?