Cult of one
Essay by Joe Szimhart, April 2026
By one definition, we tend to interpret cult as a social movement with a specialized devotion to a transcendent, self-defining focus. Prehistoric cultures designated an oak tree, the Oaks of Mamre for example, as a totem of the life-giving force of nature for the clan. In today’s world, cults can also be virtual as a new spiritual movement like the Galactic Federation of Light and Starseeds. Galactic Federation is primarily an online or virtual cult with thousands, perhaps millions globally, of loosely aligned enthusiasts engaged in mutual reinforcement of unusual beliefs that include communication with superhuman and un-earthly agents out there in the cosmos. Mutual reinforcement of fringe and occult ideas is a hallmark of New Age movements that tend to be more about a cult of shared ideas than a group in a physical commune or defined by one leader or one committee. We tend to see cults as special social arrangements with the idea that it takes at least two people to form a cultic bond: One leader and one follower. Perhaps a folie a deux. Is it possible to form a cult of one person?
Yes.
But to understand this think of someone on the schizophrenia spectrum. Severe, diagnosable schizophrenia appears in 1% of the population with a wider percentage on the spectrum presenting as a bit crazy or obsessed with overvalued and false beliefs but nevertheless functional enough to avoid hospitalization or treatment.
A formal definition of symptoms from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Association or SAMHSA states the following:
People with schizophrenia can experience:
False beliefs that cannot be changed, even when presented facts (delusions).
Seeing or hearing things that do not exist, such as a voice making commands (hallucinations).
The belief that others are reading or controlling their minds.
Disorganized thinking and speech, including shifting from one thought to the next without a logical connection, or speaking in sentences that do not make sense to others.
Difficulty speaking and expressing emotion, as well as problems with attention, memory, and organization.
Disorganized or abnormal physical behavior, including inappropriate, repetitive, or excessive or strange actions, or a complete lack of movement or talking.
A reduced ability to function normally, such as ignoring personal hygiene or not showing emotion.
Since the early 1970s, I worked professionally for 29 years in mental health and substance abuse related hospitals and treatment centers, so I have some sensitivity to schizophrenics or people diagnosed with the disorder.
The seven symptoms described above may not all be present in schizophrenic behavior. I surmise that at least two of these categories were present with patients diagnosed with schizophrenia who were admitted to one hospital where I worked for twenty-five years.
“Jenny Traveler”
The exceptional woman I will concentrate on for this article spent nine months in treatment when I knew her in that psychiatric emergency hospital when the average stay was around one week. She was a patient around 2007. The police brought her in during the night shift without incident. One officer filled out a mental health involuntary commitment warrant request that the in-house county delegate approved and signed. The statement insisted that the woman was unable to care for herself and appeared to be deluded about who she was. The woman had no identification and refused to give her name and date of birth, so the commitment form called her “Jane Doe.” My role as intake manager included arranging for female staff to search Jane Doe. I tried to orient and interview Jane before she saw a psychiatrist. We offered Jane a snack and a drink in sealed containers. She refused them.
Jane arrived with a heavy stuffed black canvas backpack that I estimate weighed 35 pounds. She may have been in her late twenties. She wore drab clothing with loose gray cotton pants, a blue work shirt, gray sneakers, and an olive-green army jacket. Her ash-brown hair hung loosely to her shoulders. She had no phone or internet technology on her or in her property. She was soft-spoken by not shy. Her green eyes looked directly at mine during appropriate interchanges. She seemed fit and relatively clean save for a mild street odor. The police said that she had been sleeping in a public park. It was early autumn. At five feet two inches and weighing 110 lbs., Jane was slim and sinewy with evidence that she did physical work. I noted callouses on her palms. My plan was to interview her, then report to the psychiatrist to help him with an evaluation.
She was justifiably upset at first, demanding that we allow her to leave.
“The doctor has the power to release you after he evaluates you. If you do not cooperate, he will have no choice but to admit you here against your will. But I have to give him a report first. You can help me by telling me your story.”
With that said, I spent more time than average with her to respect her story. An empathetic ear noted, Jane opened up to me.
“I arrived on Earth at age fourteen in North Carolina. I do not recall where I was before that, but I know I came from another star system.”
I wrote this down without a hint of incredulity, as if Jane were telling me she was born on a farm in North Carolina and her parents abandoned her to foster care.
“How do you get by, you know, clothe and feed yourself?”
“I find work cleaning houses and business offices. I paint doors and windows or anything the owner wants. Sometimes people let me live with them while I work.”
“You were in a public park when the police encountered you. Do you sleep outdoors often?”
“I’m used to camping. I stay at campsites sometimes where I can use the showers and bathrooms. I trade for my stay by helping to clean.”
“What was your last mailing address? I mean, have you ever lived in a home or rented a place?”
“No.”
“You said you first lived in North Carolina. How long?”
“I was there until last month.”
“So, you traveled to Pennsylvania. Why?”
“A young couple I met drove me here.” Jane would not answer why.
Have you ever been hospitalized or treated for behavioral health problems?
No answer.
“Have you ever felt threatened, harassed or been assaulted?”
“Sometimes…”
Jane’s voice trailed off. She would not elaborate. What I noted about her after over a half-hour of conversation was her calm reserve, her steadiness in self-awareness. She may have been keeping secrets from me as well as herself, but her sense of identity was fixed.
“One last question, Jane. Do you think you will return to your home star system?”
Jane smiled. She said nothing more. She served herself from the water dispenser in the hall. The returned to the interview room.
Jane waited for half an hour to see a doctor. Meanwhile, after gloving, I began searching through her backpack for evidence of her identity or history. Nothing. But I did note how her pattern of collecting and storing things layered neatly in wrapped packets resembled schizophrenic behavior. Beneath some food and clothing items on top, I encountered layers of many dozens of items that had not been disturbed for quite some time. Perhaps years as I got toward the bottom.
During my psycho-social archeological dig, I found wrapped utensils including a broken plastic fork, scissors, wrapped cookies, a small metal statue of a horse with a missing leg, bits of news articles, a folded People magazine from 1995 wrapped in tin foil, random trinkets like a tin box for Altoids mints stuffed with a small white handkerchief, a moldy paperback adventure novel in a sealed clear plastic sandwich bag, and one left-handed knitted glove. The deeper I got, the more mold I found. In cases like this, it was up to me to decide what was safe to clean and keep and what had to be trashed.
Jane carried no money, not even loose change in the backpack. I found no drugs or medications—two things commonly found in backpacks of schizophrenics who lived on the streets. There were no religious books or artifacts, no books on the occult, no indication of UFO-related interest. By the time I finished later during my shift, her backpack weighed less than fifteen pounds. I noted the remaining contents, labeled the bag and stored it in a locker.
The doctor decided to admit her after he heard my report and read the police statement. He spent five minutes with Jane noting only that she repeated her claim about arriving from another place in the cosmos as a teenager. Had Jane given him the name of someone he could speak to, someone who would take her in safely, he would have considered releasing her.
The diagnosis: Psychotic Disorder, NOS. By necessity to comply with admission rules, the doctor prescribed a mild dose of an anti-psychotic medication.
Jane remained locked in the psychiatric emergency hospital for nine months. The average stay at the time, as mentioned above, was one week. She always refused medications. None were forced on her as she remained calm throughout, keeping mostly to herself during waking hours while seated on a chair by a window in the main hallway. She told me she was not comfortable with her roommates. I visited with her for a minute or two whenever I passed through the treatment areas. She never changed her story. I did notice that she seemed more despondent as the months wore on. She wanted to leave, to be free.
Finally, pressure on the administrators from the board forced them to do something. The solution was to discharge her to a nearby crisis residential program (CRP), ostensibly to prepare her for release to a homeless shelter or a long-term recovery house. When I saw the plan, I deposited some money into her empty account anonymously.
Jane was happy to leave the hospital. She stayed at the CRP for one night, then disappeared never to be heard from again by the local police or the hospital.
A lone gnostic?
Home for ancient and modern Gnostics is a heavenly state (the Gnostic Pleroma is a totality in a heavenly state) that is the true and only home of the divine soul. Most ancient Gnostics believed that not all humans, in fact a small minority, had a divine soul. Most humans were hylics (mud people) that totally disappeared back into the earth at death. For the Gnostic, the illusion trap in this physical, embodied life is just that—an illusion trap created by a false, jealous god, the Greek Demiurge. The Matrix films capture this ethos of a Gnostic demiurge to entertain, but predatory humans as cult leaders take advantage by hijacking the “blue pill/red pill” choices in the film. Likewise, we experience this alienated notion when we watch E.T. The Extra-terrestrial, a 1982 film about an alien from another solar system who crash-landed on planet Earth. E.T.’s stated urge is to “phone home” so fellow aliens can come get him.
The alienated theme is taken up by world religions. Even in Buddhism proper that avoids speculating about a soul or a heavenly state, the notion of Nirvana remains for the devoted who learn about a state of supreme liberation, peace, and bliss, marking the end of suffering when the cycle of rebirth ceases. Nirvana may not be heaven, but it does sound heavenly!
Jane Doe (I want to call her Jenny Traveler for some reason to separate her from Jane Does in police records) had a transcendent story to which she was devoted. She was the authority that managed her life as she circled her transcendence psychologically if psychotically by a psychiatrist’s definition. And, as a final trait of most cults, she held to a distinct us and them reality. She was not like me or us. None of us were from her planet and we could not go there with her. She was not recruiting star travelers. She was intent on going home all by herself.
Can we envy Jenny Traveler? Or must we wring our hands with concern over her welfare?
My following comparison may be specious, but from my experience with her over nine months, her sense of now was practically superior to that of, say, Eckhart Tolle, the popular guru of Nowism with whom we can interact at expensive workshops for elite if anxious seekers of being and truth.[1] If you look it up today (April 1, 2026), Tolle’s net worth is $70 million dollars. Jenny’s monetary worth was likely nothing. The Jenny I knew survived without adulation, without a need to teach, without greed, without desire for basic sheltered comfort, and without rancor. She, for whatever reason or cause, acts as a responsible child on Mother Earth, as a simple servant doing simple labor for humans for her keep. We can attribute her odd social comportment to the severity of her mental illness, but I could not help appreciating her calm self-awareness.
Does she suffer? No more than expected from all reports I read in her hospital record. She handled pointless involuntary hospitalization as well as anyone might; perhaps better than most of Tolle’s fans “in the Now” might. Certainly better than I might have. I concluded that Jenny was satisfied with her privacy. As for hospital staff, ignoring her treatment directives (offering her meds and therapy) became a basic treatment goal. More than that caused undo tension.
I do not recall or never knew Jenny’s discharge diagnosis, but I would have opted for Idée fixe or an overvalued idea consistent with some descriptions of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Idée fixe is not an official diagnosis today, but it can have a descriptive function, in my view. As I indicated above, Jenny never wavered from her alien origin story.
No one can join Jenny Traveler’s cult that has an exclusive membership of one. We can argue that it is not a cult in the wider social science sense, but I fail to find in what sense it is not a cult of one if by cult we mean special devotion to a transcendent idea, a person, an object, or a mission accompanied by supporting rituals and consistent behaviors. Whether it is a destructive or deceptive cult, that is the most popular notion of that word, is not my concern here. A gang does not have to be a bad gang to be a gang.
Of course, without a complete backstory and a thorough neurological study of Jenny Traveler, we can only speculate about her early life traumas, brain function, and out of hospital behavior. I can say that throughout the time I knew her, she did no harm to herself or others. She ate, slept and bathed as necessary. We can question whether forced hospitalization was harmful to her. In my view, those nine months were an annoying passage in time for her that she endured well.
The larger question concerns relationship. Problematic cult behavior disturbs and distorts relationships both inside and outside of the group. Jenny Traveler had a relationship of sorts with a culture somewhere in outer space. That relationship made her happy. In her essential being, she did not feel alone. Recall that she smiled when I asked about returning “home” to her alien planet.
Getting back to Tolle and his power of now message, his awakening or remission from years of anomie and depression occurred at age 29 in 1977 while he was a student pursuing a doctorate in London. Analogous to stories about mystics, Tolle experienced a steady ecstasy or bliss that seemed to last. His parents thought he was insane as he did nothing much more than sit on benches in a park for months to come. People approached him. He told them he was convinced that his healing revealed a deep insight into life’s meaning that he began to share. His influence as a spiritual advisor grew. He published his first book, The Power of Now: A guide to spiritual enlightenment in 1997. It became a runaway bestseller among self-help spiritual seekers. He subsequently appeared on the popular Oprah Winfrey show in 2000. Oprah continued to promote Tolle’s work as late as 2025. The rest, we say, is history.
Tolle’s limits as a guru soon appear to anyone familiar with New Age pop psychology. For example, he found value in teachings not only in popular Zen, but also from highly questionable sources like A Course in Miracles (ACIM), Jiddu Krishnamurti, and G. I. Gurdjieff. The three mentioned sources of enlightenment, though dissimilar, share shifts in consciousness that became narratives for therapeutic projects. ACIM represented a shift in consciousness by a troubled psychologist, Helen Schucman, who around 1964 began hearing a voice later identified as Jesus who nagged her to write for seven years until ACIM was done. After editing, it was published four years later in 1975. Tolle’s idea of “now” apes ACIM’s concept of a Holy Instant with all of its New Thought characteristics.
J. Krishnamurti famously rejected his role as World Teacher, imposed on him as a teenager by eccentric Theosophists, when he was in his early 30s in 1929. Thereafter, he declared faith to be a “pathless land” while becoming a lecturer on what he surmised was his enlightened state as a skeptic. G. I. Gurdjieff (1865/1877 – 1949) studied Theosophy and Sufi mysticism in his youth, then shifted into his enlightened personal system called Fourth Way. Tolle, like Krishnamurti and Gurdjieff did, makes a living off teaching others how to live in his enlightened state. We can question whether or not these teachers were ever enlightened with wisdom or merely were or are able to convince some people, especially their fans or cult followings, that they were enlightened or awakened to a universal sense of being.
To me, Krishnamurti’s quasi-existentialism, Gurdjieff’s neo-Gnostic self-remembering, and ACIM’s Holy Instant derivative from New Thought, along with Tolle’s eternal “now” all share in a limited subjectivism that we call eisegesis in hermeneutics. With a little exegesis or comparative and historical analysis, all four systems of spiritual or psychological universality collapse into personal mind-stuff emitted from the person generating it.
William Blake, at least, had the insight to call his poetic cosmology and theosophy his own system with no intention or need to convince others to adopt it. ACIM’s Jesus, in contrast, insists that everyone must eventually take “the Course.” As far as I know, there were no organized Blake cults beyond a small, short-lived artists’ collective with a tongue-in-cheek title of “The Church of William Blake” led by art professor, AEthelred Eldridge (1930-2018) in Ohio. Blake did not create a new religious movement or teach his system during lecture rallies. His “church” is notoriously a church of one.
Jenny Traveler’s awakening, if we can call it that, occurred when she was fourteen around the late 1970s with her awareness that she was not of this world. Her new identity was born, and it made her happy for decades to come and perhaps will for her entire life, not unlike Tolle. She had no interest in teaching me or anyone as to the source of her bliss. She did not display her wisdom or ignorance whereas Tolle’s wisdom and ignorance like Gurdjieff’s, ACIM’s, Blake’s and Krishnamurti’s remain on full display.
We can consider an ancient occult dictum, to know, to dare, to do, and to be silent often attributed to the 19th century occultist Eliphas Levi. This phrase names the four powers of the magus and is used in various occult, and hermetic traditions, sometimes referred as the four pillars of the occult path and the witches’ pyramid. By not remaining silent, Tolle (like the other examples I mention) valiantly and vainly places himself out there for adulation as well as criticism, thus risking exposure as fraudulent or lame as a spiritual advisor along with his fame.
The occultists, magicians and witches who remain silent protect their private illusions of enlightenment and claims of magical insight or power from exposure. A silent sorcerer in Sedona, Arizona can believe that his incantations ended a drought in Mexico without fear of mockery. The silent occultists, like Jenny Traveler, can smile in the face of criticism by refusing to elaborate or give evidence of their powers and deep gnosis about their inner nature and the nature of the cosmos. Jenny’s passive aggressive smile to me when I asked if she believed she was going back to her home planet was as much self-protection as signaling.
Comparing Eckhart Tolle, who was born Ulrich Leonard Tolle in 1948, with Jenny Traveler, who was born as no one I can know, has little value, no more than comparing a famous preaching buddha with an anonymous itinerant housepainter. Who cares? Tolle by all accounts, unlike Gurdjieff, remains a wealthy but pleasant person with no dark immoral history. He might be as weirdly off mentally as Jenny. Both share a shift in a state of mind that served them psychologically or behaviorally, akin to addicts that suddenly or eventually find a Higher Power or God in Alcoholics Anonymous that helps keep them sober and happier.
One last insight I have or want to have regards what exactly happens to Tolle, Jenny or anyone who has had a life-changing self-realization. Enlightenment, derealization, depersonalization and dissociation are overlapping mental shifts that can be temporary, long term, or permanent. These mental shifts can be the result of emotional escapism due to trauma, anxiety, social alienation, or cosmic oppression (Why am I here? What’s the meaning of life?). In some cases as with Tolle and Jenny Traveler, the mental shift results in a feeling of bliss and transcendence. These mental shifts have a positive effect on how the person functions, but in no way does the shift have to mean enlightenment or divine knowledge. We know their limits by their fruits or by what they preach or claim or refuse to claim.
Some behavioral health experts classify derealization, depersonalization and dissociation under dissociative traits. There is no reliable definition or measurement of enlightenment as a state of deep gnosis about reality, the self, or the divine. Enlightened behavior is an unreliable reference that presents subjective and anecdotal evidence both by the claimants to enlightenment and their fans or devotees who are hardly reliable as witnesses. During my decades of research into the enlightened guru phenomenon since the 1960s, I have observed dozens if not hundreds fall into disgrace while only the most invested and credulous devotees would remain faithful to them.
Tolle’s fan-base or cult following may be in the millions. Jenny as presented in this chapter has no one but herself in a cult of one.
[1]A typical four-day in person retreat in 2026, for example, costs around $1200 USD plus expenses: https://eckharttolle.com/events/
