Part 4: Intention War

Where a rationalist bubble of impressionable young pranayama (and possibly psychedelics) enthusiasts after having pinballed from one guru to the next for a while enter the yes-and phase and reinvent tulpas from first principles.

It's kind of interesting in that while they have noticed that these experiences occur only when being prompted by other Leveragers, instead of thinking that maybe the vibes in this place are completely fucked in the causing bad trips sort of way and maybe the main thing Connection Theory is good for is making you really vulnerable to outside influence, they interpreted it as a psychic contagion that they need to keep contained from the outside world and so double down on the isolation.

As Tee’s subgroup began to fear malign intention objects more and more, it became hard for him to maintain relationships with people outside the subgroup. Tee says that colleagues told him that “I was unintentionally passing intention objects, sort of like a germ.”

Things seem to be falling apart since an overabundance of caution of not catching a malevolent 'intention' makes communication and organisation difficult. Can't wait to find out what Geoff's been doing during all this time, since a big problem here seems to be how completely lost and lacking general direction everyone seems to be. Is this like his version of a stanford prison experiment type situation? edit: yeah we never find out what Geoff was doing during the Intention Wars.

After months of PTSD inducing anxiety they finally grow out of this phase by employing the dark magic of interorganizational meetings and actually talking things out:

We tried to create a clearinghouse and some shared language for it.” They “found that the contagions were generally working on specific emotional vulnerabilities, psychological vulnerabilities. If you looked at a particular case, and found out what the vulnerability was, you could basically proactively talk to people about those psychological vulnerabilities and have them do a little bit of trauma work or do a little bit of spiritual — whatever their favorite modality was, and basically get an immunity.”

In other words: Some Leveragers spent months, even subsequent years, interrogating their own and each other’s minds, convinced that finding and healing their own psychic vulnerabilities was the best way to prevent the spread of dangerous psychological material. Regardless of its accuracy, this mentality may have contributed to PTSD symptoms. As Zoe Curzi later wrote about her Leverage time: “I personally went through many months of near constant terror at being mentally invaded.”

Some yada yada about carl jung and mah taboo subjects of research, on to the next part.