Over the past year, I have written about J. Michael Shoemaker, of Gold Beach, Oregon, better known as Swami Chetanananda.
Anyone can call themselves a swami, set up shop and sell beliefs.
The American governing class does not forcibly control what people choose to believe, like they do in China.
As for the violence associated with his BDSM practices, he seems to have assaulted and raped some. The first time was the best to press charges. Not after 100 BDSM sessions.
A new argument is made for coercive control laws. Mind control laws. There are forced labor and sex trafficking laws. There is blackmail, extortion, and fraud. And assault and rape.
Some people want government to decide when someone had mind control over another. A government controlling the sheep because they want a shepherd to protect them from the mind control of an occasional ram. When you first allowed the “swami” to pin you down and rape you, and chose not to go to the police, but consented to spending years having sex with him and doing drugs, you left victimhood and became a partner in what happened, even if you thought you would get great spiritual gains by being his partner, and later found it was bullshit.
Whether under his thrall or because you sought something spiritual or otherwise, with every successive BDSM season, you left crimes of assault and rape further behind. Unless there was blackmail or extortion, with a threat of serious harm.
The threat of hell, or being reborn as a cockroach, or having descendants for seven generations cursed, if you do not have sex with a swami, is not extortion.
Though Shoemaker made civil settlements. At least one appears to be from a BDSM session gone wrong. It seems not criminal, but an accident. She fell off a hook on which he hung her. He paid to keep it hushed so his extreme BDSM practices would not hurt his business.
All religion is business, just like all government is business.
Shoemaker passed himself off as a religious figure and capitalized on the “swami” name for 50 years. He “teaches” attractive women with BDSM and drugs. He uses others as servants in exchange for residency and opportunities to enter an ethereal world of higher consciousness, which only he knows.
He trades affluent followers their money in return for the promise of spiritual gains, more money on earth, and superiority in the realms where money cannot buy anything except through him.
He uses the money as he chooses, which has been to live a luxurious life, better perhaps than the Moghuls or Pharaohs, with a harem and servants, patrons, and grovelers who want to buy enlightenment with their bodies, or dollars or labor.
It’s business. He sells nirvana, enlightenment, or superiority over others, supernatural powers others can’t have, except through him. Or for some perhaps he sells the ability to love with deep compassion, a talent he can offer to sell which he lacks like his other products. Or he sells the talent to teach others something you can call yoga or meditation, Buddhism from Tibet, or Samadhi from Hindustan.
and if an emperor wore no clothes, did you?
Customers seek bargains. He looks them in the eye, and they imagine cosmic consciousness. Instead of hard work eliminating non-truth and finding the truth – whatever that means, whatever it takes – you can sit in front of him and he, coming down from or getting ready for a meth-fueled gangbang bondage weekend, will look you in the eyes in “meditation” hall, and you gurgle with delight, barely containing your urine in your panties for your great good fortune. He looked at you.
If he looks you in the eye, you will have salvation…
The public should know, J. Michael Shoemaker, whatever else he is, lived his life on his own terms. He sold himself as some profound spiritual knower who dallied with the gods, was actually, he told some, a goddess who inhabits the human body out of compassion. He could give you Her wisdom and her power without you working for it – by a touch or a look.
It made him rich and brought him women who would not have given him even a taste of wine, not once, who get drunk on giving him their power. Was it fraud? Maybe. But consorts might also be frauds, for they wanted a free pass, to buy indulgence by indulging him, and promised to go through hell to be in heaven, with him.
When it got too hot, some abandoned it and wanted him destroyed. They said they were only infants whose minds he controlled. From aspiring goddess to tiny infant.
The Vanguard, Keith Alan Raniere, went to prison, not for branding women or having sex with gullible women whom he told must have sex with him only, and no other man the rest of their lives. Only then would his magical semen work to make them “unified.”
He went to prison because he collected blackmail material on them – he called it collateral – from which, a jury found, he took away a woman’s legal consent. They were forced to do labor and sex he trafficked because of physical blackmail – collateral.
It was not coercive control. It was the blackmail that led to sex trafficking, forced labor, and some racketeering charges.
Raniere said if a woman he slept with ever had sex with another man for the rest of her life, it might destroy her and him too through the deep connective power his semen gave to the women he owned. He is now serving a 120 year sentence in USP Tucson.
Raniere could have branded 4000 women. And teach his semen made every woman see a blue light. That was legal. But the collateral put him in prison.
Marie White’s The Branding of a Slave.
Did Shoemaker use blackmail? Rape. Extortion. Statutory rape? These are crimes police are interested in.
A guy says he is a swami and likes drugs and BDSM, and seems to rape women or choke by surprise, with strong hands that could crush a woman’s neck in a second.
But so far, I have not seen a case of a woman charging him timely with rape. If he raped or assaulted you, contact me or someone in law enforcement if you want to put yourself out there to stop him.
Or follow him to a land of exotic misery where enlightenment and life beyond is around the corner.
