I would say that I was about eighty-five percent certain that what we were doing on Sequoia Crescent didn’t constitute a cult. It didn’t have a dogma. No one was seeking to extract money from me, or force me to pledge myself to anything or anyone. There was no hierarchy, no talk of the end times, no mythology or holy book. But Ashley’s and Paul’s words lodged like splinters that I couldn’t quite pull out. In my dark hours, I sometimes wondered if what we were engaged in was more akin to a conspiracy theory. A theory that a group of us had bought into in isolation, and could no longer see the forest for the trees. Science seemed to be on our side, but maybe I was only paying attention to the articles that were. I was having profound encounters with The Hum, sensations that I knew beyond any doubt were real, but what if I was self-inducing them, or they were the result of some other phenomenon?

I began reflecting on this during a conversation one meeting, led primarily by Damian, Leslie, and Mia, about government surveillance and the Deep State. Damian had gradually become more and more fixated on the idea that the Deep State—which, when pressed, he loosely defined as the military, the government, and Wall Street—had been aware of the Resonance for some time and had intentionally kept it secret. During this conversation, which the others entertained for far longer than I expected, there were some very strongly held sentiments about the NSA and metadata and Facebook, but it didn’t seem like there was an awful lot of nuance or detail. It felt more like a kind of collective purging of anxiety. Their sources always seemed vague—something read on a blog, or in a tweet, or mentioned by a friend. I found Damian and Mia, in particular, connecting dots where there weren’t any necessarily to connect, and drawing conclusions which required more than a few leaps of logic. The few times I pointed this out, I was accused of thinking ‘what they want’ me to think—though whoever ‘they’ were was never quite defined. So eventually I just submitted myself to the chaotic flow of conversation, like a kayaker plunging through cataracts without a paddle.