Testimony of ANA

Ana. Spain

(She was in New Acropolis from 19 to 29. She entered the "Internal Circle" at 21)

I entered New Acropolis at 19. At that time I was quite interested in psychology. I saw a poster in the streets of my city about an audiovisual presentation on the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung and I decided to go.

When I left the audiovisual presentation I was invited to take a course in comparative philosophy. Since ancient cultures and comparative religions were also among my interests, it seemed like a good idea to sign up. The course wasn't expensive and seemed rather straightforward. It also caught my attention that the people seemed very nice and it could even be a place to meet people.

Besides topics on psychology and ancient cultures, you could also see books on esotericism at the entrance: alchemy, theosophy, astrology. Even so, they didn't seem like the typical group of people who believe in UFOs, chakras, or angel channelings. They seemed quite grounded and even cultured, so that also encouraged me to sign up.

After two years I was already within what they call the "Living Forces" (the Organization's Internal Group). I had taken an oath with my arm raised in front of the Women's Brigades banner. I was now a disciple who had sworn to serve New Acropolis loyally and who had to obey the orders of my teachers. I left my studies, left my friends and moved to another city. My whole world became New Acropolis. How did I get to that point in just two years?

HOW I GOT HOOKED ON NEW ACROPOLIS

In the philosophy course, which they actually call "Probationism," I had a very kind and polite woman as a teacher. She was also a teacher at a high school in my city. In the second course, "Introduction to Eastern Philosophy," I had her husband as a teacher, who was also a professor at the polytechnic university in my city. Both were engineers by training, and they were normal, cultured, kind people. It was there that I began to receive what is called "love bombing," an excessive attention and kindness that makes you feel that you matter, that people consider you interesting and important.

When I joined New Acropolis, my friends began to worry. They called psychologists and printed everything that was on the internet about New Acropolis. I read it, but I didn't care. I thought, "An imperial eagle as an emblem? Bah, that doesn't mean they're fascists. If they went there and saw all the good people there, they'd understand." One day I was with my first-year teacher and the director. I told them my friends were telling me I was in a sect and were getting angry with me. The director told me that if they treat you like a fool, maybe they're not your friends. That pushed me away from them.

During the first years you don't know exactly what NA is and they tell you that the internet criticisms come from a sector of the church that criticizes NA for its religious eclecticism. The more esoteric and ideological ideas are explained to you very little by little. They say this is because the teachings must be given spaced out so they can be assimilated. But there is a big difference between receiving knowledge gradually and ending up believing something you hadn't signed up for.

There are things that, by themselves, you would never accept, things that don't fit into your value system. But there you immerse yourself in a bonding relationship, with your Masters and with your peers, and it's as if through the bond another channel opens, a channel where things enter without filter. Belonging to a place and identifying with it makes you not judge things the same way as if you saw them from the outside. On the other hand, the continuous practices of meditation and focusing attention immersed you in a different state of consciousness. It was a learning process that I would venture to say had some kind of hypnotic component.

Thus, the bond, imperceptible changes and adaptation lead to a new identity being created.

At some point I could perceive an idea that didn't fit and that clashed with my previous belief system. That day I wrote in my diary: "Ana, why do you always want to be right? Why don't you let someone teach you?" That phrase represents one of the changes that began to happen in me. I stopped worrying about whether what I heard interested me or not, whether what I read I believed or not. My focus had changed: I was no longer in New Acropolis out of intellectual interest, but now the important thing was the Master-Disciple relationship.

New Acropolis was like a big family, where the main thing was the path of self-knowledge through the Master-Disciple relationship. I felt absolute devotion for them. So when they started showing you things, you accepted them, not so much for what they meant in themselves, but for the teaching behind them.

At first they teach you that cleaning and doing tasks for New Acropolis is not just that, but that there is a teaching behind it. But the self-knowledge that was hinted at in the beginnings was not that, but a kind of enculturation, a moral system of behavior. Everything was based on controlling thoughts, emotions and behaviors. And the most important thing was that everything always had moral purposes associated with giving all your time to New Acropolis.

What began as volunteering ended up being a kind of psychological slavery. When you are hooked into that emotional bond hoping to gain self-knowledge, they tell you that New Acropolis is a School of Philosophy like the old ones, where an Atemporal Wisdom is preserved — the same that all the sages of humanity have transmitted. We did all that continuous work without rest simply to grow the school and gain members. All the volunteering and cultural activities were a façade created since the 1990s to clean their image and attract more members.

The founder, Jorge Livraga, whom we called JAL, would have been chosen by the "White Hierarchy" to start a movement that would be like a kind of "Noah's ark" where all Ancient Wisdom is preserved. He would also be preserving a Hidden Wisdom and would have the objective of giving birth to a new race, the so-called "sixth subrace." You learn about all this little by little as you enter the Internal Circle, the so-called "Living Forces."

THE TRAINING FOR THE "LIVING FORCES"

After a year, one of my teachers told me that a new training group for the "Living Forces" was opening. I saw several of my friends join and I accepted the invitation.

They separated the classes by gender. One day, during a girls' meeting, they left us alone in the meeting room and told us to look at a white dot on the board. Then they turned off the lights, leaving us half in the dark. Those exercises were called "tatrak." On that occasion they began to call us individually, in a very solemn tone.

They quietly took me to another room, and when I entered I found a man with boxing gloves. I didn't think they were going to hit me seriously, but yes, they hit me. They punched me several times until I fell to the ground. The director came and shouted in my face: "Is that how you face problems? Turning your back on them? You're a coward!" I had to repeat the exercise another day.

On another occasion they made us fight each other. They put boxing gloves on us and told us: "hit each other." You had to unleash aggression, strength, hit with force. If not, you didn't pass the exercise.

Another day they paired us and told us we had to slap each other in the face, first one and then the other. We began to give light slaps, but then the director came over and shouted: "Not weak, strong!" You had to endure the slaps without flinching, without making any expression of pain, anger or fear. If you turned your face away, you were also reprimanded.

Those exercises were supposed to be for emotional control and to go beyond "forms." The Spartans were highly exalted, and vegetarian hippies who practiced yoga were belittled. It was also said that democrats were very peaceful, but they deceived the people by making them believe they had "choice." And, of course, it was explained that New Acropolis's symbols were present in many cultures, so their use by Nazis or fascists meant nothing. Today I know that New Acropolis's symbolism is totally related to Nazism, fascism and even Francoism.

Those practices, more than generating control, produced an annulment. An annulment of my own perception of things, of what I felt and of that intuition of what is right or wrong.

Then you consented to insults and humiliations. In one meeting, the director shouted at us: "You're fucking bourgeois scum!" They told us: "If you can give 2, give 3. If you can give 3, give 4." I spent my youth barely surviving, sleeping little, without developing a profession, cleaning, and with the idea that I couldn't form a family because of world overpopulation.

During the Living Forces trials, they took us by car blindfolded to the mountain. It was winter. Among other things, the girls were made to undress and enter a waterfall. Then, blindfolded, several people pushed and shook you while shouting and insulting. Afterwards they left you sitting in the middle of the forest in the dark. Then, after a small ceremony in a cave, everyone welcomed you with hugs and smiles, and you entered a kind of brotherhood.

There were many other practices, such as public exposures where the audience treated you badly, holding objects with outstretched arms until you couldn't anymore, crawling on the ground if someone arrived late, making you obtain free things from shops to test your persuasive power, etc.

Once I passed the tests, we had to do the Oath ceremony. I dressed in the Women's Brigades uniform, knocked three times at the temple door, and upon entering I stood in front of the banner with my arm raised. I recited the oath text from memory and then saluted saying: "AVE!"

Men could be part of the Male Brigades or the Security Corps. Each of the three bodies had its symbol, its motto, its anthem and its ceremonies. We also had our code of honor, our deities, and women had to tend a fire we called "vesta" that had to be kept burning 24 hours. If someone's fire went out it was considered to be due to a psychological failure, which generated a lot of anxiety.

That's how I was for 10 years of my life.

If you had any lapse they would shout at you or punish you with extra work. If someone was late, we had to crawl on the floor. If someone raised an objection, they would shout: "You obey, period!"

HOW I MANAGED TO LEAVE NEW ACROPOLIS

We took the shouting, the pressure and the reproaches as normal. I had a friend who was slapped in the face on several occasions. In a meeting with Delia Steinberg, my friend wrote an anonymous question on a piece of paper: "Can a Master hit a Disciple?" When Delia read it, she simply said: "This is not a question," set the paper aside and continued reading the other questions. As if by magic, that question was erased.

I also had to go through humiliation tests. I was 20 and had bought a new silk tank top. One night, while I was having dinner, the director came up behind me silently and with kitchen scissors started cutting the top from the bottom up. The next day she told me: "Don't you dare dress like that, you make men suffer."

Another part of me thought it was a test and that if they had done that to me and not to others, it was because they considered me strong enough to endure it. I believed I was winning by not reacting to it, but in reality I was adopting a position of submission.

The following years were a bit calmer, but I was also more involved. I began to see reality: that the supposed Master-Disciple relationship was not such, that I was not gaining self-knowledge, that I did not feel well. I began to look for explanations and to explain the problems I saw myself, and that's when the problems started.

It all began subtly, with small gestures and stray phrases. One day the director told me: "you have a dark look." In New Acropolis there was the idea that when someone criticized or showed defiance, it was because there were "negative elementals" or certain "dark forces" that made people doubt.

One day the director came out of her office, approached me and said: "watch out, you have the sin of the fourth race." That sin was pride and arrogance. To remove my pride she told me that one day a week we had to meet so that I would cry in front of her. She made me stand in front of her chair and would say: "cry." I would fake cry until she said: "very well, that's enough." Then she would get up and leave.

When I distanced myself, the director usually had contemptuous and intimidating behaviors. He told me that "I lacked heart," "I lacked magnetism," that "when one does not accept a master, neither will they accept him or her as a master." There were times when he literally stopped talking to me and used intimidation to force me to act. For example, when he saw me sitting, he would come up from behind and grab my neck, choking me. I told him I couldn't breathe, and he whispered to me: "it's my way of showing affection."

I feel a horrible helplessness just remembering it.

At first I felt great devotion for them. I saw them as parents. But then I realized that all I had achieved in those years was to feel worse and worse. It was like arriving with a broken heart, seeing a light of hope, and returning to your broken heart, but as a slave.

FINAL REFLECTIONS

I realized that manipulation is effective while you receive certain benefits: belonging, admiration, power or mere inertia. But when everything fails, when you can't anymore, when nothing matters to you anymore, then you stop believing what you used to believe and stop accepting what you used to accept.

On the other hand, what at the time I considered the worst thing that could happen to me — that is, that my teachers humiliated me, mistreated me or considered me "dark" — was actually the first step toward my liberation.

I remember perfectly the day I left New Acropolis. I have imprinted in my mind the day I crossed the door for the last time. As I walked down the stairs I thought: "this is the last time I will go through this building, this is the last time I will have to go down these stairs." The freedom I felt cannot be described. Now another new path was beginning. The one to meet myself again.

Ana, December 2022