It has been determined over the years that the key to freedom is letting go and there is no better way to let go than to forgive. There is no better example of this axiom than is present in the story of Teal Scott. Teal Scott is, a woman who wasn’t supposed to be. Yet she is here to show others the way. She is here to show others the way out of powerlessness and the way out of pain. She made that journey herself, it was a journey where revenge and anger were road signs but not answers. Now, after years of torture inflicted upon her by a mad man and the cults he belonged to, she has no desire to see her abusers prosecuted or to have the iron hammer of justice brought down upon their heads. To her, they are just victims of loveless situations, broken families, and a cycle of separation that exists far beyond the bounds of this story you are reading now. That day, when I saw her for the first time as she rounded the corner, I was instantly struck by the fact that this woman was beautiful enough to be a super model. She moved gracefully with a looming, ethereal heir of confidence across the room. She exchanged a smile and an unusually firm handshake with me and then proceeded with unwavering eye contact to wait for me to start asking questions.
Teal was born in 1984 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the first years of her life, it became immediately apparent that Teal had been born with unusual talents that set her apart from other children. These talents were not ones that Teal’s parents understood. But in the years to come, they would discover that Teal was demonstrating abilities such as clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairaudience, the ability to manipulate electromagnetic fields and the ability to communicate with thought forms. As she grew, unlike many children born with extrasensory talents, her gifts did not go away.
When Teal was still a toddler, her parents (who were both wilderness forest rangers), accepted a job in the Wasatch-Cache National Forest of Utah, not knowing at the time about the intensely religious climate of the location. It was a sparsely populated area that at the time was over 95% Mormon. Because of this, word of her unusual abilities got out very quickly and were not only frowned upon but also feared by many in the community. Like many children growing up as a religious minority Teal was ostracized as a child and the extent of difficulty in her life might have stopped at that, except that it was because of Teal’s misunderstood, extrasensory talents that she caught the undivided attention of a loose acquaintance of the family. This man, whom for anonymity sake Teal calls “Mr. X” was a sociopath who also had dissociative identity disorder. Mr. X had many personalities, one of which belonged to a local Christian cult and one of which attended satanic rituals.
Mr. X managed to infiltrate Teal’s family and position himself between Teal and her parents as her mentor. He managed to convince Teal that among other things, he was in fact her real father. He became her mentor to such a degree that her family trusted him with her on weekend trips, with after school activities and to mentor her in horsemanship. He was who they turned to about what to do about her abilities, and later… in her teen years, they trusted him to take her in when she got so mentally unstable (due to the abuse) that the family didn’t know what to do with her anymore. All the time they were unaware that he was creating the very condition he claimed to be helping. He was taking her out of her bed at night until he eventually trained her to come of her own accord and also managed on many occasions to take her out of school. It was because of this man that Teal was inducted as a child (unbeknownst to her parents) into these local cults by Mr. X. For thirteen years, Teal was routinely ritualistically tortured and programmed by this man and the members of the cults he belonged to.
Over the course of those thirteen years, she was tortured physically and sexually in religious rituals, forced to participate in sacrifices, repeatedly raped and starved. She was forced to undergo 3 abortions (all fathered by Mr. X himself who was in his sixties at the time) he performed them himself because his job allowed not only the meager instruments to do so, but also the know how. She was photographed for sadomasochistic pornography, sold for money to men for sex out of motels and outdoor gas station bathrooms, kept hogtied in basements and kept in a hole in the ground in Mr. X’s back yard. She was exposed repeatedly to electro-shock programming, forced to undergo isolation torture and left overnight tied up in lava caves in southern Idaho. Teal was also forced to participate in bestiality and necrophilia and was drugged by Mr. X with Ketamine, Dormator, Xylazine, opiates and speed (all of which he had unlimited access to due to his career). She was repeatedly chased through wilderness by Mr. X “playing” tracking games in which he would hunt her and put her through any of a list of horrific punishments if she was caught and she was also used as a lure to other children that ended up also being hurt.
Teal was able to escape from Mr. X as well as the cults he belonged to when she was 19 years old. But the real heart of this story is found in the fact that Teal has become healthy and found joy to such an extent that she has completely forgiven her abusers.
Since her escape, she has assumed the title of “The Spiritual Catalyst” and has embarked on a mission as a contemporary spiritual guide in order to remind people of the united, energetic nature of this universe and to teach people how to find bliss in the midst of even the most extreme circumstances.
During my interview with Teal, we spoke briefly about the fact that happiness seems to be a very elusive quality and that those who do achieve it are seen as either unintelligent or conversely enlightened. I asked her if she feels like she has reached a place where she has achieved unshakable happiness and therefore a state of enlightenment. She gave a slight smile to this and bowed her head and said “No. One thing that makes it so people can not find happiness is that they think it is some permanent state you have to achieve or some place you have to get to when the truth is that happiness, like enlightenment either is or isn’t in the moment. It is a constant process in each moment to focus your thoughts and subsequent actions into happiness, just like it is a process in each moment to focus your thoughts and subsequent actions to be in line with enlightenment. I have my days where I am not very good at this, and my days that I am.” In her lengthy way of speaking she continued to say “No one is meant to come here to this life and stand in perfection, or live up to something that stands in judgment of us. We are meant to come here to life in order to find happiness. Evolution is an inevitable byproduct of following the path to happiness. Not one person here, as much as you may expect it from them, stands in perfection. Perfection is an illusion. To expect perfection from yourself or others is to be resistant to where you or where someone else is and as long as you are resisting what is, you can not move forward from what is.
For most people, the first reaction that comes upon hearing this story is one of total shock and then the sudden need for justice. The question of how we can reduce the ever increasing levels of crime and violence is one that plagues our society today. The usual answer to this question which is given by politicians and the media is that we have to be even tougher on crime. It is an answer that comes from a deeply held belief that fighting against crime even harder will eventually straighten this country out. But Teal adamantly disagrees. She has maintained the stance that no one needs be brought to justice after what was done to her.
Teal’s abuse did become a matter of the state however. Due to a confidentiality clause which was nullified by certain details of Teal’s abuse, her psychologist at the time presented her the option that she willingly tell the authorities what went on or she would have to contact them with or without Teal’s consent with the details of the abuse. So, in 2005 she told the local authorities the horrendous story of her past. It turned into an investigation, which went cold after quite some time when the district attorney decided the state could not provide enough substantial physical evidence to win a case. When I asked Teal about her views on this she said “Most women who escape from situations like I did do not ever tell about it. I did tell, but even the physical evidence I had was not enough given the years that had passed since the last incident that occurred. And I am glad for that in retrospect.” I, like most people would be, was shocked by this reply and asked her why she was glad that a man such as Mr. X could still be out in the public and not in jail. She proceeded slowly and said “There is a negative vehicle of want and there is a positive vehicle of want. It is our choice which vehicle to get in and drive our own lives from. You could say…I don’t want torture and abusers in this world… so we must punish all of those that torture, and torture the torturer so to speak. Contrastingly, instead of saying…I don’t want torture…one could say…I want compassion… and show those same actors of violence compassion that they perhaps have never been given before. Happy people who feel loved do not hurt other people.”
It is Teal’s belief that the de-humanizing environment of jails and prisons does not rehabilitate criminals, it create even worse criminals. She says it is impossible to punish someone into wellness, that punishment for crime is like fighting fire with fire, and so it is time for the justice system and the environment of jails to change. She believes that the way to eliminate abuse and criminal behavior is to change society at its root and change the way we treat those who commit acts of violence. Teal went on to say “We, as a society believe very strongly in victim-hood and so, we try to control others by creating laws. And we enforce those laws with harsh punishment for all those who disobey them. Laws are not control; they are merely the physical illusion of control. They do not work in the way that they are intended to work, and they run counter to the universal truth of freedom. They will fail and they do fail. Your crime rates will keep going up if crime is approached in the way it is approached today”.
As our meeting came to an end, I found myself awestruck at this woman who stands today in a light of forgiveness and mercy after having lived a life of torture and pain. She demonstrates an attitude which many who have fallen victim to abuse have been incapable of achieving. She comes from a past that gives her the credibility to be able to say that a person can achieve happiness, health and success no matter what they have done in their life and no matter what was done to them. This revolutionary space is where we find Teal Scott. And if you take her message to heart, this revolutionary space is where any of us can find ourselves.
