Xeno, it's now 2014 and I still love your writing and that's all I have to say which really doesn't do this piece of yours justice but there we are!
On Wednesday, January 15, 2014 2:43 PM, "anartax...@yahoo.com" <anartax...@yahoo.com> wrote: Apostasy is one of the techniques you may use for spiritual advancement, because it gets you out of thinking that what you are thinking is true rather than an opinion or a pointer. Spiritual jargon's intent is to create an environment of special vocabulary that can be used as information and strategies for getting out from under belief and experiencing life as direct here and now experience, life without labels and judgment (you can still make up judgments of course but you know you are full of it when you do so, and unfortunately you may have to act on such judgments sometimes). But the pointer 'all this is total nonsense' gets dropped out of the picture very early on. Even in TM Maharishi talked about 'removing a thorn with a thorn' using 'words of ignorance to remove ignorance' - that's the teaching - whatever the teaching, the teaching has the probability to become part of the problem you think you need to get rid of if you forget this pointer, that essentially the teaching, the words, the ideas, the concepts, is not the reality you are seeking. A teaching is an attempt (because as we see teachings often fail and fail miserably) to encode its intended target (the experience of reality) within the morass of our mental fantasies.It is like malware that wipes the hard drive of your computer clean so that nothing on it is recoverable. If it works it is self erasing, and if it fails we have ideologies and religions and the day to day life of humanity in all its warring misery. Apostasy is the result of successful spiritual investigation. Falling into a cult mentality is pretty easy because in some ways we seem to be hard wired for it. Certain things can be learned much faster this way, just by believing instead of being curious, sceptical, investigative, experimental. But at some point in our maturity this tendency starts to work against us and we remain stunted if we do not find a way around this tendency to believe in an unconscious way. Even if you are surrounded by people who seem to be most like you, if you go deep enough you find that what is in their mind (as they relate it to you) has often major discrepancies with what you think. That is a clue that what we think may not be so real as we thought. The tendency is to think he or she is wrong or they are wrong. It usually never occurs to us that we areall wrong, that there is something inherently unsteady, unreliable with our view of life. That is because what is in our head is just model, a set of symbols about experience. Life can be modeled in so many ways, but these ways are not the life we live. The life we live day to day is just pure experience, it's not necessary to explain it all the time to ourselves or others. Fun or misery, it's all we have. It's not a requirement for life that everybody else in the world follow our particular way of thinking. It should be clear being on FFL that no one here is ever in complete agreement with anyone else (which means someone is going to disagree with this tripe I am writing). Spiritual systems and politics are the worst when it comes to our inner fantasies. Apostasy is a way out of the trap. Stay flexible, inquisitive, switch brands once in a while. Apostasy in its more general meaning is the way a cult stigmatises one who leaves the cult - its name calling basically - an attempt to cast a shadow on them, to ruin them. But to the one labeled 'apostate' it is freedom. Of course one might be an idiot and fall into another trap. But if you are a good apostate, you will eventually worm your way out of those traps set to capture the mind in Fantasyland. Now I'm going for a walk in the park, no thinking. (Remember TM people, the process is designed to take experience out of the thinking mind, out of all those trite, expansive, stupid, intelligent, ridiculous and sublime thoughts. If you have to think about truth, you will never find out what the word implies, what it is intended to point to, and if you do eventually find out someday, maybe the very next thing you do will be to have a beer, or maybe you will pick your nose and exclaim, hmmm.) ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Michael Jackson wrote: > >> of course they are lying about it - that's their stock in trade > >The sadder reality, Michael, one that you may not be aware of from personal >experience (or may...that is for you to say) is that they *aren't* lying. >Except to themselves. One of the aspects of the disciple mindset (or cult mindset if you prefer) is that people who have bought into a shitload of dogma laid on them by teachers they now revere almost as infallible and as near-gods (think MMY) have an incredible way of *just never thinking about* anything that contradicts that dogma. They stuff any contradictions or cognitive dissonance away back in a corner of their minds -- literally "out of sight, out of mind." So technically many of these people are *not* lying -- consciously -- when they say that TM is not a religion, often only a couple of hours after leaving a "celebration" at MUM in which they chanted and made offerings to Hindu gods. They push the dogma they've been told to repeat -- and which they desperately *need* to be true to keep up their allegiance to this org/cause they've been told is so important -- and they just hide the cognitive dissonance away in the back of their minds and never acknowledge it. I have sadly been there, done that. Both in the TMO and in the Rama trip, so I know it's not only possible, but probable for *most* of the TM Teachers repeating the "TM is not a religion" meme they've been taught to repeat. I myself repeated the "TM is 100% life-supporting and cannot possibly have any negative characteristics" even *while* assigned to the "Twitching Group" in Fiuggi, surrounded by dozens of people like myself experiencing non-stop jerks and spasms and symptoms that looked for all the world like a viral outbreak of Tourette's Syndrome. It took *years* -- after hearing of a number of suicides and seeing people wind up in mental hospitals after long TM courses -- before I became open enough to recognize that I'd been lying to myself, and thus to others. I *wanted* to believe the "no negative side effects" meme, so I managed to blot out recognition and acknowledgement of anything that suggested it wasn't true. I would suspect that many of the people still clinging to the "TM is not a religion" meme are doing the same thing. A few may indeed be consciously aware of the reality and be lying about it, but my bet is that many are still so stuck in the cult mindset that they feel they *have* to believe what they were told to believe, and *have* to repeat it every time the question comes up. Yes, it boggles the mind, but that is the nature of the cult mindset. People who had to learn and memorize the English translation of the TM puja and "hold it lively in their minds" every time they chanted the Sanskrit version of it will look you straight in the eyes and call it a "non-religious, traditional ceremony." *Some* part of them knows that they're lying, but it's a part they can never admit into their conscious awareness. It's really weird, but it happens every day, in pretty much every religion, spiritual organization, and cult in the world. It even happens in business. I remember a documentary about activists who were tried in court for staging a demonstration at a General Electric plant back in (I think) the 60s. The screenplay was largely drawn from transcripts of the actual trials, and thus the under-oath testimony of workers at the plant, *dozens* of whom claimed that they didn't know what they were building in that GE plant. "We just worked there," they all said, claiming that they had no idea that they were working in the largest manufacturing facility for atomic weapons in the world. Every morning they walked in through a main entrance hall in which was prominently displayed the nosecone of an Atlas missile, and yet they claimed that they didn't know what they were building megadeath every day on their assembly lines. Go figure. That's the cult mindset for you -- protect the myths, protect the memes, protect the image of the group that pays you or that you owe allegiance to, hide your own everyday lies by hiding the truth even from yourself, way down deep in parts of your mind that you never allow to surface. That's what I think is going on when any TM Teacher these days claims that the TMO is not a religious organization. They're not necessarily lying to you; they're lying to themselves. > -------------------------------------------- >> On Wed, 1/15/14, anartaxius@... anartaxius@... wrote: >> >> Subject: [FairfieldLife] RE: Apostasy, is a terrible thing. >> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com >> Date: Wednesday, January 15, 2014, 4:58 AM >> >> 'Apostasy is the >> formal disaffiliation from or abandonment or renunciation of >> a religion by a person. One who commits apostasy is known as >> an apostate.' >> As I never was the member of >> any religion, I cannot ever be correctly accused of >> apostasy. As the TM org claims it is not a religion, so no >> one can ever be correctly accused for disafilliating or >> abandoning TM as apostasy (unless of course the TM org is >> lying about that claim). > >
