From: salyavin808 <[email protected]>
---In [email protected], <mjackson74@...> wrote : Oh I love it! Got the inspiration in the Dome!!!! And you actually left in the middle of program!?!?!?! Wonder what your Skelmie buddies thought of that!? It was a long time coming. Just sitting there and looking at all the twitching and hopping about I sudden; saw it from an objective viewpoint rather than as an insider and realised it was all a load of crap and we were kidding ourselves. What has been seen can never be unseen I'm afraid, and once you've looked at it like that there aint no going back. My Skem friends didn't mind. I didn't tell them I'd given it up or why at the time, I just didn't go back to the dome, and instead took walks in the woods in the morning. This was the thing that I never liked about the TMSP, the amount of time it takes out of your day. From the very beginning I resented the lack of quality time I could spend out cycling etc. That was one of the reasons I moved in to the academy, because the day was built round the TMSP and I could still feel like I wasn't just a hermit with a job. The metaphor that best explains what *happened* to all of these bright, once-intelligent people to turn them into cult zombies is "the frog in the saucepan." Yeah, I know it probably never happened and is kind of an urban myth, but *as a metaphor* it not only explains what we saw happening around us for decades in cults, it explains what happened to *us*. And it explains it better than most other metaphors or explanations. For those not familiar with the metaphor, it goes like this: Put a frog in a pot of boiling water and naturally it jumps right out and saves itself. But put a frog in a pot of cold water and then slowly raise the temperature of that water to boiling, and the frog will not notice the gradual changes and stay there until he becomes a cooked frog. THAT is what happens in a cult. Who among us here on FFL would *ever* have started TM if we had been told that it was a technique that demanded we spend 3 to 4 hours a day practicing it? Who would have started TM if we had been told that it would one day demand that we live in houses built and sold to us by TMers, take weird pseudo-medicines sold to us by TMers, get our astrological charts done on a regular basis by TMers, pay money to have little brown boys beg the Hindu gods for favors on our behalf, and refuse to enter or leave a building from the "wrong" direction because Bad Things Might Happen? Show of hands. See? Almost no one. :-) NOBODY would have bought into this crap. EVERYONE would have perceived the people trying to sell it to them as cultists and run the other way. But the TMO cult masters "started small," with TM 20/20. Then TM 40/40. Then becoming vegetarians. And then...yeah...all that other stuff. And because it happened gradually, over a period of years, people bought it. You probably would have bought it, too, Sal, back in the days before you had your "This is all bullshit" epiphany in Skelmerdale. The TMO "raised the temperature" of the beliefs required to be a member so slowly that people wound up buying into things they would have *instantly* perceived as bullshit only a few years before.
