Analysis of Conversation 1 Attitude and Meaning in words

152. Elena - April 13, 2010 [Edit]
Hi Ton and others visiting,

Our posts came in at the same time and I thought I’d clean up and eat a little something before going on, forgive me for keeping you for so long, I guess the taxes can wait and the dogs are already outside.

This is a wonderful opportunity for us to learn about language, methods of discussion, what the intention behind the words is, beginning to penetrate the three some reality of language and the world: our individuality, our sociability and our humaneness and setting some guidelines as to make of blogging an artform. We should compliment this study with other such forums as the symposiums of which I now little more than what is on wikipedia. I will take your post piece by piece so this will be long, maybe we won’t even look at it all today, no matter how brief I am trying to be.

look elena, my intention is to help you, the way i go about that is to reflect back my perceptions as honestly and directly as i am able… as you do with me.

Look Elena
is already an unfriendly, impositive tone.

My intention is to help you
Your intention to help me is only the portion of the act that you are conscious of, aware of. That is the imaginary picture you have of yourself in the performance.

If you had been able to carry out your intention you would have been able
1st. To encompass the context:
a woman who you knew has had enough low self esteem to prone her to commit suicide
a setting in which the woman had already been banned and was getting absolutely no greeting for coming back making her already very vulnerable
a woman who you knew had been working for months on the subject for you have been coming to my site all the time and who stated was there to have it explored and questioned, not to impose it
a woman who was offering her knowledge in a blog that is supposedly dedicated to understanding the Fellowship phenomenon deeply
a woman who you had already so called, “understood” was a manic depressive and who had been “labeled” in that blog by Old FOF as “too old to ever recover” an issue that you yourself have not stopped insisting on even to this day.
A woman that had been extremely violently abused already in that blog and who had equally violently attacked the people of that blog.
A woman who had apologized and expressed that her emotional centre, through the dog story, was very much afraid of going back into that setting “for more applause!”
A blog in which the participants were dedicated to comforting themselves and increasingly justifying their inaction towards the Fellowship with increasingly more excuses such as No Kid’s to let the Fellowship be until his dad dies so that he doesn’t have to help him.
A blog in which you are an active participant, who never protested or explained why you thought I should not have been banned and who continues to participate condoning and supporting the positions of that blog.
I could still go on for quite a while but maybe this will suffice for now.

I will post this in parts as I write so that it doesn’t come out in just one long shot.

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153. Elena - April 13, 2010 [Edit]
2nd. The Other Person

To help someone
Your intention to help me which you repeat and repeat is already coming from the position that you are above me. That you are “helping” me because I am a sick woman and need professional help. In stating that you want to help me you cover up what you are actually doing which is wanting me to submit to your “help”. If I submit to your help then I am a good girl and maybe you’ll start treating me as an equal or at least a good patient. You are already patronizing me and trying to subdue me. You cannot grant me equality or validate me as an equal and by so doing you immediately begin to eat away the other person’s sense of well being or integrity and in her good will and naivete, trying to follow you along, she will think that yes, maybe you are really trying to help her and yes maybe she is sick and doubt will invade her which is the real intention behind your “help”.

Your intention is not to help this person be herself more but keep her under the label that she is a sick woman which was what was established to ban her. Sick woman ranting and insulting without ever deeply addressing anything she said.

This is just wonderful because we can see so clearly that there are many different currents occurring at the same time in a conversation and one of them is in the sphere of the I or Is of the many individuals and another in the subject itself. I think there are many more but since this exploration is very new to me we’ll have to find it out little by little and hopefully help each other.

If we are to have “conscious” dialogues amongst us and HELP each other BE, we can never belittle the other person in any way. The aim of every conscious act is to help each other be our selves more fully. What helps the other person BE more is the “embrace” with which we greet her or his presence. If instead of there being an “embrace” there is a rejection or imposition or complete indifference and the person is not even addressed, that will already begin to disenable her, weaken her.

3rd. Listening and acknowledging what is being said

Had you been willing to help this person you would have listened to what she was saying and acknowledged it but you wouldn’t even acknowledge it when she sincerely asked you to do so.

In my first posts I clearly expressed how much I valued all of you and that I was there asking for help in exploring some issues I was working on and presented you with post number 10 in which I expose the idea that gurus are not consciously manipulating their flock but are as strongly the victims as the flock and we can verify this in the fact that when the explosion comes, he commits suicide with them.

This statement is already a big confrontation to what the fofblog has been standing for which is that the only truly evil person here is Robert, the narcissistic sociopath. Had you been willing to help this person, you would have tried to engage her in what she was offering, acknowledge her which would have been simply a gesture to feel at ease in what was obviously a hostile environment.

1. Elena - April 13, 2010 [Edit]
This is the first post that you avoided Ton. The tone in it is very clear and straightforward. I take care of Someone and support the blog and its people various times and simply try to present a reflexion on a particular phenomenon. My intention to WORK with the people in the blog is clearly, I give them every “embrace” to acknowledge to you and them that I am there as an equal in the sphere of our selves although the subject itself is already taking a different bent to what was common in that blog.

10. Elena – April 2, 2010
Hello Someone,
Have a happy leave. Don’t worry about what others are doing or judging that they are obsessed with something you’re not. The Fellowship Cult is just one small phenomenon in a big world and everything that happens in there is happening in different versions outside and in other cults. It is not the cults that matter but people’s lives. My responsibility as a human being is to take my small experience and understand the big lesson in the hope that others will profit from my experience and not make the same mistakes. Taking care of our selves and our lives does not mean we are obsessed with a subject. One does not need to be identified to carry out one’s work or live one’s life and the most precious aspect of any life is that which one shares with others.
The cult phenomenon is something of our times. It is good to live fully in the time one belongs to and I consider it an honor to have shared that terrible experience with the members of the Fellowship cult and consequently be able to digest it with them. Had I loved it any less, I would not have married the second in command! I wish we could use his brains to untangle the mess he managed to get himself and so many of us in.
I am presently trying to write a book and would like to share some of it here so that it will hopefully get destroyed if it’s not worth it before any paper is wasted on it! In one chapter I argue that the tendency in cults to lead to suicide like those in the People’s Temple in Jonestown where 918 Americans died, Solar Temple -74, Heaven’s Gate – 39, the Movement for the restoration of the Ten Commandments – 778, is due to the fact that members are psychologically deformed so substantially that killing or dying is the culmination of an ongoing process and not just an accident.
I affirm that when the guru finally asks for the member’s lives, (and in all of them I found the same structures were in place as those in the Fellowship cult with a very interesting difference which is that the overt violence of places like Jonestown, is strongly “introverted” in the Fellowship cult, “introverted” and “refined”, using alchemy itself to impose the restrictions) having the members already surrendered their emotional life: family, husband, wife, children, friends, mankind to blind idolatry for the guru; their intellectual expansion: reducing themselves to quotes from the teacher and his choices and their “self”: replacing their capacity to take decisions on their personal as much as social lives, death comes as a liberation from an unbearable situation in which they have already sacrificed most of their being.
This is roughly the outline of that chapter. I would much appreciate it if those who have read extensively on cults and have seen other authors addressing the issue of suicide would let me know in what book I can find a related piece.
I believe those of us who have closely lived such process and freed our selves from it can shed a great deal of light on it in the hope that it will not continue to repeat itself endlessly.

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2. Elena - April 13, 2010 [Edit]
This is the second post that you also ignored.

15. Elena – April 3, 2010
Hi Nigel, good to see you are well. I think it’s been about five months!
In another chapter of the book I’m trying to write, I state that the Fourth Way as presented by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky is essentially no different to other cults including the Christian religions.
In all of them there are a few basic premises such as a human and a divine realm, the relationship of the human to the divine and vice-versa, how the human can reach the divine through particular behavior and the relationship from human to human. It is no coincidence that the Fourth Way is presented as esoteric Christianity for in essence it adopts the same basic tenets.
I argue that the differences between the problems we face today are no different to those posed to people in Martin Luther’s time. What has changed is the number of people able to participate in the social processes due to democratic realities. The simple fact that more people are able to participate economically, socially and culturally and that the power relations between them is not as strongly tied to a unique hierarchic structure, gives room for not only greater freedom but also much more abuse. As the power of the king and the pope declines, we see the phenomenon of dictators and gurus trying to replace them each with their own particular agenda on what is right for the people. People remain, what changes is the relations between them.
What we also see is that in all times, the relations between people are tied to their relationship to the “goods” they share. Economic, cultural and social “goods” and how those goods are distributed is what determine the relationships between them as much as how each feels about his or herself.
The social, economic and political milieu in which an individual grows up, determines the way they will develop no differently than nature determines the way an animal behaves. Nature is to an animal what culture is to a man. They belong to each other as the dot to the line or the center to the periphery.
One of the great realities that the cult phenomenon is revealing is that the milieu to which people are submitted has the power to enslave them more deeply or free them more expansively in very short periods of time. We can see that the “milieu” has the capacity to lead people to massive suicide in periods no longer than weeks, months or years. Weeks in the internet mass suicides of Japan and years in the twenty-thirty year process of the People’s Temple (Jonestown). It would be very interesting to look closely at the social structures proper of Japan to understand the ingredients for the suicides. In my superficial knowledge of it, the impression is that it has been a very strict, formal society that has promoted suicide as a viable resolution to failure to act with honor in people of high rank but that has developed in modern times into very young people “joyfully” committing suicide because they deem themselves a failure before they even have or give themselves a serious opportunity to try. Statistics show that there are around 100 suicides per day in Japan. How what was once an “honorable solution” has turned inside out and against its own people, is something to look deeply into. It is as if the young Japanese today, were trying to tell their community that it has failed to honor them but instead of fighting against it, they sacrifice themselves to it and maintain it’s honor.
It is also interesting to look at how members of society are solving similar difficulties in western countries where teenagers are simply taking firearms and shooting at whoever got and gets in their way. They are both equivalent responses to different “milieus” and are both a profound scream for help from the younger generation to the older generation. Hopefully we will not take too much time to hear it.

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3. Elena - April 13, 2010 [Edit]
There is another huge difference in that post with what has been argued in that blog which is that the fourth way is crap not worth valuing any more. “Throw the baby out with the bath water and be done with it” attitude is clearly confronted here.

And I continue to work around the area of suicide not in the cult now but in society.

But again no one addresses the issues in this post.

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4. Elena - April 13, 2010 [Edit]
You then address someone with this post.

16. ton – April 3, 2010
9 Someone
“I think of the heart and mind of some folks here who left 20-30 years ago and are still full of bitterness.”
a recurring theme which “someone” continues to repeat here is the idea of “letting go” and moving on. to my way of thinking “letting go” does not imply forgetting, in fact if one were to blithely forget an incident which should otherwise serve as a real and true “life lesson,” this forgetfulness would by necessity lead to repeating the experience, albeit in some other form. to me, “letting go” requires firstly and ultimately, digesting of experience — this “digestion” implies in part, putting an experience into a proper perspective, seeing it in the larger context of one’s overall biography. in order to truly “let go” one thing is certain, it’s necessary to forgive one’s self. forgiveness of self only begins with digestion of the experience, then the “blame game” can take a positive turn and some measure of wisdom is distilled from the experience. connected to all of this is getting deep inside of and understanding one’s feelings, including the “bitterness” which may be the (literal and metaphorical) medicine in the pill of an experience.
when “someone” is “20 – 30 years” removed from the experience maybe s/he will understand how this works (?).

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5. Elena - April 13, 2010 [Edit]
I then present you with the following post that has the following ideas:

1st paragraph
1. I am not here to attack anyone
2. Destructive behavior against one’s self or others is criminal
3. I am trying to understand what’s happening that there is so much destruction

2nd paragraph
1.I’ve been indulging in intense research on suicide and sexuality, religion and power but it feels like I have barely scratched the road that is to be tred.
2. Maybe no one is meant to grasp the whole picture and we’re all justly destined to reflect the piece that didn’t get lost in our own mirror
3. The limitations in people as much as cults.

3rd paragraph
This third paragraph is the beginning of understanding the idea of an objective reality affecting us subjectively, the beginning of materializing the idea of a logos-life

The more I look, the more it seems to me that Robert and the gurus of cults are as much the victims as the members. The fact that they commit suicide together at the end of the play in the classic “cult”, does not reveal a man who fooled the rest and got away with it but a man that is as deeply enmeshed in the problem as everyone else in the play. Robert to me is not self-destructing any less than the rest of the members. He is a man incapable of love and that already reveals someone who is pretty destroyed. Like Jim Jones, who boasted that he could have sex 15 times a day, the chaos and manipulation of his sexuality simply reveals the lack of focus of his own emotional sphere. It is very superficial to think that one man alone can make a thousand people poison themselves to death and the wonder of realizing that is the beginning of understanding that not only do people influence each other but that life itself is an objective reality that has the capacity to lead people to their destruction or their realization; that the “WAY WE LIVE” with each other, the way we interact and the things we do, has a dialectic power to recreate the “social” through culture and the individual through his personal participation in that culture: his “Work”.

The 4th paragraph
tries to explain why people tend to destruct in cult

and the 5th paragraph
why they are destroying themselves in society

In the 6th paragraph I close off with a positive note on our times and emphasize that We are One.

and you, of the at least ten distinct ideas I have presented ALL closely related to the conflicts that we’ve been dealing with for the past three years, choose one statement: We are One.

19. Elena – April 5, 2010
Hi Nigel and All,
I am glad to hear you still have some enthusiasm. I am definitely not more determined to speak out against the Fellowship of Friends Cult than I am about speaking against myself or anyone else in this wide world. The problems at hand will not be solved by pointing at anyone but by exploring what in everyone tends to lead to crime and by crime I understand people who systematically act against their own self or that of others. Cults are just one amongst many of such groups. Perhaps the most tragic aspect about them is the willingness with which people walk to their own destruction convinced that they are going to heaven. When I look at similar phenomenon happening the world over in places as disparate as Sweden, Japan and Colombia, the urgency to understand what is actually happening simply triples itself.
I’ve been indulging in intense research on suicide and sexuality, religion and power but it feels like I have barely scratched the road that is to be tred. It is truly very exiting! One of the authors I’ve been digging deeply on is Michel Foucault and great as he is looking at each particular phenomenon and revealing worlds within worlds as he goes by, I’ve had the feeling that he is also simply scratching on the problem and that while he is a master at understanding some aspects of the problems, he doesn’t grasp the whole picture. Who could? Maybe no one is meant to grasp the whole picture and we’re all justly destined to reflect the piece that didn’t get lost in our own mirror. He and other equally great authors such as Jurgen Habermas seem to be looking at sides of the elephant and not the whole elephant as I believe a System tries to encompass and yet if we look at, for example the Fourth Way System as presented by Gurdjieff, it is so weak in the area of society that it lent itself to Robert’s separation from “life” and make of that weakness a tool for the development of the cult. I believe Rodney Collin tried to balance that but drastically bounced off religion when he thought that people in essence could take on the responsibility of consciously caring for others. They do it naturally as far as they can in their own sphere.
The more I look, the more it seems to me that Robert and the gurus of cults are as much the victims as the members. The fact that they commit suicide together at the end of the play in the classic “cult”, does not reveal a man who fooled the rest and got away with it but a man that is as deeply enmeshed in the problem as everyone else in the play. Robert to me is not self-destructing any less than the rest of the members. He is a man incapable of love and that already reveals someone who is pretty destroyed. Like Jim Jones, who boasted that he could have sex 15 times a day, the chaos and manipulation of his sexuality simply reveals the lack of focus of his own emotional sphere. It is very superficial to think that one man alone can make a thousand people poison themselves to death and the wonder of realizing that is the beginning of understanding that not only do people influence each other but that life itself is an objective reality that has the capacity to lead people to their destruction or their realization; that the “WAY WE LIVE” with each other, the way we interact and the things we do, has a dialectic power to recreate the “social” through culture and the individual through his personal participation in that culture: his “Work”.
The question then is: Why does life in cults lead to destruction? One possible answer is that people do not work from their self, that is, their own I is not active in the work they perform. Having given up their will to the guru they become automatons without soul and shun “culture” or creativity, which needs the inspiration that comes from the sphere of the I. They continue to “function” but without “life”. In that sacrifice of their “self” and surrender to the guru’s will, they, consequent to the premise, self-destroy. The actual ritual of “dying” is the culminating realization of what they had lived for: self-sacrifice. The tragic lesson that comes from such cults is not that the human being is a destructive entity willing to self destroy but that the human being is an entity willing to sacrifice itself for its ideals and that in the childlike immaturity of our being today, we give ourselves up naively to people as immature as our selves and who self-destroy together with us. That we all have to take responsibility for the problems because not one of us is able or capable to do so no matter how much power we give him or how willingly he takes the job.
The next question could be: Why are we living through a period of equally decadent culture in the world today? Another possible aspect of the answer is that like in cults, the majority of people work not because they are creatively inspired to do so but because they are tied to the economic profit and not the human gain, whether they are in the lower or upper classes. The production of millions of things that are not only not necessary but harmful to the world at large, using and abusing not only the material but human resources, creates, like in cults, a mechanism that tends to self-destruction. People in cults are trying to compensate what people in life are unable to offer: their capacity to sacrifice their own greed for the well being of the whole.
The election of Mr. Obama in the United States as much as the new direction in politics as presented by Sarkozy in his visit to the US, seems to carry an awareness of the problem that such “market” driven world was leading to, so I am much more optimistic about the future than I was when I was “pulled out” of the Fellowship cult by this blog. That alone makes it a worth while reason to keep supporting this blog in the hope that others inside will hold on to it to take a step outside. We are here to help you inside be less afraid of such a step. It is so beautiful to feel the expansion of one’s own self over the whole of the wide world without the constraints of a destructive little cult that I wholeheartedly invite each member inside to try it out for yourselves. This “life” is your life! You do not need to sacrifice your selves to show the world how willing you are to help it. Enough people have already done that in other cults. You will help yourselves and others more, not by self-destroying but by self-constructing through patient and gradual participation in the world at large. We are One! And it is a “magnificent” world!

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6. Elena - April 13, 2010 [Edit]
You then present us with the following post which is essentially saying the same thing I’ve been talking about but interestingly enough let’s look at the last sentence.

22. ton – April 5, 2010
why / how a person is drawn into a cult and then controlled by cult indoctrination ? at a stage in their development, an individual searches for meaning and direction in life. when the person is young and relatively inexperienced (as was true in my case), they lack the life-experience and therefore the genuine ability to reflect and look “within” in a relevant / meaningful way, and so, a young person who seeks to understand the “deeper” questions, might “naturally” (easily) latch onto a “system” which seems to contain at least the possibility for answers to the “deep” questions — or maybe it’s the other way ’round — a “system” latches onto the seeker. the pervasive conditioning of people in today’s materialistic culture is such that it creates in the individual a tendency to look outside of themselves for gratification and fulfillment, so it’s not surprising when the inexperienced seek outside of themselves for the satisfying of answers regarding “matters of the spirit.”
part of the packaging is the representative (or representatives) of “the system,” an authority figure (or figures) who are (of course) also “outside” of the seeker. once the seeker believes he’s found “IT,” then all that is required is a few suggestions by the representative(s) of outside authority, in order to sow the seeds of control which are internalized and quickly grow into auto-suggestion, auto-regulation and the invisible chains and limitations imposed by self-supervision.
the antecedents involve cultural conditioning and a form of mind-control initiated by cult indoctrination, but mind-control is internally perpetuated by the cult member herself…. this represents a type of “invisible omniscience” extended by the “guru” over the flock. the good news is, since mind-control is for the most part self-inflicted, breaking the chains is very much within the power of the individual so afflicted…

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7. Elena - April 13, 2010 [Edit]
“the antecedents involve cultural conditioning and a form of mind-control initiated by cult indoctrination, but mind-control is internally perpetuated by the cult member herself…. this represents a type of “invisible omniscience” extended by the “guru” over the flock. the good news is, since mind-control is for the most part self-inflicted, breaking the chains is very much within the power of the individual so afflicted…”

This is very important. Basically I have walked into a blog that is dying in which the participants believe that everything has been said and we must go. That is said to me by the blogmoderator when I ask him to join in private e-mails, but it is clear in the attitude of the bloggers towards the subjects and in this post Ton verbalizes it beautifully. The whole analysis is impeccable and then he culminates with this final sentence.

We have had the movement by Nigel from saying he also thinks its worth “letting go” and moving out to saying, “let’s play, I’m on” after one of my posts.

So I think here Ton enters to reinforce the blog position to let go:

“the antecedents involve cultural conditioning and a form of mind-control initiated by cult indoctrination, but mind-control is internally perpetuated by the cult member herself…. this represents a type of “invisible omniscience” extended by the “guru” over the flock. the good news is, since mind-control is for the most part self-inflicted, breaking the chains is very much within the power of the individual so afflicted…”

look again:

since mind-control is for the most part self-inflicted, breaking the chains is very much within the power of the individual so afflicted…”

that in itself is an amazing statement that must be looked at carefully but let’s not deviate on that particular now.

What I believe you were actually trying to do was reinforce the blog position that it is time to let go and stop the analysis and since it is the individual herself, and that “her” is paramount here, only if she is not healthy enough to let go of he own doings, can she not let go and insists and insists on the subject.

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8. Elena - April 13, 2010 [Edit]
I think we’ve worked enough today, I’ll try to answer the rest of your questions later on.

I wish you well.
Elena