Being back at the fofblog makes me think about the fofpeople and one of the big problems cult members have is not knowing where they would go if they were to leave. For those who are still economically connected outside the cult it is less problematic although the “instinctive” side of the problem plays a small part in the overall decision but if that one is taken care of, it is not to be in any way undermined. I would guess that it would be of enormous help to at least sixty percent of the cult population. Or rather that it would imply that sixty percent of the major difficulties to leave are taken care of. Both statements work in their own sphere.
So ex-members with companies that could give jobs would help, a center of coordination that the cult member can contact for the mediation and all other offers from ex-members would also help. I for example could offer a place to rest for a month, a holiday vacation on the Caribbean sea.
But that concern led me to think about the problem of suicide and homicide in the different nations that I wrote about this morning and was thinking that one of the greatest things that helps young people to escape their “milieu” is traveling to other countries. If governments work together to help each other’s youth that would help the youth. Just being in a different culture helps one have relativity about one’s own culture and family and it gives one the opportunity to raise one’s self above the conditioned to the human. This was certainly my experience when I was sent to England at the age of ten, a year after my mother committed suicide. After a few months of being in the boarding school I suddenly realized that I existed! That I existed on my own and without a family and that I was alright and that all the other children who lived with me and had families were in actual fact in exactly the same position I was in. Our backgrounds stopped to matter and we became just one group of children beginning to live. That was very exiting!
Of course I was not that alone or without a family. My father paid for the school and picked us up for the holidays and was there to provide for us but that fact simply made the whole experience all the better. That “support” in every sense of the word made it all the more possible to be grateful!
Of course I was not that alone or without a family. My father paid for the school and picked us up for the holidays and was there to provide for us but that fact simply made the whole experience all the better. That “support” in every sense of the word made it all the more possible to be grateful!
It seems that we live in a time in which globalization would offer us these possibilities to exchange with each other and allow us to become more human. We do happen to love people from abroad in the Colombia I know. We’ve always “looked up” at “others” as a rare and interesting “breed”. We look with great curiosity at what other people are like which makes me think that it would be wonderful if Japanese teenagers were sent to Colombia under no matter what excuse: to learn Spanish, how to make hammocks or hats or plant coffee for two years. Two years seems a very good length of time to be able to drop the tight structures of the mother culture and allow for a more human-wide vision to their own existence but even six months would help. Those children would then return with a much greater affection for their own culture and a perspective for their own role as human beings. The same would apply for children from Germany and England, the United States and any other part of the world. We could in Colombia do very well with the income that would bring and the children would highly profit from the embrace of the Colombian family tradition in the lower classes. There is something wonderfully embracing about it, so the teenagers would be safe. My guess is that these exchanges should take place around the age of thirteen and fourteen before the strong confrontational issues with parents and society begin to surface in the more developed teenager. It is also my guess, that with that relativity incorporated, the latter confrontation would be strongly mitigated, allowing for a more human understanding of their own society and families plight.
108. Elena - April 3, 2010 [Edit]This is the post that inspired the previous one.
From fofblog Post 15 April 3rd 2010
http://fofdiscussion.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/fellowship-of-friendspathway-to-presence-discussion-part-91/
http://fofdiscussion.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/fellowship-of-friendspathway-to-presence-discussion-part-91/
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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment