Sovereignty- Elena

This article taken from the fofblog fails to address the main issue of the doomsday prediction: that the whole cult is built on that fear and when it doesn't happen people are already so separated from the "world" that they cannot leave the cult. Those who do were not as brainwashed as those who do not.

I remember Girard saying with joy that it was wonderful that the prediction of the end of the world by Robert Burton had not happened and that that didn't mean anything questionable about Robert, then Robert saying that it was work on vanity for him.  I had given up on the "world" when I joined and thought that we were there to reconstruct our lives consciously so, while I was very glad that it hadn't happened, I was not shocked enough. It did manage to question the whole thing but I was already too invested in it to let go and the investment was in the possibility of reaching a status that would allow me to participate legitimately which was never reached... thankfully.

When I look at all that it is so important to realize that we reflect our selves in the society that surrounds us and the small group of cults gives the members the illusion that they can play a significant part and settle for a second, third or fourth class role in the cult always struggling to get closer and closer to the guru, which in fact never happens because he "instinctively" knows that he cannot give anyone else "sovereignty" or the "cult" will fall apart. The inner circle is in fact conformed by those who are willing to submit their sovereignty and accept their second class condition and in as much as they are willing to do so, the rest of the members are conditioned to accept the hierarchy as they join. It is a "faultless" structure and what is interesting about the structure itself is that if we are to study structures of hierarchy in different contexts, the parallels are too strong to be coincidental.

In the individual, when the formatory apparatus takes charge of life without the presence of I, the instinctive ego takes the lead. Everything "functions" but purely instinctively which, amongst human beings means, for the ego of the individual. The human being is replaced by the hasnamuss. In my understanding of the hasnamuss today, the personality that is developed acts against the self and stunts it so completely that "life" itself is shied away and what is left is the inertia of functioning at its cost: absolutely conditioned by the only status quo within which it can survive and within which it has developed.

The question of one's sovereignty is the real question. When one IS, recognition does not matter but in a world in which people are raised identityless, the struggle for recognition is similar to the struggle of the unwanted lover: the individual needs to be recognized and incorporated if he or she is to participate lawfully and not just submit.

We could well study this in every extreme organization. Within the decadent military it is a common ocurrence in as much as it has become a "life" killing force instead of a "life" protecting force. The only justification for the use of force lies in the protection of life but today force is used rampantly against life. The individual that submits to the military institution in its "killing machine" status, uses his and her formatory apparatus to justify their actions in reference to the immediate structure of the institution and forgetting the human standard: lawfulness and sovereignty.

Since we live in a time in which acts against people's sovereignty have become common in every institution, we have little choice but to submit to the rule or remain jobless, uneducated, identityless, pariahs in a world of slaves.

Within the cult the hasnamuss develops with the cult itself. They are part and parcel of each other and they opt to suicide or kill rather than leave the cult when the critical point is reached. The formatory apparatus takes care of justifying the status quo and goes against everything human to do so. It is not surprising that cult members turn out to be the victims of their own invention.

The sad irony of our times is that it is millions of human beings everywhere who are in cults today and they are themselves victims of the structure of today's society. The options were narrow: the openly "corporate" world or the second class options at their service. Those in the Art, scientific or academic arenas serve those in power if they are to have any success and the few who escape the rule, confirm the rule.

The sad fact about those who opt for the religious path and end up in a cult, is that they were the few who did not wish to submit to the corporate greed and yet ended up being fed to the lions of their own make up.

What these should tells about is that the unconscious mechanisms in our lives are as predetermined as the laws of physics. That we need to be aware of the "life" fulfilling possibilities and the instinctively animal options. In the instinctively animal options, the human being establishes hierarchies like animals do and some men submit to the will and well being of others without there being any guarantee that those in power will protect them like it is natural within animals. The instinctive mechanism is let out amongst humans but that which is lawful amongst animals: that the strongest protect the weakest, is not "natural" amongst men. The strongest amongst men only protect life if they have the consciousness of its value. "Power" today does not guarantee that consciousness but it does guarantee that what is valued is the economic profit for the 2% of the population at the cost of no matter how many people's lives and how much destruction and damage in nature.
These are people behaving like animals would and as perfectly "natural" as it is, it is perfectly inhuman.

Mankind's struggle to establish laws that can protect its humaneness are based on the possibility of keeping the animal within the human at base so that the human within the human can develop. That we each hold two or more natures within our selves is a fact. That we belong to the physical world and share it with all of nature, is a fact. That we can and do behave like animals and denaturalize our humaneness is a fact. That animals are legitimately lawful in the natural world when they behave such but that that behavior amongst human beings is inhuman, is a fact.

We establish laws so as to remind our selves about our human "nature"  and the life that is possible for future generations if survival of the human being can be a reality. Our consciousness shifts with each generation and has to adapt and reformulate  actualizing our humaneness in every step. "Life" is the actualization of consciousness: the practical expression of our selves.

That we submit only to the laws and that the laws submit only to the human, is a must. That the laws that protect life and every individual sovereignty cannot be the manipulating device of a minority in power is a must. That the spirit of the human within each one of us can stand up for itself against all tyranny and take hold of power and the rule of law in its hands, is a must. That we are each a cosmos able to stand up for life, is a reality.

"Life", like a spring of water or the birth of a child is the ability to protect these. That the "work" that we carry out in our lives aims at the continued strengthening of "life" itself for each and every individual, is a must. We live in a times in which our lives are of no human value and without the human value, people and society work for destruction, corruption, exploitation, lovelessness, mercilessness, crime.

That we can stand as people able and willing to love and actualize love as the ruling principle of all life and support that with the Law. The Declaration of Human Rights is no other than a Declaration of Conscious love that we are far from achieving as human beings. These laws cannot be appropriated by any nation and pretend that breaking those laws is lawful outside the nation. Or that those laws do not apply within each and every institution. What we need to come to understand is that "life" has a force of its own to which every individual is a part of. That "life" is not just "my life" but "life" even without me and that we cannot pretend to own all of it in our greed.

"Life" is not only the spring of water and the newborn child but it is also speech, food, community, earth, interaction, participation, connectedness, being, being, being and allowing to be and protecting that inalienable right of each individual's sovereignty. Life is not nearly as much what is there physically but what lives within and outside that physicality. Our bodies are hardly our life, sacred as they are, our life is in the music, the language, the interactions we establish with each other and how that interaction is determined.

The hierarchization of our lives that determines our sovereignty according to our social, racial, national, economic conditions, is enslaving our "lives" and in as much as our lives are enslaved, "life" is weakened. That our right to speak freely is determined by our place in the social hierarchy of no matter what institution hinders the individual's sovereignty and when an individual's sovereignty is hindered the sphere of our selves as human beings is hindered. The individual's microcosmic self corresponds energetically to the human being's macrocosmic self and when an individual human being's sovereignty is hindered, the sphere of the law in the overall human, is weakened. People who are systematically humiliated and abused as human beings without legitimate rights to participate in the socio-economic arena are outside the law and turn to criminals because they have already been outlawed by the nation before they had ever committed a crime.

We are each responsible for each other in as much as the status that we happen to have does not free us from our insertion in the whole. We are victims of crimes that we ourselves allowed to happen directly or indirectly allowing for so many to be outcasted from their sovereign rights as human beings.

Should mankind be mature enough to recognize the reality of sovereign nations and sovereign individuals beyond the nation, it is a fact that we can survive only in as much as we are able to commit our selves to "life". Not life for "our" generation only but life on Earth for human beings of future generations. The mistakes we've made and are making are too powerful to not prompt us to our destruction via the destruction of nature's balance or through nuclear explosions. We do not need anyone to predict the end of the world to realize that we can make it happen our selves, if we continue down the path we've taken in which anyone can make up their own laws within the sphere of power that they can amass and forget the human being.



















When Doomsday Isn’t, Believers Struggle to Cope

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
Sat May 21, 10:31 pm ET

If you’re reading this, Harold Camping’s predictions that the end of the world would start Saturday (May 21) failed to pan out.

That’s good news for most of us, but Camping and his followers were looking forward to the end. After all, they believed that they were likely to be among the 200 million souls sent to live in paradise forever. So how do believers cope when their doomsday predictions fail?

It depends, said Lorenzo DiTommaso, a professor of religion at Concordia University in Montreal who studies the history of doomsday predictions.

“If you have a strong leader, the group survives,” DiTommaso told LiveScience. “Sometimes the group falls apart. Most often, the answer given by the group is that the prophecy is true, but the interpretation was wrong.” [Read: Why People Look Forward to the End]

http://www.livescience.com/14179-doomsday-psychology-21-judgment-day-apocalypse.html

In 1994, Camping predicted a September doomsday, but hedged his bets with a question mark. On his FamilyRadio website, Camping wrote that he had misunderstood a key biblical passage, but since that time, biblical evidence for a 2011 end had “greatly solidified.”

Doomsdays without doom
The classic study of “doomsdays gone bad” took place in 1954. A Chicago woman named Dorothy Martin predicted a cataclysmic flood from which a few true believers would be saved by aliens. Martin and her cult, The Seekers, gathered the night before the expected flood to await the flying saucer. Unbeknown to them, however, their group had been infiltrated by psychologist Leon Festinger, who hoped to find out what happens when the rug of people’s beliefs is pulled out from under them.

Festinger’s study, which became the basis of the book “When Prophecy Fails” (Harper-Torchbooks 1956), revealed that as the appointed time passed with no alien visitors, the group sat stunned. But a few hours before dawn, Martin suddenly received a new prophecy, stating that The Seekers had been so devout that God had called off the apocalypse. At that, the group rejoiced — and started calling newspapers to boast of what they’d done.

Eventually, the group fell apart. Martin later changed her name to “Sister Thedra” and continued her prophecies.

Other failed doomsday prophets have struggled to keep their followers in line. One self-proclaimed prophet, Mariana Andrada (later known as Mariana La Loca), preached to a gang of followers in the 1880s in the San Joaquin Valley of California, predicting doomsday by 1886. But Andrada was not consistent with her predictions, and believers began to defect. Trying to keep one family from leaving, Andrada told them one of them would die on the journey. Sure enough, the family’s young son soon fell violently ill and passed away. The family accused Andrada of poisoning him. She was arrested and found not guilty, but never returned to preach to her followers.

Searching for explanations
How Camping’s followers will cope with a failed doomsday prediction depends on the structure of the group, said Steve Hassan, a counseling psychologist and cult expert who runs the online Freedom of Mind Resource Center.

“The more people have connections outside of the group, the more likely it is that they’re going to stop looking to [Camping] as the mouth of God on Earth,” Hassan told LiveScience. “Information control is one of the most important features of mind control.”

In his experience, Hassan said, about a third of believers become disillusioned after a failed prediction, while another third find reason to believe more strongly. The remaining group members fall somewhere in between, he said.

Doomsday groups in history have run a gamut of responses after failed predictions, said Stephen Kent, a sociologist at the University of Alberta who studies new and alternative religions. On occasion, a leader will admit he or she was wrong (Note from qwertyuiop: Burton occasionally would quietly admit that he was a failure as a predictor of doom. But did he really have any other choice? It was a huge elephant in the room for several years.)

Other groups will come up with a face-saving explanation. Some groups may blame themselves, rationalizing that their lack of faith caused the failure, Kent told LiveScience. Other groups blame outside forces and redouble their efforts.

“One of the options is for the group to say, ‘Society wasn’t ready, Jesus felt there weren’t enough people worthy of rapturing. Hence, we’ve got to go out and convert more people,’” Kent said.

After the apocalypse
Often, a failed prediction leads to splinter groups and re-entrenchment. After Baptist preacher William Miller predicted the end of the world on Oct. 22, 1844 — a date thereafter known as “The Great Disappointment” when nothing happened — his followers struggled to explain their mistake. One subset decided that on that date, Jesus had shifted his location in heaven in preparation to return to Earth. This group later became the Seventh-Day Adventist church.

Sociologists and doomsday experts agree that Camping is likely convinced of doomsday rather than perpetuating a hoax or running a scam. A con artist, Hassan said, would never set himself up for failure by giving a firm date.

(Note from qwertyuiop: In Camping’s case, that may be true, but I have my doubts that Burton really believed in his numerous predictions.)

A belief in doomsday gives followers a clear sense of the world and their place in it, Kent said. Those comforting beliefs are difficult to maintain after the world fails to end.

“This could be a fairly sad day for these people,” Kent said. “There will be some greatly disheartened people who may be terribly confused about what didn’t happen.”

- – - -
Despite failed prophecies for 1984, 1998, and 2006, Fellowship of Friends cult leader Robert Burton continues to hint that the Fellowship of Friends is an “ark” for a new civilization, and he has hinted that some undefined catastrophe may occur in 2012.

“Theoretically, we will survive it unharmed,” Burton said in recent months.