The Separation between State and Religion

In time we will realize that Democracy is the entitlement of individuals to every right that was in its times alloted to kings. The right to speak and decide, to be treated with decency, to serve and be served by people in a State of “love” that is, to serve with one’s work for the development of ‘life’. To belong to the Kingdom of Human Beings without racial, national, social or academic separations. To love and be loved. To die at the service of the whole and be honored in one’s death, for one’s life and work was legitimately valued. To be graceful and grateful. To have the pride and the humility of being One with the Universe, One with every realm of Existence, One with every living and deceased soul. To treat with dignity and be treated with dignity for One is dignified together with All others and Life itself. To walk the path of compassion, not in the sorrow of guilt but in the pride of being. To take responsability for one’s mistakes and sufferings and stand up again and again like a hero and a heroine and face the struggle that is put at one’s feet and in one’s hands. Millions of people, millions and millions of people might take many generations to realize the consciousness of our humaneness but there is no other dignified path for the human being.

The “work” as I conceive it is psychological and political. Psychology is the connection between the different dimensions within one’s self and Politics is the actualization of that consciousness in our practical lives. Religion is the ceremony that binds the connectedness between the individual and the Universe. The separation between religion, politics and science, the arts and sports is, in the sphere of the social, the reflection of the schizophrenia within the individual and the masses. The dialogue between individuality and the "human" belongs to consciousness. The tendency to develop cults resides in the shortcomings we’are finding in life as it is structured today. “Life” has become the private property of a few priviledged who cannot profit from it because as soon as it is appropriated it stops to be “life” or “life-giving”.

We are all the victims of our own invention and each one is called upon to find solutions. The only problem is believing our selves incapable of finding them. We are now free to use all Systems of knowledge objectively, sharing them without imposing our will on each other. To become objective about our lives means to understand that the institutions that govern its experience are critically important. That we are one with the governments, one with the religious activities that mark its pace, that the arena’s in which we move our bodies and the laboratories in which we explore our possibilities are ALL part and parcel of our own personal responsibility. That WE ARE ONE WITH EACH OTHER AND EVERYTHING AROUND US and acknowledge for ourselves a bond of love in conscious responsibility. That we human beings know ourselves part of each other and are willing and able to act on our behalf for the benefit of each and every individual. That we no longer allow governments, industries, universities or any other institution to run along unchecked by the objective principles of humaneness. That we do not allow gurus to abuse their power or governors to steal the taxes and use them to their personal advantage in detriment of the whole. That we do not allow abuse from anyone anywhere because life is too beautiful to do so and that we are willing to stop the rampant crime with the necessary compassion Conscious knowledge is every individual's right. Conscious action is every individual's duty.

Wednesday, 18 November 2009

Post from The Public Square 233-252 to label


233. Elena - November 13, 2009 [Edit]

186. Daily Cardiac – November 13, 2009
ton – 171:
“and he certainly doesn’t understand that the premises of his arguments are all based on BELIEF…”
All premises, understandings, observations, are based on belief. They can be based on beivefing what is true or believing what is not true, but it’s belief nonetheless.
“and his belief is based on his oh-so frail faith in a flim-flam man, a con-artist who runs just-another-phony-garden-variety little cult…”
The truth of that has not been determined here. This is your stated belief. I say stated because deep down you may not even believe it yourself.
But whatever it is it’s not of the garden variety, and you are well aware of that; so don’t be so disingenuous.
183
“dc 179 you didn’t answer my question… again. i’ll make is simpler, i won’t ask if your ‘teacher’ sucks your pee pee… i’ll simply ask if you imagine that you ‘love’ your ‘teacher?’ and the follow-up is, if so then how does that skew your perception and judgment? you think about it.”
I don’t imagine I love him, I do love him. He’s given me the ultimate gift, myself. It would be mindbogglingly callous of me not to love him.
As far as the second part of your question I’ll still answer it even thought the “imagine’ is not part of the equation and I’ll assume the answer still applies for you.
We’ve all been in friendships, relationships where we were infatuated, “in Love” with another. When in that state they can do no wrong. But perhaps something changes and they “do wrong’, to us no less. And so the “love” turns to its opposite, hate. All the while the other person exists for themselves, they do not change, they are who they are, only our perception of them changes. We “see” something we did not see before. But in either case we are working on incomplete, and skewered information.
When aligned with them we give give them too much praise and when we are against them we give them too much scorn. All the while they have an “objective” existence aside from our perceptions. They may have virtues the hater does not see and vices the lover does not see.
This is why schools are necessary, they release us from the illusions of the second state so we see things more for what they are and not what we project on the situation.
True Love, which I feel for RB, is only possible from a higher state. And hate is not possible from that same higher state.
What we often call love is more related to lust, which changes like the wind.
Tatyana – 181:
“I came to the FoF because I was looking for the 4th Way school/group and FoF claimed to be the one and even had a direct lineage to Gurdgieff (which turned out to be a lie)”
A direct link with Gurdjieff is formed with whomever understands him the most, not with who has the closest physical proximity to him or his students.
“I was not looking for methods to help me to remember myself/be present more deeply because this is what I was told I should be doing while IN FoF.”
Well the whole point is to engage one’s higher Self, to remember the Self, be present to the Self. But that doesn’t happen just because you write out a check to the FoF, or because you are an “older student” or around older students. It only happens with the right efforts. Wrong efforts, no matter how sincere, are fruitless.
“Neither was I looking for verification of higher forces, because in the 4th way books there are no higher forces.”
I think you’re mistaken. I no longer own a copy of the Fourth Way but if my memory is correct Ouspensky says at the very beginning, maybe page 1, that the only reason those ideas have any value is because they do not come from man, but from higher mind.
No one can successfully do the work without verifying higher forces.
“But, instead of becoming more awake I was falling asleep under a hypnosis of RB and older students, and I was wasting my time believing that I was in a higher state.”
It’s not easy to do the work in the correct way, in fact it’s not easy to do anything in the correct way. If you look at the figures of those who apply for entrance into Harvard Business School with the figures of those who actually graduate and go on to become an executive in a corporation or form a corporation that is successful the figures will be less than 10%, or about the same as those who stay in the FoF.
By the way, I answered your first 3 questions because they seemd sincerely asked, then in your next post to me you started fantasizing. I hope you didn’t expect me to respond to your fanticies.
To no one in particular:
A few have been speculating that I come here for attention and some of the same ones have dedicated entire posts to musing about Daily Cardiac; whether he’s a he or a she, whether he’s had sex with the teacher or not. It’s interesting to observe that little phenomenon. But it does succeed in avoiding the issues before us.
silentpurr – 177:
I gave a lot of energy to your question when I responded in #80 – 85, and all you came back with was something about Jeffery Dalmer.
Could you elaborate on what he has to do with the matter at hand?
By the way, in case you didn’t know, a romantic is a person having no basis in fact.
168. JustDiscussing – November 12, 2009
“Dear Daily Cardiac,
I’d like to comment on two of the more substantial points that you make in your messages.
1. The sex. Your counter examples of a CEO having sex with an employee and Ralph Fiennes having sex on an airplane with a hostess are hardly similar to what Robert is doing. In the Fiennes example, the hostess, Lisa Robertson claims to have initiated the sex herself. Just to be clear, we are talking about Robert having unprotected sex with (over the years) hundreds of heterosexual men, usually married or in a relationship.”
The Ralph Fiennes example is appropriate, especially since the flight attendant, as you say, initiated the sex. The point is that she seized the moment. If any other passenger would have approached her for sex in the lavatory she would have refused. Why was Ralph any different? Because he had something she wanted, power in the form of celebrity, status.
Robert also has status and celebrity and many students want a part of that. That’s not the whole story though. I’m sure he has many loving relationships where the love is reciprocal. If there are those who consent to sex and then regret it that’s not so unusual. Many people regret many of their actions in life. Maybe the actions were not appropriate, maybe the actions did turn out like they expected, The reasons for regret are numerous. But consent is consent, the onus is on the one who consents.
“Sex with at least one underage partner.”
I’m glad you brought it up. What happened in that case? The person who initiated the suit settled out of court. What did he settle for? Money. He could have decided the justice of a trial was more important than the money, you know, the principle of the matter.
In Robert’s case paying the money made sense. Defending himself could have cost much more than he paid. In any event Tr_y and his attorney probably felt he did not have a strong enough case to take to trial or else they would taken it to the hilt and had the trial and got the attorney fees plus the damages.
And by the way, any one can sue anyone else for anything these days. Suing is not tantamount to having a legitimate cause. Recently someone (a judge no less) sued a dry cleaning establishment for $5,000,000 dollars for losing a pair trousers. The suit was eventually thrown out but the owners of the dry cleaning firm went out of business in the process of paying lawyer’s bills.
For the record Tr_y was 17 + years old, an emancipated person supporting himself full time, 6′ 2″ and very athletic looking; certainly someone who could have been thought to be over 18, the age individuals need to be in order to join the FoF. Tr_y had a waiver to join through parental consent.
167. Jomo Piñata:
“Lacuna Piñata never heard of a “Conscious School” before meeting the Fellowship. “Conscious School” is Fellowship jargon. The jargon itself has shaped his memory because he has learned to characterize his life to fit the jargon.”
I first encountered the term Esoteric School from Ouspensky, which sparked the search that culminated by joining the FoF. Consciousness is implied in the term Esoteric School.
“In theory, you can always get what you want if you can confine what you want to what you get. In practice, I don’t know of any human being who can do that, and if I did I would regard them as lobotomized. But I’ve known a lot of human beings who grew their way out of the conundrum I just described. I wish that for you, too, Lacuna Piñata.”
In practice no one gets what they want if it’s not granted by higher forces. Everything is controlled by the spirit world. There are a lot of things you want and don’t get. The same for me and for everyone.
I want what they want and the things I try to get and do get I know it’s through divine consent. The things I try to get but can’t I assume it’s not in the cards, and if it were I’d get them without trying.
I stopped kicking in doors a log time ago.
179. Daily Cardiac – November 12, 2009
158. James Mclemore –
“DC said,
“This discussion is supposed to be about spiritual matters;”
He is mistaken. Actually he knows better, and he only wishes it was about that. He wishes it was about almost anything other than what it really is, and then tries his best to develop conversation about other topics. This blog is about the Fellowship of Friends that presents itself as spirituality but is actually a cult full of deception and fraud. This blog is about the abuse of power.
This blog is a lot simpler than he wishes it was.”
I did indeed say the blog is “supposed” to be about spiritual matters. James says I am mistaken so I presume he means it’s not supposed to be about spiritual matters.
Well he’s right in that so far it has not been about spiritual matters. In fact practically all that is discussed is sex or money; hardly spiritual subjects. Do a word search and see how many times the words sex or money come up vs awakening.(and I’m probably responsible for most of those hits)
Unwittingly James makes my point better than I could in his statements of #158.
The FoF defines itself as a spiritual school of awakening and the critics and opponents here say it’s not a spiritual school but no more than a scam and fraudulent organization.
So in fact they (ex members) must apply spiritual truths and conditions to their evaluations of the FoF, if those evaluations are to be considered valid. How then can the blog be about anything but spiritual matters? James and I seem to agree on one point and that is the blog, up to the present time, has not been about spiritual matters, but about very earthly matters.
If a food expert is evaluating a restaurant’s performance in the area of quality of the dishes on the menu doesn’t the conversation have to focus on ” food matters” ?
JM – “This blog is a lot simpler than he wishes it was”
I don’t know about the blog being simple but the real issues at hand are indeed simple they just have not yet been explored in their entirety.
I know most contributors to this blog will not follow along with this reasoning but if you deem a spiritual organization to be false you need to prove it false by spiritual standards.
As I’ve said several times, in particular to Tatyana up a little on this page, teacher sex with students, even kinky sex, does not disqualify the FoF from being exactly what it claims to be.
If someone were to say – “I came to the FoF because I wanted to see myself better, to acquire the tools and methods to help me remember myself / be present more deeply, more frequently, and it has not delivered on it’s part of the bargain while I feel I have lived up to my part.” Or “I came to verify higher forces and learn more about this area, how they work with us/communicate with us, but it was never discussed.”
Then we would have the basis for a discussion on whether the FoF was deficient or lacking in its duties as a school. That would be the basis for a spiritual discussion.

234. Elena - November 13, 2009 [Edit]

Last two posts were taken from page 85 of the fofblog.
So Daily Cardiac, you want the subject to remain in the sphere of spirituality so that the facts are not confronted?
Some questions that come up:
How can an individual develop consciousness if he/she can never, ever, within the Fellowship, exercise his or her own will?
Why did Pathway to Presence, fof, separate itself from life when this is the main condition of a Fourth Way School?
Why are members induced to separate from family, life and friends instead of not being identified with them and practicing the non-expression of negative emotions, inner considering, lying, not being in imagination, and transform their experiences within their own life instead of having to severe themselves from it?
Does severing yourself from life (family, friends, humanity at large,) allow you to practice a Fourth Way System?
If you’re not practicing a Fourth Way System, what System are you practicing?
We know Robert Burton has seriously deviated from the Fourth Way System, which is explicitly presented to develop IN life, what System is Robert working with? Could you give an outline of the System he is now working with?
In the Fourth Way System, Influence C is understood as Conscious Influence, Influence B, as a mixture of C and A and Influence A as influences coming directly from life without connection to higher influence.
Why did Influence A become evil and Influence C separate from it in the Fellowship?
It also states that a human being is composed of seven centers: intellectual, emotional, moving, instinctive, sexual and two higher centers that in normal human beings who have not worked on themselves and remain in essence or develop false personality, have not become active.
Why were the centers divided into good and evil? There is no evil in identifications, the problem rises when they become pathological and we hurt our selves or others which is what you’re doing in the Fellowship by preventing people from work on them selves and their lives. One cannot deal with one’s life if one throws it out the window! You put a stop on their processes and froze them then replaced it for a dogma and a lifestyle that is nothing but Robert’s homosexuality.
You destroyed your lives and then made it a job to destroy other people’s to justify your selves. It’s possible to free one’s self not only from the Fellowship but from one’s unnecessary and real suffering. Why have you taken the option to not face your suffering?
In our suffering lies the suffering of all of mankind. When we avoid it, we perpetuate it. Facing it and resolving it frees not only our self but also whole generations. You are people running away from your lives but they will meet you in the end and present you with the same bill with which you joined the Fellowship and by then you’ll realize that you no longer have time to live it and resolve the difficulties that you came with and were meant to work with.
It is true that we are all people who have been hurt and I did not help much insulting you but I too was hurt by you when I was screaming.
We are so much more disfigured after a cult that we cannot reconstruct our selves without resolving the issues. We can remain in a cult, which is like limbo where nothing evolves or we can try to live a life. Earth can be both heaven and hell for different men at the same time. Cults are worse than hell because they are hell made up. They are made up of the unnecessary suffering that comes from people that are not willing to face their real suffering. There is nothing criminal about real suffering but there is extreme criminality in unnecessary suffering. Organizing your selves to provide Robert with young men creates tremendous real suffering from Robert’s inability to work with his own suffering and yours to deal with your own. A cult is shrine to identification with the guru. Girard justifies Robert’s behavior because he has also proved incapable of dealing with his own sexual shortcomings. There is nothing evil about being gay or watching pornography, it is the human condition of many a man, but there’s great evil in institutionalizing gayness and pornography as not only ideal but divine activities of a Conscious School from which many a person in essence is drinking from. In the Fellowship cult, men are conditioned to behave like sissies on a big scale; they are “disfigured” psychologically, there is something very spiritual about that but nothing spiritually positive about that. Women are made moneymakers for their unconscious male authority figure. There is nothing wrong in the suffering people entered the Fellowship with but something terribly wrong in how that suffering became the device to enslave them more deeply without being able to transform and understand their parents and the society that surrounded them.
Homosexuality is not a crime but institutionalizing it for all men is a crime and men who are not willing to have sex with Robert are alienated from the life of the Fellowship. There is a community going on in the Fellowship Cult all the time and that community is subject to specific conditioning with very precise physical and psychological constraints to justify Robert Burton’s sexuality.
Were Robert a free man he would not try to justify his sexuality by imposing it on all his faithful and trustful followers. Were Girard a free man, he would not try to justify Robert’s excesses as aspects of divinity in freedom. Both these men are sick and everyone inside is being subjected to their sickness. Freeing your selves from your own conditioning is not about dealing with Robert or Girard’s sexuality. Sexuality obeys US. It corresponds to who we are. It frees us or enslaves us more deeply in our suffering and identifications. There is nothing wrong with being lesbian or gay but pretending that that is a divine path for each member to follow is criminal. There is nothing evil about watching pornography but it is an illness in which natural sexuality with another human being cannot develop. WATCHING pornography is an aspect of imagination based on fixations, identifications or complexes that were not resolved at the right time and still, while sexual tendencies might be harmful to an individual and even individually criminal they are not socially criminal until they involve other people and what you pretend to justify Daily Cardiac, is that the practices of the Fellowship are not criminal. The whole cult is in deep imagination which is another major obstacle to work on one’s self. It is lying and identification and negative all throughout. Each member of the Fellowship of Friends is participating in the sexual abuses committed by Robert by supporting his image as a Divine being and paying to be in the cult even in a far away center, or by actively participating in recruiting the boys. THAT is criminal and there is serious spirituality involved in it: one that compromises people’s essence in ways that can harm them beyond repair.
You are all people that need help. We all need help in or outside cults because our societies are seriously fractured and our families have fallen apart. It is not surprising that anyone of us has serious issues of imbalance but that hasn’t made most of us criminals and there is no reason for anyone of you to continue acting criminally. Evil does enter crime and it is marked by the inverted process in which an element takes over and systematically destroys the cosmos, be it a human being, a community or a nation. It is a cancerigenous process in no matter what sphere. The Fellowship cult is living that process and members like you are actively promoting for the cancer to grow stronger. You do not own your self. You don’t even own a name that you can stand by. You are not even free enough to represent your cult with the dignity of your own name. You come to a blog with a fake name and pretend to stand like a hero where there is nothing but a charlatan who is too afraid to say who he is. You have repeatedly avoided a hundred questions I’ve posed you and are firm on simply avoiding other people’s truth and suffering. The fact that you’ve become numb to people’s suffering is not an indication of your divine spirituality but an indication of the pathological condition that you are in. You are people who need help and we are here to help. We want to help. We can help. Are you still able to accept help?

235. Elena - November 15, 2009 [Edit]

Ton, Jomo Piñata,
Great posts. You teach us with those posts. Our minds have gotten so used to that shit that it sounds normal to us but when you reveal the deficiencies it’s a great help, for me and for Daily Cardiac and so many in and out.
It’s wonderful Daily Cardiac that you continue to participate. It’s painful but wonderful when people cut through our crystallizations and expose us. If one survives, it is so much better after!
By the time one is “done”, one is back into what looks like a relatively good householder to start all over again. As if one had stepped back a good number of years in the cult and just recovering where one was before one joined is a heroic enterprise. But so very worth it: to feel one’s self again and not Robert or all the dogma or the pretense that one is present! The pleasure of music that once moved one and observing the possibility of letting it in without allowing it to invade one. The beauty of people and lightness in conversation. All so difficult after the heaviness of the cult.
It is painful and hopefully they won’t insult you much more but then even the insults make us want to prove our selves don’t they? If no one had questioned you strongly would you still be trying to prove anything? There are two kinds of bloggers: Those who offer themselves and those who react to the offer. It’s like people who go swimming. Some get in the water and others watch from outside. Your position is much more difficult but you’ll get a lot more out of it.
I hope you don’t give up, but already I congratulate you for your work here. I mean in the fofblog. THAT is community and work: allowing your self to swim in the other’s being. We’ve all changed much and you’re beginning to change too. The bait is powerful and you’re biting on it but you’re not dying, you’re surviving and that’s exactly the opposite to the fellowship.
They were right in banning me: right and wrong, as most things are. They were right that my screaming was too much but I was right in saying the things I was saying and they didn’t ban me because I was screaming but because of what I was saying. They just used the screaming to do it. So easy to judge how the swimmer swims from outside! For whom isn’t it painful? but I’d given up! Maybe two and a half years was enough anyway.
It delights me that you’re biting on the pleasure of talking with others. The pleasure and the pain! It sculpts one inside! Kills one a little. Just the leaves and flowers when they get out of season! All worth it!

236. Elena - November 15, 2009 [Edit]

The more I think about it, the more clear it becomes that 90% of the Fellowship pathology is about making a shrine to homosexuality. As if in Robert’s need to justify his behaviour he had set it all up, unconsciously of course, to make people reprogram themselves but not to become conscious of the world as it is but to adapt to the unconsciousness of his world. It’s quite fascinating to look at the process because people did have to work and did have to change and adapt and use their will and effort but only to make a shrine out of Robert’s gayness: The men becoming sissies and the women becoming macho like. The world as he wanted it and understood it became the aim of all members, working day and night to add another decoration to his entourage.
People inside think they look so good in all that paraphernalia but they are so weird. We all looked so weird. Maybe if in Pathway to Presence they just added “exclusive for homosexuals” of all genders that would make it so much more accurate but the perversion lies in the pleasure of disfiguring heterosexuals into homosexuals and they are masters at it. With the added ingredient of making macho men put that extra flavour of dislike that weird and extreme gay men have for women as one can see in a few of the men still participating in the fofblog who can’t stand posts by women and have no problem in ridiculing them as quickly as possible.
Making a shrine of homosexuality must have been potentially in all of us, unconsciously potential. In my case, having been actively bisexual, it’s obvious why that aspect of Robert’s life tended to be approved more than disapproved but what was in our collective unconscious that played along with it for so long? And fine as that would have been had we put our selves to that aim (for maybe two weeks total?) how did we end up putting ourselves into THAT for almost forty years now?
Hey Daily Cardiac and Company, What makes you think that a shrine to homosexuality is a School of Consciousness? When you stop grooming Robert’s balls do you think you’ll wake up in heaven? Or maybe in Haven and then you’ll make a shrine to pornography and you’ll all masturbate in front of the pictures Girard will be showing you by then? THAT is what members and ex-members are protecting? YOUR friends inside having a little gathering?
It’s taken us almost three years to look at this side of the Fellowship without buffers and there are still quite a few to take off. How wonderful to be able to look at sexuality without the shame of pornography! Even that sexuality. To look at it without judgement for its not the sexuality what is being judged but the manipulation of people’s lives to accommodate them to Robert’s identification with DESIRE. In the Fellowship everyone is so quiet about it, UUUUuuuuuuuuh, OoOOOooohhhhhh, everyone tiptoeing to hide the shame we carried inside and ironically worshipped outside. Just inverted the process of shame and made a shrine of it we were so afraid to look at it. Well, we’ve seen it now! Hey Bobby, you can zip up your pants now and leave, we’re done with this show! Peepee wasn’t long enough no matter how much beebee it had!
But that’s not the problem. If Robert had been open about it from the beginning he might have actually made it somewhere besides getting peeed on in the bath tub and made a Goddess in male clothing in the meetings but he and all those involved actually hid it from the beginning including all those ex-members on the fofblog like Old FOF and so many others. THEY HID IT! What on earth for? Weren’t they in California where it was legal and possible and viable?
This getting peed on doesn’t seem like a way of showing those boys how much he values himself? How much he’s actually suffering? Does he then tell them it’s work on humility?
This was what was missing up until now. This is the axis around which everything revolves. AND IT WORKS!. It works perfectly. Instead of separating from their lives through non identification as the System offers, members have to separate from their judgement towards Robert and use each and every tool to not identify with their own judgements and negative emotions towards him and his position of authority and denial of their presence. Not identifying, not expressing negative emotions, not lying with opposite Is about it, not being in imagination about what is wrong, not inner considering about it and EXTERNALLY CONSIDERING the teacher all the way to hell is what is actually practiced but not just that, to top it all we had to develop positive emotions around it. We had to transform our horror into love for the man number eight, second to Christ. WOW! That works! But there’s not only nothing conscious about it, there is such a corrupted process of imagination that it crystallizes in the formatory apparatus and works only in as much as it doesn’t move a millimetre in any direction. It turns on itself until it shrinks people’s functions and in that horror suicide is a great relief. People continue to apparently live but like bees or ants, like insects. It is the closest phenomenon to a beehive and still ex-members in the fofblog think they are doing these people a favour in not stopping it.
Were we conscious enough we would be stampeding inside and bringing each member out as if they were burning alive! Because they are!

237. Elena - November 15, 2009 [Edit]

We’ve been talking about Robert’s sexuality all along but what we hadn’t understood, what we hadn’t connected to was the fact that we made it a religion. Inside the Fellowship, his private life was separated from the Work and we accepted that as O.K. without realizing that it was precisely his private life what was molding our work and ourselves. What we were trying to adapt to was not consciousness but accepting his homosexuality as a “Sacred Form” and practice.
When we listen to Daily Cardiac and Girard’s myriad references to letting go of standard morality, what they actually made us work with in the Fellowship was adopting a new morality that would make Robert’s sexuality and sexuality without boundaries, look normal.
NORMAL:
Separating heterosexual couples so that Robert can have sex with your husband
Having your sons work at the galleria so that Robert can have sex with them
Spending millions on young men so that they comply to the deal
Spending millions on clothes so that the gay fantasy is covered in silk
Dressing up, disguising, uniforming yourself to play your part in the gay temple for the Gold Alchemy of the Fellowship is simply gay paraphernalia. ALL OF IT!
Importing young men from the centers to his bedroom
Watching all of them modeling in and out of our lives as if they were God and the Angels
And after making heaven for them to enjoy, bearing our lot of the deal, working washing the dishes and cleaning the galleria, pruning the roses and going out to life to make more money for them to spend.
Watching pornography, child pornography included
All justified by the idea that the machine runs along separately from higher centers so it’s O.K. to rape and exploit others with one side of yourself while the other rests in consciousness.
What matters about all this is that we not only got ripped off economically, we were remolded into specific behavior, physical, emotional and intellectual that had to fit perfectly into Robert’s make up. We did work, we worked very hard and we did have to change internally and externally but for what?
It’s so tremendously sad that it is no wonder that people are trying to avoid looking at it straight in the face. If we felt shame for having ripped off, how much more shame can we experience from realizing that we made a God of the Golden Calf? And what’s even more depressing is that we continue to make a God of the Golden Calf by holding to the rule that we cannot question or take the Fellowship to Court because it is a legal organization when there is absolutely nothing legal about it: It’s all a perfect scam, a fraud from head to toe but ex-members don’t understand that yet. Statements like Old FOF’s in the fofblog that made them ban me from it, that he has to protect his friends inside from being harmed by people like me and the position that they are not willing to work seriously against the closure of the Fellowship cult is nothing but blindness and the wish to remain blind to what actually happened to us, what we actually DID. WE DID. WE made it possible. WE fell in the trap. WE promoted it and accepted it and WE are allowing it to go on.
It is not only that THEY DID SOMETHING. THEY did a lot of things but WE ALL played our part in it and as long as it remains open we continue to play our part in it and just like Ames Gilbert, Bruce Levy, Old FOF, Jomo Piñata and thousand other members who have left and did nothing to warn and help us and allowed me and thousands others to spend decades inside suffering the brainwash and its consequences if those of us leaving today don’t do anything about it hundreds or thousand others will be suffering what we are suffering or worse in fifteen and twenty years.
We are clear about the fact that the members still inside are hopelessly brainwashed? That they are willing to justify the status quo no matter who or how people are getting raped. That the Fellowship of Friends, Pathway to Presence is an organization set up to rape young men, disfigure every man and woman who joins, every child and old person and rip everyone off so WHY are you still willing to support it? For not acting against it is the support that allows it.
Ames, Bruce, Jomo might be talking about it now but is talking enough? How many more years will it take you to finally say NO as a definite decision about the life you’re willing to allow in your society, in your life? What are the dark corners about your lives that impede you from taking action against something that everyone who’s been inside knows is so corrupt?
Are we afraid of being called stupid? Stupid for believing in Conscious people? For putting our money out in what we thought was a School? For trusting others? Yes, young people are naïve but being stupid and naïve is a lot less harmful than being adults who know the truth and are willing to hide it for fear of being called naïve and stupid AND THAT IS WHAT EVERYONE IN THE FOFBLOG AND THE GREATER FELLOWSHIP IS DOING BY NOT WILLING TO ACT SERIOUSLY AGAINST THE FELLOWSHIP OF FRIENDS CULT, PATHWAY TO PRESENCE. You will not be held responsible for being stupid and naïve, you will be held responsible for being adults who know the truth and hide it, who know people are getting hurt and are not doing anything serious enough to stop it. YOU WILL BE HELD RESPONSIBLE, EACH AND ALL OF YOU BY OTHER PEOPLE AND BY YOUR SELVES IF BY NOBODY ELSE because we know it.
You might not read me here but I remain witness and testify for what is happening and this will be known sooner or later. Your silences and your unwillingness to act against this cult will be known. Your names are everywhere in the Fellowship directories. You will all be known and you will know your selves. You will know your silence and your responsibility in allowing others to suffer like we suffered.
It is not just about acting against the Fellowship Cult. It is about acting against ALL CULTS that are hurting millions of people everywhere. It is about achieving a maturity for the whole of humanity that is falling prey of such organizations. It is about looking without fear at our darkness and dealing with it in daylight. Sexuality in all cults is expressing the repression we’ve lived under for centuries now. The thwarted sexuality in cults, homosexual or heterosexual ones, is an expression of the collective repression societies have been under but there is no consciousness in making a shrine out of the deviations and repressions. It is a collective idealization that leads nowhere just like idealizing a lover and becoming their unconditional emotional slave leads nowhere. We’re collective juveniles in cults but so criminal, that it needs to be stopped. We are, in our time, like juveniles who’ve been let loose after years of being kept working at home without play or friends and fall for the first divas we meet as if they were the whole world.

238. Elena - November 15, 2009 [Edit]

This someone is a Fellowship member and doesn’t even make effort to disguise it!
The agenda is clear, they also used it inside:
Picture ex-members as losers who couldn’t make enough money and had to leave
Stand as an ex-member who had a positive experience in the cult and received worth while esoteric knowledge and practice!
And the fascinating image that if one can make a decent living one can be with wonderful people and have a great life in the Fellowship cult!!
And then stating the impression that Daily Cardiac is running the show, for he is, but pretending not to agree with it so that the double messages are confusing and producing enough dissonance that the reader will swallow the main statement:
“If one can make a decent living, one can find Apollo as a great place to live, surrounded by wonderful people.”
THAT IS WHAT PEOPLE INSIDE ARE TRAINED LIKE DOGS TO THINK. Help yourselves to another cookie Dears!
THAT IS WHAT FOFBLOGGERS ARE SUPPORTING.
The FOF blog handcuffed itself to respond to these posts for what they are: liars deceiving people, FASCISTS willing to hurt others, SICKOS.
DXP Dirty Xero Prick never went back to the blog after they banned me. She succeeded in getting me banned, was that you Linda? Well done! but worse than that, she succeeded in putting you all back to sleep again for some time. “Some” time because what we’ve done so far is just the starter of this play.
250. Someone – November 15, 2009
Just dropped by for a short visit.
Eventually one person (DC) has subdued almost everyone else here. 75% of the posts are dialogs with DC.
The above videos are pathetic. It is below the level of a bad Soap Opera.
I recognize some downsides of the FoF, but no one has ever abused me or instructed me to do things against my own will.
I was disappointed that no one has ever suggested that I go out and take care of my finances. Most members around me have taken responsibility for their lives and went out to work or study and managed to raise their standard of living. I have been quite lazy and blind to my situation.
I left the FoF real broke with almost nothing in my wallet. Now after I have recovered, I still think the FoF has a lot to offer esoterically.
If one can make a decent living, one can find Apollo as a great place to live, surrounded by wonderful people.
I have no intentions to go back, yet I absolutely do not share the massive, extremely exaggerated attacks on the FoF.

239. Elena - November 15, 2009 [Edit]

Thank you Ton. Now you’re voicing the things that matter. I would revise your last paragraph on esoteric things
“and i’m not talking about the learning of ‘esoteric doctrines’ — that’s a lot of hogwash and window-dressing designed to obfuscate and occlude what’s really going on…. true insight doesn’t come from all the surface nonsense and obfuscation that’s trotted out in the form of fof doctrine… what’s beneath the appearances and between the lines?”
I think we can now acknowledge how esoteric ideas and practices were used against us. They are actually being practiced in the Fellowship and they are very efficient but only to turn against the members practicing them. This is what we hadn’t understood. What we hadn’t incorporated yet. We’ve been denying that there is work going on or that the work is not work but that’s not true. We did work both externally and internally. Whenever I didn’t feel good about what was going on and felt like exploding I would tell myself:
I’m here to change my self first
This is a negative emotion
This is judgment
This is identification
This is inner considering
Separate from the “I”s
Don’t believe the “I”s
They are just “I”s
Continue doing your work
Remember yourself always and everywhere
On and on, all the workbooks and each tool was used to try to ignore what was actually happening and succeeded for seventeen years. This is very important because WE WERE WORKING and members inside know they have been working esoterically: that is, they have been making real efforts and have separated from themselves. The problem is that instead of transforming themselves or the lives they were given, they have been simply negating them selves to adapt to the life they are being given: work, work, work to make money for the second only to Christ.
This is another piece of the puzzle that needed to be understood and one of the main reasons members remain inside: because they are having to work hard and are convinced that that is taking them somewhere. Because they’ve already put so much energy in it they can’t believe it’s not working. Wasn’t that so for many of us? Only that their work bears no fruit and they are led to believe that they have no will, that they are not making enough efforts, that they are not good enough until Robert says so. Here I’m talking about members in Oregon House who really dug roots in the cult. Members in far away centres have a different story because they tried to use the System oblivious of the cult and Robert’s life, which simply places them in ignorance about what they are supporting. Voluntary ignorance that has nothing to do with consciousness or integrity or responsibility with one’s life.
251. ton – November 15, 2009 Page 85
25o someone,
thanks for making it a short visit… you write:
“If one can make a decent living, one can find Apollo as a great place to live, surrounded by wonderful people.”
i don’t now about ‘wonderful’ people… everyone has their idea about what constitutes a ‘wonderful’ person… probably in most cases that has to do with commonalities, you tend to be more sympathetic toward people who share your beliefs and opinions… you tend to be more antipathetic and oppositional toward those who you view as ‘different.’ it might be said that almost all people have their ‘good’ AND their ‘bad’ qualities; i think many people join the fof with some ‘good’ intentions… many are looking for community and a place where they feel they ‘belong.’ but some of the so-called ‘wonderful’ people there are entrenched in the darker machinations and actually constitute a large part of the problem… there are problems. it seems obvious from this post that you are or were looking for community, it’s a very human need and i think many people who are drawn into the fof web are/were also looking for community, i know i was. in this respect imo your statement:
“I still think the FoF has a lot to offer esoterically…”
is beside the point. with hindsight i realize that the sense of community was the most important part of the fof experience for me and that sense of belonging was the thing that kept me in the fold long beyond the time when i initially realized what the scam was all about. so don’t fool yourself about what is offered ‘esoterically’ — unless of course you are not aware of the basic human need for community, in which case an aspect of the truth remains ‘occluded’ for you…
you mention ‘pathetic’ posts, imo one thing that’s ‘pathetic’ is your attitude as it’s reflected here…. as far as the fof goes, members and ex-members alike are all in a minor way ‘little eichmanns’ and maybe your conscience allows you to ignore what you supported and contributed to as a member of the fof… or maybe you remain blissfully unaware… it sounds like for you the fof was nothing more than a country club with ‘esoteric’ window-dressing. differing perspectives on what supporting the fof implies are expected but from my point of view you seem to be in denial and ignoring somethings that need a deeper personal reflection and reckoning. speaking of pathetic, you write:
“Eventually one person (DC) has subdued almost everyone else here. 75% of the posts are dialogs with DC.”
maybe english is not your native language but in any case you seem to misunderstand and misuse the word ’subdue’ — posts by dc tend to incite other posters (granted others who are too revolted or dumbfounded by this dumbfuck dc might be subdued and remain lurking on the sidelines). there is something to be said FOR fof apologists in that they reflect the psychology of the cult while at the same time stimulating others to reflect, formulate and debate based on their own experience. from it’s inception one aspect of this blog has been about the repartee between apologists/defenders and those who view the matter differently… it seems that you would fall into the former category.
you write: “I left the FoF real broke with almost nothing in my wallet. Now after I have recovered, I still think the FoF has a lot to offer esoterically.”
let’s look at the term ‘esoteric’ — 1. understood by or meant for only the select few who have special knowledge or interest; recondite: poetry full of esoteric allusions. 2. belonging to the select few. 3. private; secret; confidential. 4. (of a philosophical doctrine or the like) intended to be revealed only to the initiates of a group: etc.
the notion that you as a member of the fof were privy to ’secret knowledge’ made you feel (and maybe still makes you feel) as if you were ’special’ and one of the ‘chosen few’ selected out of the billions of people on the planet as an ‘initiate’ to (potentially) ‘awaken.’ this erroneous notion is promoted and fostered by the fof as an integral part of it’s lure and allure, this notion appeals to a person’s vanity and false-pride, it’s one of the primary tools of the subtle and not so subtle mechanisms of psychological control over the ‘flock.’ your affiliation with the fof sets you apart alright, but not in the way you are lead to believe… this idea is intentionally misleading and serves no other purpose than to keep the followers in thrall… as a member you are lead to believe that by studying and following ‘the system’ (read:burtonism), an arcane, insane ‘doctrine’ consisting of a set of bizarre beliefs, that your adherence will lead to a ‘promised land’ an imaginary far away place which may yet be ‘lifetimes’ away… through abiding belief the ‘good student’ is kept in the fold, all the while busy building their own personal mental prison through endless and ceaseless repetitions of ’sequences’ and other ‘exercises.’ the real hidden agenda in the fof, the truly ‘esoteric’ aspects have to do with the scam that’s being perpetrated and the purpose behind it… that being in large part, feeding of the insatiable appetites and extravagant lifestyle of the cankerous queen around which the whole thing revolves. as for the ‘esoteric’ doctrine of the fof, you can glean more true wisdom and insight into human nature by cracking open almost any ‘mainstream’ psychology text book.
’someone’ — you write:
“I left the FoF real broke with almost nothing in my wallet…”
in spite of the fact that you were admittedly ‘fleeced’ by burton , you choose to look at the experience as positive…. good for you. but i think you are still under the influence… you write:
“no one has ever abused me or instructed me to do things against my own will.”
this implies that you don’t realize or care to see what exactly you were supporting through your membership and payments… you don’t realize that your very trust was abused through your affiliation, that by conforming to suggestions, and mindlessly paying up your hard earned dollars, you were as it turns out, on a subtle level doing things against your will… i’m surprised you can’t see that with hindsight… i guess it’s not always 20/20. you still want to see your association with the fof as something of value and maybe as a life experience it is valuable, but that must imply you have learned something of value…. and i’m not talking about the learning of ‘esoteric doctrines’ — that’s a lot of hogwash and window-dressing designed to obfuscate and occlude what’s really going on…. true insight doesn’t come from all the surface nonsense and obfuscation that’s trotted out in the form of fof doctrine… what’s beneath the appearances and between the lines? you don’t seem to get it yet… how long have you been out anyway

240. Elena - November 16, 2009 [Edit]

After reading this article, what surprises me is that the author would choose to speak only about Demons and not Angels which carry the same process but I think both words are too loaded for there to be a better understanding of their reality for us today. Treating them as Demons or Angels gives them a connotation that is not exactly human and although “HUMAN” are demons and angels, when we can rest our selves in the purely human aspect of our experience, it is easier to deal with suprasensory reality because we experience it from our selves and not as forces coming from outside our selves. Perhaps this is true mainly because when we can come to the suprasensible with our I, we have a powerful enough anchor that can relate to both demons and angels without being blown away by either one of them, which is what happens when we are deeply identified with both pleasure or suffering.
Perhaps the mastery of Gurdjieff and particularly Ouspensky was to bring those realities down to the language of an industrialized world in which they could be almost touched: “man is a machine that reacts to the external world when his buttons get pushed” is exactly the same idea that “man is possessed by complexes when he is unconsciously identified”
Man is a “machine” that reacts mechanically when he doesn’t have control over his identifications is not different to “man is possessed when he is identified with complexes that overpower him”.
“The complex can usually be suppressed, with an effort of will, but not argued out of existence, and at the first suitable opportunity it reappears in all its original strength” states Levy, which is no different to the idea that through the effort of non-identification a man can free himself from the many ‘I’s.
It seems necessary to relate to people in different stages of development to be able to understand how the process works.
In childhood there are states of well-being and ill being of which the child doesn’t have much control. Things “happen” to the child without the child having a mature enough I to “act” on them but a reaction to the experience is set off that “takes a life of its own” in the unconsciousness of the individual. In the teenager those unconscious reactions to the world “as it was experienced by the child” form an incipient personality that matures with the adult. The personality is no other than Reich’s character armor that is formed as a reaction to the experiences of childhood. This armor holds within itself the unconscious processes that have taken a life of their own and become the individual’s “imaginary picture” of him/herself. But the “imaginary picture” is not only an image of who one is but a living conditioning of the ability to experience joy and suffering and it is THAT conditioning, THAT personality, what will “look for”, “attract” and “choose” experiences of a particular kind.
“Personality” conditions the tendencies the individual develops. A “shy personality” attracts shy experiences or on the other end of the spectrum, extreme experiences that justify the shyness. A “strong personality” attracts strong experiences or on the other end of the spectrum, “shy” experiences that justify the strength. A balanced personality attracts balanced experiences, that is, chooses and discards what is not so balanced. While in childhood, the individual receives strong or weak impressions over which she or he has no control, in adulthood, the individual’s personality “unconsciously” chooses the experience and the strength or weakness of the experience in accordance with the way the childhood experience has become FIXED in the individual’s inner world; In accordance with the complex that the individual is repeating, re-experiencing, resurrecting or recurring.
The unconscious repetition of the experience is what becomes pathological over time and the experience is repeated over and over until light is shed on it: Consciousness.
The “facts” are only the “crystallization” or external “materialization” of forces “impressed” on the child from the outside references. The “conditioning” that personality “crystallizes” in, is what will impel the individual to reproduce the experience and materialize it, inversely proportionate to the imprint, in “new” facts. The “facts” in themselves are, in childhood, what formed the complex, the “conditioning” and in adulthood what can reveal it. In adulthood, the facts or the external experience and how it repeats itself are simply the outward expression of the inner conditioning but the individual is now actively seeking them out unlike in childhood, when he was “impressed” by them without a choice.
In “separating” one’s self, in the “will” impulse to not identify with the “conditioned action” or “reaction”, the individual sheds light on the complex and reveals its causes freeing him or her self from its power.
Both the action that gets impressed on the individual and the reaction that triggers him off to repeat it, take place unconsciously. A “conscious process” takes place only when the individual inwardly “separates” from the conditioning and chooses a free action that responds accurately to reality. Then we can speak about “Presence”.
This “studies” will eventually give us a basis to study the pathological conditioning in which Robert Burton and anyone under the power of his or her complexes will re-enact them recurrently without being able to free him or herself from them.
Elena
______________________________
Autonomous Complexes
“Autonomous complexes” are parts of the psyche which have split-off due to shock, trauma, or breach of our boundaries, and have developed a seemingly autonomous life and apparently independent will of their own. Though we are unconsciously identified with them, autonomous complexes are subjectively experienced as other than ourselves. Apart from their inherent obscurity and strangeness, our unconscious identification with autonomous complexes is the essential reason why it is so hard to get a handle on them.
Autonomous complexes act upon us, they feel like our most intimate self, eventually need to be owned, but paradoxically, don’t belong to us. The seeming autonomy of the archetypes and complexes is what gives rise to the idea of supernatural beings. Endowed with a numinous energy, autonomous complexes are what our ancestors used to call “demons.” Autonomous complexes are a psychological name for the demons in the archetypal process of addiction that animate us to compulsively act out our addictive behavior. A demon or autonomous complex, to quote Jung, “behaves like an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness. The complex can usually be suppressed, with an effort of will, but not argued out of existence, and at the first suitable opportunity it reappears in all its original strength.” Due to their lack of association with the conscious ego, autonomous complexes are typically not open to being influenced, educated, nor corrected by “reality.” An intruder from the unconscious and a disturber of the peace, an autonomous complex, Jung points out, “behaves exactly like a goblin that is always eluding our grasp.” If left un-reflected upon, these demons or autonomous complexes wreak havoc for everyone within their sphere of influence.
Jung writes, “…any autonomous complex not subject to the conscious will exerts a possessive effect on consciousness proportional to its strength and limits the latter’s freedom.” As it takes over and becomes in charge of a person, a complex incorporates a seemingly autonomous regime within the greater body politic of the psyche. Writing about autonomous complexes, Jung says “…the complex forms something like a shadow government of the ego,” in that the complex dictates to the ego. When we are taken over by and in internal conflict with and because of an autonomous complex, it is as if we, as natural rulers of our own psychic landscape, have been deposed, and are living in an occupied country. We are allowed our seeming freedom as long as it doesn’t threaten the sovereignty and dominance of the ruling power. Jung comments, “…a man does not notice it when he is governed by a demon; he puts all his skill and cunning at the service of his unconscious master, thereby heightening its power a thousandfold.” Being nonlocal, this inner, psychological situation can manifest both within our psyche and out in the world at the same time.
Demons or autonomous complexes have a possessive and obsessive effect on consciousness. Interestingly, the word “obsession” originally meant to be under the influence of an evil “possession.” Obsession refers to certain ideas that have taken possession of the person. We can become possessed by unshakable ideas of the way things should be or who we think we are, oppressing and tyrannizing both ourselves and others who hold a different viewpoint in the process. Jung writes, “The idea is like an autonomous being that wants a body so much that it even incarnates in the body; one begins to play, to perform the idea, and then people say one is completely mad. The idea has taken possession of one till it is as if one were out of one’s mind.”
Millions of our species have killed and been killed over a fixed idea.
Commandeering and colonizing our psyche, a split-off, autonomous complex is, potentially, like a “vampiric virus,” in that it is fundamentally “dead” matter; it is only in a living being that it acquires a quasi-life. Just like a vampire re-vitalizes itself by sucking our life-force, when we unconsciously identify with an activated autonomous complex, we are literally animating and en-livening the undead. Complicit in our own victimization, we then unwittingly give away our freedom, power, and life-force in the process.
Like cancer cells ravaging the body, dis-associated, autonomous complexes are like “splinter psyches” that can become overly swollen with psychic energy, and then will propagate and metastasize themselves within the psyche, consuming, devouring, and cannibalizing the healthy aspects of the psyche. Drawing and attracting all of the wholesome parts of the psyche into itself, an autonomous complex can potentially warp and destroy the psyche of the person (or nation) so afflicted, nonlocally infecting and spreading by psychic contagion its malaise to the surrounding field in the process.
An autonomous complex can’t stand to be seen, however, in much the same way that a vampire detests the light. A demon or autonomous complex will shape-shift and do everything in its power to resist being illumined, for once it is seen, its autonomy and omnipotence are taken away. Anchored, connected and related to consciousness, the demon or autonomous complex can then no longer vaporize back into the unconscious, which is to say it is no longer able to possess us from behind and beneath our conscious awareness so as to compel us to unwittingly act it out and do its bidding.
Taken from Paul Levy’s article. Are we possessed

241. Elena - November 16, 2009 [Edit]

I finished the whole of the article. It’s worth every word. There is one issue that I would mention which is the impression I get that when the author speaks about mass behavior all of which I agree to, he seems to leave out the possibility that all those of us who are experiencing a possible “awakening of the universe through us” in a very positive sense, could at a certain point CONSCIOUSLY act “en masse”. In fact, I would not label ALL mass revolutions as evil possessions but often as necessary critical moments that revolt against the unconsciousness of the status quo and that allow for the subsequent change in the individuals. Every time we enter and leave no matter what group of people acting as club, cult or institution, we are submitting our selves and often identifying with the group’s Archetype, only to leave and reflect it or deflect it in our own lives. It’s the dialogue between community and individual that keeps the balance alive.
I’ll continue to work on this article in pieces in the future because it adapts all too clearly to the cult and fofblog experience that we’ve been going through.

242. Elena - November 16, 2009 [Edit]

Nigel
Look what I just found! Another one!!! And happens to be the author of this very interesting article!!!
In 1981 Paul Levy had a life-changing spiritual awakening, in which he began to wake up to the dream-like nature of reality. During the first year of his spiritual emergence, Paul was hospitalized a number of times, and was diagnosed with having had a severe psychotic break. Much to his surprise, he was told that he had a chemical imbalance and had manic-depressive (bi-polar) illness, and would have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. Fortunately, he was able to quickly extricate himself from the medical and psychiatric establishment. Little did the doctors realize that he was taking part in some sort of spiritual awakening/shamanic initiation process, which at times mimicked psychosis but in actuality was an experience of a far different order. In 1993, after many years of struggling to contain and integrate his experiences, he started to teach about what he was realizing. He has been in private practice for fifteen years, assisting others who are spiritually emerging and beginning to wake up to the dreamlike nature of reality. In a dream come true, psychiatrists now consult with him and send him patients. A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul is in the new book Saints and Madmen: Psychiatry Opens its Doors to Religion.

243. Elena - November 16, 2009 [Edit]

There is one more thing I wanted to work on this morning and it’s about exploring why cults “work” as efficiently as concentration camps but upside down and backwards which is a process I’ve been trying to understand since we looked at THE RAPE OF THE MIND: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing, by Joost A. M. Meerloo, M.D. in the fofblog.
After realizing that we do apply “work” ideas in the cult, esoteric exercises that are extremely efficient, it is much easier to understand why the brainwashing process takes place so quickly and willingly in a cult. While in concentration camps the same things happen against the person’s will, in the cult they happen with the person’s blessing! In concentration camps all the vulnerable aspects of the human being are systematically attacked and finally make him or her “confess” and become emotionally dependent to his captors, love and hate them at the same time, desperately need them and desperately hate them all at once and these same things happen in the cult where the member is subjected to the same psychological conditioning that the prisoner is physically subjected to.
A prisoner in a concentration camp is physically separated from his family, friends, society and mankind at large while cult members separate not only physically but psychologically. These things might sound not too tragic when one hasn’t experienced them but they affect the human balance of functions in ways that we are only just beginning to understand as we deprive ourselves of them in the very imaginative institutions that we’ve developed in our massive aberrations.
Even if the member continues to work in society, he adopts and attitude of being emotionally and psychologically separate from the people s/he works with; even if the member continues to visit family or friends, s/he lives in an attitude of separation from them until severing completely. From there to fanatically surrendering to the guru and the cult as the only possible solutions to life is a very small step. It’s not that life has changed in any way, it’s that the member has effectively cut it off himself, severed it from his possibilities and left without options s/he concentrates on the only one that is left. Far from developing “unity” the member is separated into his former life and his present life creating a disassociation that s/he is consistently struggling with. Everything that he loved and longed for in the former life, becomes evil and aspects of the lower self while everything that is cultish and embraces the new life is the higher self.
We see the justification of this separation in almost every page of Mr. Burton and Mr. Haven’s works and in the open life-book of each Fellowship member.
When we understand this deeply, we’ll know why we need to help people get out of cults. The suffering experienced inside a cult is no less extreme than the suffering experienced in a concentration camp but it is “sublimized” as necessary sacrifice for “awakening”. People become trapped in the yezidi? Circle and cannot leave not only because the cult is holding them but because they’ve cut their own wings.

244. Elena - November 16, 2009 [Edit]

And last but not least
a word of love
to greet your freedom
where ever you happen
to be

245. nige - November 17, 2009 [Edit]

Hi Elena
I will try to get that book – Saints and Madmen. Sounds great!
But, funnily enough, I was thinking about sex today…..
Sex, Self, Sun….
Maybe you have been thinking along the same lines. Burton, I am sure, has crystallised as almost a teenage homosexual pervert. He is totally addicted to his ‘boys’ and his insanity can only get worse. I do not have an active sex life (for God’s sake, I am a single heterosexual male over 50 years of age who has to take ‘downers’) but have what I would consider a mature attitude to all the women in my life (I feel I have separated emotionally and mentally from Kate and still admire her femininity and desire to become a wonderful elementary school teacher – time will tell, and also my working with the situation, whether we can have a good friendship). There are regularly over 20 ladies of ages from early 20’s to over 60’s and of all body types and centres of gravity and only four men in my Academy – one Solar/Venus/Mercury, 10 of Spades, two Mercury/Saturns, King of Spades and one Jack of Hearts Jovial/Lunar. There are two classes I teach which are attended by all women and the emotional atmosphere is so enriching. I do not command – I blend and bond. Some of the ladies are very pretty and physically enticing but I have never made any sort of sexual advances towards any of them. It is almost like a kind of satelliteing tantric sex condition that prevails. I sense my masculinity among them, but it just seems to make my sense of Separate Selfhood Giving stronger. It is something you could try in some of your situations. I am not sure whether something like that could be experienced out of an artistically creative environment – I have doubts about the ‘corporate world’ – too false and depending on the extremity of our strained civilisation. You see – Burton does not experience sex – he kills it and preys upon it. NO RESPECT. I have said it many times before – BURTON IS THE ANTI-CHRIST, THE KILLER OF HUMANITY, THE BRINGER OF DEATH…..EVERYTHING WHICH IS THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT HE PURPORTS TO BE…..Nigel.

246. Elena - November 17, 2009 [Edit]

Music!
The music of music
Again
at last!
The wonderful thing about having been numbed for decades in a cult must be un-numbing one’s self again.
Life,
Little by little in every cell,
Dancing!
to old music I loved
Letting it melt the numbness of the body
Moving freely without being conscious of myself
Am I present? NO; NO; NO, I’m not present,
I’m not your present, I belong to myself
My self, my life, my body, my mind, my heart
Not yours, not yours
It’s mine!
Each minute being able to savour the light,
the night
The food just right
not throwing up
And time
to play guitar
And write
And sculpt
with glass
And love
Oh love…
Are you mad because you saved my life?
And being
For no reason
For no purpose
With no aim
Without effort
And sleeping
And dreaming
And living
my life
It’s mine
Just mine
So right
And friends!
Old friends
We laugh
With heart
Old friends
Such a pleasure in recognition
The bodies know each other,
The hearts rest patiently
The minds don’t bother
And man
Oh man!
And sister and brother and father and godfather and aunt and uncle and cousins, they taste so right!
And my daughter, my young blue-eyed daughter just called me and I say to her,
Why didn’t you hit me and shake me and tell me, you dumb ass, get the fuck out of here!
And she laughs! Laughs and says, you sound well mother! You promise you won’t let me do that again without hitting and shaking and pulling me out if you ever see me doing that again? She laughs and tells me what she’s doing: work, work, work in an American State and I say, I’ll have to start hitting and shaking and pulling you out by the hair and she laughs and loves and laughs, my younger daughter who’s only 22, with whom we stopped laughing for a decade!

247. Elena - November 17, 2009 [Edit]

Just found you here Nigel,
so good to see you!!
I’m happy!! Nigel Harris Price, I am HAPPY! and without shame!!
Nice post. Agreed. Yes, I think Robert is fixed in childhood the poor man, like I’d been with my mother for decades but there are other aspects worth looking into in the rest of the article. It’s amazing how everything in it fits like a glove.
Oh come on Nigel, you’re in your fifties, just right for love! Get a hold of one of those women and have fun!
I was down by a little river-big stream on saturday. There were a lot of children and a few adults cooking for them further up. A man came to the spot where I was, got in and started carrying stones to the edge to make a deeper hole. He carried quite a few and I was surprised anyone would bother to do that in a public river. “Aren’t you going to swim” he says “I’m making it deeper just for you!” I’d been silly enough not to take my swimming suit so I told him. He insisted, bra and pants were good enough! He smelt good although he was ten feet away!! He worked hard with the rocks and as he moved towards me I said, “it’s good” ….he looked at himself, “the dike!” we laughed! and sat for a while…
I began working with glass. Cut a whole lot of them on saturday as if it was paper. Sat and looked at the colors against the wall. It’s so pretty my Nigel! So pretty to be alive again!

248. Elena - November 17, 2009 [Edit]

Three months had passed since I’d joined The School and I’d been making supra human efforts to use the System’s ideas and work against the obstacles to awakening:
No expression of negative emotions
No identification
No lying
No imagination
No inner considering
My children provided ample material for me to work on my multiple impulses to be negative about everything and nothing and get identified about running late and other excuses that could justify it, like their not eating their meal or going to bed on time.
I’d been working for three months until finally one day I managed to spend the whole day without expressing one negative emotion as if I’d eaten myself from inside by not getting upset when they moved too much while I combed their hair, or fidgeted at the table instead of eating or talked too loud or paid no attention to what they were told. I had begun to realize that there was a negative charge that we kept going back to every day and as if it controlled our lives, we had to get it out one way or another but my children were only three and eight and I knew that whatever negativity was being expressed was coming or had come from me. I begun observing the moments when it happened and combing their hair was a mathematical trigger to getting negative about it, sometimes so much that I’d want to hit them with the brush. I got there once but that was the impulse everyday and we fought about it according to me because she moved too much, according to her because I pulled her hair and there was some of both but it wasn’t us, it was that “thing” wishing to express itself. It’s difficult not to pull the hair when it’s messy but it’s possible. It just takes more effort. Three months and we’d managed to spend the whole day even but it was time for bed and I could feel the negative energy building up begging to be expressed like a devil that wanted to come out. They were fooling around and not getting into bed and playing with the pyjamas and I was tired after a whole day of controlling the impulses to object about nothing but continued to resist and leaned back against the wall while sitting on one of their little chairs waiting for them to finally get into bed before reading them a short story. I felt like Atlas holding the world on my shoulders. Three months working for it and I was about to manage it: a whole day without a negative expression holding myself with all my strength to allow my children to develop in love, to grow up like human beings because that is what I understood by consciousness. They finally settled in bed, the story finished and I was about to get up and turn the lights off when Elisa looked at me from the top bed and said:
“mummy… you’re falling thin on me!”
I felt an explosion of love inside and outside as if the whole world had suddenly lit up and shined and every effort I had made since I joined the School had been nothing compared with that joy. In Colombia, when one doesn’t like someone, it is common to say that that person is falling fat on one but Elisa had expressed the opposite. She was eight years old and at least five years had passed since I remembered a truly positive comment coming from her. I kissed them both goodnight and turned the lights off.
The work worked! THE WORK WORKED, I wanted to scream and let the whole world know that the work worked. That if one made enough effort life could change. That if one worked hard enough love was possible. And we began to live. Not just to survive but to live: to express our selves freely, to experience joy, gratitude and gracefulness and communicate with each other gently, lovingly.

249. Elena - November 18, 2009 [Edit]

….me because she moved too much, according to her because I pulled her hair and there was some of both but it wasn’t us, it was that “thing” wishing to express itself.
No, it was definitely us, me and what I’d implanted and received myself. There is not doubt that it was me allowing it and me stopping it but realizing that I could stop, that I had the power to stop it, was the greatest realization I could have come to. To love is much more simple than to make conflict but it is very difficult to love when one is submerged in suffering, which is why people who are suffering need twice as much love.
Somewhere above I state that there’s as much suffering in cults as in concentration camps and it’s a different suffering but not necessarily less particularly because it extends out for years and years and in becoming defaced and disfigured there is no need for others to inflict suffering upon one’s self, one becomes very efficient at it by simply continuing to tolerate the status quo in which one is nothing in the community one supports. That is why there is nothing incoherent about cult members committing suicide as the materialization of what they’ve been building up to all along.
Nigel, I observed you continue to insist on the attitude that people should be afraid of experiencing the fourth state and I would like to challenge that. There is nothing greater in ones life than that experience and it is worth it even if it kills one! It is the experience of being one with the Universe and the power of the Universe in that oneness. No one should ever be afraid of experiencing consciousness. We had so much difficulty tolerating it because we weren’t well prepared by our cheap guru but people will be more prepared to tolerate it in the future.
One aspect of our lack of preparation was not conceiving of the other side as a reality but there are many of us now telling about the reality of the other side and according to some we are all moving through that threshold. Our lack of knowledge about it made it all the more shocking but there is only love in the other side and sometimes love can have so much power that one perceives the power more than the love but unity as power is love realized.
We carry it all, the love, the power, other dimensions, we carry it all in our hearts which are the key to both sides. We live on this side and through the heart live consciously in the other side as well. No one can give us the key. Just our own hearts can open that door. It takes a lot of heart to be the hero we all dream to become but as long as we each trust our humaneness, we can’t move in the wrong direction.

250. Elena - November 18, 2009 [Edit]

“…me because she moved too much, according to her because I pulled her hair and there was some of both but it wasn’t us, it was that “thing” wishing to express itself. It’s difficult not to pull the hair when it’s messy but it’s possible. It just takes more effort. Three months and we’d managed to spend the whole day even but it was time for bed and I could feel the negative energy building up begging to be expressed like a devil that wanted to come out.”
I’m still not comfortable with this statement probably because of the use of the word devil and that “thing”. It reminds me of the System’s use of the idea of the “worm” inside which is abused by the fof, pathway to presence cult, rooting in it to deepen people’s dependency on it and their need to be helped to extricate the worm out. Each of Robert and Girard’s events are designed to reaffirm the idea of the lower self, the worm, the devil inside which accentuates shame and fear in people and the feeling that they cannot trust themselves enough and must depend on the guru and the cult for support. What we need to come to understand is that emotions are objective realities that condition our behaviour. I act in a particular way if I am filled with shame and in a completely different way if I am full of self-trust. The outside world conditions us in very definite ways to feel shameful or trustworthy about our selves. The hierarchical structure of society in which the rich, educated, first world, white, father-husband-dominant male and the “others”: third world, uneducated, poor, black, women, children, old people and all the variations on the theme, condition how an individual feels about “its” self and its self’s options in life. We are all responsible for each other in as much as whatever the place we have in society is conditioning other people’s place and placement. “Identified” with our own place or position, we keep others stagnant in theirs: The rich do not want to stop being rich, the educated enjoy looking down at the uneducated, whites confine blacks, those in power confine those submitted, politically, religiously, economically or sexually not only physically but psychologically. Identified with their inferiority those submitted do not struggle to rise in the “inhuman” ladder.
The problem is that the ladder is inhuman not only for the submitted but for the “Dominator”. Identified with their position neither one can free their self from the hierarchic structure and establish real contact, real communication with others: that is what is killing culture and leading people to cults. They might all live in the same city but they are yezidi circles apart in their lives. We live very close to each other today but we are worlds apart. This is what is causing so much suffering. In the disappearance of the concept of “community”, the individuals strive for “realization” “abstracting” “separating” themselves from their actual circumstances which is exactly the opposite to work in the reality of our lives to help each other develop more consciously human or more humanly conscious. Every healthy human being is striving for the betterment of their self and their community. Those wishing to develop out of the human context are precisely those who are practicing the inhumanity in the cults they’ve organized. They are not communities precisely because they do not have a human, communal aim but an imaginary supra human objective above or below the human. Satanic cults or Supra Divine Guru cults are both equally inhuman but without digging out the extreme pathologic cancers in out society we can observe CULT behaviour in every sphere of our societies today:
In the economy there is a cult for the capitalist. It is no coincidence that the list of the richest people in the world comes out in magazines.
In Art there is a cult for artists and they are not only artists but rich and also become the subject of magazines and newspapers. These are the people we worship, we find worthy of hearing about. The people we idolize and idealize as having something we don’t have.
In Sports we find a similar behaviour. In Politics and science it is similar but acquires a different taste.
In the personal sphere there is obvious cult behaviour within the family in every authoritarian family in which what the father says is law even though the father might be little more than a criminal to his wife and children. In the jobs people hold and the relationship between them, there is the same cultish submission and dominance and even in the distribution of public space and transportation, there are clear separations between the dominators and the submitted.
In the hospitals there are the doctors and the patients and even the doctors have become tyrants towards the patient. What matters is not the patient but the money they are making and the efficiency they are making it with. In Colombia for example, doctors must not take more than twenty minutes per patient and the best doctor, who wins a prize at the end of the year, is the one that has ordered the least number of exams and medicines saving costs to the institution. Colombia is only copying first world models at a frightening speed.
Lawyers and clients fall in the same niche. Lawyers tend to treat the client as if they had absolutely no idea about anything and explain nothing or charge by the second to explain something, just like doctors. High officials in no matter what job are humanly abusing the people below them not only in the economic distribution but in the emotional rapport. People in “high positions” make lavish use of their position of authority to demeanour those below them and this is making them as sick as the people below with a slight difference that the people below in most cases are consciously submitting to the treatment because they need the job or the position while the dominators are unconsciously surrendering to it because it feeds their ego, they are so identified with it that they actually feel superior. They need to believe in their superiority to justify their behaviour while the submitted don’t completely believe it and are aware of the circumstances. There is a huge difference in that. In the long run, the dominators end up more sick than the dominated because their world is more conditioned by their own imagination than the world of the others who, by sheer necessity, have to keep more “connected” to reality.
The areas that are kept “quiet” in lawyers and doctors are meant to reaffirm the image that they hold, the image that they have something that the other doesn’t have. The “knowledge” they’ve acquired is used to justify their inhuman behaviour to the client-patient just like the guru in the cult is supposed to posses the being that justifies everything he does. A “being” and a “knowledge” that no one can pretend to understand or question. The ideal human interchange is not one in which the doctor or the lawyer teaches medicine or law to the client or patient but that the layer and the doctor make the client and the patient aware of the reality of the situation with the dignity and respect that the human interchange involves without pretending that the client-patient cannot understand what he is talking about. People understand. People have a RIGHT to understand and THAT is what the doctor and the lawyer are getting paid for.
This whole world could be grasped well in the interaction between people in banks. Nowhere are people as cold as in the interaction with money. And another area in which the inhumaneness of our world is obvious is in the use of telephone machines. The richer the company the less the human contact and people HAVE to accept the treatment. Not for long though, some of us are SICK OF IT already!
While there are true human beings in every single sphere that has been addressed in this text, what I am pointing out is the general tendency of standard behaviour. When it is more human, when we are treated with consideration by others, it lightens our soul and pushes the sense of our selves towards the dignity inherent to the human within us.

251. Elena - November 18, 2009 [Edit]

The Fellowship of Friends Cult, Pathway to Presence, states it is a School of Consciousness and not a community and justifies each and every one of its inhuman practices with that affirmation.
Since WHEN is inhumanity justified in any School of no matter what?
Since WHEN is organized crime by a legion of sociopaths, LEGAL?

252. Elena - November 18, 2009 [Edit]

This text by Girard is wonderfully elucidating of the situation but it is not a rarity. Every text by Girard contains the same corruption of reality to fit the cult.
I hope he’s Daily Cardiac because Daily Cardiac has been “touched”. He sincerely came here and he’s been touched in that sincerity. He’s far more free now from the cult mentality than before. I hope he’s Girard. What makes me doubt it is that Girard wouldn’t expose himself that badly unless he was desperate.
Panoritsa’s views that Girard is a nobody in the Fellowship cult are true and false. People around Robert had stopped respecting him a long time ago. All those who knew that he was addicted to child pornography had distanced themselves from him but never bothered to tell the rest of us the truth of the situation. They continued to rely on his prestige and use him to keep the cult running because hundreds of us would have left had we known the truth in different circumstances. They continued to USE him like they used anything and everything that continued to submit others in ignorance of what was happening inside. When I finally understood Girard’s predicament I was still convinced that Robert was conscious and thought that he was tolerant with Girard’s condition on the one hand and that for me, we had to work with what we were given and was convinced that if our sexuality was healthy he would move away from no matter what practice. If I failed, I failed willingly. Girard is a very sick man but no less sick than each and every other member in the Fellowship cult. All of them in the inner circle have kept each other protected to continue ripping innocent people off. There is not going to be a lynching of Girard Haven alone here no matter how eager people are to find one scapegoat. The sickness is in all of us. We, each one of us, made it happen and allowed it to happen because not one of us was enough of a human being nor present enough to take reality in its own terms. The Ames Gilberts of the Fellowship are hundreds, the Brucelevys, the Venas, the old fofs, the Fellowship is crammed with these stereotypes of people pretending to be better than others but they are as sick outside as those inside. They too are willing to ban people who don’t buy in their little ego business and submit to their sacredcowness. Bruce is as willing to humiliate any woman in the fofblog as Robert in the fofcult and all the adepts of the blog just keep submissively quiet! Silence is its own approval. The difference in the degree is no difference in the intention. Nor Old Fof or Ames or Vena or anyone who remained silent when they voiced what all of you carry inside. You are no less sick outside than you were inside. You are all cult people, you have no love, your sickness spreads out no matter where you participate. You hide yourselves just like Robert and Girard hide themselves inside. You give only the light side of your lives convinced that that will keep others from seeing how much darkness there is in it. But you’re not any less free of the cult sickness than those inside. And you Steve, how did you manage to get involved in the sacredcow business? How did you become so bias?
Girard:
…I suddenly found myself making a distinction between ‘verifying’ and ‘testing’…
In the way I mean it, ‘testing’ is essentially a negative process. It refers to the attempt to disprove something or to make it fail, as when an automobile door is tested by a machine which opens and closes it thousands of times, or when a child tests his parents by deliberately going where he is not supposed to go. In the Fellowship, testing usually starts from negative attitudes towards school disciplines, attitudes such as “Why should I have to do this?” These attitudes lead to efforts to discover what is wrong with a request, what is beneficial about its opposites, and what one can get away with, although all this often occurs in the guise of thinking for oneself, finding one’s own expression for the work, etc. In any case, it is easy to see that testing embodies the attitudes of opposite thinking.
Verification, on the other hand, is a positive process. It begins by adopting the attitude that the thing to be verified is correct, and then uses observation of the results of acting according to that attitude to determine the validity of the original assumption.
As an example, consider a child who is told that fire is hot. He tests this by putting something into the fire; he verifies it by trusting his parents and by observing. Although this may seem a trivial example, there are people all around us (as well as many ‘I’s within us) who insist on sticking their hands into fires, particularly when the emotional center is involved. We even refer to such people as being ‘burned’ in, for example, a bad relationship.
The dangers of testing are compounded by the fact that our emotional centers are so underdeveloped that we are often unable even to realize when we are being burned. This is especially true in relation to the School. We have only a very limited understanding of what actually serves our evolution, and that understanding is restricted to a very small part of our machines, that part of the king of hearts which has been trained by the School itself. The rest of the machine does not understand awakening and so easily adopts a negative, testing attitude which, if not recognized for what it is, can lead one out of the School.
This, then is why it is so important to learn to verify rather than to test, to develop and ability to trust the wisdom of Higher Forces and to affirm and strengthen that trust by acting on it, as the Teacher does. Essentially, the attitude that one must test in order to verify betrays a lack of understanding of our relation to Higher Forces. In our sleep, we act as if we were their equals, and set ourselves up to test and judge their requests. When we get away with it, as mechanically as we sometimes will, this illusion is reinforced. Consequently, no matter what one may finally learn from it, testing always feeds false personality.
Verification, on the other hand, can be seen as the process of intentionally deciding to adopt attitudes which presumably come from higher beings, and then confirming those attitudes, and hence their origin, by action and observation. It is an ongoing process, the method by which knowledge is brought into being to create understanding.
Moreover, because verification involves setting aside one’s own ideas to adopt the ideas or attitudes one is verifying, it runs counter to the illusion of self-importance, and so is relatively free of false personality. Instead, it is a manifestation of true personality, embodying the understanding that one cannot test Influence C, set conditions for them, or make demands of them. One cannot even ‘prove’ their existence: one must accept them, and in doing so, verify their presence.

Saturday, 10 October 2009

MISSING YOU!

Dear Elena
I am hoping you have not become discouraged and 'come away' from battlesword. As you mentioned before, if it were only you and I posting, that would be enough.....LBO.

Saturday, 3 October 2009

NEW BLOG AT bbattleswordd.wordpress.com

http://bbattleswordd.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/hello-world/#comments


I don't know why this site doesn't allow you to go directly by clicking on the address but if you paste the url on the address bar it should work.

By the people that looked at the blog yesterday it seems alright.

A friend asked me to use a blogsite like that of the FOF blog site so here it is for the forty or so of you that are still looking in here.

I appreciate your consistency!
Elena

Anonymous

The FOF BLOG ongoing „DISCUSSION“:

Are they still influenced or infected by BOB?

Does it work?

Is BOB still in power? Has BOB still power over his former and Ex- Fellows?


What are the methods?
“Creepy Subliminal Messages” and grains of truth:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng6hQfGzQig



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv1BiRkZ_Tg


or read:

·         David Bunn: Subliminal Messages (Hardback) Illustrated by David Bunn


Short Description for David BunnIn his ongoing work with the discarded card catalogue of the Los Angeles Central Library, Bunn has found cards bearing random stains and marks. Here he scans these stains and blows them up, revealing uncanny connections between mark and card text that speak of the subconscious, the occult, sex, analysis, and social ideologies.


Is BOB’s system so efficient?

Crimes without charge?

Is that possible? Never responsibility?

Friday, 2 October 2009

Mitchell-Smart case


Thank you Associated Press for this article. What I also find interesting about it is the necessity Mitchell had of justifying the ordeal with religion. Again a case of madness with a "sincere"...ly deluded lunatic.   It's good to know she's free. How long to heal?





182. Associated Press - October 1, 2009   fofblog

Elizabeth Smart says she was raped daily
Oct 1, 2009
By JENNIFER DOBNER

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) – Elizabeth Smart testified Thursday she was raped repeatedly each day after she was abducted from her bedroom seven years ago and told she would be killed if she yelled or tried to escape. She described Brian David Mitchell, her alleged kidnapper, as “evil, wicked, manipulative, stinky, slimy, selfish, not spiritual, not religious, not close to God.”
Smart testified in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City as part of a competency proceeding for the man charged in her 2002 kidnapping.
Mitchell has twice been found incompetent for trial in state court. Mitchell and his estranged wife were found with Smart nine months after she disappeared from her Salt Lake City home.
A judge ruled earlier this week that testimony from Smart, now 21, is relevant to the mental competency of Mitchell, who was removed from the courtroom before Smart arrived and taken to a holding cell where he could listen to the proceedings.
Smart was poised and composed while testifying for just under two hours.
She was 14 when she was abducted from her Salt Lake City home at knifepoint in the middle of the night. Shortly after her abduction, Smart said Mitchell took her to a mountain camp and performed a ceremony she said was intended to marry the two.
“After that, he proceeded to rape me,” Smart said.
She said he held her captive with a cable attached to her leg that had a 10-foot reach. That line was attached to another cable strung between two trees.
Smart said Mitchell plied her with alcohol and drugs to lower her resistance.
“He said that he would kill anybody that would come into the camp, or kill me if I ever tried to escape or yell out,” Smart testified.
Smart said Mitchell was motivated by sex and used religion to get what he wanted.
Mitchell’s defense attorneys had sought to limit Smart’s testimony to her experiences with Mitchell, without her opinions about his mental state.
The defense objected to the 39 so-called “lay witnesses” proposed by prosecutors, including Mitchell’s family, friends or workers at Utah State Hospital, because they lacked the expertise to evaluate competency.
In a ruling Monday, U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball rejected the argument as it relates to Smart, saying her testimony may help the court settle differences in the findings of experts who have evaluated Mitchell.
Experts have split opinions over Mitchell’s competency and have relied on statements from others – including Smart – and past evaluations to prepare reports for the court. Kimball’s ruling said Mitchell has been uncooperative with evaluators and refused to participate in diagnostic tests.
In the state court system, Mitchell was twice found incompetent to stand trial.
Smart was rescued nine months after her abduction when a motorist spotted her walking through a suburb with Mitchell and his estranged wife, Wanda Eileen Barzee.
Last year, Mitchell was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of kidnapping and unlawful transportation of a minor.
Once an itinerant street preacher, Mitchell is said to have wanted Smart as a polygamous wife and may have taken her to fulfill a religious prophecy he laid out in a 27-page manifesto drafted in April 2002.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Does any portion of this crazy situation sound familiar?
Incompetency would make similar defense for REB. Consider all those years of meeting videos that could be submitted as evidence of insanity.

Thursday, 1 October 2009

Cults: our microcosmic mirrors.




Anonymous said...

My comment:

The ongoing "FOF discussion" is a nonsense discussion because there is NO sincere DISCUSSION!

Most of the participants are former teacher's pets (Bob's pets) and they are caressing each other and hunting and banning the truth.

ACTING is an ugly word for them because they swim in that intellectual/spiritual Burton inheritance and they are really not willing to leave it or to act against the crimes of the FOF.

Inventing every day feeble excuses for their famous FOF discussion to ruminate the relationship of dependence again and again!



Hi Anonymous,

I've worked on the idea of cults and society again because the ideas in the post yesterday seemed to touch on the issue but were too long and too many. I feel I'm finally being able to unite the two worlds outside and inside the cult and making some sense of the madness. It helps me personally a great deal. Thank you for stimulating me to work on it. I suppose being excluded from the fofblog for not submitting to the ideology that supports cults makes perfect sense!

...........


A freely chosen response from an individual's conscience implies a mature human being. THIS concept is not common in our societies today. What our societies acknowledge is that at 18, an individual is responsible for his actions but by the tremendous abuses of people way above that age, we can see that age is not a measure to maturity, conscience or consciousness. A child that screams when abused is much more conscious than a man that obeys when dominated by the hierarchic authoritarian institution that exploits him psychologically and economically. THAT DEFINES CULT behaviour: the willingness to submit to abuse. But that behavior is not ONLY common in cults: in cults it has been perfectly MASTERED but it is just as common in the average institution of both capitalism and communism based on economic or political power. POWER of some over others is the cause of the inhumanity. POWER: that abstract quality that conditions each and every one of our relationships: Economic, political, emotional, sexual, intellectual POWER over each other: "If you are not willing to submit we are not willing to allow you to participate at dinner in the home, at school in childhood and in a job in society. We exclude you" We have made "SUBMISSION" the condition for love and life. Sexual submission is what Robert wanted from the boys and the submission of each member's "being" what he wanted from the members. The economic structure submits people's work force in the industries but in doing so it rendered the human being equally submissive emotionally and intellectually to dictators and gurus. Unlike the king the dictator is not a symbol of integrity but the reality of social disintegration. A true democracy must bring the individual to hold the integrity that was symbolized by the king. 

What is MASTERED in cults is the WILLINGNESS of the average human being today to submit to psychological and economical slavery so that he can participate in the community. It is the last option of a people who are looking for "meaning" in their lives. When "work" became "the job", human beings disconnected from meaning and community in the practice of their work. The work lost connection with culture and submitted to production. When making money replaces serving the community, the “meaning” of life is lost: the living dialogue between the individual and the community is stifled.

We are sick people: The "ideal" "professional" of today is a man without feelings. The T.V. hero is a man without family: a killer without emotions but so called ideals designed to defend the status quo. Cult members search in the cult for the community that society has failed to offer.

It's in society that religion, politics and economy have separated and severed the inner coherence of the individual as powerfully as the external incoherence. Man's economic life has disconnected from man's emotional and intellectual life just like art has disconnected from science, science from economy and economy from religion and politics, which have become subordinate to the power of the economically privileged. The governments have been corrupt manipulators of politics for the benefit of a few just like the guru is a manipulator of religion for his own inner circle. The conditioned structure, that is, the mental, emotional and instinctive conditioning is already in place long before people join the cult.

The external organisation of our societies has been sculpting the internal schizofrenia of its individuals. There is no inner coherence in our inner world because there is no external coherence in the outside world in which we grow up. It is not that a few are sick but that most are sick. “People” “other human beings” have become our enemies: “the idiots on my road”, the noisy neighbours, the undesirable tourists, vandals, hooligans, criminals. We live in fear of each other getting together in clubs, clans, cults, in which we reconstruct the incoherence that we "introverted" from society and perfect and recreate the systematic abuses in the microcosmic reality of the Cult.

To be able to heal from Cults we not only need to reconstruct our lives but the life of our societies.


Greg G. Goodwin


Elena, how do you explain your own many years as an active participant in a sodomy cult? The FOF is designed to maintain Robert Earl Burton in luxury while he sodomizes as many 'male members' per day as possible and you unwittingly helped in that enterprise for a number of years. Why did you and I do it? How could we be so stupid?

As always your friend in complete and utter insanity, Greg W. Goodwin



Hi Greg, the problem with putting comments is that they get lost over time. I hadn´t seen your comment until today. Please try to post posts so that they don't get lost and for the new people I think if you sign in to google then you can sign in here and post without my ever knowing who you are if that's what you want. 


I think the recent posts are explaining fairly well why we join a cult. There is nothing wrong with the reasons for joining, everyone needs other people. It's what happens to us inside what is so difficult to understand but the more we understand mind control environments the more we understand how we stayed there and supported it. 


Thanks for writing.
Elena

Extremism: Cults, gangs and Terrorists


I realize most of you cannot and do not want to read all the information I am posting. Time and interest both count. Allow me nevertheless to keep adding valuable information to our research on cults. The following is a very interesting article from an FBI executive. What is most surprising about it is that he's saying almost the same thing I was saying earlier today in Cults as a result of inhuman capitalism and communism. The approach is nevertheless equally interesting and practical. The parallel between cults, gangs and terrorist also of extreme significance. A few FOF members today would be a little shaken by the comparison but there it is, clearly stated. 






August 1995

Extremism: Cults, Gangs, and Terrorists
by Edward J. Tully


In considering the large number of people who pose a threat to a law enforcement officer, there are three groups that bear an officer's or police executive's special consideration: cults, youth gangs and terrorists.
These groups have been brought to special attention in light of the bombing of the World Trade Center, the riots of Los Angeles and Las Vegas and the sustaining role of youth gangs in each; the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and the matter with the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. All of these events received a tremendous amount of publicity, however, less publicized and less serious variations of these events occur almost on a daily basis in the United States and Canada. Some of these daily acts are caused by members of cults, youth gangs or terrorist groups.
The common thread that runs through these groups and all hate groups is members who have abnormal psychological needs or serious psychological problems. Membership in these groups apparently addresses an individual's personal needs and provides them with much needed peer support -- vital to sustaining their interest. It is also the reason some members will go to great lengths in proving, to other members, their worthiness. Their greatest fear is that the group will reject them, therefore, they become intensely loyal, provide as much financial support to the group as possible, fervently accept the beliefs of the group and follow orders and rituals that they might otherwise reject.
Each of these groups contains a number of individuals, who by any measure, would be called extremists. Extremists are individuals who hold beliefs that would lie on the extreme edges of the bell curve. They act upon their beliefs with complete disdain for the law or other consequences. The number of these individuals in any group are not great, however, with access to explosives and weapons of war, a few extremists can cause a great deal of damage to a highly technical society.
Holding an extreme view on an issue is common to all of us at one time or another. However, when an individual's extreme opinions lead them to violate the law, or the basic rights of others, then they have exceeded the bounds of civilized behavior. Excellent examples of extremist actions are the murder of a doctor in Pensacola, Florida by an anti abortionist and the bombings of the Unabomer.
An individual's unwillingness to hear the other sides of an issue or to compromise their basic beliefs, despite evidence to the contrary, is the key to holding extremist views. Although some are blessed with above average intelligence, the extremist has a mind set that is closed. Most extremists have deep-seated psychiatric problems, an antisocial personality, and -- to make matters worse -- are intellectually lazy. The extremist merely accepts a set of beliefs on a subject -- most likely from another individual -- and then disregards additional information on the subject should it tend to undermine the basic set of beliefs.
In the mind of the extremist there is no time or place for intuition, inquisitiveness, discussion, debate, or research. The closed mind of the extremist is content with the status quo. They only hear information that reinforces the original beliefs. The set of beliefs becomes the psychological balm that eases his/her mental problems. The most dangerous extremist is one who decides to act upon his beliefs to influence or intimidate others into accepting their viewpoints. At this point the extremist becomes a terrorist and an extreme danger to the public and law enforcement officers!
Cults
A cult is a close-knit community with a membership ranging from a few dozen to thousands of people. Currently there are several thousand cults active in the United States and Canada. We have cults of zealous believers in God, cults that worship Satan, and cults that strive to understand the universe. It seems as if any offbeat idea can become the central core of belief for some people who believe in nothing and, thus, will believe in anything.
Members of a cult share a strongly held belief system and have a very high level of social cohesiveness. Behavioral norms of the group deeply influence members. They often believe the leader of the cult has divine powers and/or influence. Cults recruit their members from a segment of society that is unhappy with their lives, under some form of psychological distress, or alienated from their family and friends. Cults offer the individual an atmosphere of unconditional acceptance and support. In addition, the beliefs of the cults and the direction offered by the charismatic leader offer a solution to both personal and world problems. Upon acceptance of these beliefs and the authority of the cult leader, members feel a profound change in their lives, relief of neurotic stress and a sense of well-being.
This relief produces an intense loyalty to the group. In turn, the group uses this emotion to control the new member. If the new member does not comply with group norms then the other cult members withdraw their support, leaving the new member in a state of acute distress. As you can imagine, peer support is an extremely powerful force on the new member and is often beneficial to the new member's behavior. For the most part, membership in a cult is psychologically more beneficial than damaging to members provided, of course, that you consider the mental state of the new member at the time of recruitment.
The most serious problem with a few cults lies in the behavior of the leader and his/her closest advisors. Unfortunately, many cult leaders begin to believe they have the divine powers ascribed to them by their followers. As the British historian Lord Acton once said, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely." So it is with some cult leaders! They become corrupted by their power which is derived from the devotion of the cult and the acceptance of their divine status. As the neurosis of some cult leaders deepens, they develop acute paranoia and use their imagined fears as a means to increase group cohesion.
They convince their followers that all outsiders, particularly law enforcement officers, are their enemies. This leads to measures to isolate the group from society and to make unusual and abusive demands on the members. In its most zealous state, the cult will come into conflict with the surrounding community. This conflict is usually generated by the cult's strange beliefs and practices, or by their open hostility to non members and the families of new members.
Time moderates or dissipates most cults. This is, primarily, due to ineffective leadership or, perhaps, the members tire of the rigid, closed society and desire a return to a more normal life. However, recent history suggests that certain events within a cult, primarily the deepening insanity of the leader, can lead to mass suicide of the cult members. We observed this type of tragedy in Jonestown, Guyana and Waco, Texas. Most recently, 53 members of the Order of the Solar Temple committed suicide near Geneva, Switzerland and Montreal, Canada.
From a law enforcement perspective only a few of the thousands of cults pose a serious and difficult problem. The problem rests with the behavior of the leader toward cult members and their combined behavior toward the surrounding communities. Obviously, in the early stage of development most cults do not pose a serious threat to its members or the community. However, should the cult leader begin to demonstrate behavior that suggests deepening mental instability, then the entire criminal justice system is faced with a serious and potentially dangerous problem. A recent example of this was the release of poison gas in the Tokyo subway system by Aum Shinri Kyo (Supreme Truth) cult members.
In recent times confrontation with a cult as a tactic of law enforcement has not produced the desired or expected effects. On the contrary, confrontation sometimes furnishes the leader with an additional reason to lead the cult into the ultimate rejection of earthly authority: mass suicide. We observed this result with the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. In this case, law enforcement officers were merely members of an audience at a play written, directed and produced by David Koresch. It was a play in which he was the main actor. He had written the script of insanity long before the audience arrived. What was strange about the Branch Davidian case is that some critics blamed the audience for the eventual outcome, rather than the playwright. What this says about cults is that most people, including law enforcement, do not know much about their innerworkings or psychology. This needs to change!
Knowing a cult's innerworkings will go a long way toward developing an understanding of the cult's leadership and their mental condition. If you develop information that suggests the cult is engaged in criminal activities, then you design measures to neutralize their violent and criminal actions. In this regard, legitimate legal questions may be raised if law enforcement uses informants, undercover operatives, and electronic intercepts to gain knowledge about the cult's activities or to spread dissent among cult members in an effort to neutralize the influence of the cult leader. However, if care is exercised in getting reliable information for the issuance of an appropriate search warrant, then this additional oversight of the court should be sufficient to rebut criticism regarding illegal search and seizure and/or the separation of church and state issues.
Should an arrest of cult members be planned, it goes without saying that the arrest plan be carefully crafted with particular emphasis given to staging the arrest outside of the cult's headquarters. This shifts the tactical advantage to law enforcement and away from the cultists.
Gangs
Much has been written recently on the nature and composition of youth gangs and need not be reviewed. Youth gangs have flourished in our large cities -- usually in the poor, ethnic neighborhoods -- for well over 100 years. The fundamental purpose of gangs is to provide structure and social cohesion to a group of youths who have little family influence in their lives. They view the gangs as a substitute for a family.
It is easy to understand this part of gang culture. What is more difficult to comprehend is why gang members engage in incredibly adolescent behavior in claiming and defending their turf. If cults and militia groups have to invent enemies to obtain group cohesion, then it is reasonable to conclude that gangs use turf for the same purpose. In recent years, the decline in the quality of public education in the inner cities and the spread of handguns throughout this population has resulted in a significant increase in the murder rate among gang members. Drive-by shootings are the favorite form of recreation of youth gang members. The death toll from this activity far exceeds that of the killings resulting from drug trafficking by gang members.
It is also quite possible that membership in a youth gang provides the young member with a form of excitement. This is a powerful force with a mind that is undeveloped, lacking in self-discipline, absent of normal cultural values and bored with a normal lifestyle. To this youthful mind the gang offers the allure of sex, drugs and the exercise of power through the possession of a weapon. Youth gangs will be with us until we can substitute activities that are just as appealing to young people. This will be a difficult but not impossible challenge for community and law enforcement leaders.
From a metropolitan law enforcement perspective, the continued decline of the inner city -- in terms of basic infrastructure -- the quality of life and, most importantly, the quality of public education can only be viewed as a social disaster. Why are we surprised when children of the inner city begin to have trouble living in society? Single parents incapable of transmitting cultural values, incapable of providing early education and supervision, and devoid of most usual parenting skills raise most of these children.
If one also considers the inferior quality of education received at inner city schools, the lack of religious education and the negative peer pressure from children living in a similar situation; it becomes more clear why many of these children have little chance to succeed in life. Finally, grinding poverty, a lack of hope and positive role models, and a life overly influenced by a disgraceful mass media (driven by enormous greed and total lack of social responsibility) erases any doubts that these children are at risk!
Is it any wonder that many youths in our poorer neighborhoods join gangs, distribute and consume narcotics, and grow into dysfunctional human beings incapable of rational judgment? Their own lives and the lives of those around them have little meaning. Violence is a way of life. Death -- many of them proclaim -- will come to them in a short time.
There are at least three fundamental reasons for the creation of such a hapless group of young people in our metropolitan areas in the United States during the past 40 years. First, all levels of government have been unable to solve the basic problems that caused the rapid deterioration of the inner city. In fact, it could be argued that a variety of government welfare programs have harmed the poor far more than they have helped. Second, the erosion of the cities industrial base has created a situation in our inner cities, which we have not seen in metropolitan areas for over a century. Finally, the lack of jobs and the fear of crime drove the middleclass into the suburbs. The combination of the above three factors, plus our unwillingness to place most of the blame on the individual has created an environment in the inner cities that can only be described as miserable.
So, as a result of 40 years of bumbling government, we now have a deteriorated urban infrastructure, a population increasingly unemployable, a lack of quality jobs, an insufficient tax base and incredible levels of violence. In simple terms we have a complex problem that we will not solve overnight. In fact, it may take 50 years to reconstruct our most troubled cities.
Should we decide to reconstruct the inner cities, the police will be expected to keep the public order. We should note that reconstruction will never be successful unless the fear of crime in the city is reduced! This task of keeping order will test metropolitan police as nothing before in their history. It will be necessary to find a policing method that makes a difference. The answer may be community based policing. However, if this method does not work, a more draconian method will have to be employed.
Our primary enemy in maintaining some semblance of order during the long period of reconstruction will be the youth gangs. They are filled with rage and self-hatred. They harbor a hatred of the system and lack the emotional ability to move from adolescence to adult maturity. They will continue to roam the streets victimizing the weak, the elderly, and all persons with whom they come into contact. Drive-by shootings, drug dealing, carjackings, extortion and a host of other criminal acts, will continue to be their way of life and death! One way, or another, members of youth gangs must learn that acts have their consequences!
The future of our inner cities is not particularly pleasant! Currently, there is no known trend or politically acceptable solution to the problems on the horizon. Consequently, the problems of our inner cities will only become worse in the next 10 or 20 years. Most of the people who are forced to live in the inner cities are good people. However, in an atmosphere of fear, violence, and high drug usage they are virtually powerless against the influence of the criminal element. To make a difference these good people need an ally. The police, schools, and churches are their only hope. To date, few of their hopes for strong allies have been realized! The problem is not completely intractable -- the cities can be saved. If we have the will to do so, and if we use our famous ingenuity, we can improve the quality of life. It will not be an easy task, but when considering the alternatives, what other choices do we have?
Terrorists
A terrorist is an individual, or group of individuals, who use terror to achieve political ends. A terrorist might be a member of a cult, or a youth gang. They could also be the military arm of a political party, exponents of a fundamentalist religion, or employed by a sovereign state to achieve objectives that the state cannot be achieved overtly.
Whatever the case may be, the terrorist in our time has been clever, reasonably intelligent, extremely destructive and very difficult for law enforcement to neutralize or apprehend. The terrorist is also a cold-blooded, cynical killer whose concern for innocent victims is nil. Although terrorist acts pose a complex, resource-taxing, and difficult investigation for a law enforcement agency, the success of these investigations in North America over the last 35 years has been excellent. Many unseen victories have also been achieved in preventing terrorist acts, although as one would expect, there has been little publicity surrounding these cases. The key to a successful law enforcement effort against the terrorist is collaboration between law enforcement agencies. Notwithstanding some brilliant police work against terrorists in North America, the day of the terrorist is not over.
Please consider the recent report by James Brooke in The New York Times, July 3, 1995, concerning the narco-terrorists of Colombia. In the last three months the Colombian terrorist groups have: killed 157 persons; blown up oil pipelines; kidnapped 35 people; exploded a bomb in Colombia's Congress building; and murdered two American missionaries that they had held hostage for 17 months. Brooke stated that terrorists killed at least 3,000 people in Colombia each year.
Terrorists earn millions of dollars each year through kidnaping and extortion as well as protecting drug traffickers. Their incentive is money, not social justice. Terrorism has become a job -- an occupation -- a means for many Colombians as well as many Irish, Palestinians and fundamental Muslims all over the world to earn a living and in some cases get rich.
In Ireland the Irish Republican Army (IRA) has killed more than 200 law enforcement officers assigned to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Belfast, Ireland over the past 15 years. Thousands of innocent civilians have also died during the same period. Many experts consider the IRA to be the most cold-blooded and efficient terrorist group in the world. The sophistication of their bombs and organizational structure make the IRA a most formidable enemy of law enforcement. Much like the Colombian terrorists, the IRA has lost its ideological base and now finds terrorism to be a profitable occupation.
The world is also plagued by dozens of Muslim fundamentalist groups involved in terrorist activities. A few groups represent sides in the continuing theological battle between the Sunni and Shia sects of the Muslim religion. Most view the culture and civilization of the Western world as destructive to their core beliefs. Other groups adamantly oppose the presence of the Israeli state in the Middle East and any friend of Israel in the world community. Libya, Palestine, Iraq and Syria sponsor some better known groups. Other groups, which may not be state-sponsored, can be found in Iran, Sudan, Egypt, Pakistan, Philippines, Afghanistan, Lebanon, or wherever the Muslim religion is found. To determine the potentiality of religious-based terrorism, look at what has happened to Lebanon, Bosnia, and the entire Middle Eastern region. You are forced to reach the conclusion that terrorism has the ability to paralyze any society and, in the process, turn the landscape into ashes.
Few law enforcement authorities underestimate the destructive power of dedicated terrorist groups. Armed with sophisticated weaponry, skilled in bomb making, and highly motivated -- either through money, ideology, or theology -- a modern terrorist group has used terror as a means to bring their various causes to the attention of the world. Whether they are successful in having their grievances settled by the political process is immaterial. The purpose of the terrorist is to get the cause of the agenda of discussion by political and other leaders! This is a mind-set that we have a hard time comprehending. Nonetheless, it is a technique that has worked in the past and will be used in the future by people who believe their situation is desperate!
Most law enforcement agencies in the United States are not equipped or structured to conduct an ongoing investigation of a terrorist group. This is particularly so if the group is foreign-based. In fact, no single law enforcement agency could handle this task. It takes the cooperation and collaboration of many agencies at the federal, state, and local level to effectively blunt the effects of either local or foreign-based terrorist groups. The investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing is an excellent modern example of how law enforcement agencies working together can achieve significant results.
Currently, neither international nor domestic terrorism plague the United States or Canada. Although both countries have experienced isolated terrorist acts in the recent past, there does not seem to be a developing trend of terrorism nor is there any group that is suspected of being involved in terrorist activities. Unfortunately, it is most likely that the virus of terrorism will spread to North America sooner, rather than later. It is reasonably apparent that the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York was a motivating factor in the Oklahoma City case. Still these bombings do not constitute a cause for alarm that terrorism will become more widespread in the United States or Canada in the near-term future. However, these two cases have alerted us to the enormous dangers of terrorism.
Most Americans and Canadians think terrorism could never happen, or take root, in our respective societies. At best, this is wishful thinking as it ignores the fact that both societies contain a variety of conditions, or political, reasons for homegrown or foreign based terrorists to strike against the government.
In Canada, the political struggle between Quebec and the other provinces may devolve into terrorism. Here in the United States it is possible, but perhaps not probable, that a cult, or youth gang might also resort to a planned program of terrorism to achieve their thoughtless objectives. One group perhaps likely to resort to terrorism in the near future in the United States is the Pro-Life group involved in the movement against legalized abortion.
The only prudent course of action for law enforcement is to continue to be watchful and proactive in trying to control terrorist activities. In this regard, the establishment of a better intelligence network capable of gathering, analyzing, and sharing information is essential. Our present system is too parochial to be effective. In all too many cases Lady Luck was the most important factor in preventing or solving cases involving terrorists!
Conclusion
North America, which includes the United States, Canada and Mexico, is undergoing radical change in virtually every aspect of our society, workplace and culture. A technical revolution in the workplace is spawning these changes. Thus, our most serious problem is that present and future job markets will reward only those who have high educational or technical skills. Those workers not afforded an appropriate education will not find good jobs. This is happening in our present job market and soon this trend will affect millions of additional workers.
As technology impacts on every aspect of our lives, most people have been -- consciously or not -- seriously affected by the changes. Our basic core values are being gradually destroyed by individuals not having values or having a different interpretation of what is to be valued. The religious underpinning of the old value system has weakened considerably. Unless the religious aspect of our lives is restored, then those values that best represent our culture will dissipate. Efforts to restore or maintain our old value system will not happen without a considerable political struggle. Should economic conditions significantly worsen I expect this struggle will involve considerable violence.
In an atmosphere of extensive, fundamental change, it is quite natural for many to seek stability in their lives. They tend to reject those things they find troubling in their lives or jobs. It is during times of radical change that many people develop an anti-government, anti-society, or an anti-change attitude. It is why some individuals turn to fundamental religions and/or to a conservative political philosophy. It is also why any anti-establishment cause has some appeal, why certain persons reject religion by joining causes that are anti-religion, why employees in organizations resist and sabotage change, and why so many people just want to be left alone.
None of what has been discussed in this article is particularly good news to the law enforcement officer. In simple terms our job is to nudge the radical fringes of all the competing groups into the middle of the road, in terms of using an acceptable political process to settle differences or to effect change. Our job is not to take sides. An excellent example of this is the current struggle between those who defend abortion and those who oppose the practice. As we have seen, our role in the abortion conflict has not been easy, although, most critics would admit we have performed our duties evenhandedly. Our role is to prevent violence from being used as a tactic by either side of the abortion argument. I think this example is instructive about how we must handle this aspect of our basic mission in the future. This will require that officers have a great understanding of social issues, a strong determination to preserve law and order, and the solid investigative skills so they can determine those individuals, or factions, whose only purpose in life is to wantonly destroy what it has taken good people over two hundred years to build!
The National Executive Institute Associates Leadership Bulletin editor is Edward J. Tully. He served with the FBI as a Special Agent from 1962 to 1993. He is presently the Executive Director of the National Executive Institute Associates and the Major City Chiefs. You can reach him via e-mail at tullye@aol.com or by writing to 308 Altoona Drive, Fredericksburg, Virginia 22401

fofblog - I know

This I know character is so obviously a fellowchill that it's funny how people even indulge in conversation with him. It's very interesting to look at the techniques they use to transmit the message they want and how effective it is. His name "I know" is very good because people are naive enough and if he knows, he knows! Then he limits himself to say a few good things about the Fellowship and a few not so good knowing that the message will get through in the unfiltered mind.

I know little about such techniques but he makes them obvious: he knows!

Mrs. Pilkington and her daughter in England


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6245461/Fiona-Pilkington-Will-we-hear-the-next-cry-for-help.html
Bardon Road in Barwell, Leicestershire is not syringe city. Yesterday morning, one of Fiona Pilkington's former neighbours was taking advantage of the autumn sunshine to paint his garage door a tasteful shade of sage green, while mothers pushed well-dressed children past front gardens adorned with statuary, water features and hanging baskets.
The suburban serenity of the scene makes it all the more shocking that, almost exactly two years ago, Pilkington reached such a pitch of despair about the torment she was subjected to by neighbouring youths that she gave her 18-year-old daughter, Frankie, the family rabbit to hold, drove to a lay-by on the nearby A47 and set fire to their car. With the nights closing in, she believed death was the only way they could find peace.
Hallowe'en and Guy Fawkes' night were for her not just a passing nuisance, but the low point in a year-round cycle of horror that she had endured for a decade. Using trick-or-treating and fireworks as an excuse, yobs would post lighted bangers through her door and light fires on the ground in front of her three-bedroom semi. Fiona Pilkington, 38, had complained to the police no fewer than 33 times about such incidents, as well as several vicious attacks on her son, Anthony, and mockery of Frankie, who had severe learning difficulties.
Neither the police, nor any of the agencies who should have been supporting a vulnerable family, had responded to her cries for help. After a decade of being ignored, she had become resigned to the authorities being "too busy" to deal with what they considered low-level nuisance behaviour.
Almost the most shocking thing about this case is that we might not know about this failure to help her if it weren't for Olivia Davison. The assistant deputy coroner for north Leicestershire fought police attempts to impose reporting restrictions on the inquest and, despite the police lawyer's protest about her "robust, challenging and judgmental approach", she asked the questions that all of us would want answered.
Had she not done so, we might not know how easy it is for the weakest in society to get the rawest of deals. Fiona Pilkington had learning difficulties herself and was suffering from depression. She was facing the moment when Francecca was about to leave the special-needs school where she had been happy for 14 years, and start life as an adult. With little support and nothing to look forward to, Pilkington despaired.
This case is being hailed as the Stephen Lawrence moment for disability hate crime. But it also marks a turning point in our tolerance of anti-social behaviour, on which Britain has a worse record than other European countries. "That could be because the public are less willing to intervene," says Rick Muir of the Institute of Public Policy Research, "and children spend less time with their parents."
Yesterday, in his speech to the Labour Party conference, Gordon Brown dared to talk of "mums and dads... who let their kids run riot". Labour is now wooing all those who are sick of seeing parents absolved from blame for their children's behaviour.
He could not take any other line because commentators of every political hue are shocked that a gang of youths were able to make this family's life such a misery – especially in an apparently comfortable street like Bardon Road. One of Pilkington's neighbours, sitting in a neat living room decorated with pictures of his young children, defends the neighbourhood.
"My girlfriend is not afraid to walk around here at night, as we would be in some areas of Birmingham, London or Leicester," he says. "The families concerned are not as bad as have been portrayed: at least you can talk to them. One of the boys held responsible once stole a bike from us; when I told the parents, it was returned."
If the teenage tormentors weren't hardened criminals, it is even more extraordianry that they weren't stopped, but this man knows why he and others didn't take a stand. They thought it was futile. "These days you can't touch kids, and they know it. If you have a go at them, they will try to intimidate you. The laws have become so technical that instead of protecting people, they have made the world more unstable."
To illustrate his point, he says: "My nephew was bullied on his first day at school, but when I talked to the bully, the police came to see me." His experience echoes last week's news that a dinner lady was sacked for telling parents that a pupil at the school where she worked was tied up and whipped with a skipping rope.
It is a skewed world when the police are quicker to take action against well-meaning adults than they ever were in response to Pilkington's complaints. "There have always been unruly kids," says David Green, director of the think tank Civitas, "but other parents don't stop them now because they can't say 'I'll call the police'.
"They know, and the kids know, that the police either won't turn up or won't do anything about it. If they do, they will be told off by their superiors for taking an action that cannot be measured against a target for crime reduction."
In that case, what point is there in Gordon Brown announcing yesterday that: "Wherever there is disruptive behaviour, we will be there to fight it"? A public grown cynical about the effectiveness of parenting orders and Anti-Social Behaviour Orders will shrug despairingly at the thought of more families getting the Family Intervention treatment that Brown claims has an 80 per cent success rate. But Honor Rhodes, development director of the Family and Parenting Institute, believes that Brown is right in seeing it as an effective tool for tackling problem families.
What works well, she believes, is a whole-family approach (such as social services no longer use). It must involve a range of agencies from housing to health, schools to social services, the police, even parking enforcement, "We've got to let these families experience the consequences of the life they lead, one of the most effective being to demote their tenancy of their home if they don't comply with parenting skills training. These people are scary and you have to show them that you mean business. They need to know that it's not OK, for example, for teenagers to wander around until 11 at night, they should be in by nine, and that if they aren't, the parents risk losing their home."
She used to sit on the Nuisance Neighbour Expert Panel to which the worst cases were referred from all over the country. "Often these very troubled families frighten housing officers and social workers, so the people who end up working with them are the least qualified, such as Police Support Officers.
"When the right people take action together, you get results. One family reported to us ended up not being allowed to look out of their windows because people were walking an extra mile and a half just to avoid going past their house."
Before such action can be taken, the authorities need to be alerted to the trouble-makers. The Home Office's Respect website, which puts a price tag of £3.4 billion on anti-social behaviour, begs us all to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to disruptive neighbours. Just dial 101, it says, to reach the 24-hour complaints service. Sadly, that only exists in Hampshire, Cardiff, Northumberland, Sheffield and Leicester City (but not nearby Barwell). Elsewhere, you will struggle to find someone within the local authority or police to take an interest.
Extending that service, and freeing the police to take action would be two useful outcomes to the soul-searching prompted by this sad case. But it isn't only the authorities who need to be more vigilant.
The death of these two women diminishes us all. Without getting sentimental about the imaginary days when everyone lived around the village green and popped into houses to borrow sugar, it is a reminder that we are all so busy getting and spending that we ignore what is going on under our noses. As Pilkington's neighbour says, "Lots of people were worried, but which of us did something?"
Perhaps we could all start by thinking about one of the coroner's most pertinent questions: "Why did no one sit and chat to her over a cup of tea about her problems?"

Telecom suicides in France


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113352329&ps=cprs


While the economic crisis is taking its toll on workers everywhere, it seems to have been particularly deadly for one French company: In the past year and a half there have been 24 suicides at France Telecom. And many of the employees who took their lives directly blamed the company in suicide notes.

The latest death came on Monday when a 51-year-old man jumped from a highway bridge in the French Alps. The employee, who was married with two children, left a note blaming the work atmosphere for his decision to end his life. Eight suicides have taken place since the beginning of the summer alone. One young woman jumped from her office window. Another man hanged himself in his cubicle.

Calls For CEO's Resignation

Sad and angry workers gathered at France Telecom offices around the country this week, including its headquarters in Paris.

Gauthier Rollin, 52, has been employed by the company for 20 years. He says the work environment has been unbearable since France Telecom was privatized a decade ago.

"France Telecom has spent its time breaking up teams and breaking down solidarity," Rollin says. "They cultivate individualism and selfishness. So the support you might have found amongst colleagues in difficult times is not there. France Telecom manages its employees like cattle."

A former state monopoly, France Telecom was privatized in 1998 and now competes on the world market. It has undergone several major reorganizations in recent years and cut 22,000 jobs in the past two years. But company officials say those were voluntary departures and that the firm is the only telecom giant not to have carried out mass layoffs

France Telecom's chief executive, Didier Lombard, is facing calls to quit. There are also calls for an inquiry into working conditions blamed for pushing staff over the edge. Lombard was booed as he arrived at headquarters Tuesday.

"The pressure is necessary because we have to compete on the world market," Lombard told reporters. "But there is a way to be more humane in doing so."

France Telecom has suspended the company's "Time to Move" program, which forced managers to change posts every three years. It has also put in place a team of psychologists to help workers.

Vicious Globalization Or Cynical Management?

The suicides have become the talk of TV news shows and newspaper editorial pages. In a country where five weeks of vacation and the 35-hour workweek are supposed to cut down on work stress, there has been much fulminating over the cause of the suicides.

Workplace lawyer Christophe Mesnooh says they may be linked to France Telecom's specific situation.

"Because of France Telecom's change in status from a public company to a private firm subject to free-market forces, the management had the heavy task of explaining this new world to its employees," Mesnooh says. "And the irony is that the company has communicated much better with the market and its competitors than with its own employees."

As the debate rages whether the suicides were provoked by vicious globalization, the company's cynical management, or mollycoddled state workers being made to face up to reality, France Telecom seems to be doing its utmost to avoid another one. One trade union has suggested the government levy a suicide tax on companies to make sure they maintain a decent work environment.

fofblog - sincere?

Anonymous,

Are you really understanding the problem? My problem perhaps is that I do feel they are sincere, it's their sincerity what is brainwashed! But that is precisely the problem with people in cults. That they are sincerely supporting the abuses!

Don't you feel Tatyana, Ellen etc are sincere? Even Old FOF and Ames? Ames has been fighting the cult in his own way for years, there's sincerity there. What they don't seem to be able to reach is a place in themselves that can act on their understanding of the fact that they are dealing with criminals. It's ironic because they say: criminals, crimes, crimes, criminals and then say they can't stop it.

elena

I agree but hopefully some will see through that. Don't we  make the same mistake a hundred times before the tragedy shows us how mistaken we were?

Anonymous




My comment:

The ongoing "FOF discussion" is a nonsense discussion because there is NO sincere DISCUSSION!

Most of the participants are former teacher's pets (Bob's pets) and they are caressing each other and hunting and banning the thruth.

ACTING is an ugly word for them because they swim in that intellectual/spiritual Burton inheritance and they are really not willing to leave it or to act against the crimes of the FOF.

Inventing every day feeble excuses for their famous FOF discussion to ruminate the relationship of dependence again and again!

Cults, microcosmic mirrors of Society











I've worked on the idea of cults and society again because the ideas in the post yesterday were good but too long, too many and too ambitious. I hope this helps.

A freely chosen response from an individual's conscience implies a mature human being. THIS concept is not common in our societies today. What our societies acknowledge is that at 18, an individual is responsible for his actions but by the tremendous abuses of people way beyond that age, we can see that age is not a measure to maturity, conscience or consciousness. A child that screams when abused is much more conscious than a man that obeys when dominated by the hierarchic authoritarian institution that exploits him psychologically and economically. THAT DEFINES CULT behaviour. But that behavior is not ONLY common in cults: in cults it is ABSOLUTELY MASTERED; it is common in the average institution of both capitalism and communism based on economic or political power. POWER of some over others is the cause of the inhumanity. POWER: that abstract quality that conditions each and every one of our relationships. Economic, political, emotional, sexual, intellectual POWER over each other. "If you are not willing to submit we are not willing to embrace you" We have made "SUBMISSION" the condition for love making our selves INHUMAN. Sexual submission is what Robert wanted from the boys and the submission of each member's "being" what he wanted from the members. At least bosses in industries only demand physical submission, work force, but in doing so they rendered the human being incapable of not submitting emotionally and intellectually to dictators and gurus. 

What is ABSOLUTELY MASTERED in cults is the WILLINGNESS of the average human being of our times to submit to psychological and economical slavery so that he can participate in the community. It is the answer of a people who are looking for "meaning" in their lives. When "work" became "the job", human beings disconnected from meaning and community in the practice of their work. When what a man does has no meaning for his community, when the money he produces is the only issue involved, the “meaning” is lost. The lack of connectedness between his life and other people's stunts culture and develops a subculture or infra-culture that acts against both the individual and the community.

We are sick people and many have been saying so for a long time. The "ideal" "professional" of today is a man without feelings. The T.V. hero is a man without family: a killer without emotions but so called ideals designed to defend the status quo. Cult members search in the cult for the community that society has failed to offer.

It's in society that religion, politics and economy have separated and severed the inner coherence of the individual as powerfully as the external incoherence. Man's economic life has disconnected from man's emotional and intellectual life just like art has disconnected from science, science from economy, economy from religion and politics, which have become subordinate to the power of the economically privileged. The government is a corrupt manipulator of politics for the benefit of a few just like the guru is a corrupt manipulator of religion for his own benefit. The structure, the mental, emotional and instinctive conditioning is already in place long before people join the cult.
The external organisation of our societies has been sculpting the internal schizofrenia of its individuals. There is no inner coherence in our inner world because there is no external coherence in the outside world in which we grow up. “People” “other human beings” have become our enemies: “the idiots on my road”, the noisy neighbours, the undesirable tourists, vandals, hooligans, criminals. We live in fear of each other getting together in clubs, clans, cults, in which we reconstruct the incoherence that we received from society with faithful precision, perfecting the incoherence in the systematic abuses of the Cult: The microcosmic image of the inhumanity of today’s subculture.