lindyhopper

Are you crazy? Well, do you live on a farm? Cause if you are living in the middle of Houston, then I would say yes.

forgiveness = moving on/ letting go I think I have said that in so many words here before. I more or less agree with that in that it is a fairly liberal definition or explanation of one way of getting over a painful experience. My question is, is forgiveness (as it is typically referred to) really the tool used to get to the point that you can move on? I think perhaps in some situations, but not in all. Moving on is the goal, not forgiveness. Forgiveness certainly isn't the magic pill, the cure all, of bitterness, anger, and whatever else may hold you back. People willingly admit to "working" on forgiving for years concerning the same experience/people. Well, there are other people that spend years working on moving on by going to a therapist, or working it out in their art, or say posting on internet forums or any number or combination of things. Life is complicated and I don't think forgiving someone is necessary in every situation. Moving on is. Absolutely. A simple forgiving one of a wrong, though, does not miraculously heal you of all the damage and pain that something may have caused you. However you go about "moving on" you "work through it." It is work. It is a process. It takes time and everyone takes a different amount of time and may need a different process. Plus, even if you move on (as has been said here repeatedly) that doesn't mean you forget and it doesn't mean you stop talking about it. You don't forgive and suddenly become an expert on the type of pain and experiences others are dealing with. Just because you or I have moved on doesn't either. We all continue to learn and that learning process only happens with communication, discussing the good, that bad, and the ugly. I think it is important for us to keep this in mind, when speaking with people that are dealing with issues like we sometimes have here at the Gspot. Sometimes it is very healing to discuss experiences with people that understand and can sympathize through a common connection or similar experiences. I can't think of a verse that says that, but it is the truth. There are no formulas that fit everyone. Yet I see many times a standard concept of forgiveness being pedaled around like it is the elixir to cure the woes you may not even know you have! Many times I see it as yet another way to avoid dealing with the real issues, a tool to get past the bad moments, instead of getting to the root of what triggered these thoughts and emotions to surface. That is what gets me, and I imagine others here. The concept is not an issue. If it worked for you great, but it isn't a cure-all. That's my take on it anyway.

COOL! A Wierwille descendent with another farm looking for free labor. SIGN ME UP! Outside my comfort zone? Do they mean things like nude log splitting? That would kill it for me.

Damn, AJ, nice job with your music. Did you produce it all yourself, lyrics to mix? You've got skills man. I'm glad things are working out for you and if God is a part of that for you then cool. I have no problem with that. I don't feel bitter or a need to blame people really. There is obviously analyzing of the past that needs to be done at times. Like I said this is just my back story and it has made me who I am and for better or for worse I am pretty happy with the way I turned out thus far. It is pretty hard to be bitter when you are happy with yourself and with life, you know. It could have been a lot worse. Perhaps, and I don't mean this to be insulting, it is the same with many people and God. I'm happy, content, and don't feel a lacking or an empty spot in my life. We are all different and yet very similar. We all want happiness and love and to some degree answers in life. How we try and achieve those things can be very different. As long as we go about it in a non-destructive way then it's a good thing, IMO. I don't know about you but I have a lot of good memories as well. Cumulatively there is way more good than bad especially from my youth. So, I keep things in perspective.

Sorry to here about the things you're having to deal with right now, AJ. I was in the family corps with AJern. Looking back at times it seems somewhat surreal, like another life at times. Lately, the way I have come to view my Way experiences is that this is just my personal issue. Everyone has them. Whether it be divorce in the family (had that too), or Catholic school nuns beating you with rulers, or drugs and alcohol, or school violence, or inner city violence, or a disease you've had to live with, or deaths in the family, or long-term illness in the family, or a learning disability, or rape, or physical abuse, or verbal abuse, or spiritual abuse, or parents that were never there, or teenaged pregnancy, or a chemical imbalance, or the cult of your choice etc. etc. etc.... I have not met a person in this life that has not had some variation or combination of these kinds of things that has messed them up or strongly affected their personality or direction of their life. TWI is just my weird cult story. Yes, it has affected me. At first in my self esteem and then in my motivation and ability to do things on my own without "council" and "guidance." My tendencies toward parenting always seem to want to go back to how I was taught and raised. You deal. I am agnostic. Atheistic agnostic, maybe, lol. Don't worry....I'm OK. Did my TWi life lead me to that decision? Well, despite my want to control my destiny and my decisions in life absolutely, of course, it was part of it. The same way your backgrounds lead you to joining a cult. I guess perhaps my upbringing and my Way teaching of not having "faith," but needing proof and being logical etc. lead me to this point. The more challenging times in TWI, while not being the direct cause of my decision to leave, did help move me along a little quicker. In the end, the things that don't kill you and the things you don't allow to kill you slowly, make you stronger or at the very least, more interesting at parties. Life is just a wild mix of nature, nurture, and natural disaster and we all have our very own unique wonderfully screwed up lives: )

I think I posted on here a couple of years ago, maybe less, of a night I was looking around at info on E Stanley Jones and came across something that sounded a lot like VPW's train story. Can't find it now, but at the time it was another, WTF, moment. I love the parable about the guy who goes to a degree mill to get a fake Dr degree, but never finishes. Still somehow, by the grace of God I ssspose, he still becomes a "Dr" and then starts his own ministry using other people's work and so on. I forget the point being illustrated by the parable, but I'm sure it was good.

I am going to make a guess and say Norman Vincent Peale, Ex. Sounds exactly like his sort of thinking. I was thinking of Peale in light of how easily we swallowed this and other stories that seem so clearly messed up, made up, etc. now. At least for some of us. It got me thinking about Peale's ideas on autosuggestion, a kind of repetitive self hypnosis, and thought it would be interesting to go back and look at PFAL and look at it not just in terms of analyzing what VPW says but when and how often, etc. Much of the class, the way VPW, taught it, IMO, was Peale-esk in his delivery and the things he encouraged us to do. The "Law of Believing" is just a part of it. I wonder if the amount of info that was being thrown at us in a fairly short period of time (by design) with repetitions sayings, and encouragements of not thinking negatively, not questioning (both in terms of the rule of the class and in terms of the 2 Peter 3:20/ Gen 2 "fall" teaching, etc that's been discussed) distancing ourselves from unbelieving negative people and worldly media, etc etc etc. lulled us to an almost hypnotic sleep (some more than others maybe). I already think the whole thing was, by design, a con but I often wonder how crafty was this self proclaimed Dr. Shyster was.

I think most of the time you need the *nose* to truly appreciate the depth of a wine. The glass helps, but if you don't have the nose and a sensitive palate, a truly great wine will be lost on the uninitiated. I like the word "cash." It is the equivalent to cool, bad, bad a$$, awesome and of course "coolnosity". As in, +/_ODD, you are cash. This thread is totally cash. Like "you are so money, and you don't even know it" -swingers Salute!

Those would indeed be murder. Against the law, not to mention against nature. They were obviously pushed to insanity or went off medication or were just plain crazy or something. Don't know what they "believed," OCW, but I doubt being fearful of themselves killing their own children is what pushed them over the edge. I suspect VPW or LCM or perhaps some here might say those mothers were PO-ZEST! (fun way to say it, adds a little evil citrus flare) I still can't believe I missed that in VPW's PFAL story. Why did VPW die of ocular cancer? It was the FEAR in the heart of that smoker! Oh, and the Deeevil was out to get that grrrrreat man-O-God. What made that grrrreat man-O-God such a pervy sexual predator? It was the fear in the heart of his mother? It all makes so much sense now. Read me some more piffle WTH, I need a bed time story.

Yes, thank you very much, WTH, for posting the rest of the story. It hasn't been since I was in and still a Christian that I have read or heard the whole story again. You know what I now see in this, quite possibly made up, story? The woman goes to her minister for advise, council. The minister basically says pray and give them to God. Basically saying believe that God will take care of them. The very next thing in the story is a year later the kid is dead. VPW tells the story in a way that assumes the woman ignored her minister's advise and her fear kills her son. BUT, when the kid is killed the mother is not there. After years of walking him making sure he is safe she is not there. Looks to me that the mother took her minister's advise and gave her son to God that morning at the morning prayer. Then the minster says God took another rose pedal blah blah blah blah. I see this as a story about the blissfulness of faith. It certainly isn't about God's protection or God's love. It isn't really even about fear. VPW turned it into that, but really not all that subtly. The things we fell for. Boggles the mind. Forget WTH, it's more like WTF.

whoopsy

Exactly. It is also called "parenting." If you don't worry and fear for your child to some degree, you are not normal. The most obvious refutation of one of the stupidest doctrines in TWI is that there are actually children running around in the world! Non of us would be here today, much less have been around for that idiotic class. It gave an easy answer to those unanswerable hurt-filled "why" questions in life. To come down on the fear of a parent protecting and watching out for their kids is just lunacy. You want to come down on parents, point the finger at those that DON'T care enough to be fearful and careful enough to watch out and protect their kids from the many time obvious dangers in the world that a normal parent worries about.

Connerron, I ran into him a couple of years ago and we spoke a little about it. We were in the corps together and I knew his kids. I was wondering what kind of new information would have.... you can PM me I was just thinking about him the other day. I'm living rather close to his native island at the moment.

That must have happened in the last year or so, cause last I knew they were still in MD, limbing it up. We don't seem to be big fans of eachothers.

Of course it affects you. "How" will be about as unique of an answer as the person. Same as 6th grade gym class. Some people will have something happen in 6th grade gym that messes them up through high school. Another person will be over it by the next day. Another person will let it affect them the rest of their life and maybe is looking for you for what you did to them right now! :blink: I think I came out of 20 or so years of wayfer childhood/young adulthood relatively unscathed (compared to what I have heard others indured or to what could have happened.) On the other hand there are lingering effects I notice every now and again. It has directly affected my professional life. I left college after my second year because of the debt teachings. Went back years later after I left TWI. Didn't figure out what I wanted to do with my life professionally untill a few years after that. Can't complain though. I got a late start, but I figured out what makes me happy and what I want t do with my professional life in the end. All those experiences went into the process of making that decision as all the ones up to now will affect the next big one. I am in Grenada now with my family, as my wife goes to Med school here. Life is crazy. If you go with the flow it usually works out. If you go against the current, you fight the change in life's flow, or hold on to something (the past) it will tire you and eventually bring you down. (I'm not talking about conformity here, just life.) Who knows what the future holds for me at this point. Everyone will react differently and everyone not only has the variables of TWI but every other family, interpersonal, and genetic variable or other variables of self that uniquely shape our reactions and actions. I would say that depending on your kid's experiences and their age, it will impact them to a degree for a year or three, and then they will get over it and move on. Memories don't go away. Experiences don't change once they've happened. We are the artists, clumsy, foolish, shortsighted visionaries wielding, flinging, what we have at life. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't, but it all helps us with the next challenge that comes along. I am not angery with my parents. They are still involved and are still good people. I wish they were not involved still and it does affect us to a degree, IMO, but not to the end that any of us are upset with another. I took a couple years to get to that point. They like many people here probably think that something, someone in TWI has affected me negatively because I no longer consider myself a Christian. I am now agnostic, but I am still the same person I was when you get to my heart. So, yes I have moved on, it has had it's effects on me, and I care about somethings and don't care about others. It is like what I told my mom the night we had a little sit down after I stopped "fellowshipping" with TWI. She was upset because she felt she had done here best to keep me and my brothers out of harms way and the confusion and hurt of life, by raising us in "the Word." There I was throwing it all away and walking out from under His protection of the household. Her worries- genuine, not divisive, unfounded but genuine. I told her, "you try, most people do that and yet sh!t still happens to everyone and what it comes down to is what do you do with it. How do you react. That is what's important."

YOU CALL THIS A PARTY, HAM? I'm BLEEDING over here! BLEEDING! oh no wait that is just my bloody mary. I must have spilled it. BACK TO TOPIC this thread is screwed now.

Can you walk in love and hate your brother? Can you walk in love and be very upset and angry with your brother? Can you walk in love and be rather peeved with you brother? Can you walk in love and hate a person who claimed to be your brother but really isn't? Can you walk in love and hate a person that you don't know if they are your brother or not? Can you walk in love and not warn one brother of another brother who happens to be not walking in love, maybe even being E-ville? Can you walk in love and talk about how E-ville this brother of yours used to be and you don't know if he is still the same way or not because you can't get in touch with him, he can't get in touch with you, you grew apart from him since you got kicked out of the cult he was in charge of, he may be dead and perhaps talking about him helps you recover from his E-ville doings and perhaps helps another brother avoid that E-ville brother and the cult he used to run? Oh why weren't there MORE red letters in the Bible. Sometimes you really need them to tell you how to live. Here's one for ya. If God forgives everyone absolutely and bringing up past wrongs is evidence of lack of forgiveness then how is it that the Bible (if it is the God breathed WofG) isn't filled with only the good things about believer type people?

All the talk about warning others in the recent forgiveness type threads, got me wondering about this. Sure it is both, but is it more one than the other? How many people do you think GSC has warned? There has to be quite a few. I knew a couple, including my wife, (when she was just a friend) who mentioned WayDale when I was trying to get them to come to fellowship. There are a lot of us who have been here a while and all for relatively different reasons. Is it in someway part of the recovery though? I think for me it has been more about recovery... about moving on and sorting things out. The warning part seems nobel and I think it is a great side note, but this place for me has been more about the recovery. I always hate when people come on and try to get people to forgive and blanket all negative views with bitterness and hatefulness. It is silly to think that way. It is an unnecessary step IMHO in the literal sense. I heard somewhere that forgiving was not letting the offenders have control over you anymore. Moving on in a sense. That I have done. It was part of the recovery process, but not a critical or specific step along the way. I have heard form posters here that the things I have said have helped or done something good for them and that is awesome. Others I have really pi$$ed off:) To think that something I have said helped someone move in a direction away from a cult and more towards something better, seems unlikely to me, but would be really cool. So fore me - recovery which is it for you?

I don't think we can separate ourselves this way, our experiences from our decisions and actions. Everything touching effects and influences everything else. That being said, no one should blame themselves or their family etc for getting involved with a cult. So many things seem totally random to me. I know many of you will disagree with that and say you see the hand of God or something, but I see random variables all leading to a variety of experiences and decisions and all of them influencing the proceeding ones. I think of so many things in my life that if it would have happened a few minutes earlier or if I would have met that person a day or a week or an hour earlier or later how I would have reacted differently to them and it would have changed my life entirely. I don't loose sleep over this stuff. There is no formula. There is no 100% accurate profile. Of all the friends I have had in my adult life, or in my life since I have had friends that would talk openly about their life, I can't think of one that didn't have something messed up in their life. Most of the women I have known have been raped or physically abused. Most of the kids I grew up with had family issues. So many people I know, indeed my whole generation, come from divorced parents. Every family, whether they talk about it or not have at the very least stressful dynamics. Each person within that dynamic has their own subjective idea of their role in all that mess. It happens anytime people spend has much time together as a family does. You can't get away from them: ) Having two boys of my own now, I wonder how much of personality is nothing more then genetics. They are each so unique and different. The fact that my family was/is in a cult has less to do with them or me and more to do with the randomness of them meeting the people that got them involved at the particular moment that they did and the machinery and dogma and the charade of the cult. Whether it was you, me, or some other guy that was just previously browsing the religion and philosophy section of the bookstore a minute before you arrived and met the Wafer that saw you as she was walking by it seems rather random. I would also say that the local and national state of our culture has a huge effect on all this as well. I think the boom of TWI in the 60s and 70s was largely due to the culture at the time. The hippie movement. The sexual revolution. Women's rights developing. Vietnam. Etc. etc. Today, you won't see that in TWI. I don't think you will ever see it again. In part because of their own ills and in part because we are in the era of the mega-church and religious " market" where most people can get what they want and get inspired by these types of church groups. The variety of the music. The variety of the church groups. Singles. Married. Young. Old. Korean. African-american. GLT. Also, this is the information age. Not only is information on just about anything available at your fingertips, good, bad, and ugly (we fit in there somewhere), but online groups such as this exist for just about everyone. If you don't have a sense of family or belongingness at home or in your town, you can get it virtually on the internets. You can find freaks just like yourself somewhere online. The most important thing, though, is realizing that there was most likely NOTHING that you could have done to avoid joining the TWI and that it happened and that you are now the brilliant person that you are and what are you going to do with that reality NOW. Learning from mistakes, sure, avoiding the same in future absolutely, but are you going to be able to avoid those things that you don't know are going to hurt you? No. We just keep learning and adapting and evolving. I just live the best I can, using my head the best I can, and treat people with love and respect and usually that is what I get in return. Funny how that works. Like what Ex said.

This thread has really got me thinking. And what it reminds me of is THIS

Well, I thought I could come back and revise the poll, but it doesn't look like I can...or I haven't figured it out. I would add the "my child(ren) was abused" I guess I don't care so much about knowing whether it was man on man, or woman on man, or woman on woman, or man on woman, it is all equally bad in my book. I guess it might be intriguing to see how much homosexual abuse or harassment went on seeing as we were SO anti-gay in TWI. I am not looking to be representative of this community. I am just looking to see how much of this stuff happened to people in this community...or at least among those willing to say something about it. I realise this isn't the best way to get a true measure of it and I don't think percentages really make a difference when it comes to those that these things happened to. One in a million is too many. Doesn't lessen the damage, cruelty, sickness or profound impact of that one event. So I don't care if you weren't abused....but horray for you, plenty of others were. I am a little surprised of how many people were told or encouraged to get an abortion. Well, not that it happened (I know that teaching was going on) but only in that I have only heard of maybe one or two people's stories before. Very sad. ((((ladies/families)))) Maybe I haven't been paying much attention for a while. Maybe we should have a slot that says I definitely know of X number of people that don't post here that were sexually abused or harassed. and you should have been able to click more than one box if needed. Did I do that right? And I know that other incidents of abuse are valid as well, but I guess I was trying to weed out the people that were not apart of the TWI culture of sexual abuse. What I mean is, there were the teachings that at the very least implied the condoning of leaders taking advantage of the flock, and those teachings (as far as I remember) happened more at the advanced class level and up. Maybe I am wrong. So Joe Blow from fellowship may have been an abuser, but may not have been someone using TWI's teachings as an excuse justifying their actions. Does that make any sense? So, the condoning of spousal abuse would be one to add, for those reasons. I guess, these would be incidents that happened on lower than advanced class levels as well.

Reading Tex's story and blog I started wondering how many people here were subjected to this type of abuse. I know there have been plenty of discussions on the board before and plenty of people have come forward. I also know that there have been people on here who needed time before they came forward and perhaps there are still more in that sort of situation. I don't believe I have seen a poll of this nature before and I thought this would be a good way to get an anonymous count. If you have other ideas that you don't feel are covered in the poll but pertain to the topic let me know. I am trying to stick to leaders in TWI, ones that might be considered apart of this dark side of TWI culture and not just other random a-holes that were involved on lower levels. This obviously is not to minimize any other form of abuse that happened in TWI but just to get an idea of the scope of this particular area. -lindy

I would have thought time existed within God, not God being outside of it. There are indeed a lot of these questions. The only way I can see there being a semblence of a reasonable answer is to stop making God an identity, an individual, an "intelligent being." Thinking of God as literally being light and literally being love is a way to start looking from that perspective. Lose the personage, lose the big daddy, lose the way you have thought of God. Perhaps break the clay pot as Todd said. The problem with that (well it isn't really a problem, maybe the challenging part of that) is that you lose many of the qualities the God you may think you have come to know and love may have had. The one you are comfortable with. The one that you have to have blind faith in, and these types of questions in order for Him to exist at all for you. Then the language gets a bit slippery and perhaps becomes pointless or meaningless or just plain wrong. Is the word God really usefull in this sense anymore? Maybe, maybe not.

Water of a ducks back. Perhaps one of the saddest things IMO, Twinky. I don't think it was just me. It seems like after a while there were so many people that I knew that were kicked out for whatever reason, that it almost didn't faze me, outside of a shake of the head and a "that is too bad." It may have been different if it were a really close friend, but I had ran out of most of those over the years as their families left or were kicked out. When my parents were put on M&A or whatever it was, that hit home, but I still knew they would do whatever they had to do to come back. And they did. I can't say I ever thought about them differently as people, can't say I thought about the situation too deeply at the time. Just upset and a little fearful. Perhaps that is what it did to some people, like spiritual partners, over time. "If it happened to them, it could happen to me," must have been on some level in people's minds. I think without realising it that was somewhere in my head. Glad I got over that. I know when I left TWI one of the most emotional parts about it was the feeling that I was disappointing so many good people that I knew cared for me and that I was letting them down in some way, including my family. Reality is that if they felt that way, they were wrong. Leaving TWI has been one of the best things I have done. Getting kicked out, is possibly one of the best things that could have happened to you. If anyone felt ripped off, it wasn't by you. It was by an organization that was just plain rediculous at times.

Quite possible, Belle. It is the honest way to go. We really actually do not know what came before a ..00000etc of a second after the Big Bang. It could have been the collapse of an earlier universe. It could be creation. It could have been a being infinitely larger than we are farted or we could be trapped in the matrix. For me it makes sense that matter may be infinite. I could be wrong and you won't find me forming a religion or movement on that idea, just shrugging my shoulders and guessing. Great reading your thoughts on these threads, BTW.