Mike

I was not so unfortunate to have bonded my eyes to the visuals in AOS. I think I got the cassette tape before seeing the video. But for sure, I only saw the video once, and then heard the cassette music MANY TIMES on my walkman while working. I got an unbiased hearing of the music; I understand your visual handicap in this matter. Since then I have only looked at brief minutes of the video in recent years. Once maybe twice in 38 years.

The point is, the correct lines don't come out. The actor is not "free" to emit them, speaking with the analogy. If the actor wants the correct lines to come out, he must read and study and memorize them. That is work. Same with free will. If we don't do the work of preparing our synapses for a free will "performance," then we will remain locked in our old, wrong way of deciding on this issue.

It was the collaterals, and far less the transcript, that I focused most on for those 20 years. Just to be clear, do you mean when Paul (Saul) was blinded and went to get healed by Ananias?

That story effectively shows how the NORMAL process of language evolution can be fed steroids by LARGE GOVERNMENT for great evil. I was talking about normal, slow evolution, that starts in small groups and rarely ascends to the majority usage. You need to study how dictionaries are made and edited.

I do not know what you are referring to here. If you give me a few more details and a few key words I can find it in the transcript of the class. I know for sure that VPW taught that the revelation of the mystery was NOT all at once for the Apostle Paul. He said that was an evolution of revelation there. That seems to contradict your memory of the class that you posted. What you posted does not compute for me at all. Are you sure it was the foundational class that you heard this?

I see you might be classified as a “Platonist” when it comes to words. The way I am using the word “Platonist” here may not be in your dictionary, because it is only in a relatively sparsely populated group that I got it from. This group is very small; it is theoretical mathematics. In mathematics there is an ongoing debate that seems to never get settled, a little like free will in philosophy never gets resolved. The math debate is: Are numbers and the math relationships between them INVENTED by man or DISCOVERED by man? A similar, but far less deep a debate happens occasionally in the realm of letters: do men INVENT definitions or do they discover them? The idea that numbers exist independent of man is called Platonic because it seems Plato felt this way. But for letters it is much more easily seen that definitions of words are invented and re-invented by men continually. Language evolves, but math theorems do not evolve. A dictionary tells us how people in the PAST defined words. Most often there are several different ways listed in a big dictionary. But a dictionary has NO AUTHORITY over us as to how we must use words in the future. It may be possible to tell us if we will have great or mild difficulty in communicating to people with a new definition, though. Neither you nor the OED can forbid anyone from re-defining a word for use in a small group. Trying to forbid me or VPW in this reveals your weak and defective understanding of the whole ball game.

So we are talking about the Research Dept having an Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word "research" posted on the wall there? Re-defining the word "research" was very openly done by VPW for the way WE at TWI would use that word. Verification was major and discovery was minor. This was explained to us several times and it seems we did not get it. I admit to this myself. Until 1998 I was totally committed to using sense knowledge techniques to unscramble the Bible. I finally GOT IT that such a job is humanly impossible, due to the devil's overwhelming power in the realm of the senses. Spiritual intervention is necessary at times to break the adversary's lock on the scrambling.

I am having trouble understanding what this OED means. Oxford English Dictionary seems to not fit the context.

Hello Nathan_Jr. I'm your friendly, unnamed apologist, I think. You are getting it right. There is no way the Bible could be untangled by ORDINARY sense knowledge research. God had to step in to give enough revelation to get the ball rolling on such a massive untangling project. To think that the Bible could be untangled with ORDINARY sense knowledge research is arrogant academia on parade. It demonstrates complete ignorance of the great power that Adam gave to the god of this world. The tangling up of the Bible was done by great spiritual force, and great spiritual force is necessary to untangle it. There ARE many times where ordinary senses research IS sufficient, once the spiritual untangling (PFAL) is used. So both methods were to be used in the Research Dept, best as I can see. But it seems this was not well understood by all members of the staff. I remember talking with 2 of them in 1978 and they were bent out of shape over the spiritual part of the research. The next year the Jul/Aug Way Magazine had some corrections to this, and VPW again explained the way research was supposed to be re-searching what God had taught him. None of us got it. It took me another 20 years to see this circa 1998. Several times VPW put out strong hints that I never followed up on with questions. Several times VPW said on the weeklyt SNT tapes that someday he expected to find a manuscript that would VERIFY what God had taught him. Once he said that we probably would NOT find a manuscript, but that we should still believe what he was teaching. He tried to tell us, but we did not hear it.

I respect what you feel and write here on decisions. This kind of talking about free will and decisions has gone on for over 20 centuries. In this old mode of investigating free will we have at our disposal our own feelings, observations of others behavior, hearing words of them describing their decisions. They we weave a narrative that seems to make sense to ourselves, and hopefully to others also. So the free will debate has proceeded this way (philosophically) for a long time, and it started thousands of years before the scientific method was perfected, which was only about 400 years ago. The philosophical debate over free will has never been resolved; it rages forever, and never matured or progressed to the level of practical applications. For 300 years science was not developed enough to deal with the complex issue of free will. Now it is beginning to deal with it. In this scientific approach, decisions are made SOLELY on the basis of preparation. When a person is facing a decision they have no choise, and are forced into the decision by whatever synapse set they walked into the decision with. An analogy of this would be an professional actor who is scheduled to perform in a practice run of the play WITH NO REHEARSALS. When the curtain goes up, whatever lines he has well memorized beforehand are likely to be delivered well. The actor has prepared his synapse set to do this. He mas made these lines a HABIT. He can almost relax and perform them, as this habit is a synapse set that FORCES him to perform well. But suppose his script had a missing page! When that part in play comes up, his synapse set is unprepared, and the actor is FORCED by ignorance to flub those lines on the missing page.

It is a mistake to think that when a person makes a choice, that the choice must automatically be a FREE choice. It could be a FORCED choice. We don't have the ability to sort those out when we observe others. It is very difficult (sometimes impossible) to sort that out just for ourselves. What would FORCE a choice in a decision? The synapse set the person brings to the decision. Babies are born with muscles and nerves just learning to function. The baby's skeletal muscles are very weak at birth. I see adult free will to be LIKE a muscle. A normal baby has all the parts needed for free will at birth, but no strength has yet been built up for making free choices. That takes time and effort. Many developing children never get this kind of "free will" exercise, and they become problem adults, unable to conform to function well with others. Since the Sixties, our culture has encouraged less and less "free will" exercising for children and young adults, and it is falling apart for the distinction of pitifully weak wills. More and more people are being "blown about with every wind of doctrine" both spiritual and practical.

YES ! YES ! YES ! We start out having only a very minor influence on our behavior, but with persistence that self-influence can grow.

Whoever wins the trophy in sports, keeps the trophy, except in hockey.

Read closer. It is His power in the senses earthly realm where both God and the devil are limited by God's budget. It is an earthly budget, not a heavenly one.

Note: you are ALWAYS in confusion over everything I say. I cannot cause the confusion that blinds you.

He has the budget planned to accomplish that job, but just barely.

You are not paying attention. The angels have a budget, plus the angels themselves are God's budget here on earth, while God in heaven has no limitations.

When it comes to free will and the workings of the brain, Philosophy is to be regarded as folklore. See Patricia Churchland's MacArthur Award winning book "Neurophilosophy." Example: Aristotle thought that the brain was like a car radiator, and used to cool down the blood.

Socrates has an impressive success record, but not in the area of free will. Please tell Socrates that I am in a meeting.

Well it happened again. I'm reading along in the Word and another "budget" verse jumped off the page and into my word processor, and is now posted. Jude 9 says: “But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you!’ ” Both angels have a finite budget to fight with. It was a struggle when they clashed, and not an overwhelming wipeout, with Michael beating the devil. All the while, God has the infinite power. This is very similar to Daniel 9 and that budgeted clash.

I agree. This is an extremely good video. It shows clearly that free will competes (as a minor player) in the mix of brain/mind activities. Good thing she states in the beginning that she is no philosopher, and takes a practical approach to free will. At the end of the video she acknowledges at least some PARTIAL control to the entity we call our “self.” Philosophers go bonkers on that one; impractical eggheads that are they. I remember when parts of this gut/brain connection was discovered in the 1990s. A famous visiting brain scientists announced one day at our weekly meeting, that it had just been confirmed, that some genuine “cognition computation” takes place OUTSIDE the brain. Up till then, only the retina in the eye can claim anything close to that. He said our cognition processes extent to the gut. What he reported was very simple, compared to this video’s reports of much more current research. He only reported that the gut can sense what kind of food is in the upper digestive tract and relay the information to the brain. The brain then can “decide” what downstream glands need to prepare for. No free will was hinted in these processes back then, and that remains to this day. MOST of what goes on in our brain and body is mechanical, non-thinking, and compelled. Breaking away from this mechanical norm, over to a different mechanical norm, is done in only in TINY increments called learning. This inspired me to search for a MINIMAL free will mechanism to support such a minimal move away from the norm.

Yes, the VAST MAJORITY of the ancient peoples that produced the prophets of God, were told by those same prophets that "their beliefs about the origin, nature, and purpose of the world and humanity ..." were all screwed up, and that they needed to come back to the minority point of view, which is God's Truth.

I was thinking more of Schubert and his amazing masterpiece "Rosamunde." Like AOS, the play that Schubert wrote that music for bombed and closed in a week, but the music lived on. Like in AOS, the melodies are riveting in Rosamunde.

Several times I have reported that AOS was inspired by a play called "The Struggle of the Magicians" by Gurdjief. I know that VPW read P.D. Ouspensky's "In Search of the Miraculous" because he told me himself, personally. Ouspensky was Gurdjief's popularizer around 100 years ago. He wrote his book in 1949. Below are the first three occurrences of the word "magicians" in this book. There were 9 passages altogether, but these should show that the main inspiration for AOS came from this book. Also to be seen here, besides the story line, are some of the comments that Craig would put on the SNS tapes as they were developing and practicing for AOS, and how the performers get to learn special things about their spiritual walk. Page 13 From London, through Norway, Sweden, and Finland, I arrived in Petersburg, already renamed "Petrograd" and full of speculation and patriotism. Soon afterwards I went to Moscow and began editorial work for the newspaper to which I had written from India. I stayed there about six weeks, but during that time a little episode occurred which was connected with many things that happened later. One day in the office of the newspaper I found, while preparing for the next issue, a notice (in, I think, The Voice of Moscow) referring to the scenario of a ballet, "The Struggle of the Magicians," which belonged, as it said, to a certain "Hindu." The action of the ballet was to take place in India and give a complete picture of Oriental magic including fakir miracles, sacred dances, and so on. I did not like the excessively jaunty tone of the paragraph, but as Hindu writers of ballet scenarios were, to a certain extent, rare in Moscow, I cut it out and put it into my paper, with the slight addition that there would be everything in the ballet that cannot be found in real India but which travelers go there to see. Soon after this, for various reasons, I left the paper and went to Petersburg. There, in February and March, 1915, I gave public lectures on my travels in India. The titles of these lectures were "In Search of the Miraculous" and "The Problems of Death." In these lectures, which were to serve as an introduction to a book on my travels it was my intention to write, I said that in India the "miraculous" was not sought where it ought to be sought, that all ordinary ways were useless, and that India guarded her secrets better than many people supposed; but that the "miraculous" did exist there and was indicated by many things which people passed by without realizing their hidden sense and meaning or without knowing how to approach them. I again had "schools" in mind. In spite of the war my lectures evoked very considerable interest. There were more than a thousand people at each in the Alexandrovsky Hall of the Petersburg Town Duma. I received many letters; people came to see me; and I felt that on the basis of a "search for the miraculous" it would be possible to unite together a very large number of people who were no longer able to swallow the customary forms of lying and living in lying. P 16-18 It is difficult for me to reconstruct the beginning of the conversation with G.'s pupils. Some of the things I heard surprised me. I tried to discover in what their work consisted, but they gave me no direct answers, insisting in some cases on a strange and, to me, unintelligible terminology. They suggested reading the beginning of a story written, so they told me, by one of G.'s pupils, who was not in Moscow at the time. Naturally, I agreed to this; and one of them began to read aloud from a manuscript. The author described his meeting and acquaintance with G. My attention was attracted by the fact that the story began with the author coming across the same notice of the ballet, "The Struggle of the Magicians," which I myself had seen in The Voice of Moscow, in the winter. Further—this pleased me very much because I expected it—at the first meeting the author certainly felt that G. put him as it were on the palm of his hand, weighed him, and put him back. The story was called "Glimpses of Truth" and was evidently written by a man without any literary experience. But in spite of this it produced an impression, because it contained indications of a system in which I felt something very interesting though I could neither name nor formulate it to myself, and some very strange and unexpected ideas about art which found in me a very strong response. I learned later on that the author of the story was an imaginary person and that the story had been begun by two of G.'s pupils who were present at the reading, with the object of giving an exposition of his ideas in a literary form. Still later I heard that the idea of the story belonged to G. himself. The reading of what constituted the first chapter stopped at this point. G. listened attentively the whole time. He sat on a sofa, with one leg tucked beneath him, drinking black coffee from a tumbler, smoking and sometimes glancing at me. I liked his movements, which had a great deal of a kind of feline grace and assurance; even in his silence there was something which distinguished him from others. I felt that I would rather have met him, not in Moscow, not in this flat, but in one of those places from which I had so recently returned, in the court of one of the Cairo mosques, in one of the ruined cities of Ceylon, or in one of the South Indian temples—Tanjore, Trichinopoly, or Madura. "Well, how do you like the story?" asked G. after a short silence when the reading had ended. I told him I had found it interesting to listen to, but that, from my point of view, it had the defect of not making clear what exactly it was all about. The story spoke of a very strong impression produced upon the author by a doctrine he had met with, but it gave no adequate idea of the doctrine itself. Those who were present began to argue with me, pointing out that I had missed the most important part of it. G. himself said nothing. When I asked what was the system they were studying and what were its distinguishing features, I was answered very indefinitely. Then they spoke of "work on oneself," but in what this work consisted they failed to explain. On the whole my conversation with G.'s pupils did not go very well and I felt something calculated and artificial in them as though they were playing a part learned beforehand. Besides, the pupils did not match with the teacher. They all belonged to that particular layer of Moscow rather poor "intelligentsia" which I knew very well and from which I could not expect anything interesting. I even thought that it was very strange to meet them on the way to the miraculous. At the same time they all seemed to me quite nice and decent people. The stories I had heard from M. obviously did not come from them and did not refer to them. "There is one thing I wanted to ask you," said G. after a pause. "Could this article be published in a paper? We thought that we could acquaint the public in this way with our ideas." "It is quite impossible," I said. "This is not an article, that is, not anything having a beginning and an end; it is the beginning of a story and it is too long for a newspaper. You see we count material by lines. The reading occupied two hours—it is about three thousand lines. You know what we call a feuilleton in a paper—an ordinary feuilleton is about three hundred lines. So this part of the story will take ten feuilletons. In Moscow papers a feuilleton with continuation is never printed more than once a week, so it will take ten weeks—and it is a conversation of one night. If it can be published it is only in a monthly magazine, but I don't know any one suitable for this now. And in this case they will ask for the whole story, before they say anything." G. did not say anything and the conversation stopped at that. But in G. himself I at once felt something uncommon; and in the course of the evening this impression only strengthened. When I was taking leave of him the thought Hashed into my mind that I must at once, without delay, arrange to meet him again, and that if I did not do so I might lose all connection with him. I asked him if I could not see him once more before my departure to Petersburg. He told me that he would be at the same café the following day, at the same time. I came out with one of the young men. I felt myself very strange—a long reading which I very little understood, people who did not answer my questions, G. himself with his unusual manners and his influence on his people, which I all the time felt produced in me an unexpected desire to laugh, to shout, to sing, as though I had escaped from school or from some strange detention. I wanted to tell my impressions to this young man, make some jokes about G., and about the rather tedious and pretentious story. I at once imagined myself telling all this to some of my friends. Happily I stopped myself in time. —"But he will go and telephone them at once. They are all friends." So I tried to keep myself in hand, and quite silently we came to the tram and rode towards the center of Moscow. After rather a long journey we arrived at Okhotny Nad, near which place I stayed, and silently said good-by to one another, and parted. Page 23,24 I once asked G. about the ballet which had been mentioned in the papers and referred to in the story "Glimpses of Truth" and whether this ballet would have the nature of a "mystery play." "My ballet is not a 'mystery,'" said G. "The object I had in view was to produce an interesting and beautiful spectacle. Of course there is a certain meaning hidden beneath the outward form, but I have not pursued the aim of exposing and emphasizing this meaning. An important place in the ballet is occupied by certain dances. I will explain this to you briefly. Imagine that in the study of the movements of the heavenly bodies, let us say the planets of the solar system, a special mechanism is constructed to give a visual representation of the laws of these movements and to remind us of them. In this mechanism each planet, which is represented by a sphere of appropriate size, is placed at a certain distance from a central sphere representing the sun. The mechanism is set in motion and all the spheres begin to rotate and to move along prescribed paths, reproducing in a visual form the laws which govern the movements of the planets. This mechanism reminds you of all you know about the solar system. There is something like this in the rhythm of certain dances. In the strictly defined movements and combinations of the dancers, certain laws are visually reproduced which arc intelligible to those who know them. Such dances are called 'sacred dances.' In the course of my travels in the East I have many times witnessed such dances being performed during sacred services in various ancient temples. Some of these dances are reproduced in The Struggle of the Magicians.' Moreover there are three ideas lying at the basis of "The Struggle of the Magicians.' But if I produce the ballet on the ordinary stage the public will never understand these ideas." I understood from what he said subsequently that this would not be a ballet in the strict meaning of the word, but a series of dramatic and mimic scenes held together by a common plot, accompanied by music and intermixed with songs and dances. The most appropriate name for these scenes would be "revue," but without any comic element. The "ballet" or "revue" was to be called "The Struggle of the Magicians." The important scenes represented the schools of a "Black Magician" and a "White Magician," with exercises by pupils of both schools and a struggle between the two schools. The action was to take place against the background of the life of an Eastern city, intermixed with sacred dances. Dervish dances, and various national Eastern dances, all this interwoven with a love story which itself would have an allegorical meaning. I was particularly interested when G. said that the same performers would have to act and dance in the "White Magician" scene and in the "Black Magician" scene; and that they themselves and their movements had to be attractive and beautiful in the first scene and ugly and discordant in the second. "You understand that in this way they will see and study all sides of themselves; consequently the ballet will be of immense importance for self study," said G. I understood this far from clearly at the time, but I was struck by a certain discrepancy. "In the notice I saw in the paper it was said that your 'ballet' would be staged in Moscow and that certain well-known ballet dancers would take part in it. How do you reconcile this with the idea of self-study?" I asked. "They will not play and dance in order to study themselves." "All this is far from being decided," said G. "And the author of the notice you read was not fully informed. All this may be quite different. Although, on the other hand, those taking part in the ballet will see themselves whether they like it or not." "And Who is writing the music?" I asked. "That also is not decided," said G. He did not say anything more, and I only came across the "ballet" again five years later.

In all the years since AOS first came out, I have never heard anyone talk about the music. It has always been my opinion that AOS had the best of the best music. I have thought of it as being some of the best music of the 20th Century. It is still very inspiring to me. I'm lucky that I didn't see the video enough to be stuck with the visual AOS scenery in my mind as I listen to it. The general story is also very inspiring: a twig leader protecting his people. Too bad it overemphasized the idea that devils can be defeated with dance, music, and colorful costumes. I was even happy that Craig jumped into it as an obvious amateur, in that it can be inspiring for us to take on unusual activities we thought we were not qualified for. I know that seeing Craig teaching with his amateur dancing stuck in my brain as something positive. I was, at that time, a genuine dance phobe, but maybe Craig softened my fears there, and somehow 10 years ago dance became the most fun hobby I ever found.