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Throwing it all away


Raf
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31 members have voted

  1. 1. What have you done with your TWI books?

    • They're in a shrine in my bedroom, on my hope chest, next to a tube sock.
      0
    • They're in my library. I consult them from time to time, usually as I'm putting a teaching together.
      2
    • They're on my shelf, along with a bunch of other books I open just about never.
      8
    • They're in a box in my garage/attic. Sealed. But I can't throw them away. Too many memories.
      1
    • The Staten Island Landfill, or its local equivalent.
      16
    • TWI published books? I'd forgotten.
      4


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I don't know if I want to throw it all away..

when I leave this life anyway. I've hurt/helped/been hurt by/been helped by too many other individuals here..

it all has to mean something, doesn't it?

well.. sorry. I know that is not exactly what you were asking..

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it all has to mean something, doesn't it?

I think it ALL means "something".

I'm just not sure WHAT.

edit: I think we're better off NOT knowing that we know that we know that we know and so on.

Edited by waysider
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Yeah. Me too..

Don't get me wrong Raf..

I know it was all the touch of a narcissistic, plagiarist's hand..

but etherically.. or whatever else one calls it.. it all goes somewhere..

:biglaugh:

I just hope it doesn't end up in a deep, fiery pit for following a false prophet of sorts..

:biglaugh:

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Burn The Chaff (Uncle Harry in effigy) Day

Exiled now you travel inward

Flames engulf your throne

Puppets hang in effigy

While someone casts a stone.

A lonely queen has cuckold you.

A princely sword's been drawn

The noble blood once spilled for you

Will wear your crown at dawn.

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  • 1 month later...

Only recently did I realize that vp's words did not have the flavor of truth in my brain.

I am one who put the "Holy Spirit usages" into any Bible I got. Had many (too many) Bibles defaced in agreement with what vp said was correct. The sounds of the poems and hyms and biblical truths still are in the frame of vp's voice because I listened to PFAL and the SNS teachings so so so very much when I could hear and now that I am deaf the only wordy sounds I hear are those from the memory of my heart. (A deaf person does have lots of whisles and squeaks and rumbles and screeches from one's brain rattling around.)

But recently I realized that The Bible itself is stronger in my. Such a nice "revelation" to have. And just because I remember something that vp said doesn't make it right. This is a big breakthrough for me.

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  • 2 weeks later...

We had about 4-6 sets of PFAL books between hubby and I--got new sets when we took the new Craig classes, plus had our originals. We sold them on ebay a couple of years after we left the Way. Used the money for something on the car. Tires? All the other stuff--Way mags, videos, tapes, pamphlets, etc I threw away when we moved west. Those tacky posters we used to have in our living room! Trashed. I think we might still have some music cassettes somewhere, but we no longer have a cassette player to listen to them on if we wanted to. But we did have a basement flood about five years ago and lost a bunch of boxed stuff, so those cassettes might have been in that mess.

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Just the other day, I unearthed a funky little wooden treasure chest, to put on a shelf for decoration. Opening it up , I found it was filled with old way badges-including advanced class '79, and that real stupid wow button from '76-77, that I don't even know how to describe-but remembered I never wore it unless I had to. I thought about dumping them, but realized it had no emotional effect on me, and will make an interesting conversation piece should any visitor open the chest. It felt weird seeing them, but felt good not to care.

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Good idea waysider. At the neighborhood halloween party I'll come as the witch of endor with all my twi nametags.

Wait a minute - No one would understand. The children would just think I was wierd, and they would be right. I have the name tags, too. Those 20+ years were not a vacuum. I did stuff, learned stuff, learned to love some. Name tags remind me of the beach I got to live near and friends God made dear. So sorry we were sold down the river for vp's "bowl of lentil soup," but Holy Spirit was there for us. Jesus Christ never left us forsaken. Like others have said, the more detached from the cult-wickedness-twi are our memories are the more we can assimilate them in a healthy manner.

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I dunno..

The more I think about it.. the Light of the World is Toxic. It will burn something off as in dead if one gazes long enough.

And it's not exactly an unpleasant experience..

throw it all away..

somehow I think it will be easier than all of that in the end..

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The only things I have left are a couple bibles and the plate we got at PFAL '77 to celebrate the alleged 35th anniversary of the founding of twi. Now, 35 years after that, I have it under a large potted plant. :P

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  • 4 years later...
On 5/18/2012 at 5:46 PM, Raf said:

This worked for me and maybe only because of the uniqueness of my experience, which was not quite the same as the rest of yours.

I'm not saying you guys all had the same experience. Just that you have a lot in common with each other but not with me. Namely, you actually were involved with TWI for quite some time and gave that group a significant part of your life. I was with TWI for under a year and was far more influenced by my experience in an offshoot than I was with the mothership.

So that said, I want to confess that I never really broke free from TWI and its offshoots until a couple of years ago. This was after figuring out what was right with it and what was wrong with it. This was after documenting actual errors in a hilarious but shockingly failed bid to get a devoted sycophant to recognize that there were real flaws in the work. This was after finding the original works of the robbed authors to document the rampant plagiarism that some people refuse to acknowledge to this day.

This was after my last twig, branch, fellowship, home teaching, tape, whatever you want to put as the word there.

This was after the Living Epistles Society, after To Wit, after generating and eliminating my own message board, after coming to terms with being ex-Way and ex-JW and an ex-husband to boot.

After all this, I finally broke free. And here's how.

I threw it all out.

I kept a couple of souvenirs, don't get me wrong, but most of the stuff is gone. If you searched my home today, you would find scant evidence that anyone named Wierwille ever existed, or that I ever once counted myself as an admirer of the books that were published in his name.

I threw it all out.

Every enslaving, insipid, ripped off piece of pseudo-religious propaganda is gone.

I threw it all out.

Because I never want my son to pick up a weathered copy of Christians Should Be Preposterous and ask, "Daddy, what's this?"

I threw it all out.

And when someone wrote something defending it, I didn't care anymore. And when someone wrote something exalting it above anything else that has ever been written, I didn't care anymore.

I threw it all out.

Physically. It's gone. And soon, it was gone mentally as well.

Oh sure, I'll never erase certain things. There was plenty of salvageable material in there that transcended its use and abuse, and I have been able to hang on to those things I want to keep. But I do the same with the things I learned in college. In high school. In church. In court. It's not an unusual process. It doesn't consume me. I don't lose sleep over it.

I threw it all out.

There's a great freedom in that.

Just my two cents. Keep the change.

Raf, I didn't know you were a former JW.

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