corboy - I understood that you didn't write that letter about TM.

corboy wrote:

"... they may well be persons from traumatized backgrounds who as children made excuses for abusive parents, rationalized thier own misery as 'character building' dissociated from their horror and sense of shattering betrayal, and identified with thier perpetrator".

This idea has come up before. I was part of the inner circle of my group to the extent that I did (unfortunately) withhold secrets about both the Guru & his wife from other students. When I look at my own background, I know I had a fairly loving and stable childhood. It was rather later events in my life, I think, that de-stabilized my personality enough to make me susceptible to the initial entrance to the group.

Looking at other members of that 'inner circle', the backgrounds of each person were all so varied, across a very wide spectrum, from loving families to not-so-loving. It seemed to be more of a character thing ... people who somehow felt that they didn't quite fit in with 'normal' society, such as those who were very sensitive, emotional, artistic, creative, or who thought deeply about spiritual matters ( i know that there are people who think deeply about spiritual matters in the wider society, but I mean people who tended to think outside of traditional religious systems).

There were quite a few people who had been through some terrible life-events, for example some had been forced to leave their home countries (refugees) or lost loved ones at some point in life. Often those events had rocked their world to such a depth that they were never quite satisfied with 'ordinary' lives in the same way again.

From my observations these are perhaps people who do have emotional damage or who are somewhat outside of the social norm. It is not necessarily that they suffered childhood abuse or trauma, but probably some kind of de-stabilizing life-trauma.

So yes, these were people, myself included, who were not able to fit into the dominant culture. Perhaps many of us felt that we were dissatisfied, or somehow 'let down' by the dominant culture. We had not found a satisfactory place in the dominant culture. So we were looking for both meaning and structure and the group offered both of those things. Of course we were not aware of how much the group would demand in return.

Many of us were strongly idealistic. There was an overwhelming desire to 'change the world' - perhaps to make it conform more to our own vision of how things should be. Plus most of us who did well in the group had were young and resilient. We were able to rationalize and withstand abuse for the sake of this supposed 'higher purpose' and there you have it ... the inner circle.

There is no doubt that this issue becomes ver complex when you start to really delve into it. These cults do seem to provide some kind of social function. The question is how society can fill some of those un-met needs in order that people don't become lured into these groups because of their unrecognized / unconscious needs.

***

Do watch out though folks. A little further reading from the Emotional Zen Website:

"The name of this blog, Emotional Zen, is a phrase coined by Daniel Barron, author of There’s No Such Thing as a Negative Emotion and Enheartenment. Daniel is the founder of the new emoto-spiritual paradigm: Theohumanity"

I do believe there is a thread about 'Theohumanity' in this very forum somewhere. I don't know much about it but after all we have discussed here I see some red flags just in the words 'emoto-spiritual' and of course the big one 'paradigm'.

New-Agey types love that word :) Is that one of Katie's words?

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solea13
My God. What a powerful letter on first reading. Thanks for that corboy.

helpme2times - I saw it all the time with my Guru's wife. She would love-bomb the hell out of people to where they were kneeling or weeping on the floor in front of her! They were often exhausted from travling to the seminar, struggling with money issues from coming up with $1,000 - 2,000 to pay and then this woman would hug them, stroke their hair, and graciously waive 50% or even the entire fee.

Then later in the day she would could turn round to me and give me a word or look that would have frozen hell over! One time at work she came to my desk and she pushed everything off it with a single sweep of her arm because I had forgotten to do some small task. I made sure not to cry about it in front of her because she couldn't stand 'emotional' people. This is what these people are like with their inner circle. I am almost 90% sure that Byron Katie would do very similar things.

(It came to where I couldn't stand to have her touch me. She stroked people's hair like petting a stupid dog.)

Yech, that sounds pretty awful, Solea13. There seems to be a theme of fakery with these guru-led groups. God forbid someone should display normal emotions. They've got to be Work-ed or chanted or meditated away. Except it doesn't "work"!

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solea13
I do believe there is a thread about 'Theohumanity' in this very forum somewhere. I don't know much about it but after all we have discussed here I see some red flags just in the words 'emoto-spiritual' and of course the big one 'paradigm'.

New-Agey types love that word :) Is that one of Katie's words?

I don't recall "paradigm" as one of BK's buzzwords, but I just did a google and came up with:

[[url=http://www.paradigmshiftscoaching.com/]Paradigm Shifts Coaching[/url]]

Lo and behold, Patrick Walsh not only "coaches" and does "the work of Byron Katie", he's also a follower of Gurumayi.

Eek. I just read the following testimonial at the website of Patrick Walsh (aka Ravindra):

"Today 'I' am no longer who or what 'I' thought 'I' was at one time. I am on a sacred path that is leading only to where the path began. It would be called the path to no self; I am going nowhere; I am the sacred path. Thank you Teacher Ravindra for your grace, compassion, humor, wisdom..."

Now does that sound psychologically healthy?

Yep. helpme2times, it's true. Being human with normal human emotions just doesn't cut it when you are on the vanguard of spiritual evolution, you know?

I just finished reading 'Enlightenment Blues'. I saw that it was the same thing with Andre van der Braak's experience with the American Guru Andrew Cohen. People would be harassed by Andrew or the other students until they broke down in tears of frustration. Then they were accused of being emotionally manipulative and unable to face the 'reality' of their own ego.

As the Guru's wife used to say, 'You cry because you don't want to learn. You cry because you are stubborn'. It was one thing she really hated; to see people cry and feel sorry for themselves. Oh well. That's the way it was. When she cried I fely plenty sorry for all the trouble the Guru caused her.

I saw her being handed divorce papers when he finally decided to marry one of the (many) other women he'd been seeing. Yeah. I cried for her that day; from a basic human compassion. As said in previous posts, it was plenty okay to feel pity for the ones in power.

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solea13
I just finished reading 'Enlightenment Blues'. I saw that it was the same thing with Andre van der Braak's experience with the American Guru Andrew Cohen. People would be harassed by Andrew or the other students until they broke down in tears of frustration. Then they were accused of being emotionally manipulative and unable to face the 'reality' of their own ego.

I read "Enlightenment Blues" last year and thought it was very good. Andre is doing lots of people a big service in unmasking Andrew Cohen, whom I find incredibly frightening.

I haven't yet but would like to read Andrew's mother Luna Tarlo's book, "Mother of God". Am curious about her side of things.

If you want information on AC, read this blog which was started by a former editor (Hal Blacker) of AC's What Is Enlightenment? magazine.

The EnlightenNixt articles are good start because they give an orientation to the entire collection of articles, plus comments.

[whatenlightenment.blogspot.com]

The blog ran for 3 years.

And WIE magazine is still published to this day, and each issue includes an interview between AC and Ken Wilber, a tastemaker in these matters and who has also created a major media nexus that forms part of what Wilson termed a 'cultic milieu'. Ive seen it on the rack at our local upscale supermarket.

Here read this account to see what happened when one staff writer felt shame ridden guilt for having a writing block as deadline for WIE loomed.

[essentialwhatenlightenment.blogspot.com]

Wilber has written this endorsement of harsh methods by gurus, yet he has never at any time been a student of a guru and never endured the methods he declares so beneficial..for others.

[www.globalserve.net]

"When it comes to spiritual teachers, there are those who are safe, gentle, consoling, soothing, caring; and there are the outlaws, the living terrors, the Rude Boys and Nasty Girls of God realization, the men and women who are in your face, disturbing you, terrifying you, until you radically awaken to who and what you really are.
And may I suggest?: choose your teachers carefully.

""If you want encouragement, soft smiles, ego stroking, gentle caresses of your self-contracting ways, pats on the back and sweet words of solace, find yourself a Nice Guy or Good Girl, and hold their hand on the sweet path of stress reduction and egoic comfort. But if you want Enlightenment, if you want to wake up, if you want to get fried in the fire of passionate Infinity, then, I promise you: find yourself a Rude Boy or a Nasty Girl, the ones who make you uncomfortable in their presence, who scare you witless, who will turn on you in a second and hold you up for ridicule, who will make you wish you were never born, who will offer you not sweet comfort but abject terror, not saccharin solace but scorching angst, for then, just then, you might very well be on the path to your own Original Face.

"Most of us, I suspect, prefer our spiritual teachers to be of the Nice-Guy variety. Soft, comforting, non-threatening, a source of succor for a worn and weary soul, a safe harbor in the samsaric storm. There is nothing wrong with that, of course; spirituality comes in all sorts of flavors, and I have known some awfully Nice Guys. But if the flavor tends toward Enlightenment instead of consolation, if it drifts away from soothing dreams toward actually waking up, if it rumbles toward a God realization and not egoic fortification, then that demands a brutal, shocking death: a literal death of your separate self, a painful, frightening, horrifying dissolution—a miraculous extinction you will actually witness as you expand into the boundless, formless, radical Truth that will pervade your every cell and drench your being to the core and expand what you thought was your self until it embraces the distant galaxies. For only on the other side of death lies Spirit, only on the other side of egoic slaughter lies the Good and the True and the Beautiful. "You will come in due course to realize that your true glory lies where you cease to exist," as the illustrious Sri Ramana Maharshi constantly reminded us. Your true glory lies on the other side of your death, and who will show you that?

"Not the Nice Guys and not the Good Girls. They don't want to hurt your feelings. They don't want to upset you. They are here to whisper sweet nothings in your ear and place consolation prizes in the outstretched hand of the self-contraction, balm for a war-torn weary ego, techniques to prop it up in its constant battle with the world of otherness. In a sense, it's very easy being a Nice-Guy teacher: no muss, no fuss, no wrestling with egoic resistance and exhausting confrontation. Be nice to the ego, pat it on the back, have it count its breaths, hum a few mantras.

"Rude Boys know better. They are not here to console but to shatter, not to comfort but to demolish. They are uncompromising, brutal, laser-like. They are in your face until you recognize your Original Face—and they simply will not back off, they will not back down, they will not let up until you let go—radically, fully, completely, unhesitatingly. They live as Compassion—real compassion, not idiot compassion—and real compassion uses a sword more often than a sweet. They deeply offend the ego (and the greater the offense, the bigger the ego). They are alive as Truth, they are everywhere confronted with egos, and they choose the former uncompromisingly.

"Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, used to say that nobody comes to a therapist to get better (although they always say they do); they really come to perfect their neurosis. Just so, nobody comes to a spiritual teacher to get Enlightenment (although everybody claims they do); rather, they come to a spiritual teacher to learn more subtle and sophisticated egoic games—in this case, the game of "Look at me being really spiritual."

"After all, what is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It's not the Spirit in you, since that is already enlightened and has no need to seek. No, it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher: you want to see yourself in the presence of the spiritual game, you want to meet yourself tomorrow as a realized being—in plain language, you want your ego to continue into a spiritual paradise.

"And what's a poor teacher to do, confronted with such egoic cunning? Everybody who comes to a spiritual teacher comes egoically motivated. And teachers have two choices in the face of this onslaught of the separate selves, this conference of the self-contractions: they can play to the audience, or they can blow the entire building up.

"Andrew Cohen is a Rude Boy. He is not here to offer comfort; he is here to tear you into approximately a thousand pieces...so that Infinity can reassemble you, Freedom can replace imprisonment, Fullness can outshine fear. And that simply will not happen if all you want is consolation, soothing prayers, ruffle-free platitudes, "It will all be okay." Well, it will not be okay if you want Enlightenment. It will, in fact, be hell, and only Rude Boys are rude enough to tell you that, and to show you that—if you can stand the rudeness, stay in the fire, burn clean as Infinity and radiate as the stars.

Solea, thanks for fact checking that emotionalzen blog. I thought that
'theohumanity' name sounded familiar but didnt check it.

Damn, its so easy to see how one quite good article or blog post that bats 1000 can be tied to something else that is iffy.

Hazards for Intuitively Gifted Persons

Solea wrote:

these were people, myself included, who were not able to fit into the dominant culture. Perhaps many of us felt that we were dissatisfied, or somehow 'let down' by the dominant culture. We had not found a satisfactory place in the dominant culture. So we were looking for both meaning and structure and the group offered both of those things. Of course we were not aware of how much the group would demand in return.

Many of us were strongly idealistic. There was an overwhelming desire to 'change the world' - perhaps to make it conform more to our own vision of how things should be. Plus most of us who did well in the group had were young and resilient. We were able to rationalize and withstand abuse for the sake of this supposed 'higher purpose' and there you have it ... the inner circle.

There is no doubt that this issue becomes ver complex when you start to really delve into it. These cults do seem to provide some kind of social function. The question is how society can fill some of those un-met needs in order that people don't become lured into these groups because of their unrecognized / unconscious needs.

Yknow, I think this is fruitful..that it isnt just family trauma that can make people vulnerable but also having a personality that doesnt fit easily into mainstream society.

One can be quite a healthy person from a happy upbringing, and have a set of potential talents that dont fit in with mainstream society. In searching for mentors, one may risk encountering someone who exploits one's potential. Older persons find the energy and vitality of younger persons appealing and may exploit your vitality and earning power, rather than honoring your potential and serving your potential by showing you how to develop your talents and protect yourself, as well.

Young people may be riddled with self doubt, and fear they have little to offer that is worthy. But thier vitality may attract wolves.

A career counselor told me that people who are artistic and or have intuitive sensitivity face special challenges in the United States. Overall, the US was settled and its culture created by extroverted, problem solving types. In Europe and African/Asian cultures, there was a culturally recognized role for artists. In very old tribal cultures there was a role and an honored one, for the musicians and story tellers and shamans.

But in the US, art means nothing unless you get famous and make money.

My counselor said in the US, artistic and intuitive types have to figure out a day job that wont wear them out and will give enough income to pay rent and food and health care and leave enough time for you to do your art or spiritual practices 'after hours.'

For a description of what happened to one man who found himself out of synch with the mainstream, I recommend CG Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections.

(Jung was innovative, but also a man of his times. He died in 1961, and so be prepared for turns of phrase that may make you wince. Dont deny they are there. At the same time, dont let this rob you of a chance to read a most remarkable story.)

Jung mentioned among other things, that when he began getting stressed by working with his unconscious and seeing and feeling the material that surfaced, he recognized this was something valid, that matched what many of his psychiatry patients were reporting...but for which there was at that time, no accepted scientific framework.

At that time, Jung had been on faculty at the university for seven years. He chose to resign that position, because he knew as a professor he had a duty to teach consistent science to the students. He felt that he had no right to expose his students to his own personal chaos, at a time when they needed basic training in scientific method.

Jung also commented that he was kept grounded because he was married, had his family and his psychiatry practice. He also stated the only thing that kept him from getting lost in the surge wild material from his unconscious was always to ask himself what the ethical task was that each image asked of him. The other thing that kept Jung on track was, he wanted to understand the terrors of what his own patients were going through and wanted to be better able to help them.

Now, Jung had this surge of inner material at a time when he was adult, had had solid training in medicine and science, and also wide training in classics and philsophy. He had some inner structure and knew some of the methods of early psychoanalysis and experimental psychology and was in his thirties.

But persons much younger than Jung, who have that kind of sensitivity, may not know how to cope with such material. And in their search for mentors, they are indeed vulnerable.

I was first introduced to Jung by a mentor who turned out to be very problem ridden himself...and from whose clumsy ministrationsI had to recover.

For, X was himself an unlicensed therapist. He actually refused recommendations that he charge for his sessions...he did his stuff for free, but only financially.

The pay off for him by working for free was, not having to face his countertransferance because he was never trained to do so

Getting narcissistic supplies from me

And by not charging money, being totally outside the network of legal accountablity. For X had a secret. He presented as the most humble and heroically moral of men.

But secretly, he hated acountablity. He even once admitted he preferred doing his own secretarial work because he once had a secretary and it irked him that someone knew his comings and goings!

Of course, I only learned this after I went to a real therapist who asked me the right questions.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 07/27/2008 09:15PM by corboy.

Final note on Jung and his autobiography:

For all his attempts to give an honest inventory of his life, Jung did not mention a long term affair he had with one of his student/analysands, Toni Wolff.

Today this kind of thing is much better understood and is considered unacceptable behavior on the a part of a therapist, whether you are a client, a student therapist in clinical supervision, or a doctoral candidate.

CultCity brought forth the idea of "coaching", so I decided to get an idea as to how many folks might be utilizing BK's work in the context of "life coaching".

It's STAGGERING how many people are doing this. Imo these people are trying to make an easy buck off of the vulnerable. They may or may not be conscious of this. They may have new age-ly convinced themselves that they can actually help people AND "manifest" $$.

I can recall myself years ago considering becoming a "coach". I shudder now to think that I would do such a thing. What the heck was I smoking?

Well I wasn't smoking anything, but I WAS a veteran new ager and I held a rather fluffy view of "the universe". (You hear about "the universe" a lot in new age circles.)

Here's a PARTIAL list of people I found who both do "the work of Byron Katie" and "coach":

Life Coach Mary
Patty Alessi
Maggie Carter
Global NLP
The Work For Breakfast
Clear Life Solutions - Carol Skolnick
Heather Ambler
The Work Coach
Coaching For Life - Sandra Harris
Vier Vragen
Satori Coaching - Jane Hardy
It's Not About Your Stuff - Ariane Benefit
Nurture Through Nature - Jen Deraspe
Insightful Way - William Cael and Lily Alexander
Inner Wisdom Revealed - Kim Antonson
Enlightening Lives - Dawn Rockwell
Clarity Coaching
Institute for Life Coach Training
Discover the Treasure That is You - Theresa Andersen
The Work with Rosie
Holistic Counselling - Marilyne McPaul
My Reunion Coach - Christi Bender
Proactive Change
Authetic Promotion - Molly Gordon
Paul Welcharts
Mary Collins Osborne
Meadow DeVor
New Life Focus - Leslie Gail
The Voice For Love - DavidPaul Doyle
Karen Caplan
Paradigm Shifts Coaching - Patrick Ravindra Walsh
4 Gateway Coaching
Realing Self

Again, this is but a PARTIAL list.

Note: they want you to PAY them to do "the work" on some level with you. In many cases they are getting what a licensed therapist would get, and more. So much for how "free" the work is.