That sounds like when an aging rock band says this their FINAL TOUR, to drive ticket sales, until next year.

Marketing.

Its so twisted, the way she talks..."The Body".
That is a very unhealthy way to think and speak. Its dissociated.
She does this for a reason, so her followers will parrot that language, and the disconnected emotional state that goes along with it. She wants to dissociate you.

If her ticket sales are slow, expect some "I might be dying from cancer again"...that will drive home the point she "might be leaving us anyday now"...19 years later...still at it...

Quote
helpme2times
Very, very interesting.

I just received the latest Byron Katie International newsletter in my email in-box. Which I still get to keep tabs on her org.

Try this on for size:

Quote

I am thrilled to be traveling to Europe this summer.

This may be my last visit for a while. The body says "slow down"
and mind says "keep going until everyone in the world has The Work.

Could it be that BK is pondering packing it in?

Ah, what you say makes a lot of sense. As usual!

yeah, every LGAT Guru on earth says...

THIS IS MY LAST APPEARANCE IN THE UPPER MIDWEST FOR THE NEXT YEAR!!!!!!!!!!
MAYBE FOREVER!!!!!!

(unless they come back next month, again).

Its just more motivation to try to get people to drop that $5,000.
Her salespeople can say...you better go this time...she MIGHT not be coming back.
Her "body" is slowing...she might "leave the body"...at any moment
after all she has CANCER CANCER CANCER

EVERYONE MIGHT HAVE CANCER SO BUY THE TICKETS NOW!!!!!
CANCER = DEATH
YOU MIGHT BE DEAD NEXT WEEK!
So get out those credit cards!!!!

(sorry for the sarcasm...but it really is ludicrous what she does)

Scarcity Marketing.
Scare-city



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2008 08:52AM by The Anticult.

Quote
solea13
Still, if a person wishes to grow spiritually, there are apparently authentic or at least accepted spiritual traditions out there such as 'Advaita' (non-dualism) which do advocate as follows:

"The seeker must serve the Guru and submit questions with all humility in order to remove all doubts (see Bhagavad Gita 4.34). By doing so, advaita says, the seeker will attain moksa (liberation from the cycle of births and deaths)." (from Wikipedia)

How do we reconcile such spiritual traditions with the desire to remain a critical thinker? It would appear to be impossible and unfortunately these theories of non-dualism seem to be the basis for untold spiritual abuse from countless unscrupulous 'gurus' for so many years.

Does anyone have any comments or anything to share that would help me understand further on this subject? I'd appreciate it and thanks very much :)

Hi there S13,

I''m not a Buddhist, but I'll respond to you with a quote attributed to Buddha:

Quote
Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

Quote
yg
Hi Solea

The issue of authority is a big one, and if we were not looking to authority outside of ourselves, or authority learned from outside of ourselves but now internalized, we would not be prey to so much.

[snip]

Getting free of the lure and the hypnotic influences of some these things I had to really go deeply into this authority issue and wanting to give my power away or another way to say it is always looking for Mommy and/or Daddy to tell me what to do. Either authority outside of myself, or internal learned authorities operating internally.

yg

This makes a lot of sense to me yg.

Here is an excerpt from one of BK's books, A Thousand Names for Joy:

Quote

I was sitting once with a friend who had a huge tumor, and the doctors had given her just a few weeks to live. As I was leaving her bedside, she said, "I love you," and I said, "No, you don't. You can't love me until you love your tumor. Every concept that you put onto that tumor you'll eventually put onto me. The first time I don't give you what you want or threaten what you believe, you'll put that concept onto me." This might sound harsh, but my friend had asked me to always tell her the truth. The tears in her eyes were tears of gratitude, she said.

[www.thework.com]

What struck me about this was the way the BK invaded this woman's boundaries and invalidated what she had just told her. BK ignored the woman's expression of love, then presumed to tell the woman that she did NOT love her, and even told her what she would do at some future date. To top it off, she says she did so because it was "the truth". Wow.

The friend expressed her inner reality to BK and BK essentially said "no, that's not what you feel. I'll tell you what you feel." This is exactly the process Patricia Evans describes in her book "Controlling People." Evans says someone is trying to make a control connection when they define you, rather than respecting your right to define yourself.

I am wondering, does anyone ever ask "Is is true?", in response to Katie's edicts about HOW IT IS.

Hi questionlady, that BK quote was one of the many awful things written in that book that brought me back to reality. It made me feel sick. What a cruel verbal slap in the face to someone in their suffering. In the old days we would call it "kicking someone when they are down". But not BK. I really hope that anecdote is fiction. Can you imagine that people may believe this is an ok thing to say to someone dying?

helpme2times, I too got the May BK newsletter (unsubscribed now!) and it reminded me of a posting on the BK website/newsletters in the months leading up to this trip where she asks people in Europe to contact her and suggest places to go and activities in Europe for her and her grandchildren. At the time I thought, "Haven't you heard of Google?" and then I put it out of my mind. Now, seeing BK in a different light, I wonder if this was another way of casting the net for more gullible individuals. Perhaps I am seeing more into it than I should.

I am feeling a considerable amount of anger - I guess this is just natural when one discovers they have been duped, and worse had their core belief system severely undermined. Ironically, I called in to see a friend in her shop this morning and visibly recoiled as I spotted "The Power of Now" open on her counter top. Aaargh!

I see more patterns in the Byron Katie cancer tumor story above.

One of the main ones, is Byron Katie says over and over and over, about her DEATHBED VISITS. Obviously she does these. The questions being asked are people signing over their entire Estates as "donations" to Byron Katie on their deathbed? That might sound like its unbelievable, but from the other reports about people handing over their valuables to Byron Katie, its par for the course.

Cancer hypnosis metaphors:
Byron Katie uses "cancer" in the exact same way other hypnotists use other concepts. For example, Milton Erickson would use concepts about the "cactus plant" and interweave those into his "teaching stories" and they were very healing for people. Its a metaphor.
Byron Katie has done the same thing with cancer, but in reverse, to get POWER over people. She has claimed she had cancer at least 2x, without evidence, she uses other people's cancer (OPC), and also tells all those cancer stories.

Again, in hypnotic terms, this is being used as a metaphor for DEATH.

She also uses ROBBERY as a metaphor. You are supposed to LOVE being ROBBED and love the robber. To the trained hypnotist, we understand what she is doing.

Your unconscious perceives (correctly) that Byron Katie is like a "robber" and she is telling your unconscious to "love" her.

The cancer story above is the same thing.
Byron Katie says... "The first time I don't give you what you want or threaten what you believe, you'll put that concept onto me".
That message is for YOU the reader, that "story" is fiction, she just wrote it up. But the message to you is...

total SUBMISSION of your Will to Byron Katie, even to the point of your Ego-death. (it reminds one of her other terrible belief.."Love is a murderer".)

Yes, Byron Katie is that abusive, that is why people are on their knees before her in parking lots.


As far as the travelling tips and grandchildren stuff, that seems to be a technique to build "false intimacy" with strangers she has never met, she knows her audience, mainly older women.
She does the "light" stuff like that, and in the next sentence its about rape, cancer, murder and robbery. That is why its so powerful
Yes, it is scary stuff.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2008 08:43PM by The Anticult.

Fascinating analysis Anticult. What books or other sources do you recommend for learning more about these types of techniques? I would imagine that if you can spot them, you are less likely to be taken in by them.

There are two articles in this same thread that deal with concerns expressed earlier by solea:

[forum.culteducation.com]

“The nature of the 'spiritual teacher'/'disciple' dyad makes impossible to do any sort of scientific examination to see if the teacher's claims are true or actually help people.

John Wren-Lewis was a scientist and found himself in a state nondual realization as a result of a medical crisis.

W-L's His entire article is very interesting in that he found that that guru/spiritual teacher role created a pattern of social relationships that actually militated against any truly scientific inquiry into the nature of enlightenment itself or of what gurus themselves were supposed to be so expert about.

For in the atmosphere of reverence around spiritual teachers, their claims to be enlightened and whether enlightenment was permanent or an impermanent state, went unquestioned and uncorrected.”

[forum.culteducation.com]

These comments are from Agehananda Bharati, born in Austria, with a solid Western Humanist education, who became a Sanskrit scholar and a sadhu in India. He practiced within the major nondualist Hindu systems in India and reached sufficient proficiency that he taught philosophy at Delhi University and Benares Hindu University. And was intiated into a tantric tradition as well. Though he loved his Hindu tradition, Bharati stated that he found that it had limitations.

“U: You are an initiate of an advaitic school, but you don’t really care for advaitic philosophy, as you have said. Why?

Bharati: I think, first of all, it doesn’t really generate a sense of humor. It’s also very dry, and the trouble is, the great pieces of Indian art and music were composed in spite of monism, not because of it. But monism is a good, solid guideline for the kind of meditation I enjoy. But I think it’s drudgery, I think it’s very bad philosophy.

U: In what way?

**Bharati: For me, philosophy is to solve problems. In monism, there are no problems. The problems (that remain in monism) are of a linguistic sort.

U: Could you give us a one-sentence or one paragraph summary of your own summum bonum?

Bharati: My own personal philosophy? I think that the modern mind has to work on several levels. At one time I called it syncretistic parallelism. By that I mean that you live the religious life by whatever form of meditation, which is purely private and not communicable, and you lead whatever social and active life you choose. The two don’t meet, even schedule-wise, because you do them at different times of the day.

' I enjoy the meditation, but I think if you try to make a bridge between the meditation and the philosophy, you’re in great trouble, because it bars you from doing good philosophy.”

earlier in the interview, Bharati said this:

“I don’t think eastern mysticism is very attractive. But I think it’s of psycho-experimental importance, it’s one of those things that you can do to skim confidently over your problems, which I find very helpful.”

In his book, The light at The Center: Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism, Bharati studied the anthropology of nondual experiences and the role expections embedded in the guru/devotee relationship.

Bharati found that devotees in India were socialized by the culture, as well as the guru, to behave in a particular way with gurus. Only certain kinds of questions could be asked. It was normal and appropriate to tell miracle stories that their guru could levitate, etc. These were part of the saint-making conventions of India, the language of holiness.

One guru told Bharati he most certainly could not levitate and it was nonsense that his disciples said he could. Bharati regretted he had not had the guts to tell the guru, 'So, why dont you use your teaching authority to forbid your followers to tell stories about you that are untrue and keep them childish in relation to you?' But Bharati stayed polite. In order to keep gathering his information he dared not make too many scenes.

Bharati himself wandered much of India on foot as a sadhu and in his biography, The Ochre Robe, describes the stereotypical kinds of questions asked him again and yet again in villages throughout India.

And..gurus were stuck in pre-formatted roles and very few tried to break out of those roles.

What Bharati would deplore is that this same restrictive student teacher relationship has now been translated to the US and people are just as effectively pre-socialized in the 'seeker's circuit' to only report certain experinces, keep mum about anything 'negative' and only relate with thier teachers in a particular way. Ditto for teachers.

Its not healthy in India and not good for us, either.

I might add that this thread on Eckhart Tolle and Advaita attracted some
energy draining troll visitations.

As an educational service, here is a method that can be used to identify whether someone, very early in his or her career is developing into a disruptive presence.

Here is how to do it:

If someone is making you feel annoyed or uneasy, dont reply to them.

Do this instead:

Go to the 'search' button on the upper right hand corner of the RR.com message board window. It has a small, magnifying glass icon next to it.

Open it.

Scroll down to do an an 'author search' and put the person' name into that slot.

Select 'all forums' and 'all dates'

By the time someone has reached 10 to 20 posts you can tell if they're able to deal with discussions in an open community, or if they find the open-ness and trends of discussion RR.com repugnant and wish to disrupt.

Another signs if if a new visitor shows up demand proof, or says, I am a newbie here. What is an LGAT (large group awareness training).

Dont type out an answer. Give then a link where they can read the definition of an LGAT.

Trolls try to get us to do their work for them.

If they refuse to do the recommended reading, that is a tip off.