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Now, as to their garments being mostly blue (kabild}^ one
of the reasons is that they have made wandering (siydkat] and
travelling the foundation of their Path ; and on journeys
a white garment does not retain its original appearance, and
is not easily washed, and besides, everyone covets it. Another
cause is this, that a blue dress is the badge of the bereaved and
afflicted, and the apparel of mourners ; and this world is the
abode of trouble, the pavilion of affliction, the den of sorrow,
the house of parting, the cradle of tribulation : the (Sufi)
disciples, seeing that their heart s desire is not to be gained
in this world, have clad themselves in blue and have sat down
to mourn union (with God). Others behold in the practice
(of devotion) only imperfection, in the heart only evil, in life
only loss of time : therefore they wear blue ; for loss (fawt)
is worse than death (inawt). One wears blue for the death
of a dear friend, another for the loss of a cherished hope.
A dervish was asked why he wore blue. He replied : " The
Apostle left three things : poverty, knowledge, and the sword.
The sword was taken by potentates, who misused it ; knowledge
was chosen by savants, who were satisfied with merely teaching
it ; poverty was chosen by dervishes, who made it a means of
enriching themselves. I wear blue as a sign of mourning for
the calamity of these three classes of men."
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Lack of positive religion and of morality arises from
heedlessness {ghaflaf). Well said that great master, Yahya
b. Mu adh al-Razi : " Avoid the society of three classes of men
heedless savants, hypocritical Koran -readers, and ignorant
pretenders to Sufiism." .... The
ignorant pretenders to Sufiism are they who have never
associated with a spiritual director (pir\ nor learned discipline
from a shaykh, but without any experience have thrown If**
themselves among the people, and have donned a blue mantle
(kabi idi\ and have trodden the path of unrestraint.
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"You never bring friends to church with you because
> you are embarrassed by how weird the church is."
If things go on at your lodge that you don't feel you can tell your
outside friends, and worse, you feel you must not discuss this with members of your own lodge, this is how oppression takes over.
Bad enough to keep secrets from your outside friends; it is even more oppressive to keep secrets from yourself, you fear to have a conscious inner dialogue about your own life.
When there are too many incidents you fear to admit to yourself, fear to reflect upon within yourself, your inner life dries up. It happens at first at the edges of your awareness, the way some eye diseases blind us by eroding our side/peripheral vision. One can lose most of one's vision without awareness of loss if blindness creeps in from the periphery.
One goes numb inside. This can be mistaken for serenity, but lacks the vibrance of serenity.
One may cease to have dreams -- especially if one is required to discuss one's dreams with a lodge preceptor or with a therapist affiliated with your lodge whom you fear does not respect confidentiality. (One good reason among many why ethical therapists avoid conflicts of interest.)
One may grow numb and become more and more dependent upon the joyful feelings manufactured by the group's rituals.
Over time You can find it too much of an effort to maintain lodge life and outside friendships, precisely because there are too many things you cannot tell your friends.
So, over time you may, by default, spend less time with your outside friends and end up with only the church and its people for company. You can
end up surrounded by people who have done the same thing -- dropped
outside relationships.
Ever so slowly, like fog drifting in, you end up lacking outside perspective.
**And..one of the things you dont like to be aware of is...feeling trapped. That becomes one of the things you find you dont want to face, and that feeling of being trapped becomes another secret you keep from yourself. It can be tempting to become yet busier with church or group projects and convince yourself that all this is right for you. And that feeling trapped is just a temptation from ego.
And because one often drops outside friendships by default, by not
thinking about it, you dont realize you've done it.
And these days, when so many of us have the 'busy disease' our
outside friends may be too distracted to catch on that they
are not seeing us quite so often.
Some exploitative leaders and groups deliberately keep people busy for
exactly this reason - no time to think. Cleaning toilets, endless volunteering
requests, endless music practice, theatre practice, endless requests for
help on child projects tied to the group -- you'll be kept too busy
to have a genuine inner life. This can create sleep deprivation, which
is a tried and true method of keeping one's mind and emotions blunted.
When one is run ragged, whether by secular society or by an exploitative
guru or employer, one becomes too busy to be a person. One becomes a blur.
And..finally. Watch out if during pastoral counseling or shepherding, you are told something about yourself that turns into an oppressive secret.
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An off balance Sheikh or Pir or Msd
wants you to keep secrets. God doesnt deal in secrecy.
Privacy is negotiated between equals. Privacy supports truthfulness. Secrecy
generates lies and oppression.
Secrecy is imposed -- and it serves the Adversary. Paul told his judges that he
preached openly and things were not done in a corner.
Whispers and rumors and secret keeping are signs of a bad relationship, whether a group or friendship going sour -- or a church going sour.
The ways to confuse us are many.
* Keeping people busy and short on sleep. This hampers our ability
to use critical thinking -- and that includes discernment, a delicate
process. Skits? Costumes for skits? Rehearsals? Setting up the
theatre? Creating and editing the script and the music?
Plenty to keep a person too busy to find his or her own soul.
Quite different from the Prophet Jesus/Issa who said "Come to you all who are weary and heavily burdened, and I will give you rest; my yoke is easy
and my burden light." Jesus gave missionary assignments but didnt micro
manage them; his disciples were sent out in pairs on their own.
* Exploiting crises when people are under stress due to hardship
in their lives. This happens to any of us - we get sick, or someone we
love gets sick or has some other hardship.
* People we love and trust are tricked into putting their trust
in something misleading and we trust their recommendation because we love
them as friends. This happened to me.
* Hanging onto good memories and not being able to face that a once
trustworthy leader or group has changed for the worse.
*Becoming used to living with unease. I have fallen into this trap a lot. I
grew up in a very anxious family and so before I could think, I was
accustomed to living in the midst of unease. People from this kind of background
can easily ignore bad signs or incongruities.
Properly taught and understood, God works through creation and through our bodies and relationships, not against them.
* Are you getting sick more often? When I got out of a bad situation, I
had fewer colds. A girl pal of mine who was involved in a miserable relationship
and got out of it, was amazed when her grades improved and her anemia went away. She'd been suffering heavy GYN bleeding due to stress. When she left this
bad situation, her health improved.
* If you get sick do you discover you are glad because that means you dont have
to go to church or to meetings of a group that is making you miserable?
* Do you find yourself feeling angry or anxious or depressed when on your way to church or a group that you formerly enjoyed?
*Are you doing more stress eating? Doing shopping compulsions you never had before? Instead of feeling shame and berating yourself, treat these as clues and apply discernment. I was once very angry at someone. Instead of being able to face this, I did something I had not done before -- purchased and read books about battles and military affairs. I remember being puzzled. Only after I got out of the situation did I realize I was feeling as though in a war, and acted it out in my choice of reading materials. So...notice changes in your own behavior -- it may be a sign of a secret you are keeping from yourself.
* You find you are putting more effort into hiding things about yourself
because you dont want to allow an opening that could lead to your being
reprimanded
* You learn to avoid key words or topics that trigger discord or work requests
from your domineering leader
* You stop telling your family or friends about what is going on because you feel afraid that if you do tell theml, they will stare and think it is strange or bad for you and you dont want to face this kind of honest input from your friends.
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In some important ways, an Addiction Trigger Mechanism (ATM) mimics the functions of a self object in providing the self with an experience of relief
from dysphoric (painful feelings) states; however it is not a genuine self object.
(For)it (the addictive trigger mechanism) lacks the inherent capacity to add structure to and hence transform the self.
On the contrary, an ATM functions as an ersatz selfobject. As such it only mimics the structure building functions of genuine self objects. However, though lacking the power to transform the self, an ATM possesses the often deadly power to deform and in some cases, to destroy the self through
trapping the person in addictive ritual and habit.
Dissociative Anesthesia and the Transitional Selfobject in the Intersubjective Treatment of the Addictive Personality: Richard B Ullman and Harry Paul, page 112 of New Therapeutic Visons Progress in Self Psychology, The Analytic Press, 1992
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The cold reading, at its best, provides the client with a character assessment that is uniquely tailored to fit him or her. The reader begins with the same assumptions that guide the psychological reader who relies on the stock spiel. These assumptions are (1) that we all are basically more alike than different; (2) that our problems are generated by the same major transitions of birth, puberty, work, marriage, children, old age, and death; (3) that, with the exception of curiosity seekers and troublemakers, people come to a character reader because they need someone to listen to their conflicts involving love, money, and health.
The cold reader goes beyond these common denominators by gathering as much additional information about the client as possible.
Sometimes such information is obtained in advance of the reading. If the reading is through appointment, the reader can use directories and other sources to gather information.
When the client enters the consulting room, an assistant can examine the coat left behind (and often the purse as well) for papers, notes, labels, and other such cues about socioeconomic status, and so on.
Most cold readers, however do not need such advance information. Geronda Joseph (formerly Ioannis Voutsas, now Abbot and father-Confessor at St. Nektarios Monastery, Roscoe, NY).
The cold reader basically relies on a good memory and acute observation. The client is carefully studied.
The clothing- for example, style, neatness, cost, age- provides a host of cues for helping the reader make shrewd guesses about socioeconomic level, conservatism or extroversion, and other characteristics. The client’s physical features–weight, posture, looks, eyes, and hands provide further cues.
The hands are especially revealing to the good reader. The manner of speech, use of grammar, gestures, and eye contact are also good sources.
To the good reader the huge amount of information coming from an initial sizing-up of the client greatly narrows the possible categories into which he classifies clients. His knowledge of actual and statistical data about various subcultures in the population already provides him the basis for making an uncanny and strikingly accurate assessment of the client.
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For instance, an understanding of cold reading would have helped me a great deal. I never knew what cold reading was, and until I saw professional magician and debunker Mark Edward use cold reading on an ABC News special last year, I didn't understand that I had long used a form of cold reading in my own work! I was never taught cold reading and I never intended to defraud anyone—I simply picked up the technique through cultural osmosis.
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I was always a very bright and skeptical person. Even in my early teens, I was able to see right through questionable things like est, Scientology, breatharianism, urine drinking, and the really dangerous cults-yet that same skepticism and intelligence actually helped me validate other unusual experiences (of which I had many). I knew many psychics and alternative healers who seemed to be very good at what they did, and I directly experienced healings and psychic readings that I couldn't logically refute.
In that period, it would have been wonderful to come upon skeptical and critical thinking techniques, but alas, critical thinking wasn't taught in my high school. I didn't even know the category existed! When I went to junior college, I took geometry and logic for my critical thinking courses and thus I missed out on the subject once again. In my education, I didn't gain the skills I needed to help me understand what was occurring when New Age and metaphysical ideas and techniques seemed to work. My empirical experience “proved” the validity of things like psychic skills, auras, chakras, contact with the dead, astrology, and the like—and I had very little in my intellectual arsenal at that time to help me understand what was truly occurring.
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When people approach me about what some have incorrectly termed my “conversion” to critical thinking and science, they seem to be looking for some evidence of a crisis of faith. But it was never a crisis of faith; it was always a crisis of conscience. As a healer, I specialized in working with survivors of severe dissociative trauma, and I knocked myself out trying to help these already-injured people feel safe, cared-for, and protected.
Therefore, I was always studying different modalities and healing approaches, and learning about the many questionable (and oftentimes troubling) alternative healing practices that were being offered to trauma survivors.
And here we arrive at the crux of the matter, and the central reason I left the New Age behind: With its time-honored “no-judgment” rule firmly in place, there is simply no formal way to test, question, or bring full critical faculties to what is offered in the New Age. And that’s not okay.
I became a healer because I wanted to help, and because I didn’t want to see people suffer. But I saw plenty of suffering in the New Age as people chased after the magical promises that come so fast, and so continuously. And because there is no formal mechanism for questioning or for consumer protection in the New Age, no one was ever held accountable when things failed to work … and I got really tired of watching it happen over and over and over again.
I also got tired of hearing these failures referred to as “valuable learning experiences.” I was working with people who had been traumatized and who were sometimes struggling through a kind of waking nightmare, and everywhere they turned, magical promises were being lobbed at them. They were wasting time, energy, and money on empty promises. That’s a hell of a lot of learning experiences.
As I searched for responsible information about all of the endless healing modalities, gurus, cures, diets, tinctures, meditation techniques, workshops, and herbs, I found a surprising thing. Because there is no mechanism for consumer protection in the New Age, an entire subculture arose to do it for us. I discovered the work of the skeptical community, and though I was put off by a great deal of the tone and behavior I found there, I’ve done enough shadow work (see my posts on the shadow here, here, and here) to know that what enrages and offends you is often the thing you most need to understand.
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There have been long term victims who have written about a separate or parallel "self," awareness, or consciousness hidden away from the cult "self" that quietly records the real truth and acts as a dump or repository for all the doubts, questions, skepticism, humor, and other un-cult-like thoughts or impulses. They describe this awareness as something they attempt to ignore, though it seems to have a life of its own and often asserts itself in sleep or times of stress. They use cult techniques to silence it, often blaming themselves for their inability to destroy it completely. Religions have taken this "self" as a sign of satan's untiring vigilance and impetus for people to work harder and harder to maintain control of their own (the church's) minds, apparently having no problem with the paradox or hypocrisy. I find the existence of this parallel self heartening. The ones who are most successful at dampening this awareness are in reality the failures, the apparent failures the truly successful, being those who release themselves to a higher truth above the cult or religion's definition. Sad to say, this truth has more questions than answers, more doubt than certainty, and more "unknowing" than most people can tolerate. Too bad the human race is so quick to rush to the safety of answers and certainty. It might be our undoing.
Ellen