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Cosmic Connie:
What's important to me now is that the main topic I am becoming more interested in, i.e., this whole "persuasion" industry, *is* getting some good coverage on this forum. That's one reason I keep coming back here.
Years ago, somewhere in his book, Rational Mysticism, journalist and author John Horgan referred, in passing, to 'The Enlightenment Industry.'
At the time, this rang a bell for me, as that choice of words linked the Enlightement Industry with the celebrity driven media driven Entertainment Industry.
And the two overlap, partly by sharing the same focus on creating and marketing celebrities, whether as entertainers or as gurus, A lists, B lists and the ways celebrity gurus tend to mingle with celebrity artists and entertainers.
Well, Cosmic Connie has given us a new phrase--The Persuasion Industry.
And, to a terrifying extent, The Persuasion Industry overlaps with the Enlightenment Industry and the Entertainment Industry.
It is my considered opinion that genuine teachers will not be a part of any portions of these three Industries, for the methods of all three--media exposure, advertising, image building, advertising, all work by massaging the greed, escapist fantasy, and trance.
In the words of Aldous Huxley quoted earlier, the Persuasion Industry, Entertainment Industry and yes, the Enlightenment Industry-- all deepen the quasi hypnotic trance in w which humans spend much of our time--and from which all genuine philosophies and truly spiritual religions seek to liberate us.
One of the items listed in the Bodhisattva Precepts is variously translated as 'beware of darkening the mind of self and other with intoxicants.' (Others translate it as do not sell or give intoxicants.')
Most persons consider this to apply only to drugs.
It is my opinion that this precept concerning intoxications also includes:
Marketing and advertising techniques that massage afflictive emotions of greed, delusion (because you are not given full truth about the product,group or guru being advertised)
Use of music or chanting that induce trance
Intoxication generated by sexual imagry designed to throw someone off balance so as to sell them somthing
Fascination with power, fame and celebrity, charisma
Trance induction through methods of hypnosis if not done by a medical practitioner and in a patient provider relationship boundary marked by law and professional ethics
Intoxication induced by any sort of social pressure
Intoxication brought about by issuing new upgrades of a belief system necessitating constant purchases of new books and DVDs and tapes in order for your intoxicated adorers to keep up with you.
Intoxication generated by sleep deprivation dehydration, anything undermining full access to ones mental and bodily resources
Anythingthat installs fear or lust or delusion, a)Which IMO includes most forms of advertising and celebrity fascination)
Intoxication brought about by creating mob mentality, installing us versus them mentality, creating social environment that sustain excessive and unbalanced emotions
and block access to complete and truthful information from outside sources about that social environment.
Yes, there are great and famous persons who did huge amounts of good who became celebrities of a sort, such as Schweitzer, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King, Gandhi and FDR.
But they took a terrible risk and all the persons I have listed lived in a time when mass media was not as intrusive and powerful as it is today.