I am not trying to distract from the purpose of this thread, but i feel the responsibility to make one last point, for the purpose of clarity.

In my view, we need to be careful when it comes to Cognitive symptoms.
Why?
Because our Cognitions (thoughts) ABOUT our Cognitive symptoms, affect the original cognitive symptoms.

Our Metacognition, affects the original cognitions.
How we think about about thinking/feeling, affects our thinking/feeling.
They can go into a feedback loop.

Example:
Anxiety.
A person is feeling lots of anxiety.
Soon, they might begin to think and feel anxious ABOUT feeling anxiety.
So the more anxious they feel, the more anxious they get.
It can start a feedback loop, and bingo, you have a serious debilitating anxiety disorder.
According to Cognitive Theory, the anxiety is created by the anxiety provoking Cognitions, or anxious Thoughts.

So how we THINK about our thinking profoundly affects our thinking.

So if i cannot concentrate, and if i then begin to feel anxious about this, it can contribute to the concentration problem, and start a similar type of feedback loop.

What i am saying here is not superfical at all. It is actually very powerful.
I have had PTSD symptoms myself in the past.
And i had to learn the hard way, that i was making myself worse, by my panic and worry over my PTSD. I had do do all sorts of "behavioral experiments" and "cognitive restructuring" to eliminate those symptoms.

So this is a large area of psychological knowledge, that is very subtle, and has an enormous amount of scientific evidence to back it up. There have been hundreds of studies in the cognitive behavioral therapies, looking at different aspects of this.

I just wanted to throw that point into the mix.

The point that how we Think about our Thinking, affects our Thinking.
How we think about our feelings, affects our feelings.

So, i won't post any more info into this thread.
If anyone is interested in getting into specifics, i would be more than happy to in the RECOVERY threads.

Coz

to supplement what Elena mentioned several posts above, I have identified a special form of lying one that is very powerful:

Something factually true/spiritually authentic is used to serve a much larger and more pervasive lie.

I discovered this over 10 years ago when dealing with a manipulative, narcissistic boss who was heavily into Catholic spirituality. (He's become a Roman Catholic priest in the past 2 years. Lucky us.)

One day, I watched the guy running his mouth and suddenly a light went on in my head and I realized, 'Even when you are telling the truth, its part of a much larger lie. So even when YOU are telling the truth, I cannot trust you for an instant.'

The worst set ups are when something spiritually authentic is looted from the tradition and then used, out of context as a mere 'power/manipulation' tool in something like a problematic LGAT.

The Buddhists talk about the importance of being in a line of work that supports the attitudes of mind and heart necessary for true spiritual practice. If you're in a line of work where you're treating people like objects, you can go to valid practice paths like Zen, Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, etc and never see that these are designed to help humans grow in wisdom and compassion. Instead, a someone with the soul of a hustler will look at these practice paths and miss the love and compassion entirely. He or she will only see them as a collection of power tools.

The Sufis have a proverb: 'When a pickpocket encounters a saint, he seeks only his wallet.' (If it is an crook who is into power games, he or she sees only the saint's influence and special knowledge--the spiritual crook doesnt want to see that the saint is in service to God and humanity.)

Its sad but true that any valid spiritual practice or psycho therapeutic technique can be used to either heal or poison us.

Its the intention, the quality of mind and heart, of the person using the tools that matters.

By contrast, the minute you look at someone as an object, something to manipulate, tweak around, make money from--you've begun to make them ill--and make websites like this one so necessary

Stumbled upon this website by way of trancenet.org. There is a forum also and some of the stuff the posters wrote really describe what life has been like for me - not really depressed, but just numb. I mistook it for apathy. At least I have some info I can bring to a counselor if it ever gets approved by insurance.

[www.depersonalization.info]

Trancenet provided info on depersonalization and dissociation as a result of TM. The site above discusses other speculative causes like trauma and serious illness. I seem to fit this mold more than PTSD. Reading about DP, I recalled a crisis state the doc helped me get to, what a therapist called decontextualization, and what the doc called something pertaining to a buddhist state of being. Who do I believe? I felt like I had stepped out of my life. Unfortunately, that's when he asked me to start working for him.

Cos - I wasn't trying to start an argument, I just can't seem to get the right words here.

The thread is [forum.culteducation.com]

Here is some more info on Depersonalization Disorder.

[www.psychnet-uk.com]

"" In simple terms I was once Steve living his life but now I am the experience of Steve living his life""


This reminds me of something I read once. My apologies, I cannot recall the source.

"Before I sought enlightenment, I thought a mountain was just a mountain. When I believed I was enlightened, I realized a mountain is not a mountain. When I was truly enlightened, I knew a mountain was just a mountain."

Penny

[forum.culteducation.com]

Penny,

From 'Only Don't Know' by Zen writer, Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn (aka Soen sa Nim) [www.cizny.org] ISBN 0-87704-054-0.

'A don't know mind is a before-thinking mind. Before thinking is clear like space. Clear like space is clear like a mirror.'

In other words, ‘only don't know’ means choosing to pay attention, in order to dispel confusion, to be non-judgmental, to see reality as it really is, 'just like this'. Everything just is what it is - a pencil is a pencil, Landmark is Landmark, a cult is a cult - without interpretations or opinions. It's not nihilist, it's not like E&M, it's about stripping reality down to the bare essentials of love and compassion. Very different to the cynical Landmark use of DKDK as a hypnotic enrolment technique.

Zen teaches that there are 4 (main) levels of enlightenment (or 'don't know mind'). I suspect that the lower levels (the 'Landmark levels') are hypnotic dissociations, and as for the upper, top level, well - either it's a higher level of dissociation and the whole concept of enlightenment is a fraud, or it's something else, a different order of 'being' that is valid in and of itself.

(Personally I find the levels of enlightenment make sense viewed from a scientific perspective of trial and error, where you 'try on' a new theory or idea, test it against reality, and gradually refine it until you have a working model that fits the known evidence - a bit like the concept of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Landmark's 'philosophy' is at the lower end of the scale, a set of theses that has not been tested or peer reviewed,
and which fails at the first hurdle of rational examination.)

The 4 levels of enlightenment, according to some Zen traditions, for example Seung Sahn in my favourite Zen book ‘Dropping Ashes on the Buddha’, are :

1. attachment to thinking (0=1, 1=0; all things are the same, all things come from emptiness and will return to emptiness; form is emptiness, emptiness is form; the pencil is a bird; “your complaint is a ~racket~”)

2. attachment to emptiness (1x0=0, 10000x0=0; no thinking, no words, no speech, no God, nothing at all except the Zen belly shout KATZ; no form, no emptiness; the pencil does not exist; “life is empty and meaningless, and it’s empty and meaningless that it’s empty and meaningless”)

3. attachment to freedom (1+2=3000, 100x1000=-4; the arena of magic and miracles, no hindrance in space or time; freedom form, freedom emptiness; the pencil is choosing how it’s being; “I manage myself to create your listening”)

4. “just like this” = no-attachment thinking (3x3=9; all things are just as they are, the truth is ‘just like this’; form is form, emptiness is emptiness; the pencil is a pencil; Landmark is Landmark)

Another way of explaining it is that “first enlightenment” is attachment to thinking, attachment to emptiness and attachment to freedom; “original enlightenment” is no-attachment thinking (‘like this’, the sky is blue, the grass is green, the pencil is black); and “final enlightenment” is ‘just like this’ (when hungry eat, when tired sleep; the pencil is a pencil).

I think Landmark’s non-linear, ontological ‘empty and meaningless’ paradigm (and Landmark work in general) is level 1, attachment-thinking, or “first enlightenment”, which is a type of hypnosis, a form of dissociation from normal, everyday ‘like this’ or 'just like this' reality.

Chris

Kico,

Thanks for the book references -- they're on my 'read this sometime' list.

I have a few other comments, but I'll not hijack the thread for them.

Penny

This thread was posted to inform about a particular topic.

Please remove any posts not germane to this topic.

You can start another thread somewhere else. Anything outside of the topic will only serve to obfuscate the issue.

Thanks

Guy

Thanks for moving your posts,Corboy. :)