Quote
thinkitfirst
She is now in a very vulnerable position, with self doubts, etc. There is also some confusion about the good moments (highs).
My feeling is that she is trying to rationalize the experience, but it isn't working for her.
think first
The problem with rationalizing is that it takes the emotions out of things, and thereby makes them smaller. What they do on inquest can never be made small or unemotional so a rationalization will never "make sense" in an intuitively acceptable way. They say inquest is "profound" experience and in a sense it is. The dictionary defines profound as:
1. penetrating or entering deeply into subjects of thought or knowledge; having deep insight or understanding: a profound thinker.
2. originating in or penetrating to the depths of one's being; profound grief.
3. being or going far beneath what is superficial, external, or obvious: profound insight.
4. of deep meaning; of great and broadly inclusive significance
In day to day interactions most of our responses and feelings are fairly superficial, we say and do things that are designed to protect our inner feelings and to promote the idea we have in our minds of what we are. If you are forced into a situation where you are not allowed to do that, you have to dig deeper, and deeper and deeper until you get a response that is acceptable to the trainers and the group. Each person will therefore access some profound level of themselves, whether they like it or not, and expose that to the group. The advantage of this to quest is that if they push you into a very deep and positive response, even for a moment, they can tie that feeling to Quest itself. By that time all the concepts and goals of quest are neatly arranged in your mind as one total and self contained package, so you buy the whole thing at once. All the concepts and goals are designed to be mutually inclusive and exclusive of everything else - if you accept one aspect of quest you have to accept all of it, if you reject one aspect you have to reject all of it. All the goals and concepts are designed to perpetuate quest. They are not designed to help the individual leave a happier life. They are however designed very accurately to lead the person to believe that quest gives them a happier life, because that belief in each member perpetuates quest. Maybe some even do, but never all. The other thing is that it is not designed to "work" for everybody in the group (by "work" I mean create the illusion that it was a fantastic experience") - part of the group dynamic they deliberately use is scape-goating, for example. Unfortunate for that individual, but effective in manipulating the other people (the odds are still in quest's favour).
Inquest is traumatic, and traumatic things do have profound effects. There are plenty people who say they had great insights, discovered things about themselves they knew, changed their whole lives etc after some terrible even, eg being raped at gunpoint, car accidents, other near-death experiences. Its a normal and natural part of human nature to have profound things within ourselves, that come to the fore under stress. It is not normal and natural to exploit that quality in people for profit and power. And the amount of impact from inquest that comes from a moment or two of feeling profound, is miniscule compared to the real effect, which is the bulk download of the entire quest package, for the benefit of quest.
Also, some of what feels profound may in fact be profound but is largely a chemical reaction - the endorphins etc, the shock effect, all that. So though it felt real, and may have had some genuine elements of profundity, the intensity of it is largely a chemical reation and that in itself may make things that were quite ordinary appear to be profound.
The other "profound" thing that happens when you're put in a traumatic situation is bonding. I'm sure you've seen movies of people in planes about to crash, sharing their deepest dreams and so on. Well, the fact is, when you're about to die (or have been humiliated to a point of near-death) you can't be too discerning about who you trust. Plus it doesn't matter since you're about to die. So people bond. Its real, but in real life we need to be discerning, and carefully choose who we want to bond with, not just bond with an arbitrary gathering of people thrown together by chance into a group. Quest gets around that by saying that at a spiritual level everyone chose to be in the group they were in. Bollocks.
So its doesn't help to try to rationalize it too much, to understand exactly what happened how and worse, what it all means. That can literally drive a person crazy. (Everything single tiny detail in inquest is treated as deeply symbolic and coming from the higher self or spiritual energy world, so there is plenty of stuff that might mean something but probably doesn't). What you can do is get an understanding of the big picture (humans have deep and profound response to life, my deep nature was exploited for profit), and some of the tricks. For example some of the techniques they use have been around for centuries, used to convert people to different religions (revivalism, probably also secret societies) Whether you agree with evangelical religion or not, the point is there is a specific scientifically repeatable methodology that gets people to believe they've seen god, or whatever, and the funny thing is people see different gods depending on who is practising the techniques on them. I'm not religious but if I were I'd say they'd seen a false god, because the religious texts I've read all say you don't need to pay someone to communicate with God, and I'm pretty sure God would be pretty pissed off to find a bunch of over-priviliged middle class people interrupting him for a quick meeting in the middle of a self-improvement seminar).
To get back to rationalising and being profound, if you look at the definition one of the main things is "deep" as opposed to surface or superficial. Inquest attempts to DESTROY the surface and superficial to get to the other stuff. That doesn't happen in a natural trauma, you don't have to destroy one part of yourself to "discover" you had another nice part you never knew about. On inquest they always destroy something. But the surface and superficial things are part of us, they're actually indicators of the deeper things. You can't destroy the outside, make it out all to be bad, then say the inside is "magnificent", and expect people to continue in life with any kind of true integrity ie wholeness. Worse, the people running inquest are not experts, and they can quite cheerfully destroy deeper parts of a person, or the whole person, without ever getting any meaningful genuine profound response.
I've rambled on enough, the point is some things aren't easy to explain rationally but sometimes its not necessary. We used electricity long before we knew how it works. People have discovered a set of techniques for brainwashing people by inducing highs and lows and intense experiences, exploiting aspects of human nature we don't fully understand yet. You don't have to know how the techniques worked exactly, only that techniques were used on you for the purpose of perpetuating Quest, not necessarily in your interest and not necessarily because there is any value in them. The most benevolent motivation I can think of for people who run lgats is that they believe they are brainwashing people into being good. Regardless - they have an agenda, and they make trainees into tools of their agenda and that really stinks.
My last thought (I promise) is that I've read several articles saying that lgats deliberately regress people to a child-like state. My theory is that they do this to a certain age (maybe about five or something) on quest, then take people further back on inquest (to pre-verbal pre-rational state). So if pre-rational elements of people are penetrated by inquest, then rationality is not a good tool for helping to fix those parts. But gentleness can help, I think.