Welcome TheycalledmeJonah:
GOOD that you got a girlfriend and good, good, good (TOV!) that you got involved
with a band in spite of what Craig said.
There may be plenty of reasons Craig did not want you to get involved with a band.
* You'd have a group of friends outside the cult (Bad!)
* You'd have more fun and feel more alive outside the group than inside (Bad!)
* You'd learn something about performance skills and how to establish rapport with and influence an audience. This might cause you to look at Craig and
see he isn't magically charismatic - that he's using the very same bag of
tricks to handle audiences that you're learning as a member of a band!
(Bad, bad, bad!)
For an example, here is a description of how a high ranking Tibetan lama bossed and bullied his student (author of the account quoted below. The author was accompanied by two friends, Tsar and Vinnie. The three of them ran into Geshe Lama Tsetan, the author's teacher.
Nicolai Grozni, the author, was a Westerner who had taken ordination as a monk. The Geshe was Tibetan, a celebrated master of philosophy and logic - and Grozni's religious superior. At the time, Grozni genuinely believed that the Geshe was enlightened and possessed special powers and insight.
From Turtle Feet: A Memoir by Nicolai Grozni -- 137 -139
Quote
Geshe Yama Tseten never showed any sign that he recognized me, so I
was quite surprised when one afternoon I turned a corner and saw him standing
in the middle of the street, arms akimbo, looking at me as if he'd been
anticipating my arrival.
"What are you doing walking around!" he asked, with a heavily exaggerated
Tibetan intonation--covering two octaves in just one sentence.
"Uh, no special reason," I said, taken aback. I was with Tsar, who was
smoking. Vinnie was trailing behind with the chessboard. Geshe Yama
Tseten chuckled in a rather mean way and pointed at Tsar with his lips.
"Who's this!"
"He is from Bosnia," I explained.
"Every day I see you walking around like a headless chicken," Geshe
Yama Tseten said with disgust. "Up, down, up, down. Lead a meaningless life
and die a fool."
"I study every day," I replied in defense.
"Study! What, the alphabet? It's all very good. Very good! Incredibly
good!"
Now Geshe Yama Tseten was shouting and Tsar looked at me, trying to
figure out what was going on.
"What's the difference between someone who has seen emptiness and
someone who hasn't?" Geshe Yama Tseten pressed on.
I was so confused about the situation I had found myself in that I didn't
even pay attention to the question. Was Ani Dawa behind this? It was very
possible. I could see her going to Geshe Yama Tseten's room and asking him
to save me from ruin. I knew that she resented Tsar and was convinced that
he was going to lead me astray.
Geshe Yama Tseten looked at me intently, waiting for an answer. I had
spoken to him only once before, when he'd kicked me out of his room for
alleged disrespectful behavior, but I knew that all of his questions were traps.
He was prepared to destroy me no matter how I answered.
"Even a little kid knows this," Geshe Yama Tseten snickered.
"What's the difference between a person who has seen emptiness and
one who hasn't!" I repeated, buying myself time.
Aside from the obvious answer-one understands reality, the other
doesn't-I had no idea. Difference. In what sense? Unable to calculate what
Geshe Yama Tseten was getting at, I focused my attention instead on the two
dogs behind him who were dealing with the humiliation of postcoital
entanglement.
"There is no difference, is there?" Geshe Yama Tseten laughed. "You
have someone who walks up and down, up and down, busy-busy, very busywGeshe-la
closed his eyes and contemplated the meaning of "busy" with a sour
face-"and you have someone who thinks about the way things are and the
way they appearw-here, he put on a blissful expression to demonstrate what
that felt like-"and in the end, no difference. Very good. You could waste
your life and die a complete idiot, and you wouldn't have to worry about it.
Don't worry, you understand? Dying empty-handed is a good idea. Very
good."
Geshe Yama Tseten turned around, laughed at the adjoined dogs with
disdain-"Huh! Huh hu-u-uh!'-and walked away slowly, with the grace of
a three-ton hippopotamus.
"This guy has great acting skills," Vinnie commented. "Laughing, shouting,
pausing to contemplate, his intonation as well. . . I didn't understand
anything he said, but he looked great."
"Vinnie used to stage plays in nursing homes across Germany," Tsar said,
winking at me.
"Not true," Vinnie protested. "Not across Germany, and not always in
nursing homes."
See?
Vinnie, with his background in theatre arts, looked right through the cloud of gestures and words and recognized that this grand Buddhist lama had....
(drumroll)
great acting skills.
Lets ask ourselves what's left of any cult leader when we subtract the acting skills?
When you get involved with a band, you're going to learn acting skills along with teamwork and musicianship.
Learn acting skills and you'll see right through Craig's facade the facade he created via his acting skills.
Cult leaders don't
like that.
Have too much fun and friendship, get more vitality outside the church than inside the church -- you're less controllable.
You might even cause others to get up and leave.
Horrors!
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/05/2018 07:53AM by corboy.