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Shavoy
As far as your experience on accepting Christian literature soo boldly in front of the members---another example of mass mindthink that Hell is the next stop for the bus for even holding such slanderous literature...
Agreed. If the bus had had an accident on the way back, I'm sure it would have been my fault, too (in their eyes)! Also, in their eyes, I was tainting all the good "fortune" they were accumulating from attending the meeting. I heard the ol' "plus, MINUS, equals = ZERO" manipulation (i.e., appeal to adverse consequences) line: you make a "good cause" by going to a meeting, but you essentially erase all of your efforts by engaging in such slander. (Insert eye-rolling emoticon here . . . )
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Shavoy
I wanted to pose a question here: Did anyone have the experience of being discouraged to socialize with fellow leaders (if you were one) and/or other members outside of SGI activities? The reasons I got at the time were that "it had the potential to sway one away from the Correct Practice" or something like that.
We were only really discouraged from getting too close to YWD, lest nature take its course and our pure faith be somehow overtaken by our raging hormones. Other than that, I can't say it was really discouraged.
The Japanese WD went out and had their shindigs all the time. I went out a few times with fellow youth div. and it was odd to see your "senior leaders" acting somewhat "normal." I say 'somewhat' only because they weren't completely normal in that some still had a tendency to order you around a bit and a lower leader still retained the diehard habit of brown-nosing his superior, no matter what the circumstances. Hanging out with the MD was probably my preference, because they weren't so anal about things and were most laid back (HAHA!)
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Freeheartandmind
I just finshed reading SHO-HONDO by Mark Graber. In his preface, he states "The readers will notice some glaring flaws in the 1973 NSA organization,: militarism, male chavinism, aggrandizement of leaders, repression of sexual relations, arrogance toward other religions, and certain Japanese customs and superstitions being mistaken for the teachings of Nichiren. These defects have long since been corrected. The present day SGI-USA organization is very different than what is depicted in these pages."
HUH? These defects have long since been corrected? From what I can tell, the structure of the org has remained substantially unchanged. Does anybody know if this Mark Graber is in SGI, he doesn't say what his status is, except he is not representing SGI in an official capacity.
I loved that part, too.
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Freeheartandmind
That said, I don't think I could have survived YMD! Besides the difficulty in keeping whites clean when you have no time to wash clothes, YMD seems like you were in the Army or something.
Not many bothered even trying to keep their milkman uniforms clean. I remember, some were pretty disgusting. It was always a readily available and easy excuse for getting yelled at - having unclean (or unpressed) whites. Some people's were so dirty and wrinkled that it looked like they had slept in and crawled through the gutter over night (no joke).
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Freeheartandmind
Fake musicianship was common in Kotekitai also, girls were told to just move their fingers if they didn't know the song. I'm sure this did a lot to advance the cause of cousin rufus. Silly, none of this band stuff advanced anything except organizational control over people's lives.
HAHA! Same thing in the brass band, too! Some of those people couldn't play if their life depended on it. We were told to just play louder to cover it up. Some of the practices sounded, appropriately, like feeding time at the zoo.
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Freeheartandmind
Members who went on "tozan" were accorded higher status than those who couldn't, for whatever reason, this org was/is very status conscious. I wanted that recognition since I wasn't getting it any other way, but it still did not happen.
You know, this is something that I had completely forgotten. You're right, "tozan people" were definitely afforded a "special" gold status over those who never went. I did "tozan", too.
I equate the experience to be the equivalent of 24/7 immersion into a cult retreat world; its sole purpose, to heavily and deeply indoctrinate you and reform your thought and behavior processes. Essentially, an attempt to implant permanent gakkai cult filtered contact lenses into your eyes, so you view everything and respond to the entire world differently thereafter. You are no longer an individual and become part of the group. The group and Cousin Rufus take
all precedence and are
all that exist and
all that matters. You cannot think for yourself, you cannot move by yourself and you have absolutely no freedom except for a few DESIGNATED hours towards the end of the trip, specifically tasked to go pick up some souvenirs and do some personal shopping. Otherwise, it was constant "GO!, GO!, GO!, HURRY UP & WAIT!, GET IN LINE!, DO THIS!, DO THAT!, NO!!!, FASTER!!, GO!, GO!, GO!." The whole experience was like a kind of whirlwind journey of controlled epic chaos that never let up.
If you didn't show up for something that you were scheduled/told to do (soka-han, baggage, planning, practice, whatever), somebody would come looking for you, to yell at you, and physically drag you to where you were supposed to be. The ideal member was one who would do everything they were told to do and nothing else. They higher the "leader" you were from the outset, the more that was expected of you. I would be telling a lie if I didn't admit that some of us regular ol' ymd common members didn't sneak away when we weren't supposed to and dally around the streets of Japan on our own. We never got caught and it was a lot of fun for us precisely because it was against "gakkai" law (HAHA)! Maybe because I did that, I didn't undergo the complete immersion that others did.
I definitely felt the tugs pulling me in, though, but it all ultimately had the opposite effect on me. It made me further realize just how warped, manipulative and extreme things could potentially go if one gave in to it all. In a way, I'm glad I went, though, because it gave me a much better perspective and understanding about what the cult is TRULY all about. You were also treated differently once you went. You were more readily accepted and trusted more by the sheer virtue of simply having gone thru such an experience together along with your peers. It was like some sort of official 'initiation' into
their world. It kind of made you a true "insider." I'm sure that senior salaried leaders all also have their own version of this kind of stuff, too (tailored to their "level", etc.).