Re: Soka Gakkai International -- SGI
Date: January 31, 2014 02:01AM
There's always that promise that once you chant enough, if your practice is strong enough, once you've connected with senseless strongly enough and once you've donated enough, your dreams will come true. But what is "enough"? If you're chanting to have your teeth grow back, there is no "enough," unless you're one of those highly unusual people who might have an extra set of choppers lurking around . . . not "impossible," but highly unlikely. As you wrote, Spartacus, the failure always belongs to the member - they aren't doing enough to overcome that nasty karma, so they're screwed. And das org benefits. The member just keeps getting smaller and smaller, in his own mind's eye, and hearing about all the victories that other members get just makes them feel worse.
funny - the last new year's gongyo I went to, the young woman who shared the great-big-experience was one whom I knew by reputation (not great), and what she shared was so close to some of my own life situations that I sat there almost slack-jawed listening to her tell one outrageous lie after another. I can cite an example from her presentation; after having been in her job for a couple of years and thinking that she was set for life, she was suddenly relieved of her position because she was pregnant. According to her, she was denied unemployment. Anyone who has ever had to collect unemployment knows that unless you're fired for some sort of blatant misconduct, you will receive those benefits. Secondly, no employer in his right mind is going to fire an employee because she's pregnant - that is flat-out against the law, and she could have headed her tail over to EOC and gotten that straightened out in a big hurry, along with either getting her job back or having grounds for a lawsuit to recover her salary (at the very least). In other words, her "experience" was blatant fiction. Of the couple hundred people sitting in that room, I think I was the only one not sitting there in a trance, hanging on her every word. That might just have been the beginning of the end for me, now that I think about it. The community center is in Philadelphia, and you can't tell me that there weren't people in that room who weren't on unemployment or had been on food stamps for a while (another part of her tale of woe).
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2014 02:03AM by meh.