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Interesting posts........ The ability to separate the Truth from the lies are very hard to do when you are in because you think everything is truth, based on what you have been taught. But inwardly, you know there have been times when you have said to yourself...."What?" "That doesn't make any sense" OR "I don't think that's right", or "Why do we have to do that" or "Why is it always "MY" fault" and leadership is ALWAYS right. How can a human being ALWAYS be right? I think there was only one that was ALWAYS right. How can you absolutely believe you are right in a situation, (in fact, know you are right), but when someone else says, "No you are wrong and you should be humble because I am your leadership and I am spiritually in charge....Do you abandon yourself in favor of accepting "Their truth". Why do you not trust yourself any more. Do you even know who you are any more??? Have you abandoned what you loved before you entered into TWI? Can you answer these questions honestly?

No problem or offense taken, dmiller man. We buy things off the shelf, unwrap them, read the instructions and go from there. Usually the goods are good to go as is, some are less than what's advertised and still others, disappointing. Some things are downright destructive especially if used counter to their intent. When I get to the "things of the spirit" I might wonder how a loving Father could give something bad to a child. Therein is a single strand of reality that efffects our lives, I believe - that we often don't know exactly what we need. (We barely make it through life recognizing to our own satisfaction who we really are, what we should really be doing and where we will ultimately end up) We do to a degree but not always completely and as in other things, we don't know...what we don't know. So we are faced with a series of moments that are always poised in a balance that will go either way - we think. How would we know, how will we know? How can we? Followers of religious traditions speak of "faith" as something unseen and therefore unknowable in memory. Without recall we have no context to properly evaluate our present knowledge. If we were explorers setting foot on this terrain for the first time we'd be learning everything fresh and new. "What's this??"...."I don't know - what is it???" Through the remembrances of others though we have a shared knowledge. In reality my faith is based on fact, somewhere at some time, be it events or the revealed images of the future. So I can in fact understand my faith in things I haven't experienced directly - through the shared knowledge of others. We do that in every realm of our lives. Is it so unusual that we would do that in other things, "spiritual" things? (he asked). "Trust" is a first step towards enlightenment, a corny word these days but one that we desparately need in our vocabularies more than ever. Jesus said if our eye be filled with light than our whole bodies too! The eyes of understanding being enlightened - understanding is different than knowledge. And in fact Ephesians quotes to us that following understanding a whole range of knowledge will open up to us. Yet, we typically reverse that - that through an abundance of knowledge we will piece together understanding and then we will "walk with all power" and be hmmm, all we can be. People want to know know know and it seems there's never been a lack of people to teach teach teach, and so it goes. Me-Help books pile high only to be shoved aside to make room for more, the latest and the greatest, the last-one-you'll-ever-need-to-buy books, volume 1. Reserve your copy of vol. 2 now! Knowledge is necessary but without understanding we only have part of the whole. One first, then the other and out of it all, wisdom, a past, present and future that is coherent. Or something close to coherent at least would be nice. The power, whatever it is, is always there. It's never the goal. Out of it all comes the open vision of life as it really is and will be. Simple trust. It's no more complicated than that, that a loving Father will behave and relate to us as He has in the past with others, now with us in our own individual lives. So I speak in tongues.

Regular sleep is probably one of the most basic elements of health, like being hydrated and breathing. When we're young, in our 20's, we're bullet proof (or think we are). We can stretch the limits and bounce back fully loaded and ready to go. That recovery time changes over our lifespans as we age. Still our bodies work with what they get and given all the hereditary factors that load into making us who we are we're able to manage a lot of variances in our environment. I went through a period of a few years where I loved to jog and "run". I ran quite a bit in the 70's and reached a point where I could go out on a Saturday afternoon and run from The Way Nash driveway for 5-6 miles, as a "fun run", keeping a slow easy pace of 7 minutes a mile or so. I felt like I could keep going for another 5 easily and often just ran for time - an hour or so and then stop. I ate "healthy"and if I binged on a burger or a pizza here and there, it never mattered, it burned up and off. That changed. My shins gave out, "shin splints" set in because I didn't manage the running and adjust as I aged. Speaking in tongues changed too - in fact, I found it more of an effective means for private prayer and "meditation" for want of a better word, as the years went on. It's contributed to what I would call my own personal "insight" and awareness hugely. In my youth I tended to (thinking back now) to have a lot of other things going on when I would speak in tongues, not giving that practice the room emotionally that it needed to fully expand into my whole "soul life" and authenticate itself from other activities. I know many of you don't see any benefit to it and relegate it to wasted activity but I don't. Still, I can't fully transfer my own experience to anyone else so I accept it for what it is, for me, and leave it at that in relation to this board. I can see now though that managing our own basic health routines factors greatly into how we think and our own perceptions. When we're tired and grouchy, piqued by this or that, we react one way. Rested and ready, another. Somewhere inbetween, a balance is achieved as we juggle the realities of day to day life. My first advice to anyone seeing the visage of one change into another would be - get some rest. Particularly to those tired souls so whipped and battered by the Geer/Martindale parade. Look at how it affected Craig. He characterized a person on one long emotional merry go round, making one bad decision after another, unable or unwilling to disconnect, breathe deep and give it a rest, literally, for a time to evaluate and just live. Hindsight = 20/20. Applied in real time today - "gold".

Hmmm....kind of like when CES promotes their personal prophetic revelatons with "spiders coming out of" people's noses. The reaction shouldn't be ... "Wow is that really prophecy?" The reaction should be .... "Wait.....did you say you see spiders coming out of someone's nose....????" I too have read here, but never heard from a live warm human being, that Craig and others said they saw Geer's facial features change into VPW's. Never heard it from their mouths mind you, just second hand, and here. Years ago VPW had a thing about cutting back on his sleep. In fact, late in life he was going over a list he'd made at one time, of things he'd do differently over his lifetime. And one of those things was, get up an hour earlier everyday. He'd added up the number of "days" that would have added to his actual lifetime and it was significant. Quality of life comes to mind n that regard, though - and health. If you only average 4 hours of sleep a night, which was what he proposed, you'll likely experience ill health as a result. It was and still is popular in a lot of circles to sleep less and get more up time. But you will go through some very strange mental, physical and emotional challenges if you do that over a long period. And 5 hours a night isn't healthy either. Some people or for awhile, perhaps - on average, no. Which may account for people their seeing changes like this - seriously now, I'm only half-kidding. Sleep deprived and under extreme pressure Craig sees someone's facial features change. No one should have wondered .... wowzzaa! something spiritual is going on.....they should have backed up slowly towards the door.... "Duh!!!" Maybe him taking some time off, geting some rest and doing a personal - what were those? - "Check up from the neck up"...might have helped a little too. But in general - "shape shifiting" as it's called in other circles is absolute b.s. Not to be confused with the lesser strength but completley effective normal B.S., the absolute stuff is pret-ty pungent.

Hi Para, As for "most people" do you mean "most people who've gotten out of TWI" or just "most people"? The evangelical (scholarly) world (for what it's worth) pretty much read Acts as if it was doctrine and the antics of the heros as being totally of God. Take for instance Peter at the beginning of the "church which is his body" (which I still see as having begun on Pentecost 29CE): He stands up and says "this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel (in reference to the outpouring of the holy spirit). Well, in hindsight, was it? I say no, but fundamentalists cannot but believe that Peter was speaking ex cathedra even then. Well, he was not the Pope (yet) and he was uninformed (at the time). My point is that Paul's trip (in that it happened and was RECORDED IN SCRIPTURE) was OK with God for most people. Reading critically I don't see any way in which, though Paul was trying to do a really nice thing for the impoverished "saints" in Jerusalem, that he could have been following guidance from Jesus. RE