waysider

I wonder if, twenty years from now, they'll be having Kindle burnings.

Something like "Cantalope until my honeydew."??

I personally never heard him speak on Gandhi. I suspect he borrowed his interest in India from E. Stanley Jones. You may recall, it was from Jones that he borrowed "Fear is sand in the machinery of life."

Cleveland had Ghoulardi HERE

No matter what you do------Love Will Find You

Before I took the foundational class, I engaged in a conversation with one of the local advanced class grads. "You know", said the AC grad, "behind every religious statue and idol there is a devil spirit." "Oh?", said I. "Do you mean that they're inspired by devil spirits?" So the AC grad gets a bewildered look on their face and indignantly says, "Well, Dr. said in the AC that there is a devil spirit behind each one of them and that's good enough for me!!" :wacko:

Stupid Way Story Cleveland, 1973 or '74 A young lady with a history of drug abuse and mental health problems is "witnessed to". She has no interest in the class but someone offers to pay her "donation". Midway through session 5 (the "Christ In You" session) she gets a disgusted look on her face, stands up, says, " I gotta get out of here" and leaves---never to be seen again. After the session, we worker bees are called together by the class leader, Mr. Spiritual, and informed we have just witnessed a devil spirit being dispelled by the light of "the truth". (You know, the "devil spirit" was doing the speaking.) Now for the stupid part-------------We believed it!

Yes, I'm familiar with it. Your reference of it evoked a memory of consuming a goodly amount of it before riding "shotgun" in one of VP's classic cars. (a red one)

Wild Turkey?

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value=" name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src=" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

That middle of the night strategy seemed to be quite popular in TWI. (We had them in FLO, as well.) Why?, I don't really know. Maybe it was to take people off guard. Maybe it was to frame the message in an aura of false urgency. Maybe it was because people are more willing to relinquish control of their logic and reason when they are sleep deprived. Personally, I think it was a method they borrowed from legitimate applications, such as the military, and exploited to their advantage. What I do know, from personal experience, is that it can prove to be very effective at squelching opposition.

I still remember how my Grandmother lamented over the demise of formal letter writing.

Thanks, Nato, for "getting it". Yeah, I've pretty much worked myself past all that stuff, too. GSC played a big part in helping me do that. AND---I never really thought about how Wierdwille used that explanation to hide his slothfulness. LOL.

I probably didn't explain this very well. I'm not talking about the obvious stuff that doesn't relate to TWI. Stuff like someone keeping a hand grenade on their desk or talking about blowing things up. That stuff doesn't require any affiliation with TWI to be a cause of alarm. What I'm talking about is the things that relate directly to TWI teachings. Stuff like someone you've gotten to know fairly well revealing to you they take meds. for bipolar disorder or that they've been a recovering alcoholic for the last ten years or that they have cancer or that they are homosexual but in the closet. That kind of stuff. When I was in TWI, I would find myself in those situations and suddenly feel a sense of paranoia about what I may have revealed to them. What have I said? Was I talking to a devil spirit? yada, yada, yada. Plus, there was always that guilt that I must have missed on the discerning of spirits angle. I worked with a guy for a couple of years who was very normal. Very nice person. One day he revealed to me that he started life as a female but had surgically changed his identity to male. All kinds of TWI thinking goes through your head at times like that. Now, years later, I feel foolish and guilty for allowing my "Waybrain" to ruin what had been a good friendship. That's what I'm talking about.

I guess Willie Dixon must have been a "seed boy".

From what I remember, they used to extract verse 3 out of I Thessalonians, chapter 5 and give it an interpretation that had nothing at all in common with its contextual meaning. "For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape." This verse was used in a way that is so far out of context, it's embarrassingly ridiculous.

Well, the stuff we ate in FLO was mass produced by the food co-op, Manna. Anyhow-----I was kinda thinking about the sort of built-in paranoia that came with some of those old teachings. Some of that thinking lingered in me for decades. (Embarrassing but true.)

According to TWI thinking, anyone who publicly advocated peace and harmony had to be a "seed boy". Oh, the horrors of it all! :P

Why do I feel hungry when I think about "familia" spirits?

I think it was in PFAL that Wierwille talked about how he would work all week on his Sunday sermon a bit each day and then put it in the desk drawer. He couldn't understand why, by Sunday, the congregation had hardened themselves against the topic. And then a little light bulb of understanding went off in his mind. It must be, he reasoned, that the Devil would take his sermon out of the drawer, look at it, and then whisper words of disagreement in the ears of the congregation all week. That's when, he said, he decided to keep his thoughts and teachings locked up in his mind where the Devil had no way to know them. Later, in the Advanced Class, he talked about how "familiar spirits" hung about, gathering whatever information was brought into the open via spoken or written word. He also talked about how, if a person had a spirit, such as one of the many, many listed in the Advanced Class syllabus, that divulging information to said person was the same as divulging information to the Devil. So here's the thing. Were you ever in a conversation with someone who fit the criteria of the Advanced Class for devil possession (ie: alcoholic, suicidal, homosexual, schizophrenic, reincarnation advocate, etc.) and found yourself being very cautious about what you said to them? After all, you could be talking to a devil spirit. Heck, maybe you should even give them some bogus information like a secret agent who thinks he might be getting double crossed! Am I making sense? Suppose there is a person at work who is stereotypical of TWI's definition of "devil possessed". How much can you really reveal about your true thoughts and feelings to them, knowing you could be divulging your secrets to devil spirits? Shhhhh! Careful now---They might hear you.

The supposed purpose of the Twig Hopper was for VP to tour the countryside and visit the twigs. After all, "the life of the ministry is in the twig", remember? Now, I know they did some kind of week long or month long scenic bike ride or something because a poster here went along on that ride. But does anyone here recall VP ever dropping in on their twig? Never dropped in on mine. Hell, for that matter, he never even bothered to drop in on Fellow Laborers, even once, in all the years I was there.

Why, yes, it was, indeed, RA.