WordWolf

I'm convinced this isn't a joke. After everything, Mike really thinks that twi will admit to things in writing. They go out of their way to HIDE anything. Documentation? They were even vague IN COURT, under threat of perjury. Seriously, I'm supposed to take Mike seriously and trust his perceptive ability when he makes gaffes this big? Oh, right- he never actually MADE that gaffe. He was referring to something else, he was misunderstood, he was taken out of context, he never meant to suggest twi's error-ridden previous policies would be admitted to in black-and-white, and it's all our fault for thinking that's what he meant, and we're all meanies who are ganging up on him. It's like a piano with ONE KEY.

I sat through a LOT of ICs as a grad. We never had a problem like that among the grads, and when I was a new student and in the same excellors as the new students, hesitancy was a minor thing that was easily dismissed. I don't know why your excellors sessions were so inferior. The students could all have been unprepared to take the IC, or whoever was running the show might have been deficient, or something else. I don't think that it was just NY'ers were that much better than everywhere else.

I was watching this television program last night. There's a contest among chefs, and the winner will get backing and advice so they can open their own restaurant. The contest is to determine who is most ready for the opportunity- who COULD run a restaurant if given a chance. Each contestant thinks they're ready to do it, and has their own concept of the restaurant they want to open. In the very first challenge, they were each given the task of making a single plate of food that embodied their concept for the restaurant. They were told that one person would be sent home afterwards, the one who performed least well in the challenge. (So, the task was to be making a single plate of food that embodied their concept for their restaurant, and also tasted good, which was obvious to all the contestants.) Everyone ran around and each prepared a dish. A panel of 3 people was presented each dish one at a time. One person on the panel knew the concepts. The other 2 tried the food, gave their thoughts on the quality of the dish, and also speculated on the specific concept of the restaurant, which was compared to the stated concept. Three chefs ended up performing less well than the others, and the one who performed least was sent home immediately. He said his concept was "Southern food and ramen." The dish he presented was not Southern food, nor did it contain ramen. Both guesses to the concept were from judges who could detect no pattern. "The concept is 'a mess.' " When the chef was sent home, he told the cameramen that the concept was there, but for some reason the judges couldn't see it. (Um, neither could we, and we were watching from home.) He refused to accept that the responsibility for clear communication was his, and decided that if there was a miscommunication, it HAD TO be on the recipients because he was SURE he had communicated clearly. However, he had not- and we have the video recordings to prove it. It's a poor communicator that communicates vaguely and then blames the audience for not seeing his points.

IIRC, the IC was 7 sessions when I took it. There's excellors for each session, and when the grads were in a separate room, there were longer excellors for the grads. The grad ones had nothing to do with fear removal. In the foundational, it was mentioned quite a bit. I remember one new student who was only eligible now to take it but had been doing SIT and so on before, and he was complaining about all the time being wasted on that rather than getting into SIT. Considering episodes 9-12 are on holy spirit and SIT, and nobody's supposed to SIT until session 12, he's got a point, that's a LOT of filler. As for the IC, yes, the alphabet game, the recordings with the length of the tongue, the natural breaking points and so on, yes, those are all in the IC I took. That was quite a bit of time. None of that was about "fear removal."

"There is some consolation for all this harsh minimal-ness. There is a hidden BENEFIT to having less than total freedom, on the spot, to act or decide. I think, as a culture, going over-board with the ideology of human freedom can sometimes become confusing in issues where freedom needs to come up in practical ways. The idea that too much freedom can be bad or unsafe is too often automatically rejected. But in theorizing about the mechanisms of the brain, it’s good to remember that too much spontaneous freedom of thought can be VERY bad. Bad in a practical, everyday sense, that is. Lots of freedom sounds great for artists, but for survival IS cosmic freedom useful? We live in a culture with great abundance, compared to most civilizations that came before us. We don’t think through enough about how FW and consciousness must work under much more austere circumstances. But even logically, shouldn’t a totally “free” thought or action be viewed as dangerous to the thinker? To me it sounds like a great way to lose my place in a complicated set of thoughts. I want solid, immovable markers in my mind as I explore complicated ideas. A thought, totally uninfluenced and guided by any past experience, may be poetically attractive at first, but WHO’S TO SAY there can be any practical, everyday-life benefit to such a type of freedom? Entropy would predict the opposite!" ==================================== I think it's fascinating to discuss models of culture where personal freedom has been curtailed. Mrs Wolf's fond of reviewing those- they're all DYSTOPIAS where, somewhere along the line, some idea or ideal was proposed as a cure-all and everything was adjusted to accomodate it... and society as a whole was crushed in response. Where "people can't think on their own- they need to be told what they should think." -Mrs Wolf. In this case, we're looking at what Mike thinks is a problem-too much free will! Mike wants LESS free will! Mike wants a world so deterministic that his choices are hemmed in tightly. To Mike, that's comfort. I'm not against things being orderly, but I don't hold order to be the highest principle. Imagine the book of Genesis with freedom of choice hemmed in deterministically. Well, actually, the options were right there. Some people complain Genesis 3 is bad because the freedom of choice is NOT hemmed in deterministically. People are given a chance to decide on their own- so they do. Who argued that the system was wrong in Genesis 3? Well, you can read it for yourself. I remember an Intro to Philosophy textbook that lauded "the serpent" as the hero in the Garden of Eden story. But, with LESS free will, there's no Genesis 3 account because humans aren't given "enough rope to hang themselves." But, let's be honest here, I think that's the wrong perspective. Yes, it's true that one can view it that way- if one's perspective is confined strictly to the present moments as they occurred. If one considers all of history, with all the free will decisions from that time, since then, to the present, and into the future, Which is the greater good- a hypothetical Garden of Eden, forever perfect from Genesis 3, with the unchanging status of Genesis 3 and two humans serving God? or a hypothetical future New Jerusalem, with millions of faithful, who chose to serve God Almighty despite other choices being available and easier, all transformed/resurrected with the new set (upgraded body and mind)? On paper, when looking at all of eternity, is the second outcome not greatly superior to the first outcome, even with suffering on earth, unhappiness, and deaths- until then? I find it superior in many ways. Each person had the choice to serve God- and those who wished to do so did, and those who wished not to did not, and each got what they wanted. God got people who CHOSE to serve Him, who freely offered their loyalty to Him, who had the choice to love Him- and chose to do so even when it was not easy. Instead of 2 humans serving Him, God got a LOT of them, each serving in their own manner. What possible use is the hemming-in of free will? Someone who is scared of their own power, their own ability to choose, may well hand over their free will. (There's people who do that all the time.) Someone scared of the choices we are given might even posit that there either IS no free will, or that we should not HAVE free will after all. Does this truly benefit the person? I think not, but I can see how someone can be made to think that- or how one can run to such a doctrine when the world out there looks too big and scary. If you ask me, it's the kind of decision for someone who misses the child's lack of agency. (And WordPup, for one, doesn't want to be there even if he is young. He wants all the ability to choose that an adult has- but he accepts that it will come in time and that he might want some more practice until then.) Those of us posting here are all adults- no matter what we're feeling like right now.

"I met a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis."

No.

Albert Einstein Professor Max Krassman Tomas de Torquemada Dr Richard H. Thorndyke Moses Professor Van Helsing

Emerson Lake and Palmer's "LUCKY MAN." Nice to recognize one.

Ezekiel 33: 3-5 (KJV) If when he seeth the sword come upon the land, he blow the trumpet, and warn the people; 4Then whosoever heareth the sound of the trumpet, and taketh not warning; if the sword come, and take him away, his blood shall be upon his own head. 5He heard the sound of the trumpet, and took not warning; his blood shall be upon him. But he that taketh warning shall deliver his soul. =============================== All the warnings in the world are in vain for the person whose practice and doctrine punish them for CONSIDERING/THINKING, and reward them for blind loyalty and never examining whether or not they've taken a wrong turn somewhere. STUBBORNNESS is not a fruit of the spirit, no matter who seems to think it's something praiseworthy.

This is an expected side-effect whenever one embraces a doctrine that requires one to CLOSE their eyes and ears, and LOCK the doctrine tightly. This produces mental inbreeding. Just like physical inbreeding makes animals or humans weak or ill, mental inbreeding weakens people by limiting their sources, their intake. Even if it's one good source, it's like eating nothing BUT rabbit. The rabbit isn't poisonous, but if you eat nothing else, you could die of malnutrition. In the case of mental inbreeding, the ideas that float around become progressively more UNsound. Worse, if grading is based on how "faithful" one is to the sole source of input, the more unsound the doctrine and ideas get, the harder one is to cling BLINDLY to them- and one is lauded and praised for doing so. "In multitude of counselors is safety." If one only has one source of knowledge and counsel, trouble is inevitable.....

Albert Einstein Professor Max Krassman Tomas de Torquemada

It's one of those one-word shows..... "SUCCESSION?????"

Taking my usual wild swing here.... "CAMELOT????"

"Tongues of angels" is mentioned exactly ONCE in the entire Bible. That should raise a few eyebrows, because whenever vpw posits a doctrine around a SINGLE VERSE, it always turns out he'd flubbed the verse and that wasn't what it meant after all. "Tongues of angels" is mentioned in a list of incredibly wild, over-the-top claims of practices. It's no more a reality one can experience than can having ALL Knowledge. What all that means is important, and why there were several threads just discussing all that. Naturally, Mike never learned anything from any of those discussions.

Although it's possible for anyone to change over 20 years (some of the GSC'ers have changed radically), Mike is so used to being refuted and ignoring the refutations that posting corrections, even obvious ones, won't be of use to him as to other people because Mike doesn't come here to ever try to learn anything. Mike's here purely to advertise.

So, the person who insists on breathing and eating this ideology, is there any long-term and/or short-term harm to them?

So, Mike is pfal's last chance, and Mike is free will's last chance. Mike is amazingly important- according to Mike.

With Mike, that's usually the way to bet. Find a way to relieve him of the responsibility of the decisions he made, of the responsibility for the actions he took.

BTW, I don't think you're going to get the Psychologists to go along with any new definitions or new phrases you propose and use, like "synapse set." Especially when they don't agree with previous definitions of either word.

One standard technique, right from the conman's playbook, is to INVENT a problem and then SELL you the solution.

Incorrect- just Mike unable to get past the polarizing influence of black-and-white thinking. Some of what vpw stole was good material from good people. Some of what vpw stole was not- and vpw was unable or unwilling to tell the difference. Since he was just copying over, he likely didn't understand a lot of it and just bluffed a lot. After that, people came along and cleaned up his work, corrected him, or constructed elaborate covers that hid how bad a mistake he'd made. One problem was when a good person- like Bullinger- made a big mistake, and vpw was unable to tell the difference. (Bad material from good people.) Furthermore, sometimes the material was bad and came from bad people, and he couldn't tell that, either. Since vpw was cobbling together an inferior theology from diverse sources, these were an obvious risk- and were an obvious outcome. It was theoretically possible for him to construct a serviceable theology using eclecticism- but it required a better eye than he had, and harder work than he was prepared to do. Cognitive dissonance is what one gets running into a big pile of vpw error, then trying to spin it into some secret truth hidden by God Almighty.

No, it was a False Dilemma as posted. Although it is not outside the realm of possibility that you're just that awful at communicating, and are continually misunderstood, I'm going with "I got caught making a mistake, so I'll rephrase myself and claim I was misunderstood instead, and the fault is in the reader instead." Since you've previously VOLUNTEERED to us that you "dodge, distract, but never admit an error is an error," it's more likely just more of the same. So, you're making lots of mistakes, admitting to none of them, and keep insulting GSC'ers who understand and catch you on each mistake, pretending they're the ones making the mistakes. if you're trying to convince us you're really up on Psychological and/or Psychiatric thought, you've a long way to go (and probably won't get there.)

Apparently, I don't know The Kinks nearly well enough for this round.

I try not to post when I have absolutely nothing to add. George and I both apparently only know 1 quote from John Paul Jones. Unless you meant the one who was in Led Zeppelin, that would be different.