brainfixed

have you ever heard the term "recipe for disaster"? so i'm thinking "it takes a recipe to make the koolaid so why would anybody put those ingredients together ever again?" why do people want to rekindle friendships, make new friendships or even marry people that were in the same or even another cult? i've always wondered how it worked out for such people and the one example i've got to "watch" is showing that it makes the koolaid. i just don't get it.

thanks. i probably could have done that myself huh? :) so what's it mean "welcome to babylon" then?

is babylon a real place or just a place made up by religions?

i don't like the idea of a scapegoat (adversary, devil, satan, whatever you want to call it) because it's lazy on both the parts of the doers and the people that are being done to, because for the doers then they don't have to look at what they're doing and for the people being done to they don't have to learn that they can quit being done to, and the "fix" is unattainable and surreal for most people, and i speak this from all my life experience so i'm not judging but speaking from experience. once i figured it out that the doers are out to get what they want i started figuring out that i don't have to give them what they want and that i don't have to treat them with respect or in a humane way or with dignity or anything besides like the animal on the hunt that they are, and what do you do with an animal that's hunting you? well you either get the heII away from them or you disable them so they can't hunt you, but first you learn to recognize them and their hunting patterns and then you stay off their hunting grounds. like i don't go out for a walk at two o'clock in the morning, or if i get one of those feelings about somebody on an elevator then i don't get on the elevator with them, or if i recognize a behavior pattern immediately i don't tell myself that i'm just being judgemental but i tell myself good for me that i learned something and i'm not going to be a victim this time. even though he used it as a perpetrator, wierwille was onto something when he said "you can't offend a dead man" but i use a different twist on it now as "you can't offend an offender" and i speak up to people that i know would use people, abuse people and throw them away when finished. like i hear somebody laying on the smarm about not being able to pay their bills and how bad their wife is about shopping and keeping house and always complaing, well then i know right away that he's looking for a "discrete relationship" and will complain about me when he's smarming up the next "fresh" piece. and why have to find what i did "wrong" anyway? that's like all the deer getting together and trying to figure out why their fastest, most alert buck got shot down. deer have better hearing, better responses, better smell, better everything than humans do and if they get shot down, then what makes us humans think we can always be "on top of things" enough to escape everything that will come our way? if we're thinking like that still then we're still in the way international or in some cult or another or something because it's not mentally healthy and it's called "hypervigilence" and this is something i speak of from all my life experience too so i'm not judging here either. and here's some news about all that too. perpetrators love that their victims get all hypervigilent. yep. they get off on it and will watch their victims looking over their shoulders and worrying themselves to death about what they did wrong. even if it isn't their own victims, too, perpetrators will seek out other victims and listen to them trying to figure out what they did wrong and how to avoid doing it again in the future so they won't be a victim again. it's part of the power thing perpetrators love. that's why so many perpetrators are in the "helping" fields like volunteer on suicide hotlines or help children go through court processes or volunteer in rape crisis centers. and we thought they were just getting their next victim. nope. they're also getting a power fix.

maybe i'm reading something wrong here but i thought this was about why you can actually write out john lynn but not vince finnegan and geer and others? or maybe you can but aren't supposed to?

all my life i wondered why things happened to me and what i did to let them or make them happened to me because of course it had to be because of my believing or because i "left the door open" or "dropped my guard" or wasn't "dealing with the adversary" right or something. but then about a couple of weeks ago i watched that oprah episode where she was interviewing those convicted pedophiles and getting into their heads. i watched it because i have this masochistic need to know why perpetrators do what they do. but anyway, there was a man on there that had messed with his own twelve year old daughter and oprah asked him what he said to his wife to get out of trouble with her when his daughter told on him. he said that he told his wife his daughter was lying to get what she wanted. oprah asked him how that made hiim feel to say his own daughter was a liar. he said, "i wasn't thinking about her or what i was doing to her. i was just trying to cover my own butt." that's when it hit me and hit me hard that all abusers are the same and that all abusers want just one thing and that one thing is they want what they want. that's it. they're not thinking of anything else but what they want. it doesn't matter if the abuser is "just" a verbal abuser or if the abuser is a pedophile or if the abuser is a cult leader or if the abuser is a wife beater or if the abuser is a murderer or if the abuser is a rapist or if the abuser is an arsonist or if the abuser is a burglar or whatever. the bottom line is they are thinking ONLY of themselves and what THEY want. so it has NOTHING to do with who/what they choose to perpetrate against. and sickness and misfortune are the same way. $h1t happens because that is what $h1t does.

ok this is probably no big deal to start a new topic about but i thought about how people find this place and how search engines work and so i thought maybe i would say something, but i don't use "twi" but spell it all out as "the way international" so that when people search for information there are more "hits" from here, and maybe the more "the way international" is used in a topic then maybe the more a topic itself pops up on a search. and maybe i don't know what i'm talking about and it doesn't matter. can anybody tell me if it does or not?

true that thehighway. and after everything he said about embracing his past instead of running away from it, and how his children see it as stories and part of their history, i guess it would be like being a decendant of al capone or something. it is all helping me to be less freaky about being raised in a cult, and that's a good thing for me because i am pretty freaky about it all and it's hindering my progress in life, so whatever helps is refreshing and i am thankful for it.

i like this thought because the article could be that "always unpredictable" thing that gets the way international seriously investigated, so that's a good thing in my mind, but then again that's happened a few times already, hasn't it? so anyway i don't get the whole reason for bringing up the wife's involvement either but if it somehow gets some investigation to shine a light into the darkest corners of the way international i say great, and in this day and age it probably will at least put suspicious way international people on "no fly" lists and that is probably a good thing, and maybe even get some of the "lost" registered sex offenders "found" and back on "active" listing and stuff like that, so maybe the mention is worth something.

i'm sorry for getting that adoption information wrong, but i have it recorded and will go back and see how i missed it, and i didn't watch the gacey part yet so i'm going to go back and watch it sooner or later when i have more time. taking his children to see the place, i don't think i could have gone back myself but taking my children? i don't know because i have so much shame, but this is really making me think about a lot of things and that probably there's hope that i will find a way to do what he's done with making peace within himself about such things. oh these are links to the whole show? very cool and thank you for putting them here because i didn't know if or when it would ever be reaired.

i just got to watch it and oh man there's some good stuff he says in there, and the thing he says that i liked the most was when he was talking about how he copes with having that particular history he said "i embrace it because if i embrace it i don't have to run from it". did anybody else get to see it? i didn't know that jim jones and his wife were the first caucasion couple to adopt an african american child either. that history is something else, and it was something good for this man (jim jones jr) as much as it was something bad for him. he also talked about how his children have handled everybody knowing about their grandfather and his cult and the murders of over 900 men, women and children, how because he embraced it all and didn't let it become a stigma for him, then his children haven't either. and then he told about how the reason he didn't die in the whole mess was because he was 150 miles away playing basketball, and then about 15 years afterwards when he was self-destructing on booze and drugs and his wife was about to leave him, how it was basketball again that saved his life when he connected with his son through basketball and found a reason to sober up and make his life the way he wanted it to be. that son is now a big basketball star, and he said that for the first many years of his life he was known by everybody as "jim jones's son" but now he's known as "rob jones's father" and how much that means to him and shows how life can change no matter what. i cried a whole lot. it was a very good interview i thought, and i see how i don't have to always be the kid that was raised in a cult.

thanks for that information penworks! and krys it's not that i don't want to go off in that direction because i really do, but it's that i don't want this discussion to get sent to the "doctrinal" area before it's had a chance to put the thinking of the way international into the "light of day", so go ahead and say what you're thinking and let's see where it goes. :) mstar i have spent some time with different types of religious beliefs with people when they are very sick and even dying and compared to the way international and what the way international claims is "christianity", these other religions are far closer to what the bible says is "christianity" than anything the way international ever, EVER practices concerning sickness and death and dying! which is where i began to wonder if that "truth" must be a universal thing and not something held in a book and for only the specifically initiated. i mean doesn't even the bible say of itself that even a child could understand the truths? if that's the truth, then what's all the learning, all the "according to usage" and other mumbo jumbo the way international used to "prove" they had some "special" understanding, all the "research", all the whole waste of time, really, when what the way international at its top level produced out of it all was a handful of rapists, thieves, wife beaters, drunks, aldulterers and possibly even murderers? i mean seriously, something got lost in the translation if the way international thinks they found "the truth" about anything.

thanks for the link. would it be ok to put those two quotes here? because they do describe things pretty good.

this discussion is getting better and better! thanks!

i'm not saying that there is no truth in the bible or that anybody shouldn't believe in the bible or anything like that, but what i'm saying is that i think it's stupid to think that the only truth is in the bible, and the discussion i was looking for wasn't a doctrinal discussion but a discussion is how come i thought like that, and i found out that it was because of what the way international taught me.

this has been in my mind for a few days now and is kind of because of the discussions about the thinking processes of the way international, but something was bothering me and it just came clear to me today and it is the idea that the only truth is in the bible. really? that's a pretty stupid way of thinking once i look at it in the light of day. and how'd i get to thinking like that? i think it started with the idea that "all things that pertain unto life and godliness are contained herein" or whatever the way international said about the bible. again, really? i remember my brother used to play this "game" with people and say, "hey, want to play a game with me? ask me any question, i mean any question you can think of and i can find the answer to it right here in the bible!" at first i was impressed with it all but then i saw that he really didn't come up with any "answers" but it was more like reading the horoscopes in the newspaper every day and he was just finding verses that might work if he twisted them just so and just there and around this way a little bit. eventually the only people he "impressed" were the people that were looking to be impressed. but there's also the whole "center reference for truth" doctrine of the way international that plays in here too. i mean, come on, really? if the bible is my "center reference for truth" then i'm in a big pile of doo doo because i'm of mixed heritage and have no tribe and even though the "old testament" is not "written to me" but "for my learning" it still "teaches me" that there's a whole lot of things i should be doing on a daily basis that i'm not doing and if i did do i couldn't even keep a job! and heII if i did even just what the "new testament" demands of me then i still wouldn't be able to keep a full time job or even be able to have a place of my own or more than one pair of shoes or more than one of anything. and if my "center reference for truth" was the bible, then what about even being on the internet? the bible didn't prophecy about the internet, so what am i doing using it because it isn't "real" because it was not "written"? and this all brewed inside of my head because some yay who said to me the other day, "if people would follow the one true god and learned of his truth there wouldn't be all this crime in our city," and went on to spout off with some very way international thinking patterns and it just made me wonder how and why i ever got to thinking that the only truth was in the bible.

there is another possibility that i have heard of is a new "up and coming" thing with "closed ranks" groups and that is donating your own blood for your own self. i don't understand the "ins and outs" of how it works because it sounds like it doesn't have longevity (blood can be kept for only so long), but i've heard that people can "choose beneficiaries" (i don't know the right terminology for something like this) of who gets their blood donations, so maybe the way international is doing a blood drive to keep it all in the household? i don't know, really, but the way international is an aging group that shunned medical care and practiced whacko "health" activities for a long time, so maybe there are people now in need of blood transfusions, so maybe a blood drive is appropriate?

it's not for the squeamish one bit and it's set in ancient egypt, and i don't know if it "truly" reflects "ancient evenings" or not (it is a novel after all) but it gets pretty graphic about the "frolicking" of the gods and brings them to a quite base human level, which really all of the gods are if you think about it.

it is all very clear to anybody that's outside looking in that the way international (and any other cult for that matter) teaches some very unsound mind stuff, but the real problem is that when people are in the middle of that unsound mind stuff it isn't clear to them that it's unsound. and this makes me think of when i first was told that going to college isn't about getting an education as much as it's about broadening a person's horizon and getting a person some more world experience and maybe getting an education in those first couple of years. after coming out of a "teaching and research" focus this information was like telling me that there was no god! and the more i've learned in the world the more i've found out that without outside input people get pretty unsound in their thinking, which is the importance of isolation to cult leaders and other abusers because without isolation people would be exposed to more sound thinking processes and be able to see other options than the unsound thinking options provided by the cult leaders or other abusers. so trying to understand things from the outside looking in isn't going to happen, and that can be seen here on many different discussions when people talk about having to explain over and over again to their therapists and just even their non-way international friends just what things were like to the point that most of us just don't bother any more because it doesn't make sense because it was all of an unsound mind paradigm.

i got to see this firsthand in a "real world" experience yesterday and it gave me the shivers something awful! i was taking care of a person that has lung cancer and she is very frightened and holds onto any "hope" she can and her "sister" (she has no siblings but she calls this woman "sister") told her a story that i couldn't believe she latched onto but then when i saw where her "sister" was going with things i shivered. this "sister" told this woman that on the city bus on her way over to visit she actually convinced the driver of the city bus to stop the bus and let her lead the whole bus in prayer for 5 minutes for this person. ok now. this is in a large metropolitan area and right now there is snow and ice on the streets. i didn't believe that story for one minute and when the woman with the lung cancer started crying and feeling all special and like her "sister" had pulled off some miracle i got the shivers and thought "oh my god this is what geisha was talking about on that list!" and it turned out that the "sister" was trying to get power of attorney over this woman because of a big life insurance policy. and she got it. now here's the thing that's even worse. this "sister" has visited this woman only twice and both times it was to get something from her, and this "sister" never shows up to help and never brings any cards or flowers or even tries to cheer this woman up at all but argues with her and bullies her and intimidates her, but because the doctors consider this woman to be "of sound mind" there's not a thing anybody can do about her signing that power of attorney over to this "sister". so people don't have to be mentally screwed up or anything to get hornswoggled, but just being in a place of wanting something is enough.

yes waysider that's it really, isn't it?

oh yes geisha it is very subtle and that's what i mean when i say that i didn't even know about the stuff that got into my head and how i am now understanding how people got sucked in, and i say "sucked" in instead of "drawn" in because i am "drawn" to things that are decent but i am "sucked" by things that are not, it's just a thing i use to separate things in my head and i don't expect anybody to agree with me or even understand me because it's just for me and my head. and this whole thing about faith is a very interesting discussion because as i grow up i learn that what i had "faith" in had very little to do with a "god" or anything "spiritual" and had mostly to do with what is "clinically" called "magical thinking" or in every day terms something like "santa claus" or "cinderella" thinking and it goes something like "if i'm good enough then i will get ______" or "when the right _______ comes along then my life will be happy and whole". and the basis of the thinking is that i somehow control how everything turns out in this world, and that just isn't so by a long shot. so to me real faith is understanding that there may not be anything "out there" at all, but that the "miracle" is how something as lowly and easily killed off as all the species here on earth has even survived, and all the balances and all the nuances it took to even have life in the first place or even have a planet or two that would support life, and this satisfies me that there must be something way too big to even comprehend. and i prefer to have my faith in something i cannot comprehend because if i can even begin to comprehend something, then it no longer is something i should have faith in because if i can comprehend it, then it is no better than me! so the whole figuring out god stuff is bs!

this made me laugh because i am currently reading "ancient evenings" by norman mailer. now back on topic, are you talking about the list that included "el shaddai"? i used to invoke "el shaddai" as the "strong arm of god" all the time hoping against hope for protection. dammm the things that are in my head!

yah that's the whole rub of it all is that in the end there just isn't enough energy to keep up the hypervigilence and sooner or later the body is going to give out even if the mind wants to keep it up, but even the mind has to rest, and some therapists are looking at the possibility that some of what has been diagnosed as "bi-polar" might really be the extreme ends of the hypervigilence cycle where one end is the collapse (physical and mental) of sheer exhaustion and the other end is the extreme energy after coming out of such a collapse. it's something i tried to express here at "the cafe" before and i couldn't get it out right or something, and i see that bolshevik is having a similar difficult time, but staying involved in the way international was pretty much because people were either hostages (like us children that had no choice) or were not thinking well for one reason or another. i am not saying that people were mentally ill! what i am saying is that the way international would not be considered a "cult" if it did not practice mental and emotional and spiritual and physical and sexual abuses, and people would not have stayed around if they were not caught in the cycles of those abuses until they felt safe enough to get the heII out. i'm editing to also say that from a kid's point of view, an adult had to be pretty screwed up to voluntarily join the way international. most of the kids i knew saw right through most of the bs and we could not understand why the adults didn't. but now that i've grown up a little bit and seen how the bs stuck in my head without me even knowing it, i can also see some of how the adults got sucked in.

there are other places on this discussion that talk about something similar and this is called "hypervigilence" and is seen a lot in abuse survivors as a coping mechanism to try and keep themselves safe from the next attack by seeing the warning signs before the attack actually happens so they can hide or try to ward off the attack in some way or deflect it. hypervigilence serves its purpose when trying to survive but when it's practiced in non-survival situations it interferes with normal living and can make things so difficult as not to be able to function without the constant threat of danger, which is part of the woes of those that suffer with ptsd. the "reading" of people and situations is quite common not only to abuse survivors, but to con artists too, like "fortune" tellers and "psychics", and even to every day people like sales people and law enforcement people that need to be one step ahead of others, or even politicians and community organizers or anybody, really, that stands out as a leader of people in some way, they "read" people and situations all the time whether they realize it or not. it's not a great "spiritual" thing at all and is really a very "senses" thing to do in the end. and the "still small voice" is something i learned in therapy to recognize as my own inner voice, which is why it was never 100% right. well, duh. how many stories of people waiting for a voice, or even voices, ended up very good? even the bible examples didn't end up very good if you look at them without the magical thinking glasses on. so what i learned in therapy to do was to teach myself to think better so that when i needed to do better, i could. i really like what dr phil says about luck being preparation meeting opportunity. and if you read the bible in its essence as a whole and not in its pieces as a "literal according to translation" interpretation according to some yay who, then you will see that basically the bible says to grow up, get wisdom, work out your own salvation, and have a little faith that the universe does not revolve around you.