Mike

What is your solution for all this? Did you find a better way to think about God?

E gads! That is a written promise. Claim it; best you can; we're all learning here.

That is not accurate. I never said "t's all in the collaterals." Not even close!!! What I say is that I trust them and use them. Your memory is inaccurate here.

No it is not strange. What is strange is that you think I have an un-limited about of time for your topics.

Again, it was marble cake. There were some VERY good spots. I was there too, and managed to move from light spot to light spot for years. Did you see Ralph D's account of that on Long Lsland that I posted yesterday? It happened that way in several places.

God is fair, and the rules He made up before Adam's fall are fair. But we got to know them well; down to details. What is unfair is the playing field where we apply them in the devil's world. It is a complicated spiritual war we are in and all sorts of nasty, unfair things happen. We were given the abilities to fight them, but we got to be good at using the abilities. Things went wrong in our learning, very wrong, around 1986. For people who got into the ministry after that it was unfair that they didn't get to see it all working well, like inthe 70s From that chapter (9?) in Daniel, God's forces working for us are delayed and lots of things are going on behind the scenes we have no inking of.

I am tempted to drop everything and get the folder into post-able form. It is one of the ECNs that I've been proposing in texts to leaders, both in and out of TWI-4. I wish I had the time to yield to that temptation right now.

How many times did you not read my comments that I feel like calling the Corps "Wierwille's Folly" in the past 6 months? Like VPW was wrong (and admitted it) in committing the funds and time for PFAL'77 being a replacement for the '68 class, I feel he was wrong in the way he wound up the Corps training, and the Corps taking over the field. But after 1982 it was too late for him to admit the mistakes and too late for him to implement change. I know there were many good people and activities from the Corps also. I don't forget that, even though I don't always post it.

We are posting on top of each other. I will slow down.

Jesus's Prayer to the Father: ... Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven. God's will is not done on Earth right now. God is not in charge; it's broken.

No. I've been through this with other grads for decades, and with myself also. We are living behind enemy lines. God is not in charge; the devil is. This is temporary. All this is in PFAL. The broken universe is in Romans 8.

How are you defining this promised abundant life? I mean THEN, how did you define it. What WERE your expectations in such a life back then? From whom did you get these expectations? I'm guessing VPW and session one. Did you update them with the SNS tapes, like I posted a few minutes ago? Most importantly, did you refine your Session One understanding/definition/expectations as you searched the Gospels to see what Jesus had to say about such an abundant life, beyond John10:10? */*/*/* Sorry about all those questions at once. I'd also be interested in how you define it now. Did you eventually get it straight what kind of abundant life Jesus came for you to have? If not, are you interested in Jesus' perspective on this?

I think you are at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding them. If you look at old cigarette ads or old TV shows, they push all kinds of emotional buttons also. It is after you learn to suppress emotion that you can see the data more thoroughly and hence more clearly. But you clearly are riding the emotion like an amusement park ride. It must be fun, but that's the hook. Like all free rides, there is a comedown price to pay.

I paid attention to the class, then more to the book, but also to the followups in the SNS teachings for years. Remember, the foundational class was foundational. If you don't build on that foundation, then the Big Bad Wolf doesn't have to do much huffing and puffing. If you are stuck in your first impressions of Session One, then that might be a part of why the law of believing didn't work to your satisfaction.

I agree. But "producing good fruit" is, like I was saying earlier, a complicated entity. I think it is pretty important to recognize that this entity changes from time to time. We have several decades of data to look at to see if the training techniques were working good or bad fruit. An over-simplistic assessment of this, especially if a few of the decades were before one's time, could be very disadvantageous at times, when trying to help people who got hurt in the ministry machinery. I have some first hand understanding that TWI-2 was an extreme version of the marble cake model I have of the ministry. As crazy as TWI-2 was at HQ, my first hand knowledge is of a few of the light spots on the field, far from HQ, and staffed by Corps wiser than their colleges elsewhere in TWI-2. I know a couple of people who dodged bullets in both TWI-2 and TWI-3, and are now helping TWI-4 remember what TWI-1 was like, when the marble cake was mostly light with a few dark swirls. TWI-2 was the opposite, lots of dark and only a few light swirls. I say swirls, because of the fact that the personnel move about in the field geography every few years. It's that time factor again, zooming out and looking at years and decades.

Life in the broken universe is rarely fair; not yet, anyway. The "abundant life" is a topic that is in bad need of definition. I remember several SNS or SNT teachings over the decades calling attention to us getting the definition wrong. This could, and should, be a thread in itself. I feel that I got an abundant life, and it is still developing. There have been ups and downs, but that's to be expected in the 2nd heaven and earth, which are goaning in pain, like childbirth, at the moment.

I think you may mean 1971, not 72. If it's really '72, I am interested in it. I have transcripts for '71 and '79. It's been about 15 years since I looked at them much. I search for things in them once in a while.

I disagree. There is a training period and an application period. You are emphasizing the training period gone bad. It wasn't always that bad, at least, in areas outside the Corps. Did you see my post yesterday of the 78 or 8 passages from the Gospels? They were all on the topic of the appropriate "blame" Jesus handed out in the Gospels to STUDENTS who he was teaching to believe better.

I have a folder concurring with much of this that I have prepared for TWI-4 people. Some of them I have already talked to in person or in texting about the Revered Title versus gift ministries. I have been received well. Maybe I should post on that folder sometime. The following discussion would probably beef it up some.

You said it better than me. I agree. Milquetoasts, no. Just the opposite towards men: fearless, almost like a man who has nothing to lose. I was talking about meek towards God only, like Moses.

No, not any folders on this topic. A lot of this is from scriptures in my head and seeing how things fit. My AC was in 1975, and I credit that as my start. I've paid close attention to some of these issues, seeing how the fit with scripture. But I've not approached this from a perspective of DERIVING it all from scripture. Once shown these things in the AC, a lot of it becomes self-evident.

I did. What about it?

Thanks much, AGAIN, Old-Skool. I feel no dis-respect. I appreciate the pleasant atmosphere to discuss this. If I forget, or if my text is wanting of creative emogies, please forgive me. */*/*/* Yes, I do see that people are victimized. And it pains me, and I feel for them, and I thank God I was far less victimized. I have my minor battle scars, a few of them, but mostly healed now. After TWI there were other private ways I was victimized, and worse, and it wasn’t with religious people. So I can relate to the victims in general, and I want to help them as a whole, and most of all, one-by-one in person. */*/* Yes, I do see it as an intellectual pursuit at times, in order to find the best ways to help the victims. This is a very complex pursuit, because there are several kinds of victims, there are several periods of time in which the abuses occurred, there was a large body of written and spoken data to sort thru for good info vs. bad info. There are lots of intellectual opinions as to where the baby ends and where the bathwater begins, and sorting through this large inventory takes a lot of brains, a lot of energy, and a lot of time. */*/*/*/*/*/* So here we are, with a bunch or intellectuals using keyboards to pursue causes of abuse and solutions to a vast array of complicated pigeonholes that are topics and threads here. I think that separating truth from error is a worthwhile keyboard pursuit to some degree, so that is why I contribute here, in the keyboard sense. When I am in private texting things change. When I am face-to-face things change. But here in keyboardland it is pretty much an intellectual pursuit for all of us. And I have skin in the game that I prefer to not pass thru my keyboard about,,, for my privacy and for the privacy of others. I have confided some of these things to as people in private, to the extent I think they could help me, or to the extent I thought that I can help them. I have skin in theTWI game in the sense that I took it seriously that we grads were family with seed of the same Father, and that we were bonded on a mission from God together. I don’t see myself stopping this taking it serious. It completely baffles me how so many times I have seen a loving grad family split up for some dumb reason, and they all want to hate each othe,r and deny or forget the strong family ties we had. */*/* It may have sounded in the past 20 years that I only have a one-size-fits-all way of dealing with the abuses. But I had a lot going on in private those 20 years. I had local grads of all flavors and victimhood that I was interacting with, and I had about 10 or 12 GreaseSpotters I was dealing with in e-mails and phone calls. I had the Open Mic people and a few other groups I’ve never mentioned here. The GSC friends I made then were either rare posters here, or never-posters. Some I am still very good friends with. NONE of the richness of interactions I had over the past 20 years with all these varieties of people, both grads and pagans, ever leaked into my posting here. I was a one-trick-pony by my design. But, as I have stated several times, I finished that job. I am now allowing more of my positions and opinions of solution(s) be known. In the first 20 years I almost never distanced myself from anything VPW. I focused almost entirely on the collaterals and other printed works. But in recent months, all that has changed. My one-trick-pony days are over. I have a special regard for the collaterals, but I have been making it known how strongly I have distanced myself from many things TWIish. Not all, though. It is a large sorting process, and I protest how it is done mass production style here. */*/* In my humble opinion, GSC posters can help others better if they adopt a more realistic and detailed model of what went wrong. It is not just one big bad guy in this story; that’s simplistic. This is a VERY complicated problem, and most of the victims know it. You can’t win their trust with a pure evil model of nearly everything VPW said, did, and wrote. The victims are not that stupid, most of them. There is so much good that came to us all, and the victims know that too. What they don’t know is exactly what was correct that they have in their brain versus what was not correct in their brain. Telling them to dump it all and start over will repel the wise ones, and screw up the less wise ones. That is my opinion. */*/* If it is thought that I contaminate GSC with my intellectualism, look at T-Bone, and Rocky, and Word Wolf, all operating as college professors here with their intellectual posting. I am not complaining about this. Sometimes I like their links and summaries. It’s just that I think that it might be worth considering that my intellectual pursuits here are worth considering in the mix, as you all pursue solutions and closure. Anyway, I just wanted most to let you know I feel for the victims. I feel like we’re in a war with real casualties, and most tragically, some of them are collateral damage. */*/*/* I had no idea that pun in the last sentence was going to come out, until the period at the end of the sentence was typed. LoL This fits in with my theory of comedy, that it is so entropy driven. I’m glad I resisted the impulse to edit it, and preserved it for your folks to have a laugh over. I want to thank you again for making this post pleasant. Have a great day.

God might choose one only to be refused, like with Jonah. It takes two to tango this kind of thing. Remember how rejected prophets are. I get the impression many of them were losers who had grown accustomed to rejection, and were pretty meek and not heady about themselves. Nowadays, everyone is encouraged to make the best of themselves and excel over others. Not good prophet prep.

Nobody likes them, so nobody wants to be one.