There's a long-winded explanation for that. Like "God Bless you Abundantly above etc etc etc.". Just say a lot for friggin ever and put the listeners to sleep.
That was just plain stupid. However, for a lazy researcher like vpw or even lcm, downgrading "research" to just "rereading" something made it possible to CLAIM you "researched" something when all you did was read the twi explanation. It also made it easier for vpw to justify just plagiarizing anyone else's explanation so long as he "READ" it, after all, he searched it again, "that's 're-search' ".
Retemories - a branded term for the small flash cards with scripture verses on them. "Believers" don't memorize, they "retermorize".
Cop Out - a version of the older term that meant to "cop to a plea" or 'fess up. Adopted by Wayfers to mean someone who left the Way, dropped membership, was no longer "standing" or "believing" the "accuracy of the Word". Eventually everyone but a small remnant will, in order to pattern closely what happened to Paul by the end of his life.
The Best - when good just isn't good enough, everything has to be "the best". A bar frequently not reached, usually because of something you did.
Blessed - another word for doing fine, feeling good, things are going your way, but with the added weight of God's eternal approval and judgment. All leadership is blessed and if they're not, it's your fault.
Joyful - spiritually happy. Makes regular "5 sense" happy seem like a dirty word, no one's really blessed being happy, they have to have JOY and be full of it.
5 Senses - very limiting way of learning and knowing something, unreliable and bad. Never rely on your senses unless it's a leaders senses in which case they're not really just 5 senses, they're the very fabric of God's Presence.
All 9 All The Time - another way of saying you're "believing" and "walking" with all the manifestations in operation, means you're in fellowship and pretty much golden. A goal, unless you're a leader in which case you're next fart is really a Word of Knowledge.
There's so many more of course. And there's a common theme to many of them. I agree that it's not unique to "religious" cults, and is more a part of humanity's need to recognize who's a friendly and inside the inner circle of trust, like family and your closes associates. Like jokes only you 'n' me understand (wink wink) and the noobs don't get yet, kind of thing. Definitely can be used as a tool of manipulation too.
"retemory" was a portmanteau word mixing together "retain" and "memorize" because twi had to have it's own word for memorizing something. Saying you "retained" what you memorized is needless. It's like saying you have to mention you ATE something that you DIGESTED. It demonstrated a lack of understanding of what it meant to memorize.
"Cop out" became really popular once 80% of the people got up and left at once in 88-89. They needed a slur to slap on the other Christians who were doing all the same things as them but not with the same social organization, so they were "copped out."
"The Best" - It's shocking how dissatisfied the cadre at the top of twi can be about everyone else who has a life and a job and still does HOURS of stuff for twi. On the one hand, vpw always claimed twi had all the "best" people and he studied under "the best" despite their lack of background. However, if YOU do something for twi, the top person from there can avoid saying something nice and say it wasn't "best" instead, implying it wasn't good enough.
"All 9 all the time." - A nice goal to aim for, but impossible in practice. NOBODY EVER walked around in twi, CONTINUALLY performing miracles, doing healings, casting out demons or devil-spirits, etc INCLUDING vpw, no matter how often he FAKED getting revelation.
All the holidays were wrong because they had pagan origins, so other Christians were wrong to celebrate them. So, we just renamed them and got to celebrate them just the same????? Yeah, stupid. Shows the degree that integrity DIDN'T have. Jehovah's Witnesses think that and FORBID a holiday. That at least has integrity and conviction.
The Dead are Not Alive. To celebrate is to admit defeat.
Trick or Treating was devil spurt possesion. By little kids. Getting access to your home.
"retemory" was a portmanteau word mixing together "retain" and "memorize" because twi had to have it's own word for memorizing something. Saying you "retained" what you memorized is needless. It's like saying you have to mention you ATE something that you DIGESTED. It demonstrated a lack of understanding of what it meant to memorize.
"Cop out" became really popular once 80% of the people got up and left at once in 88-89. They needed a slur to slap on the other Christians who were doing all the same things as them but not with the same social organization, so they were "copped out."
"The Best" - It's shocking how dissatisfied the cadre at the top of twi can be about everyone else who has a life and a job and still does HOURS of stuff for twi. On the one hand, vpw always claimed twi had all the "best" people and he studied under "the best" despite their lack of background. However, if YOU do something for twi, the top person from there can avoid saying something nice and say it wasn't "best" instead, implying it wasn't good enough.
"All 9 all the time." - A nice goal to aim for, but impossible in practice. NOBODY EVER walked around in twi, CONTINUALLY performing miracles, doing healings, casting out demons or devil-spirits, etc INCLUDING vpw, no matter how often he FAKED getting revelation.
Y'know, on that general topic of what-said-versus-what-real, Penworks put the final stamp on something I'd realized about the earlier years in the Way's growth, the period right before and after 1970...
In her book she described her own experiences as an early participant and then Corps member and the very real struggles that she encountered, and in so doing refers to the similar experience of the others around her, many of whom were developing somewhat mythical reputations about what they were doing, they're "believing" and the "results" they got "operating the principles" of the "class".....stories about "classes coming together" and great things happening when they would go out on assignments proliferated when in reality if you were around during those periods what you really heard about was how valuable something was for them - what they'd learned, the great personal healing they'd experienced, how powerful it all was to "see God Working" in their own lives, etc......which may or may not have been fully true and would be perfectly fine as far as that goes but it very clearly got blown up into much larger stories of outreach and growth .....later as these same people rose up through the ranks they continued to be held up as models of success even to the point of using it as a lever to denigrate and step over others they likely considered competition to their own ascendancy and most importantly their elevated reputations. I would say that as the years rolled on it became apparent that most of these earlier "heavies" never exhibited the "signs, miracles and wonders" in what they did nor in how they worked with others - rather they merely got better at workin' the system, the language, the logic of it all.
I met and got to know Penworks throughout that period and always found her to be honest, supportive, and very caring in the most human of ways. Her own sense of self awareness and her own struggles allowed her to take the high road so to speak and to NOT take advantage of others in order to get what she wanted or felt she deserved. This was and is an admirable trait but one lacking in many of her peer group at that time, as we saw unfold over the years. She wasn't alone, there were others but there soon came to be a core group of up and coming "leaders" who were grabbing the horns of the corporation and riding it out.
Which aren't all that many years - from the period of PFAL 2.0, (their was an earlier homegrown version that was scrapped for being extremely sub standard) the final professionally filmed version that was in the can as of 1967 till VPW's death there's only 17years of time - and that's the time frame when he finally had enough of his ducks in a row that he felt he could promote PFAL on an international level, doing things like going West to reach the "Jesus Movement" of the '60's. Etc etc.
My own experience prior to PFAL coming out to Cali was one where I'd seen quite a bit of real change and "the power of God" through faith in Jesus Christ and the teaching of the Bible, in it's simplest forms. PFAL teaching put pieces together for me but not in an altogether new way, in some ways it simply put structure and a way to understand what was actually happening. In other ways it didn't create a whole new horizon or "produce results" where there were none........
So I was used to hearing stories and of great things happening, I was living some of them myself so it was not merely an academic exercise..........so it seemed a little thin hearing about all these great wonderful things from the first and second Way Corps but never - actually - seeing - exactly - what they were talking about, other than a lot of what you'd call "personal growth". And Stuff. Lot's of "oh God taught me" this and that and loads of "I feel so humbled by what I am learning" kind of stuff buuuuuuuut unfortunately it the Way Corps did not become a "program" designed for spiritual awareness, in action. Kinda ironic.
The pattern I see looking back is that for many people there was a period of early growth in and around PFAL and if that took form into a more ritualized set of practices through their Way fellowship, the Way Corps or other programmed participation, the risk increased for it to become fosselized and lifeless. Busy, noisy, chaotic, even beautiful and good sometimes but more man made, mechanical effort than "pneumatikos" engerized and moving through faith. It's a fine line and one that some others might not see but to me, it's there and is where I see the broad swathe of humanity and effort that the Way had for those years. It's exactly the environment that produced an LCM, El Presidente, a man focused on methodology and linear thinking who literally could not see the forest for the tree.
My point - is NOT that NOTHING was real and it was all BS, but rather that there was a LOT of BS being shoveled ABOUT those early "heavies" some of whom didn't buy into the marketing and others who unfortunately did, for whatever reasons.
This is why I'm so ambivalent about trying to "convince anyone" of anything - I believe those "signs, miracles and wonders" DO and DID occur, and they are to be retold and sharing as those involved are guided and God wishes. They're testimonies to His great Presence and Will. It is happening all around us and all the time. Many ask "why not now" or "why is this or that allowed to happen?" and while there's reasons for and causes, in the end I am not the Creator nor Giver of Laws and in many respects - I just don't know. But I'll continue to tell the story I know and love, as long as theres' one to tell.
Your post reminded me of why in the hell I decided to go into the way corpse in the first place. It was right after the 2nd and 3rd corpses came into NY, on the first of what were to become known as “Lightbearers”......the in-Rez corpse “practical challenge” to prove the efficacy and reality of the corpse training in the the lives of “god’s most committed” followers of the way. That was in the late spring and early summer of 1973. It was the 2nd corpse (graduating that August) and the 3rd corpse (finishing up their first year in-Rez).
Unlike the subsequent “practical challenges” of “Lightbearers” groups, which were primarily made up of getting a piffle class together within a two week visit to an area of “concern, interest, and need”, this group was sent out on the mission to kick ass, take names, and “straighten things out” in the limb of NY, which had been hit very hard by the putsch-like firing of Steve and Sandi Heefener in March of 1972, and the resistance to Boob and Doody Moneyhands having been brought in as the new limb bosses.
I had been a “full-time ministry employee” at the way of Long Island from September 1971 through May, 1972. Steve and Laurie Perez were the full-time area leaders for the way of Long Island, which they started from scratch in the fall of 1970. There was an authentic Christian “revival” in lower NY among the young people and hippies of the time. Steve and Laurie sparked a non-stop slew of piffle film classes at a clip of 4 or 5 a month from Suffolk, Nassau & Queens, for 12 months in a row, leading up to the AC in Rye, NY in March, 1972, during which the Heefners were publically slandered and spitefully fired.
When the Heefners got fired, the Perezs quit. That left Ed Goebel, John Petty, and me as the remaining full-timers down in lower NY from the 5 boroughs of the City to Nassau and Suffolk Counties. We all decided to quit full-time employment with the way of NY, but, except for Ed, we retained our oversized branches to keep running classes. At that time, the whole “blue form” send all the $$ to HQ thing began too! So, it had been quite a year of fighting and resisting for the lower NY areas by the time the 2nd and 3rd showed up in June of 1973.
I was busy getting ready for the ROA ‘73 and finalizing my decision on whether or not to go into the corpse that fall. I got married in July of that year and 2 weeks later was at HQ for summer school and in-Rez. I was playing back- up guitar for Cliff, and lead guitar for Sweet Fellowship (most of whom were going into the 4th corpse) and we backed-up a whole bunch of other groups from the Northeast. Doug MacMullan was 3rd Corpse and he was specifically assigned to work with all us “way productions” people to get us ready for the ROA that year. It was total HELL! LOL! Rehearsals were these 14 hour marathons at Ray Bertine’s parents’ farm in upstate NY, with Mac Mullan telling us to smile, and move, and look at the audience, and, and, and, and.........,
It was during that week of rehearsals at the farm, that I made the decision to go into the corpse. My thoughts were these:
I could see the handwriting on the subway walks pretty damn clearly! If anyone wanted to have any leadership position in the way it would eventually require doing time in da corpse! THAT was made quite obvious to us by vp himself during that month-long Advanced Class in Rye, and by Boob and Doody with their smarmy obsequious worship of all things dictor paul, and by the book bondage”leadership” style.
I just wanted to get married, run the Queens/Brooklyn Area Of NY for the way, and make my living playing music. I did NOT want to go be a limp leader or staff person somewhere. I wanted to stay in NY, get married, play music, and “move da word”!! LOL! There’s the language manipulation again!!
Well, once we were in the way corpse gulag at HQ, EVERYTHING CHANGED! VP had big plans for us Way Productions keedz that we had no idea about! Then, suddenly, there was an Interim year added!!! WTF?? And then......JCING came out.....and then PFAL ‘77.....and then AC ‘79......and then The 40th Anniversary Year weekends, Living Victoriously, The Installation of Da forehead on the 40th Anniversary, Sound Out ‘84.....WIBAP.......one mega event after another and no time to think about what the hell we were doing other than we were “just moving the word”!! Well that wound up a big bust! LOL!
Point of it all being, I never went into the way corpse to be a lifelong ful-time “Minister”! I just wanted to get married, run a branch or two for the way of NY in the City, and play music. I only wanted the corpse so HQ would leave us alone in NY! Leave us alone to run classes, glorify Jesus, play music, have fun, and live life! But, dictor Paul had other ideas. He manipulated the meaning of “a lifetime of Christian service” into a lifetime of indentured servitude to his personal perverted peccadilloes and pathological illnesses. I pity the fool.
Thanks again for another good post Socks. You rawk!
I just wanted to get married, run the Queens/Brooklyn Area Of NY run a twig for the way, and make my living playing music. I did NOT want to go be a limp leader or staff person somewhere. I wanted to go back to NY Cleveland, get married, play music, and “move da word”!! LOL! There’s the language manipulation again!!
With a few minor changes to the text, I guess you could say I "made it my own".
Here’s a modern day example of “language manipulation” for ya!
Each year The Washington Post publishes a contest in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for various words. Here are some past winners:
1. Coffee (n.), a person who is coughed upon.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
3. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
4. Gargoyle (n.), an olive-flavored mouthwash.
5. Flatulence (n.), the emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
6. Balderdash (n.) a rapidly receding hairline.
7. Testicle (n.) a humorous question on an exam.
8. Pokemon (n.), a Jamaican proctologist.
A bit off topic from the starter thread, but as regards signs, miracles and wonders, I simply say: God works in small ways.
Yesterday I was going out for a casual stroll around some public gardens. I put together a small bag with a few things I might want, nothing much, but I didn't want to take my full-on handbag ("purse," for Americans). My fingers touched on a roll of micropore, a sort of lightweight band-aid, and I put that in my little bag - I'd never bother usually. (Heck, why am I doing this?) In the park on a bench I found a man who'd done a longer walk, got wet feet, and got blisters. I offered the micropore and it fixed his feet enough to get back to his car a mile or so away.
I'm glad I listened and was able to help that man. I do think that was a "God thing," to put the micropore in my bag.
Not that any GSC readers (unless perhaps they are newly escaped from the fundamentalist cult that is TWI) necessarily still believe or understand this particular manipulation of language to be unique to TWI, but a friend of mine just yesterday had an article posted to rollingstone.com. She (Ashley Sanders) wrote the story last year on escapees from Scientology. The first paragraph reads,
Scientologists have special words for the people gathered at a sleek Airbnb townhouse on a mild day in September. They’re irrational, or “banky.” They’re putting off bad vibes, or being “downtone.” They’re full of negative energy, or “chargey,” and they won’t contain it — they won’t “get their TRs in.” But the people sprawling on the living room’s vinyl wraparound couch don’t use those words to describe themselves anymore. Growing up inScientology, they say they were constantly told to be stoic. Now that they’ve left, they’re tired of jargon about repressing emotion. Instead, they’re looking for new words to describe themselves—new ways to express the psychological consequences of their upbringing—and they’ve traveled all the way to Brooklyn to tell their stories. They’ve already landed on one new way to think about themselves—a phrase that helps illuminate why it’s so hard for them feel things. They call themselves the Children of Scientology. Psychologists call them SGAs, or Second Generation Adults.
However much they might dislike Scientology, its jargon is their native tongue. Some even say it’s a relief to talk without code-switching, or worrying that they’re talking gibberish. There’s a reason why the language is so central to the belief system, and so hard to shake. According to psychiatrist and thought-reform expert Robert Jay Lifton, new lexicons are common in cults — and often essential. He calls the practice “loading the language,” and includes it as one of eight core features of high-demand groups. When the group breaks to smoke, I ask Shelton for a second opinion.Forget the question of emotional repression for a second. If there are words for these feelings already, why not use them?“It makes us feel special and unique,” he jokes. “If we used regular English words, then anyone could do this!” But he agrees with Lifton’s idea of cult idioms as thought-terminating cliches. “It gets people thinking in the cult leader’s system,” he says. “It literally makes it harder to think outside the box.”
Dr. Matthews agrees, pointing out that many high-demand groups have jargon around emotional repression. Some fundamentalist Christian cults use the phrase “keep sweet,” she says, meaning “stop whining, stop complaining.” She adds, “Jargon like that rewires the brain.”
In a similar-but-not-identical vein, TWI leaders saw the word rereward in the OT and read it as "re-reward," as if God were going to give you another reward.
I feel like "lo shanta" never really had a fixed meaning.
I'm sure folks on the outside thought one thing. And innies thought something different every time.
I'm not sure of the meaning, but I know vpw used it periodically to demonstrate to the group that he could SIT, and it was exactly the same sentence each time.
"Lo shanta malaka SIto la SHONta."
If we had been running an Intermediate Class, and a student was always saying the EXACT same sentence, we would have been trying to identify the PROBLEM. vpw did it and was never doubted for an instant because it was vpw. Really, he was held to a ridiculous double- standard. Half the things he got away with would have been issues or problems for anyone else, and he got a free pass.
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waysider
Advance = retreat Opportunity = problem Being negative = identifying a problem Think positive = ignore an obvious problem Stand on the word = practice cognitive dissonance
Rocky
When I was in twi, that meant, "sell the PFLAP class."
DontWorryBeHappy
LOL, waysider! Looks like you did! Here’s a modern day example of “language manipulation” for ya! Each year The Washington Post publishes a contest in which readers are asked to supply alter
WordWolf
That was just plain stupid. However, for a lazy researcher like vpw or even lcm, downgrading "research" to just "rereading" something made it possible to CLAIM you "researched" something when all you did was read the twi explanation. It also made it easier for vpw to justify just plagiarizing anyone else's explanation so long as he "READ" it, after all, he searched it again, "that's 're-search' ".
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waysider
Pot bless
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WordWolf
"retemory" was a portmanteau word mixing together "retain" and "memorize" because twi had to have it's own word for memorizing something. Saying you "retained" what you memorized is needless. It's like saying you have to mention you ATE something that you DIGESTED. It demonstrated a lack of understanding of what it meant to memorize.
"Cop out" became really popular once 80% of the people got up and left at once in 88-89. They needed a slur to slap on the other Christians who were doing all the same things as them but not with the same social organization, so they were "copped out."
"The Best" - It's shocking how dissatisfied the cadre at the top of twi can be about everyone else who has a life and a job and still does HOURS of stuff for twi. On the one hand, vpw always claimed twi had all the "best" people and he studied under "the best" despite their lack of background. However, if YOU do something for twi, the top person from there can avoid saying something nice and say it wasn't "best" instead, implying it wasn't good enough.
"All 9 all the time." - A nice goal to aim for, but impossible in practice. NOBODY EVER walked around in twi, CONTINUALLY performing miracles, doing healings, casting out demons or devil-spirits, etc INCLUDING vpw, no matter how often he FAKED getting revelation.
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Bolshevik
The Dead are Not Alive. To celebrate is to admit defeat.
Trick or Treating was devil spurt possesion. By little kids. Getting access to your home.
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outandabout
Pot bless??? Say it isn’t so!
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waysider
Oh, I could say it isn't so, but I'd be lying. We had to say Pot BLESS because we weren't supposed to say "luck".
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Rocky
Ah HA... I thought it might have something to do with cannabis.
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WordWolf
I thought that, also. What incredible verbal contortions twi had people go through just to live their lives!
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socks
Y'know, on that general topic of what-said-versus-what-real, Penworks put the final stamp on something I'd realized about the earlier years in the Way's growth, the period right before and after 1970...
In her book she described her own experiences as an early participant and then Corps member and the very real struggles that she encountered, and in so doing refers to the similar experience of the others around her, many of whom were developing somewhat mythical reputations about what they were doing, they're "believing" and the "results" they got "operating the principles" of the "class".....stories about "classes coming together" and great things happening when they would go out on assignments proliferated when in reality if you were around during those periods what you really heard about was how valuable something was for them - what they'd learned, the great personal healing they'd experienced, how powerful it all was to "see God Working" in their own lives, etc......which may or may not have been fully true and would be perfectly fine as far as that goes but it very clearly got blown up into much larger stories of outreach and growth .....later as these same people rose up through the ranks they continued to be held up as models of success even to the point of using it as a lever to denigrate and step over others they likely considered competition to their own ascendancy and most importantly their elevated reputations. I would say that as the years rolled on it became apparent that most of these earlier "heavies" never exhibited the "signs, miracles and wonders" in what they did nor in how they worked with others - rather they merely got better at workin' the system, the language, the logic of it all.
I met and got to know Penworks throughout that period and always found her to be honest, supportive, and very caring in the most human of ways. Her own sense of self awareness and her own struggles allowed her to take the high road so to speak and to NOT take advantage of others in order to get what she wanted or felt she deserved. This was and is an admirable trait but one lacking in many of her peer group at that time, as we saw unfold over the years. She wasn't alone, there were others but there soon came to be a core group of up and coming "leaders" who were grabbing the horns of the corporation and riding it out.
Which aren't all that many years - from the period of PFAL 2.0, (their was an earlier homegrown version that was scrapped for being extremely sub standard) the final professionally filmed version that was in the can as of 1967 till VPW's death there's only 17years of time - and that's the time frame when he finally had enough of his ducks in a row that he felt he could promote PFAL on an international level, doing things like going West to reach the "Jesus Movement" of the '60's. Etc etc.
My own experience prior to PFAL coming out to Cali was one where I'd seen quite a bit of real change and "the power of God" through faith in Jesus Christ and the teaching of the Bible, in it's simplest forms. PFAL teaching put pieces together for me but not in an altogether new way, in some ways it simply put structure and a way to understand what was actually happening. In other ways it didn't create a whole new horizon or "produce results" where there were none........
So I was used to hearing stories and of great things happening, I was living some of them myself so it was not merely an academic exercise..........so it seemed a little thin hearing about all these great wonderful things from the first and second Way Corps but never - actually - seeing - exactly - what they were talking about, other than a lot of what you'd call "personal growth". And Stuff. Lot's of "oh God taught me" this and that and loads of "I feel so humbled by what I am learning" kind of stuff buuuuuuuut unfortunately it the Way Corps did not become a "program" designed for spiritual awareness, in action. Kinda ironic.
The pattern I see looking back is that for many people there was a period of early growth in and around PFAL and if that took form into a more ritualized set of practices through their Way fellowship, the Way Corps or other programmed participation, the risk increased for it to become fosselized and lifeless. Busy, noisy, chaotic, even beautiful and good sometimes but more man made, mechanical effort than "pneumatikos" engerized and moving through faith. It's a fine line and one that some others might not see but to me, it's there and is where I see the broad swathe of humanity and effort that the Way had for those years. It's exactly the environment that produced an LCM, El Presidente, a man focused on methodology and linear thinking who literally could not see the forest for the tree.
My point - is NOT that NOTHING was real and it was all BS, but rather that there was a LOT of BS being shoveled ABOUT those early "heavies" some of whom didn't buy into the marketing and others who unfortunately did, for whatever reasons.
This is why I'm so ambivalent about trying to "convince anyone" of anything - I believe those "signs, miracles and wonders" DO and DID occur, and they are to be retold and sharing as those involved are guided and God wishes. They're testimonies to His great Presence and Will. It is happening all around us and all the time. Many ask "why not now" or "why is this or that allowed to happen?" and while there's reasons for and causes, in the end I am not the Creator nor Giver of Laws and in many respects - I just don't know. But I'll continue to tell the story I know and love, as long as theres' one to tell.
PEACE!
Edited by socksCuz.
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DontWorryBeHappy
Thanks for another thought provoking post, Socks.
Your post reminded me of why in the hell I decided to go into the way corpse in the first place. It was right after the 2nd and 3rd corpses came into NY, on the first of what were to become known as “Lightbearers”......the in-Rez corpse “practical challenge” to prove the efficacy and reality of the corpse training in the the lives of “god’s most committed” followers of the way. That was in the late spring and early summer of 1973. It was the 2nd corpse (graduating that August) and the 3rd corpse (finishing up their first year in-Rez).
Unlike the subsequent “practical challenges” of “Lightbearers” groups, which were primarily made up of getting a piffle class together within a two week visit to an area of “concern, interest, and need”, this group was sent out on the mission to kick ass, take names, and “straighten things out” in the limb of NY, which had been hit very hard by the putsch-like firing of Steve and Sandi Heefener in March of 1972, and the resistance to Boob and Doody Moneyhands having been brought in as the new limb bosses.
I had been a “full-time ministry employee” at the way of Long Island from September 1971 through May, 1972. Steve and Laurie Perez were the full-time area leaders for the way of Long Island, which they started from scratch in the fall of 1970. There was an authentic Christian “revival” in lower NY among the young people and hippies of the time. Steve and Laurie sparked a non-stop slew of piffle film classes at a clip of 4 or 5 a month from Suffolk, Nassau & Queens, for 12 months in a row, leading up to the AC in Rye, NY in March, 1972, during which the Heefners were publically slandered and spitefully fired.
When the Heefners got fired, the Perezs quit. That left Ed Goebel, John Petty, and me as the remaining full-timers down in lower NY from the 5 boroughs of the City to Nassau and Suffolk Counties. We all decided to quit full-time employment with the way of NY, but, except for Ed, we retained our oversized branches to keep running classes. At that time, the whole “blue form” send all the $$ to HQ thing began too! So, it had been quite a year of fighting and resisting for the lower NY areas by the time the 2nd and 3rd showed up in June of 1973.
I was busy getting ready for the ROA ‘73 and finalizing my decision on whether or not to go into the corpse that fall. I got married in July of that year and 2 weeks later was at HQ for summer school and in-Rez. I was playing back- up guitar for Cliff, and lead guitar for Sweet Fellowship (most of whom were going into the 4th corpse) and we backed-up a whole bunch of other groups from the Northeast. Doug MacMullan was 3rd Corpse and he was specifically assigned to work with all us “way productions” people to get us ready for the ROA that year. It was total HELL! LOL! Rehearsals were these 14 hour marathons at Ray Bertine’s parents’ farm in upstate NY, with Mac Mullan telling us to smile, and move, and look at the audience, and, and, and, and.........,
It was during that week of rehearsals at the farm, that I made the decision to go into the corpse. My thoughts were these:
I could see the handwriting on the subway walks pretty damn clearly! If anyone wanted to have any leadership position in the way it would eventually require doing time in da corpse! THAT was made quite obvious to us by vp himself during that month-long Advanced Class in Rye, and by Boob and Doody with their smarmy obsequious worship of all things dictor paul, and by the book bondage”leadership” style.
I just wanted to get married, run the Queens/Brooklyn Area Of NY for the way, and make my living playing music. I did NOT want to go be a limp leader or staff person somewhere. I wanted to stay in NY, get married, play music, and “move da word”!! LOL! There’s the language manipulation again!!
Well, once we were in the way corpse gulag at HQ, EVERYTHING CHANGED! VP had big plans for us Way Productions keedz that we had no idea about! Then, suddenly, there was an Interim year added!!! WTF?? And then......JCING came out.....and then PFAL ‘77.....and then AC ‘79......and then The 40th Anniversary Year weekends, Living Victoriously, The Installation of Da forehead on the 40th Anniversary, Sound Out ‘84.....WIBAP.......one mega event after another and no time to think about what the hell we were doing other than we were “just moving the word”!! Well that wound up a big bust! LOL!
Point of it all being, I never went into the way corpse to be a lifelong ful-time “Minister”! I just wanted to get married, run a branch or two for the way of NY in the City, and play music. I only wanted the corpse so HQ would leave us alone in NY! Leave us alone to run classes, glorify Jesus, play music, have fun, and live life! But, dictor Paul had other ideas. He manipulated the meaning of “a lifetime of Christian service” into a lifetime of indentured servitude to his personal perverted peccadilloes and pathological illnesses. I pity the fool.
Thanks again for another good post Socks. You rawk!
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Thomas Loy Bumgarner
DWBH, you were a slave for TWI. Want some reparations?
Edited by Thomas Loy BumgarnerLink to comment
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waysider
With a few minor changes to the text, I guess you could say I "made it my own".
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DontWorryBeHappy
LOL, waysider! Looks like you did!
Here’s a modern day example of “language manipulation” for ya!
Each year The Washington Post publishes a contest in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for various words. Here are some past winners:
1. Coffee (n.), a person who is coughed upon.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
3. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
4. Gargoyle (n.), an olive-flavored mouthwash.
5. Flatulence (n.), the emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
6. Balderdash (n.) a rapidly receding hairline.
7. Testicle (n.) a humorous question on an exam.
8. Pokemon (n.), a Jamaican proctologist.
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Twinky
A bit off topic from the starter thread, but as regards signs, miracles and wonders, I simply say: God works in small ways.
Yesterday I was going out for a casual stroll around some public gardens. I put together a small bag with a few things I might want, nothing much, but I didn't want to take my full-on handbag ("purse," for Americans). My fingers touched on a roll of micropore, a sort of lightweight band-aid, and I put that in my little bag - I'd never bother usually. (Heck, why am I doing this?) In the park on a bench I found a man who'd done a longer walk, got wet feet, and got blisters. I offered the micropore and it fixed his feet enough to get back to his car a mile or so away.
I'm glad I listened and was able to help that man. I do think that was a "God thing," to put the micropore in my bag.
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Rocky
Not that any GSC readers (unless perhaps they are newly escaped from the fundamentalist cult that is TWI) necessarily still believe or understand this particular manipulation of language to be unique to TWI, but a friend of mine just yesterday had an article posted to rollingstone.com. She (Ashley Sanders) wrote the story last year on escapees from Scientology. The first paragraph reads,
Scientologists have special words for the people gathered at a sleek Airbnb townhouse on a mild day in September. They’re irrational, or “banky.” They’re putting off bad vibes, or being “downtone.” They’re full of negative energy, or “chargey,” and they won’t contain it — they won’t “get their TRs in.” But the people sprawling on the living room’s vinyl wraparound couch don’t use those words to describe themselves anymore. Growing up in Scientology, they say they were constantly told to be stoic. Now that they’ve left, they’re tired of jargon about repressing emotion. Instead, they’re looking for new words to describe themselves—new ways to express the psychological consequences of their upbringing—and they’ve traveled all the way to Brooklyn to tell their stories. They’ve already landed on one new way to think about themselves—a phrase that helps illuminate why it’s so hard for them feel things. They call themselves the Children of Scientology. Psychologists call them SGAs, or Second Generation Adults.
Aren't tribal idiosyncrasies special?
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Rocky
From the story linked in my previous comment:
Edited by RockyHowever much they might dislike Scientology, its jargon is their native tongue. Some even say it’s a relief to talk without code-switching, or worrying that they’re talking gibberish. There’s a reason why the language is so central to the belief system, and so hard to shake. According to psychiatrist and thought-reform expert Robert Jay Lifton, new lexicons are common in cults — and often essential. He calls the practice “loading the language,” and includes it as one of eight core features of high-demand groups. When the group breaks to smoke, I ask Shelton for a second opinion. Forget the question of emotional repression for a second. If there are words for these feelings already, why not use them? “It makes us feel special and unique,” he jokes. “If we used regular English words, then anyone could do this!” But he agrees with Lifton’s idea of cult idioms as thought-terminating cliches. “It gets people thinking in the cult leader’s system,” he says. “It literally makes it harder to think outside the box.”
Dr. Matthews agrees, pointing out that many high-demand groups have jargon around emotional repression. Some fundamentalist Christian cults use the phrase “keep sweet,” she says, meaning “stop whining, stop complaining.” She adds, “Jargon like that rewires the brain.”
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GeorgeStGeorge
In a similar-but-not-identical
vein, TWI leaders saw the word rereward in the OT and read it as "re-reward," as if God were going to give you another reward.
It was an old spelling of rearward, goofballs!
George
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Raf
Throughly imbecilic
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waysider
I see what you did there.
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Bolshevik
I feel like "lo shanta" never really had a fixed meaning.
I'm sure folks on the outside thought one thing. And innies thought something different every time.
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Kathy Niclaus
I have a lo shanta remark-
In 1983, my local twig coordinator wrote out a birthday card for me from him and his wife Patty, and this is what it said-
Love you now,
love you later,
love you like
a lo shonta potato.
LOLOLOL!
I found out later that summer at the Rock that he had been blowing weed on the sly.
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WordWolf
I'm not sure of the meaning, but I know vpw used it periodically to demonstrate to the group that he could SIT, and it was exactly the same sentence each time.
"Lo shanta malaka SIto la SHONta."
If we had been running an Intermediate Class, and a student was always saying the EXACT same sentence, we would have been trying to identify the PROBLEM. vpw did it and was never doubted for an instant because it was vpw. Really, he was held to a ridiculous double- standard. Half the things he got away with would have been issues or problems for anyone else, and he got a free pass.
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engine
Too CUTE! LOL, 2.
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OldSkool
Malaka is greek slang for wanker....lol
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