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In Reply to: Thinking Errors in the MLs, GNs, Family member posts posted by Tarbaby (because the ML /GN muck sticks like tar) on October 25, 2005 at 10:44:09:
Imagine being stuck in a world where:
1. that is pretty much the only input available to your hungry developing mind,
2. you are obligated to accept it, and are marked as a pariah by those who control your entire world, or even punished, when you ask questions (even if you ask them simply to be honest about dealing with qualms that you have instead of falsely pretending you buy it all). And I really tried this with the things that I noticed did not compute.
To escape that hell I had no option but to become homeless and (lower case) family-less.
One of the specific moments I remember is listening to the letter "Kill Khomeini" -- the unpurged version -- and thinking "oh my God, they not only expect me to take *this* seriously, but to respect it as "The Word" and some sort of spiritual sustenance and its author as the Prophet??" The only possible response is "WTF!"
You are on the money about "simply trying to understand what's being said causes a disturbing shift in cognitive processing." While I was frustrated by failure of the "Word" of Maria and Berg to compute, and ultimately unable to treat the source as reliable, it still required an effort when I first left to read things that did something other than repeat one trope for pages and pages. If you zone out pages of much non-Family reading, you might actually miss something that is not repeated 10 times elsewhere.
The other difficulty is memorization. You had to memorize a certain amount of "The Word" every week. There was the "set card," "Memory Book" additions to it, and the many Psalms, other chapters of the Bible and "Daily Mights" that were identified as "memory work".
It was not until the rise of "Mama" to prominence that I realized how good I had had it when the mental recordings I had to make involved those passages. At that time you started to be given "Mama" quotes to memorize.
Oh. my. god.........
I was just looking at the "GenUps" that were posted and found some of this type of "quotes." These may have been pronounced by "Mama" or by one of the people who has learned to mimic her in delivering simulacra of meaning (not too flipping hard to escape detection unless you have an expert pablum-taster). How, tell me HOW, do you manage to remember such conclusory statements for more than a couple of hours?
I did not make these up:
"GRAB THE KEYS WITH THE HAND OF FAITH, THE POWER OF HEAVEN IS AT YOUR COMMAND."
"RISE ABOVE WHAT'S BUGGING YOU.--USE KEY POWER!"
"I'M NOT TAKING YOU OUT OF THIS WORLD, I AM GIVING YOU OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD KEY POWER!"
"YOU WHO STUDY AND APPLY MY WORD CAN ACTIVATE MMY KEYS AND THEIR POWER."
Eventually, either you learn to play mind tricks on yourself or you realize that the "promises" are not coming true. Or that the word "power" is absolutely hollow. Or means something other than what you thought the consensus was on its meaning based on observing the meaning those around you seem to giove it, and/or a dictionary.
"And again I say unto thee, "what the f***?""
