You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

Godwillwin ago

Agreed. Now I understand why several of my highschool teachers spent a week on teaching us about cults and how to spot them in order to not get sucked into one. Our religion teacher touched on the topic first, which made sense, but I remember being annoyed thinking why is my civics teacher now teaching this, then the next year wondering why my history was, then being super annoyed when my literature teacher started up on cults. I now see that they weee good teachers who prepared us well

strix-varia ago

Just ask founder of Shambala Meditation, Choygam Trungpa Rinpoche (oh, he's dead now from cardiac arrest at 48, from being an alcoholic) and his sidekick Osel Tendzin (who died of aid/hiv, but not before giving it to a bunch of his students). Ask any older student of Trungpa about his drinking and they will say, "it's not for me to question."

shoosh ago

yes, I see it in most settings. The ''think create positive'' group takes this to programming extremes, for example, rather than identifying something along with its result, formulating a healthier approach to achieve healthier results at the root, many of these groups advise the person to turn off the part of their brain that views it as negative. It's all the persons fault for viewing it as negative, recommending that if you just think more positively everything will be better.

This compartmentalizes and causes people to be positive in the midst of negative, rather than getting to the root and changing it. It disorients a person similarly as if you were spun around in circles and brought to a stop, not knowing up from down, left from right. I recognize media propaganda and politicians plying the same technique by disorientating a person, keeping them focused on the positive thing, the acquisition of consuming more, or ignoring the thing that could be addressed and changed. Like you said, these leaders are usually hiding with drugs, sex or other types of addictive consumption, money materialism power consumption, to pretend they are happy and positive because they're busy denying and ignoring the real root of the issue, and standing up to make necessary changes or identification of what's really going on.

It's alive and well in politics and all types of belief systems. We have a large civilian population of ''don't ask don't tell', or the ostrich syndrome.