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Re: beautiful post, John. -- lesley Top of thread Post Reply Forum
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06/28/2017, 01:30:45
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It was a late night post, fiddling about with my phone. 

I was really just trying to make the case that our stepping out of the cult isn't such a unique and strange experience. I don't want to diminish the harm done by Rawat in his practise of 'cheat and deceit' - his charade has radically changed the course of many people's lives leaving most of them financially much worse off, he has wrecked families with his demands for devotion to him alone, he has harboured other criminals - the now familiar list goes on.

And yet it's nothing compared to having belonged to ISIS, or the Lord's Resistance Army or living somewhere like N Korea (might sound a far fetched comparison, but they're people too, the luckiest of whom might come to recognise their delusion). Zooming out, there's the manipulation of masses by religion and political ideologies, and zooming in there's the manipulation of vulnerable people by family and 'friends'. And then there are even more invisible memes such as consumerism - how many people's lives are twisted by their requirement to own the biggest, latest, must-have thing? Or the greatest experience? Or something at least to post on Facebook? I heard an old woman on the radio who had had her savings ripped off by a young fellow posing as an insurance salesman. It took a while for her to take in that all her money had gone, and then, that she didn't actually have any insurance cover, and then, she became concerned over the young man's welfare on account of him seeming to her such a nice young man. You could see the scales falling from her eyes, but slowly, and not all of them.

We can do our best to recognise how we've been duped, but it would be a mistake to think it unusual, and complacent to think we're immunised by our experience.








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