I want to thank all of you for your kind words again. In my current work in Texas of working with parolees and probationers I am humbled by their painful past. Here is another post I wrote some time back for you newcomers.
MIND AND HEART CONTROL
You can take the JW out of the Watchtower but for some it is nearly impossible to take the Watchtower out of the JW, why is that?
Einstein once said that the problems cannot be solved on the same level at which they were created, and herein lies the key. A person who was a JW was programmed on the mental plane. Over and over day in and day out the diet of beliefs kept the person on the mental plane, which in time lead to a disconnection of heart. In the early stages when there was dissonance between the mind and heart the person was kept in the mental plane by means of rationalization. This schism I experienced firsthand lead to holes in my integrity, I became a subtle liar to myself and to others. Since I dominated the mental plane this lead to arrogance that I could not escape from, it became my own prison.
In order to remove the destructive control over a person one must experience a freedom of mind but more importantly a freedom of heart. If you examine the strategies used by former JWs the majority focus on battling the mind plane. While this is very important, to show the flaws in the logic and all the lies and rewritten history of the Watchtower leadership, if people were to take a comprehensive approach to healing and reconnecting with the heart in my opinion this would compound the positive results of freeing yourself once and for all.
After leaving the movement some six years ago, recently I experienced a a major shift in my own spiritual evolution clearing some of the last vestiges of this ideal gone awry. In the book “Anatomy of the Spirit” the author has several models to explain the cause of disease and the reasons why people don’t heal. I concur with most of her explication and I would like to write about one model of growth as it relates to my own experience.
There are basically four stages of growth these are:
Revolution
Involution
Narcissism
Evolution
The first stage for me started when I could no longer think clearly and lacked any motivation whatsoever to do anything to better the quality of life for my wife and me.
I had simplified my life to living in a six hundred square foot apartment driving an old car and feeling the need to simplify more and go off and pioneer in a rural community to people who did not want to be preached to. When I saw the hypocrisy of elders who were preaching poverty and self sacrifice as a virtue while they were getting new cars, going on expensive vacations, buying new homes and the like I rationalized my envy as me being better than them by being more spiritual. I was lying to myself and I could not see the self-deception. Once I decided to go back to school to acquire specialized skills that was the start of the end. The revolution in time would grow and keep growing to helping myself and many other JWs. In hindsight what I was doing was reconnecting myself and my clients with their heart felt feelings.
In the next phase of involution I turned my attention inward carefully examining what I believed about others, the world and myself. What I found was very ugly and quickly started cleaning out beliefs that were not my own. In removing fear, shame, and guilt from my psyche I quickly entered into the next phase of narcissism. I felt good about myself and I felt a pride about pride. In my own personal experience I stayed in that phase for some five years and I would fluctuate between involution and an arrogant narcissism. This phase came to me a great price tag. I unconsciously sabotaged many opportunities to make very good money. Deep down I did not feel worthy due to my integrity being full of holes. I had made some serious compromises in my core essence and I paid the price.
If you are in any one of these phases, there is hope, stay the course.
“I just want to know God’s thoughts the rest is details” A Einstein
Victor Escalante