@zophar Wow. That's a very off-script thing for him to have said! It completely flies in the face of Watchtower's staunch attitude of DENY, DENY, DENY. I would have approached him afterward and tested the waters!
Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho
JoinedPosts by Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho
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21
This Week CLM Meeting
by zophar inso, this week on the clm there was an interesting comment at our kh.. under the "apply yourself to the field ministry" portion this week, there was the bible study assignment based on the publication: who are doing jehovah’s will today?
published in 2016. the material was from lesson 28 "what can be found on our website?
there is a footnote at the bottom that reads: .
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Everything Happens For A Reason
by Charles Gillette indoes everything happen for a reason?
i hear this from so many people without any explanation as how this is so.
what do you think about this belief?
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Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho
@galaxie: “sounds like someone elses reasoning… is of profound interest to you”.
Well, of course. That is the case for all thinking people. Perhaps some are more conscious than others of the fact that thoughts don’t just appear in our minds out of nowhere. Often, as you indicated, they’re someone else’s thoughts - someone long dead, in many cases. Even the words we use to think are utterances of people who have been long dead. Consider your seemingly innocuous disposition of requiring evidence before you “buy it”. That’s hardly an original stance, yet if we were to critically deconstruct each and every phrase, thought and idea that one another uttered, we’d find ourselves spending days at a time trying to get through a single conversation.
I’m not sure why you put “biological” in inverted commas. Were you simply quoting me? Or were you unable to connect the principle of human biology with our quest toward maximal development within our species? One just needs to take a glance at drama, mythology, literature, art - even the very discussion we’re having on this thread - to see a common theme of humanity’s struggle to rise above its animal forebearers and become more conscious of what it means to be human.
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second letter from a supposed friend
by chellechelle indear michelle, .
just one qucik letter to let you know i miss you.
like everyone else i am concerned for you; but dont worry im not going to lecture you.
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Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho
@stuckinarut2 I thought I was reading a current thread!!! I wonder where @chellechelle is now...
Can I out myself as a piece of sh*t right now and admit something? I, too, have written this kind of emotional sonnet to a "lost" friend who'd left the organization. In true Anne pageantry, I annoyingly overused illustrations. I insultingly assumed it was unhappiness that have overtaken her. And not once did I realize that there was no "shoreline" Anne speaks off that was separating me from my friend.
Nearly nine years later, I'm now that friend who is on the receiving end of such mind-numbing drivel. I hope Anne will one day say the same.
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The WT and child safeguarding chasm
by Nicholaus Kopernicus inthe following are some notes from my recent level iii child safeguarding training.
i have tabulated the notes and then expressed my thoughts about the training and the paradigm of the wtbts / christian congregation of jehovah's witnesses...... .
course notes....... steps to take when one learns of / receives a complaint of child abuse.. uk level iii child safeguarding training (excerpt).. .
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Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho
@Nicholaus Kopernicus: "The guidance tabulated above is not rocket science."
You hear that, Watchtower? It's not ROCKET SCIENCE! Take it from Nicolaus Copernicus, the Renaissance-era mathematician and astronomer we have on board here.
(Sorry, but the irony between your words and username made me laugh out loud.)
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Everything Happens For A Reason
by Charles Gillette indoes everything happen for a reason?
i hear this from so many people without any explanation as how this is so.
what do you think about this belief?
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Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho
@galaxie: "I cannot speak of any form of reasoning (if any) outwith the scope of my brains limitations."
You'd be surprised.
There’s this idea in Jungian psychology called The Circumambigulation. Jung basically believed that you had a potential “future self” which would be, in potential, everything that you could be, and it manifests itself moment to moment in your present life by making you interested in things. And the things that you’re interested in are the things that would guide you in the path that would lead you to maximal development.
While that sounds like a metaphysical or even a mystical idea, it’s actually not. It’s a really profoundly biological idea. Your interest is essentially captured by the things that will lead you down the path of better development. We basically rose out of the dirt and the muck three and a half billion years ago and here we are, conscious, but not exactly knowing what it IS that's guiding our individual thought systems on this lifelong journey.
It was through developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, that I began to understand that our articulated systems of thought are embedded in something like a dream. That dream is informed in a complex way by the way we act. All of us act out things in a way we don’t always understand. If that wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t need a psychology, a sociology and an anthropology, etc because we would be completely transparent to ourselves - and we’re clearly not. We’re much more complicated than we understand, which means that the way we behave contains way more information than we know.
It was Freud who popularized the notion that your actions, your perceptions and your thoughts were all informed and shaped by unconscious motivations that were not part of your voluntary control. I find that an incredibly strange thing. It’s one of the most unsettling things about the psychoanalytic theories, which are something like: you’re a loose collection of living sub-personalities, each with its own set of motivations, perceptions and emotions and rationales. And you have limited control over that. You’re like a plurality of internal personalities that’s loosely linked into a unity.
We know this because we can’t control ourselves very well, which is one of Jung’s objections to Nietzsche’s idea that we could create our own values. Jung didn’t believe that, especially after interacting with Freud, because he saw that human beings were deeply affected by things that were beyond their conscious control. But no one really knows how to conceptualize those things.
The cognitive psychologists think about them in some sense as computational machines. The ancient people thought of them as gods. For example, rage was a god. The god Mars possessed a soul who was feeling that emotion, causing that person to say what it wanted to say. And it didn’t just inhabit an individual - it inhabited everyone, including animals - and lives forever. So you have this transcendent psychological entity that inhabits the body in politic like a thought inhabits the brain.
LONG STORY SHORT: We can derive from the psychoanalysts that there are things inside you that are happening that control YOU instead of the other way around. I’m sure there’s a bit of reciprocal control, but these internal manifestations of subconscious spirits (so to speak) determine the manner in which you walk through life. Perhaps it is THIS reason that everything you've done in your life has happened.
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So, I did a thing ... Shunned VIDcast #1 - Secrets - Jehovah's Witnesses and Cult Life
by dubstepped inalright, many of you know me from the this jw life and shunned podcasts along with my inane ramblings on here.
i just made my first video and put myself out there on youtube along with my podcast episodes that are on there now.
i put my podcast audio up on there as videos and new people are subscribing and finding it through that.
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Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho
@Wakanda and @Diogenesister, the three of us should band together and do a collaboration video on YouTube. I think I'll do it if there's someone else in the video with me to hold my hand (and hair in case I puke).
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A great article! Highly recommended!
by stuckinarut2 inim not sure if anyone has posted this before?
(sorry if so).
http://exitwatchtower.weebly.com/.
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Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho
Highlights from Vincent Gomez's Journey Out of the Watchtower:
"That late-winter day, my soul was ripped out of me. Our brains are chemical/electrical components. What happens when you discover that what you have dedicated your life to is a lie, is like pouring water over electronics. Your brain literally short circuits. Everything you believed and everything you were, suddenly cannot be processed by the mind. It almost is seizure like."
"The entire range of emotions was something I will never forget. Even the way I viewed my physical surroundings suddenly changed. No longer would I drive to work thinking about talks or having kingdom melodies in my head. Now, there was this indescribable silence of the world around me. The real world became a foreign and mysterious place."
"Shortly after that, I received a phone call from my mom one evening. Word had gotten out that I was questioning things. Quickly, she started saying, "Tell me what is going on?!" I tried to calmly tell her what I had discovered. Within seconds, she said, "You are an apostate! I don't even know you anymore!" This was stated several times in our short conversation. She then hung up on me. I can honestly say, that her tone of voice was no different than what you would hear on a horror film. It was simply evil. I will never forget how she spoke those words to me."
"What I once considered to be a clean and undefiled people, was now becoming a dark and mysterious entity. Something to be feared."
"One day my older children came over. Something snapped within me. It was like a dam of emotions erupted that had been built up over a few weeks. That is when I began to pace the floor and experience what I described in the opening paragraph. The Watchtower likes to run with such experiences. Simply because it appears to be that Satan is taking control, but in reality, I was having a nervous breakdown."
"By the time I went to my second meeting, I had done much research on mind control, known as undue influence. I was taking in information from many unbiased sources. This is when things really turned dark for me. As I walked into the kingdom hall that evening, the kingdom hall became a very frightening place. I now could hear the “cult talk”. My mind could now take note of this type of control on the mind. The parroting of answers from publications began to seem strange and pointless. Personalities became plastic in so many ways. I began to see how difficult it is to separate the authentic person from the cult. I was terrified."
"The kingdom hall was now haunted, by the seven spirits of the governing body that sit in New York controlling every facet of my thinking."
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Begining of freedom???
by JW-AWAKED J17 inhello every body!.
it's my thirst time here.
i'm verry glad to tell you my resignation as an elder in my local congregation.
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Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho
Welcome home, brother.
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Spiritual "Protection" - a Menace on Psychological Development
by Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho innot quite a week ago, @lost in the fog created a thread entitled: do you have this illness?.
https://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/5187824140681216/do-you-have-this-illness.
in my year of being on this forum, i have browsed many a disillusioned thread of ex-jehovah’s witnesses expressing similar symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder when detailing their awakening - my own story included.
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Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho
@Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho: "...threatening [the elders] with legal action will make me feel like a toddler going head-to-head with an armed bank robber, threatening to fire a water pistol at them."
*CRINGE* I can't believe it was me who wrote that! Well, I guess it really was someone else who was writing those words a year ago: my cult persona. Thanks for that awkward, albeit empowering, throwback, @jp1692.
@jp1692: "...you're a bad-ass woman that can take care of herself. A real force of nature."
*Bows* Thank you, senei.
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How do you feel you have progressed ?
by stuckinarut2 inin the months or years since leaving the organization, how do you think you have progressed as a person?.
(or if you have regressed too i guess?).
what aspects of personal development are you happy with?.
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Wake Me Up Before You Jo-Ho
@Whynot: "...I lost ALL my friends."
I hear you. One thing that became painfully obvious to, though, was...
You can't lose something you never had.
I remember that dilemma of being a fully-fledged adult looking on at other groups of people in their little social network. I felt so despondent at the thought of having no one to call on. No one to hang out with. No one to trade stories with. All of that was snatched away with the cult, as you've experienced.
I was an outsider looking in at sometimes decades-long friendships that people all around me were sharing. Shopping malls, cafes, social media - everywhere I looked was a painful reminder that I was a newcomer into this world.
Maybe your child's upcoming "Appreciation Day" will be a good opportunity to meet some other parents of the invited kids. Swap numbers without a few people. Chances of them becoming your BFF are slim. But it's through this act of networking that you might just meet a fellow soul that really clicks with you on a social level.
Postmodern artist, Dulce Ruby, wrote: "Sometimes your circle decreases in size, but increases in value." I think that's a good one to keep in mind.