exploringsuicide

This blog is about exploring suicide with the firm conviction that no one really wants to kill themselves but change their lives and suicide is the only option they find. That was my experience. My mother committed suicide when I was almost nine years old and I tried to commit suicide when I was twenty seven. Overcoming such experience has taken over twenty years but I am happy to say, life was never as beautiful as it is today. We can at least talk to each other. That helps!

Wednesday, 7 April 2010

In honor of my mother

Today is the 43rd anniversary of my mother's suicide. I might not have been able to help her then but one day I'll hopefully help many to not choose self destruction rather than life.

On Humanism and Suicide- Two posts

116. Elena - April 7, 2010 [Edit]

Posted in FOFblog

Dear Ton who have consistently checked on me and kept biting at my heels in the hope that I will move a different way, I sincerely thank you for your insight on my recent participation.

I am afraid that like you, I also feel that you pick on a little something of everything I am saying and neglect to address the whole idea, which is all right. If that is all you can do here that is what I am willing to take from you. It is clear that I am little more than a sloganeer for you and if that is what I am, please keep repeating it that I might one day see it and that whoever is reading me is three times careful with what they are hearing.

I write what I believe and it is not that I am following a humanist doctrine that I read somewhere as Thot Plickens suggests but that I have come to understand for myself that everything that made and makes me inhuman towards others is based on some kind of imaginary separateness that I justify because they are different to me economically, socially, academically, nationally or racially. When work on my self began I repeatedly observed those things in me and the more I stopped expressing negativity towards others for these totally absurd reasons, the more I understood that behaving “consciously” for me meant behaving humanly. I am still far from being all the human I wish to become so I thank you for pushing me on. I am glad for you if you feel you have already reached such a condition.

It is also very clear to me that most people don’t understand each other because as soon as they meet they catalogue the other person so thoroughly that they either fall into deep identification wishing to attract that person or totally ignoring them. This too I’ve observed in myself.

I sincerely believe that WE, every human being alive today, can behave humanly at least towards a few people and that wars as they are being waged are not only not necessary but criminal. Since this is my belief the least I can do is to not carry out a war with you and the many here as I did before I was banned. We are not here to agree but to talk and listen and help each other and those inside who, some agree, would benefit from not continuing to sacrifice themselves in the Fellowship cult. It is the duty of a nation and every individual inside of it to stop its people from destroying themselves or others, some still try to help individuals who are about to commit suicide, why aren’t we helping those in cults when we know they are on that train? How many more people in cults have to die before laws are passed to control them? Laws that forbid every institution and cult and anyone with no matter what authority to act against people’s human rights? I am afraid we are far from human today and need laws that will protect us from our very powerful inhuman tendencies such as Fascism just half a century ago and the equally fascist activity of Israelis towards Palestinians today. It is a blessing that so many Jews are already acting against the State of Israel.

I am also not here to be attacked personally or attack you personally but to dialogue about our understandings. Before I was banned I was still so emotionally shocked by the cult experience that people who did not agree and support me in everything I said were perceived as people who did not love me and my self steam was so low that I turned very aggressive towards them. I am very sorry that I needed so much protection after the cult experience and did not look for it somewhere else. I am a little less vulnerable today and your agreeing or disagreeing with me is an opportunity for me to reflect on my understanding and continue to hold you because you are simply another human being with as much confusion and pain as I often experience. Where you not, you would have no difficulty being kind and generous. I do not ask you to love me but there is a huge difference between a conversation in which there is love and one in which there isn’t any. There is no love in your tone, no kindness and when there is no kindness, it is very easy to dismiss what is being said because the other person has in fact dismissed one and just picked up the piece of what one said and used it for his own interests. I sincerely do not know what your interest is but I get a feeling that you are not interested in me which is all right. We are not here to focus on my self but on life. We are fortunate to have the right to freedom of speech and do not need to share deep love to be able to practice it. That is what laws are for.

I can understand that I have hurt many of you in my previous participation on this blog. I have already asked you to forgive me but I cannot force you to forgive. We each come to that in our own time.

I also sincerely thank you for questioning my thinking. Let it get buried deep in the ground if there’s nothing worth sprouting in it. It seems to be helping me and I have not lived in vain, so hopefully it can be useful to others. I have actually nowhere found a simple understanding of what being human means for the individual and society “together”. History seems to be crowded with those who dealt with the inner side or the outer side without getting to the fact that they are too sides of the same coin: the human being. Everywhere people seem to agree that it is enough to be human with those one likes and agrees with, but not with those who do not belong to one’s class, race or nation. Humanism as I am understanding it means Humanism: we are all equals as human beings. We all have the same rights and freedoms:

Civil rights include:
Ensuring peoples’ physical integrity and safety.
Protection from discrimination on grounds such as gender, religion, race, sexual orientation, national origin, age, immigrant status, etc.
Equal access to health care, education, culture, etc.
Political rights include:
Natural justice (procedural fairness) in law (such as the rights of the accused, including the right to a fair trial; due process; the right to seek redress or a legal remedy)
Individual political freedom, including rights of individuals (freedom of thought and conscience, freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of movement) and the right to participate in civil society and politics (freedom of association, right to assemble, right to petition, right to vote)
Civil and political rights comprise the first portion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (with economic, social and cultural rights comprising the second portion). The theory of three generations of human rights considers this group of rights to be “first-generation rights”, and the theory of negative and positive rights considers them to be generally negative rights.

We are FAR in the world today from practicing these freedoms and rights and each and every one of these rights is horrifically abused in cults, which is the particular area that we are discussing in this blog.

My aim is to explore humanism as I understand it so deeply that there will be no doubt as to why we human beings cannot continue to allow these very destructive cults to proliferate in our societies. My aim I believe is to a certain extent your aim. May we at least share that portion of the effort even if we only get a third of the way. Others will surely pick up where we left off.

117. Elena - April 7, 2010 [Edit]

Humanism!
116. Elena – April 7, 2010 [Edit]
Posted in FOFblog

Dear Ton who have consistently checked on me and kept biting at my heels in the hope that I will move a different way, I sincerely thank you for your insight on my recent participation.

118. Elena - April 7, 2010 [Edit]

We are not here to agree but to be and help others be. Just be. Just sit around with each other and let our selves be. Talk, laugh, cry if you wish. It is all good as long as we don’t become criminal to each other.

If we sit together long enough we will end up loving each other as is already happening between us. We have shared enough to miss each other when we don’t. That is already beautiful!

119. Elena - April 8, 2010 [Edit]

“Before I was banned I was still so emotionally shocked by the cult experience that people who did not agree and support me in everything I said were perceived as people who did not love me and my self-esteem was so low that I turned very aggressive towards them.”

This is worth exploring because after saying it I realized that there is a process in there in which when people are so vulnerable, so hurt, they cannot take rejection and THAT is what makes us so aggressive. The thought came that killers, sexual killers in particular, do not kill the people they’ve abused because they hate them, they kill them because they can’t bear having them look at them. They kill them so that they don’t see them. They can’t bear themselves and killing the other person is a way of ignoring how they acted towards that person. “Leaving no witnesses we can pretend it didn’t happen!” They are simply dealing with their own shame.

Anyone who is abusive enough long enough will tend to eliminate the abused. That is why gurus in cults end up “inviting” their followers to commit suicide. Leaving no witnesses and having sacrificed their own self with them, gives them the hope that humanity will judge them less harshly and will “understand” them. This does not mean that “humanity” should not understand them, beyond their “madness” is the tragedy of human weakness and strength. Cults prove that human beings have no difficulty in sacrificing themselves, in letting go, in surrendering, in “being”. Suicide is a double sword experience. One in which people state that they are willing to sacrifice themselves and one in which they are willing to fully realize their self. What they are longing for is not death but the end of suffering. Death not only means death but no suffering, no desire, no thought, no effort: unity. That is what the suicide is longing for and cannot reach through such mean but if they are lucky enough to survive, as I did, life pulsates in them with the same power that the killer inside of them pulsates and THAT is new. That pulsating LIFE was not there before but shines brightly after and if they can be protected long enough to recover themselves and control the side of themselves that wishes to eliminate them, they will have a certainty about life that doesn’t shine as brightly in other people who never had it “turned off” and who have had the good luck and the beauty to shine it throughout their lives. It is not exactly a side of them that wishes to eliminate them, it’s a side of them that has GIVEN UP and in having GIVEN UP, it is very difficult for them to retract from that surrender. Once people reach that place, there is no turning back usually and the tendency to keep trying to realize their new AIM is repeated until they succeed. Something, someone inside of them is no longer willing to suffer defeat. THAT is why it is so important for them to find help: people who are seriously committed to life who can transmit that trust in their self and can help the other person recover it.

WOW, this is very interesting, very interesting because that is what happens to cult people: Once they’ve given up on themselves and their lives, once they’ve surrendered to the guru, it is very difficult to get them to retract, that is, take a step back and recover themselves. Actual suicide is just one small ritual ahead “crystallizing” the fact just like “marriage” is just a ritual crystallizing the reality of love between two people.

Monday, 5 April 2010

In honor of all those who have died and their deep suffering

109. Elena - April 5, 2010 [Edit]

18. nige –
Hi Elena, again…..
I had a chance to view the few pages that are on your Public Square site. I feel you are as determined as ever to speak out against the FOF and cults in general. That being so , I think I must be supportive of all efforts here to expose the FOF and REB to close scrutiny, since I was one of those who survived the psychological and financial pressures of the cult (the scars of hell or “mestatized at the fingertips” as one student poetically wrote about my suicidal injuries remind me that there was a reason I survived).
I cannot be sure whether REB is inwardly quaking in his boots and putting on a brave face or whether he is just so pathologically far gone that nothing bothers him. Either way, we must keep probing away at his bubble…..Nigel.

Hi Nigel and All,

I am glad to hear you still have some enthusiasm. I am definitely not more determined to speak out against the Fellowship of Friends Cult than I am about speaking against myself or anyone else in this wide world. The problems at hand will not be solved by pointing at anyone but by exploring what in everyone tends to lead to crime and by crime I understand people who systematically act against their own self or that of others. Cults are just one amongst many of such groups. Perhaps the most tragic aspect about them is the willingness with which people walk to their own destruction convinced that they are going to heaven. When I look at similar phenomenon happening the world over in places as disparate as Sweden, Japan and Colombia, the urgency to understand what is actually happening simply triples itself.

I’ve been indulging in intense research on suicide and sexuality, religion and power but it feels like I have barely scratched the road that is to be tred. It is truly very exiting! One of the authors I’ve been digging deeply on is Michel Foucault and great as he is looking at each particular phenomenon and revealing worlds within worlds as he goes by, I’ve had the feeling that he is also simply scratching on the problem and that while he is a master at understanding some aspects of the problems, he doesn’t grasp the whole picture. Who could? Maybe no one is meant to grasp the whole picture and we’re all justly destined to reflect the piece that didn’t get lost in our own mirror. He and other equally great authors such as Jurgen Habermas seem to be looking at sides of the elephant and not the whole elephant as I believe a System tries to encompass and yet if we look at, for example the Fourth Way System as presented by Gurdjieff, it is so weak in the area of society that it lent itself to Robert’s separation from “life” and make of that weakness a tool for the development of the cult. I believe Rodney Collin tried to balance that but drastically bounced off religion when he thought that people in essence could take on the responsibility of consciously caring for others. They do it naturally as far as they can in their own sphere.

The more I look, the more it seems to me that Robert and the gurus of cults are as much the victims as the members. The fact that they commit suicide together at the end of the play in the classic “cult”, does not reveal a man who fooled the rest and got away with it but a man that is as deeply enmeshed in the problem as everyone else in the play. Robert to me is not self-destructing any less than the rest of the members. He is a man incapable of love and that already reveals someone who is pretty destroyed. Like Jim Jones, who boasted that he could have sex 15 times a day, the chaos and manipulation of his sexuality simply reveals the lack of focus of his own emotional sphere. It is very superficial to think that one man alone can make a thousand people poison themselves to death and the wonder of realizing that is the beginning of understanding that not only do people influence each other but that life itself is an objective reality that has the capacity to lead people to their destruction or their realization; that the “WAY WE LIVE” with each other, the way we interact and the things we do, has a dialectic power to recreate the “social” through culture and the individual through his personal participation in that culture: his “Work”.

The question then is: Why does life in cults lead to destruction? One possible answer is that people do not work from their self, that is, their own I is not active in the work they perform. Having given up their will to the guru they become automatons without soul and shun “culture” or creativity, which needs the inspiration that comes from the sphere of the I. They continue to “function” but without “life”. In that sacrifice of their “self” and surrender to the guru’s will, they, consequent to the premise, self-destroy. The actual ritual of “dying” is the culminating realization of what they had lived for: self-sacrifice. The tragic lesson that comes from such cults is not that the human being is a destructive entity willing to self destroy but that the human being is an entity willing to sacrifice itself for its ideals and that in the childlike immaturity of our being today, we give ourselves up naively to people as immature as our selves and who self-destroy together with us. That we all have to take responsibility for the problems because not one of us is able or capable to do so no matter how much power we give him or how willingly he takes the job.

The next question could be: Why are we living through a period of equally decadent culture in the world today? Another possible aspect of the answer is that like in cults, the majority of people work not because they are creatively inspired to do so but because they are tied to the economic profit and not the human gain, whether they are in the lower or upper classes. The production of millions of things that are not only not necessary but harmful to the world at large, using and abusing not only the material but human resources, creates, like in cults, a mechanism that tends to self-destruction. People in cults are trying to compensate what people in life are unable to offer: their capacity to sacrifice their own greed for the well being of the whole.

The election of Mr. Obama in the United States as much as the new direction in politics as presented by Sarkozy in his visit to the US, seems to carry an awareness of the problem that such “market” driven world was leading to, so I am much more optimistic about the future than I was when I was “pulled out” of the Fellowship cult by this blog. That alone makes it a worth while reason to keep supporting this blog in the hope that others inside will hold on to it to take a step outside. We are here to help you be less afraid of such a step. It is so beautiful to feel the expansion of one’s own self over the whole of the wide world without the constraints of a destructive little cult that I wholeheartedly invite each member inside to try it out for yourselves. This “life” is your life! You do not need to sacrifice your selves to show the world how willing you are to help it. Enough people have already done that in other cults. You will help yourselves and others more, not by self-destroying but by self-constructing through patient and gradual participation in the world at large. We are One! And it is a beautiful world!

110. Elena - April 5, 2010 [Edit]

Today a huge step has been taken in the understanding of the cult phenomenon and it is in realizing the deepness of the human tragedy that involves them. I do not know if other authors have seen this side of the picture but I haven’t seen it elsewhere and it is a beautiful side that merits the deepest look. I am talking about the self-sacrifice capacity of cult members that has immediately connected me to each and every soul that has committed suicide under cult conditions. They need to be heard. These were not just lunatics that killed themselves because the guru said so, they were human beings that deeply believed in what they were doing and they were sincerely protesting and renouncing to the alternatives that the world of today offered them. Mass suicide is all the more tragic than individual suicide and like in the individual, what these people are telling us is that the world left them no other alternative and that they are its willing victims.

With so many mass suicides and homicides today, we will inevitably come to understand the differences between individuals that kill others and those who kill themselves. Both are equally hurt by the world they live in but while one opts to escape it without hurting others, the other resolves it by trying to destroy those who hurt him. They are both telling us there is something substantially unbearable about their life conditions. The fact that they are so young, confirms that they are victims. These are not the mature suicide the hara-kiri demanded or Hitler escaped with, these are effects of social realities and not personal failures.

13 year old Megan Meier who committed suicide in her closet is no different to the 914 members of Jonestown that committed suicide with cyanide kool-aid one sunny morning. They were all, like the 100 suicides daily in Japan and that many more in Russia and other parts of the world, telling us that they can’t bear it. That they don’t have the inner resources to process and transform within themselves what they’ve received: That they needed help and couldn’t find it and weren’t strong enough to look too hard.

There is something pathetically tragic about cults and it is that they are like those poor girls whose mummy never allows them to go out and makes them obey everything she says until after they are forty and then dies leaving an orphan who never married or knew how to do anything but obey and struggles the rest of her life trying to live a life without having the life to live it. Cult members likewise, seem to be people that were willing to do everything they were asked to avoid the conflict that confronting the world implied and sacrifice themselves convinced that they are doing it for the well being of mankind. Their tragedy needs to be heard. They are screaming from beyond begging us to hear them and render them justice but more than that, desperately hoping that we do not follow their steps. I honor each and every one of these deaths. That is, I am present to their suffering and willingly embrace them with compassion. People in cults are not lunatic revolutionaries who act blindly against society, on the contrary, they have everything society asks for: self-renunciation, self-sacrifice, unconditional effort, work, work, work, submission to the authority, no matter which, no matter why. That is the problem.

We have lived under such authoritarian regimes for so many centuries, that we no longer know how to live, just like the little girl who at forty no longer has enough of a life to live it. What cult members tried to do when they joined a cult at thirty or earlier, is not show that they are not willing to commit themselves to mankind and work hard, on the contrary, they are ONLY willing to commit themselves to mankind and everything they do inside is justified by the “humanitarian” ideal. That is why they all act out the tragedy of the end of the world and when it doesn’t come, kill themselves or the people around them to make sure! Unless they are fortunate enough to be in feeble little cults like the Fellowship of Friends in which instead they become unconditional slaves to a psychopathic queen who is yet to prove how much further into self-destruction he can take them.

How many more people will have to commit suicide in cults before we the people resolve our conflict between our “self” and our “selves”? Our religion and our laws? Our humanity and our multiple nationalities? The sphere of religion is not and cannot be separate from the sphere of law. The sphere of humanity has to include the sphere of our multiple nationalities. What is right for our own people is right for all people in no matter what nation. Globalization cannot come without such consciousness without proving its destructiveness as it already has. We are One and there is enough for all of us if we share in illness as in health. The multiplicity of our nations speaks only of the grandiosity of the human spirit that we all carry inside. Just as we do not act against our brothers and sisters who are seldom like us, we cannot act against each other’s cultures and nationalities because they are different to us. Those differences between us are what make life glorious! What matters is not what religion or nationality we belong to but how human can we be with that religion and that nationality.

Nationalism in developed nations that have to suffer the presence of the people they previously invaded is as absurd as fundamentalism from those who continue to resist the reality of globalization. We are One and just like an adult has to bear with the consequences of his and her mistakes as a teenager, developed nations cannot avoid assuming their role in history. If they are to survive, they must be able to embrace their own acts and violence. People in the third world must bring forth their own humanity and embrace those in the first world after taking care of their own governments and their ability to rule their own lives coherently. Destruction is destruction and what we can and want to do, is live.

Saturday, 3 April 2010

Elena: Life is love! The octave of impressions!

Elena: I am using these people's work to develop my own understanding of the subject at hand. This is my first attempt to formulate a theory of the Octave of Impressions as conceived by the System or The Work, presented by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. This paragraph is taken from the article http://ej.lib.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/2939/3007.

My only aim is to help people stop hurting themselves and each other. Life is LIFE! Love is life!

PD: Yes, but — to return to what is emerging as a powerful theme in this discussion— the reason for a transformation in a distinctly modern mode of self knowledge derives, not just from the innovations of that class of elite producers charged with the task of self reflection — the ones we call philosophers and human scientists, whose communication with the everyday has yet to be adequately explained from a Foucauldian standpoint — but from changing social figurations in everyday life itself. A new subjectivity, one characterized by a new inwardness, or by the belief in a new inwardness, and a distinct sense of an emotional interior, as an object to be

known and interpreted with the aid of science, develops from a wider process of relative class equalization.

Elena: This is interesting. The relative class equalization brings to the average human being a sense of his own self independent of his position in the social hierarchy. The human being appears! But we always were there from the beginning. What is happening is that we are becoming conscious of it en masse!

At an earlier time, people experienced emotion in terms of practices of deference to their superiors, in which emotions are associated very

clearly with social hierarchy. Under the effects of increased interdependence and class equalization, emotions are disentangled with hierarchies, and become projected onto this new domain, the subjective interior. People tend to lose their social compass as a means of finding the source of emotional experience, yet they still experience emotions, which they now imagine emanating from within. So if modern subjectivity is understood in terms of the emergence of new ways of searching for the truth of oneself, this must be understood not simply as a philosophical innovation, but as a reflection of changing social figurations.

In other words, the homo clausus, as Elias termed it, or the myth of the individual subject, does not come directly from practices of the self, though people may of course engage in practices that could be described in this way, but through changing dependencies (andtherefore power relations) between people of divergent class positions.

Elena: This last paragraph is important. If I understand correctly, for which there is no guarantee being so little familiar with this language and context, the question here is whether the individual self actually exists or is a make up of social relationships and I would argue that both spheres exist. The sense of "individuality" that developed in Capitalist America, creates a definite kind of individual and individualism that has nothing to do with the kind of individual that almost "feudal" Colombia develops in its nationals but neither one has hardly anything to do with practices of the self. The practices of the self that even Foucault speaks about when he puts forward the idea of philosophy as a "therapy of the soul" belong to a perfectly individual inner realm that can become independent of social dependencies. Only in that realm is the individual truly in a sphere of his own volition. This does not mean that the individual is disconnected to the social fabric, it means that he is connected to the archetypes, the net itself and not the threads or colors of the tapestry. It means that s/he is not as easily affected by the world around him and instead becomes a force of his own that begins to affect the world around him. Like circles of force circling within and around each other, when the individual creates a life of his/her own he/she moves from being a completely passive circle to being an active circle creating a lemniscate between himself and the world around him. Life itself takes care of developing lemniscate forces between the individual and his surrounding through the personal experiences each person goes through. In every exchange between people, the self of every individual expresses itself and whether the relationship is pleasurable or displeasing both individual’s selves “introvert” the experience which conditions the notion of who they are. This is the first explanation I’ve ever written on how I am beginning to perceive the “octave of impressions” as conceived by the System, which could have never develop within the Fellowship cult because it requires freedom to develop itself amongst people. This is so beautiful! Free people produce freedom and recreate each other in that freedom. People in psychological prisons destroy each other. The objective consequences of relationships between people determine what those relationships will reproduce the dialogue between the individual and his world, the individual and his surroundings is what the octave of impressions is about.

It was impossible to understand or develop it in the Fellowship cult because there is no second line of work; because there is no freedom, because there is no culture, because there is no life. This is what leads cult members to suicide in the long run. The guru is a victim as much as the members. His death with the members proves it. They all succumb to their own invention without the slightest hope for help. The “closeness” of the “air” they breathe, suffocates them. The lack of “self” of each individual producing the dialectics of life in the community, leads them to self-annihilation.

We must look at this carefully. My theory would be that every single human being is, at all times, “creating” “life” from within their own self. The “quality” of “life” that s/he can “create” depends on the state of “health” of his own self. The kind of “life” that each human being “exudes” “creates” “distills” depends on his own condition. Farmers “distill” a different kind of “life” to what citizens “distill”. Scholar’s “distillations of life” are also different to the distillations of life that blue-collar men distill. Likewise people from different nations have a different “distillation” to themselves. This “distillation” proper to every individual is a reality onto itself and we feed of each other’s “distillations” like “perfume” of our selves. Each human being is a human perfume! The names we carry are actually the name of that perfume!

Our lives mutually feed each other and if we are individually psychologically disappearing as it happens in cults and every form of psychopathic repression of the self, including in parent-child relationships and every form of psychopathic authoritarian power, “life” is literally “sucked” out of the individuals. In other words, any time that an individual is abused by his teachers at school, his classmates, parents, doctors, policemen, military and no matter who, “life” is shunned out of the victim. Very high levels of abuse even through lack of contact and indifference is what is causing the suicide and homicide of young people around the globe. “Abuse of each other” is not necessarily happening “actively”, it is happening in great quantities not by what people do to each other but by what people neglect to do for each other.

In cults, this neglect of people for each other becomes pathological in the whole community but the more they abuse each other, the more they justify it and sublimize it as the necessary step towards “awakening” required by the power structure within the cult. The vicious circle that the energy of being abused and the “transformation” of the abuse develops, becomes addictive and the abuses become greater each day because they need to grow in the justification of the abuse itself. It becomes a form of life or rather “lifelessness” but what keeps it going is that the self of each individual participating in it is active in the process of destruction as it justifies it and at the same time promotes it. The individual actively participates in his own destruction by submitting to the guru’s will. Like in any drug addiction, the process repeats itself until death consumes them all.

Within the cult there are no “checks” like in regular society. People are not stopped from behaving this or that way, on the contrary, they are conditioned to behave specifically THAT way. In regular society, “any” way is too much after a while: once the repetition becomes vicious, people move away from it because “life” demands it for survival. In the cult on the contrary, any change is seen as criminal.

Happy Easter! We resurrect each second!

These de-

pendencies are not exclusively based on class, of course, but also upon other group

relations that have changed, and which consequently channel emotions in particular

directions (in this case, inwards). I think Foucault’s use of the word ‛practices‛ com-

pared to Elias’s insistence on processes is telling here. Maybe it’s Foucault’s con-

tinued attachment to philosophy that made him sometimes look more for invariance

or specificity, and less for gradual change or linkage over successive stages of

development. For example, the practices of the self described in The History of Sexua-

Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 164.

Binkley, Dolan, Ernst & Wouters: The Planned and the Unplanned

lity seem to be designed for universal application; there’s little sense of how they

might change depending on changing social contexts.

Elena on international suicide prevention program!

107. Elena - April 3, 2010 [Edit]

Being back at the fofblog makes me think about the fofpeople and one of the big problems cult members have is not knowing where they would go if they were to leave. For those who are still economically connected outside the cult it is less problematic although the “instinctive” side of the problem plays a small part in the overall decision but if that one is taken care of, it is not to be in any way undermined. I would guess that it would be of enormous help to at least sixty percent of the cult population. Or rather that it would imply that sixty percent of the major difficulties to leave are taken care of. Both statements work in their own sphere.

So ex-members with companies that could give jobs would help, a center of coordination that the cult member can contact for the mediation and all other offers from ex-members would also help. I for example could offer a place to rest for a month, a holiday vacation on the Caribbean sea.

But that concern led me to think about the problem of suicide and homicide in the different nations that I wrote about this morning and was thinking that one of the greatest things that helps young people to escape their “milieu” is traveling to other countries. If governments work together to help each other’s youth that would help the youth. Just being in a different culture helps one have relativity about one’s own culture and family and it gives one the opportunity to raise one’s self above the conditioned to the human. This was certainly my experience when I was sent to England at the age of ten, a year after my mother committed suicide. After a few months of being in the boarding school I suddenly realized that I existed! That I existed on my own and without a family and that I was alright and that all the other children who lived with me and had families were in actual fact in exactly the same position I was in. Our backgrounds stopped to matter and we became just one group of children beginning to live. That was very exiting!
Of course I was not that alone or without a family. My father paid for the school and picked us up for the holidays and was there to provide for us but that fact simply made the whole experience all the better. That “support” in every sense of the word made it all the more possible to be grateful!

It seems that we live in a time in which globalization would offer us these possibilities to exchange with each other and allow us to become more human. We do happen to love people from abroad in the Colombia I know. We’ve always “looked up” at “others” as a rare and interesting “breed”. We look with great curiosity at what other people are like which makes me think that it would be wonderful if Japanese teenagers were sent to Colombia under no matter what excuse: to learn Spanish, how to make hammocks or hats or plant coffee for two years. Two years seems a very good length of time to be able to drop the tight structures of the mother culture and allow for a more human-wide vision to their own existence but even six months would help. Those children would then return with a much greater affection for their own culture and a perspective for their own role as human beings. The same would apply for children from Germany and England, the United States and any other part of the world. We could in Colombia do very well with the income that would bring and the children would highly profit from the embrace of the Colombian family tradition in the lower classes. There is something wonderfully embracing about it, so the teenagers would be safe. My guess is that these exchanges should take place around the age of thirteen and fourteen before the strong confrontational issues with parents and society begin to surface in the more developed teenager. It is also my guess, that with that relativity incorporated, the latter confrontation would be strongly mitigated, allowing for a more human understanding of their own society and families plight.

Elena on suicide and "milieu"

From fofblog Post 15 April 3rd 2010

http://fofdiscussion.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/fellowship-of-friendspathway-to-presence-discussion-part-91/

In another chapter of the book I’m trying to write, I state that the Fourth Way as presented by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky is essentially no different to other cults including the Christian religions.

In all of them there are a few basic premises such as a human and a divine realm, the relationship of the human to the divine and vice-versa, how the human can reach the divine through particular behavior and the relationship from human to human. It is no coincidence that the Fourth Way is presented as esoteric Christianity for in essence it adopts the same basic tenets.

I argue that the differences between the problems we face today are no different to those posed to people in Martin Luther’s time. What has changed is the number of people able to participate in the social processes due to democratic realities. The simple fact that more people are able to participate economically, socially and culturally and that the power relations between them is not as strongly tied to a unique hierarchic structure, gives room for not only greater freedom but also much more abuse. As the power of the king and the pope declines, we see the phenomenon of dictators and gurus trying to replace them each with their own particular agenda on what is right for the people. People remain, what changes is the relations between them.

What we also see is that in all times, the relations between people are tied to their relationship to the “goods” they share. Economic, cultural and social “goods” and how those goods are distributed is what determine the relationships between them as much as how each feels about his or herself.

The social, economic and political milieu in which an individual grows up, determines the way they will develop no differently than nature determines the way an animal behaves. Nature is to an animal what culture is to a man. They belong to each other as the dot to the line or the center to the periphery.

One of the great realities that the cult phenomenon is revealing is that the milieu to which people are submitted has the power to enslave them more deeply or free them more expansively in very short periods of time. We can see that the “milieu” has the capacity to lead people to massive suicide in periods no longer than weeks, months or years. Weeks in the internet mass suicides of Japan and years in the twenty-thirty year process of the People’s Temple (Jonestown). It would be very interesting to look closely at the social structures proper of Japan to understand the ingredients for the suicides. In my superficial knowledge of it, the impression is that it has been a very strict, formal society that has promoted suicide as a viable resolution to failure to act with honor in people of high rank but that has developed in modern times into very young people “joyfully” committing suicide because they deem themselves a failure before they even have or give themselves a serious opportunity to try. Statistics show that there are around 100 suicides per day in Japan. How what was once an “honorable solution” has turned inside out and against its own people, is something to look deeply into. It is as if the young Japanese today, were trying to tell their community that it has failed to honor them but instead of fighting against it, they sacrifice themselves to it and maintain it’s honor.

It is also interesting to look at how members of society are solving similar difficulties in western countries where teenagers are simply taking firearms and shooting at whoever got and gets in their way. They are both equivalent responses to different “milieus” and are both a profound scream for help from the younger generation to the older generation. Hopefully we will not take too much time to hear it.