Theos-Talk Archives (November 1997 Message tl00238)

>From:         bern@arcadis.be (Bernie)
>Date:         1997/11/07
>Message-ID:   <347363ce.26255064@snews.zippo.com>
>Newsgroups:   alt.religion.scientology
I found a very interesting mailing list on Krishnamurti.
This means that my output to ars risk to be significantly
reduced.

        I wrote a small (not!) introduction on myself for this
occasion. I thought that it summarizes rather well some of the
points I have been making in this newsgroup over the last two
years. 

Here it is.
_________________________________________________________________

Hello Everybody,

        I am afraid I made my entry in this list a bit louder than
I had wished. Indeed, I first sent a message to the list with
the subject "Subscribe", which was not the right way to
subscribe. Then, I also let, by mistake, the wrong signature.
Not that it matters too much, but I thought that the web site to
which it pointed to was rather irrelevant for this list. I
received some nice feedback though, so you can never really tell
what is good and what is bad at the end of the day.

        I will even use this opportunity to, instead of lurk
heavily before posting, give a short description as to where I
come from, since I already feel rather at home on this list,
although it may be a bit early to say.

        I remember when I was about 16 years old, writing something
very much along the materialist line that you can't have matter
without spirit and, reversely, you can't have spirit without
matter, and so, it is logical that when the matter is no more,
there isn't spirit left either. So, it can't be said that I had
an early spiritual vocation. If the circumstances were to be
slightly different, I may be sitting now in the atheists or
skepticals newsgroups. That's not how it turned out, though.

        For some reasons, I started to develop an interest in
spiritual matters. I believe that most of it came through
reading. In the beginning, it all seemed completely incredible,
though. I remember standing in a book shop, scanning books
around, and hitting a book in which the author explained how his
son, who met an accidental death, was speaking to him. This made
no sense at all for me. If his son was death, were was he
sitting? How could he speak at all? I could not conceive at all
that someone could exist without body. 

        I guess that this must be how materialists, atheists,
skeptics, etc, feel as well. A friend and colleague of mine was
asked someday, by some other friend of mine who was rather
spiritually oriented, if he believed in a life after death,
reincarnation, etc. He thought about it for a while, and
answered "I really would like to believe in it, but I just
can't". This stroke me as an honest and even wise answer. There
seem to be people who, indeed, just cannot conceive of anything
else than what they see here and now. They aren't necessarily
different than those who do. They just can't conceive of it,
like I could not conceive of it before either. I am glad that,
through this phase of mine, I am better able to understand what
may be their position.

        My interest grew, though, and I started to read more and
more along spiritual lines. Circumstances also seemed to push me
towards this orientation. For example, as I was waiting at the
hairdresser, I read a magazine article about a women who was
driving away spirits from an haunted house. The article was well
written, and it caught my interest. I decided to buy one of the
books mentioned. I got it wrapped in present paper to be open
only at the end of my ongoing school examinations.

        Of course, I couldn't wait, so, instead of studying, I read
the book. I must have read it over the night. Couldn't lift my
nose from it. At the end, my interest spear headed upward about
tenfold. I guess I really got convinced at that time, and the
universe did seem to shift, in a kind of world-shattering way,
in another new and considerably larger dimension. 

        I also got influenced through comic strips telling stories
about UFOs. One night, I made a strange dream about it, heard
some strange bells and woke up. I couldn't move at all, no
matter how hard I tried. Yet, I was without a shade of fear.
After a lot of effort, I succeed to move, though. This happened
several times thereafter, but it is only many years later that I
realized that this was a condition in which I was able to leave
my body without effort. So, instead of trying to move with all
my strength, I started to lift up higher and higher. The return
in the body was made without effort after awhile, and I then
could move normally.

        But this all is much later. For now, I finished the book,
and still passed my examinations and was done with school. What
would I do next? What higher studies would I pursue? I had no
ideas. However, by then, my interest for spiritual issues was so
big that I started to read a lot on this toic. I read a book
about parapsychology wonders in the URSS. I became very
interested in the subject and decided that this was the type of
study I would do next.

        At the time, in 1974, there was nothing of the sort,
though. So I took up psychology instead. It didn't interest me
so much, too materialist. Didn't take the spirit into account,
didn't even take the possible psychic influence of the
experiencer on the experiences. Most of my time I spent, rather
than follow the courses, with my nose in books. I read a lot.
Lobsang Rampa, Spiritism, Edgard Cayce, Swedenborg, you name it.
I even read a book, well written, though, that claimed that
Humanity evolved out of cannibalism! Of course I was also
reading a few of the psychological and philosophical books
recommended by the curriculum. I was also following some
courses. One that I never missed was the philosophy course. It
was given in an outstanding way as well. During this course, I
understood more about mathematics, as the teacher explained how
the exponential function evolved out of the philosophical theory
of Leibniz, than I learned in preceding years of school about
it.

        It is only when I started to get into Theosophy that things
began to make sense and that the puzzle got together. I started
to frequent the Theosophic quarters. In there, I saw a portray
of someone I found amazingly beautiful and obviously of high
spiritual elevation. This was Krishnamurti. So much passed
through his eyes and his every being, that years of teachings
would not even give a glint of it.This, alone, was a revelation
on its own.

        The Theosophical Society featured some weekly lecture, some
courses, and also had an amazing library. You could find there
books that are nowhere in print anymore, and that would dig into
very deep and interesting spiritual and philosophical dimension.
I got advised as to which books were the best by some of the
many old ladies to be found there, and of course Annie Besant
was an amazing writer.

        It is only later that I came on Krishnamurti, through a
bibliography of his. I remember reading in it poems he made to
express his enlightenment. It was so beautiful and hit something
so deep within me that I believe I cried. I posted one of these
poems some time ago in alt.meditation. It starts with

" 
        Oh! Listen,
        I will sing to thee the song of my Beloved.

        Where the soft green slopes of the still mountains
        Meet the blue shimmering waters of the noisy sea,
        Where the bubbling brook shouts in ecstasy,
        Where the still pools reflect the calm heavens,
        There thou wilt meet with my Beloved.
"

and goes through, among many paragraphs:

"
        In the shadows of the stars,
        In the deep tranquility of dark nights,
        In the reflection of the moon on still waters,
        In the great silence before the dawn,
        Among the whispering of waking trees,
        In the cry of the bird at morn,
        Amidst the wakening of shadows,
        Amidst the sunlit tops of the far mountains,
        In the sleepy face of the world,
        There thou wilt meet with my Beloved.

        Keep still, O dancing waters,
        And listen to the voice of my Beloved.

        In the happy laughter of children
        Thou canst hear Him.
        The music of the flute
        Is His voice.
        The startled cry of a lonely bird
        Moves thy heart to tears,
        For thou hearest His voice.
        The roar of the age-old sea
        Awakens the memories
        That have been lulled to sleep
        By His voice.
        The soft breeze that stirs
        The tree-tops lazily
        Brings to thee the sound
        Of His voice.
"

and finishes with:

"
        In the sacred temple,
        In the halls of dancing,
        On the holy face of the sannyasi,
        In the lurches of the drunkard,
        With the harlot and with the chaste,
        Thou wilt meet with my Beloved.

        On the fields of flowers,
        In the towns of squalor and dirt,
        With the pure and the unholy,
        In the flower that hides divinity,
        There is my well-Beloved.

        Oh! the sea
        Has entered my heart,
        In a day,
        I am living an hundred summers.
        O, friend,
        I behold my face in thee,
        The face of my well-Beloved.    
"

        From there, I became extremely interested in him. I was
wondering. How can someone, who have been raised in such a
protected environment, taught no doubt the many facets of the
fascinating Theosophical cosmogony and philosophy, can shred all
of it? Surely, if there was anyone who would know what Theosophy
was about, it would be K. I started to read his writing,
although I didn't quite understand too much of it at the time.

        In the meantime, I also got to meet, sometimes through
friends, sometimes by chance, several spiritual groups. One
friend was in DLM and preached to me the holiness of their own
type of meditation in which they tasted some nectar. Another in
the Sufi movement and meditated rather harshly and intensely.
One group was teaching that everything was Satan, while my
University neighbors tried to convince me that if I confessed my
sins and surrendered to Jesus, I would be "saved". Still other
emphasized the importance of prayer to avoid eternal hell. 

        The only ones who didn't seem to want to convert me to
their own religions were my own parents. They were of Jewish
confession but didn't seem to bother about it very much. My
mother believed in some kind of vague higher intelligence, and
my father was really an atheist. One of the rare times I spoke
about spiritual matters with him, he said that he saw so much
suffering during the war that, for him, there just can't be a
God.

        It was examination time again, University ones this time,
and I decided to take one day off a week from my intensive study
and do nothing. I decided for Saturday, just to "test" out the
idea contained in the Sabbath, in which you just don't do
anything special (my adapted interpretation, of course). I went
in town and walked idly around. It is then that I was approached
by a young man who proposed me to pass some psychological test.
I accepted without after thoughts because I was used to it. In a
small University town, and in a psychological section, you are
regularly asked to serve as guinea pigs for all kinds of
experiments (memory, etc). The young man, however, wasn't a
psychology student. He was a Scientologist.

        My interest in Scientology (Scn) got quickly awakened. I
already was looking around to all kinds of spiritual groups, and
this one didn't seem as odd as the other ones. It believed in
reincarnation and OBEs, like I did. It didn't have some kind of
strange meditation practices, but what seemed like a scientific
technique, and it also offered me something the others didn't
seem to offer: a meaningful mission in life and society,
something useful to do. That appealed strongly to me, even more
so since I wasn't really interested in any kind of existing job
types. and found my studies boring and very limited. It didn't
take long before I dropped my studies and joined the young and
cheerful local team.

        That's where the story I recount in my web page starts,
moreover. I recount how I got involved in Scn and eventually got
out from it. How I got involved in what I now call the "cultic
mindset" and how I evolved out from it.

        One of the reasons that attracted me initially to Scn was
that it seemed to offer a concrete method to effectively achieve
spiritual powers and spiritual states. Theosophy was very nice,
but seemed to end in an dead-end. Once you have assimilated the
basic elements of its philosophy, what do you *do*? Scn seemed
to offer something valuable and effective to do, a potent method
to exteriorize and travel around without body. I figured that
once I would be able to do that, I would also be able to travel
to places like Tibetan monasteries and expand my knowledge of
spiritual issues. Part of the reason I thought that Scn
effectively achieve these result is because the framework is
such that this is constantly and affirmatively repeated, and the
original appearance of a religious science, or a scientific
religion gives this impression.
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