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exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

 

Cultism

psychologists speak of

the 'hidden slavishness' 

 

 

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There's an underlying proclivity, what psychologist Ferenczi called the "hidden slavishness."

You'll want to read about this in Dr. Ernest Becker's "The Denial Of Death":

 

the hidden slavishness; the secret desire to lose oneself in the aura of another

"Man ignored the slavishness in his own soul. He wanted to believe that if he lost his will it was because of someone else. He wouldn't admit that this loss of will was something that he himself carried around as a secret yearning, a readiness to respond to someone's voice at the snap of his fingers. Hypnosis was a mystery only as long as man did not admit his own unconscious motives."

 

the compulsive neurosis, the hidden desire to merge with power figures

Sándor Ferenczi, a Hungarian psychoanalyst and colleague of Freud, in 1909 wonderfully explained the underpinnings of hypnosis. He

"pointed out how important it was for the hypnotist to be an imposing person, of high social rank, with a self-confident manner. When he gave his commands the patient would sometimes go under as if struck by coup de foudre ["stroke of lightning"]. There was nothing to do but obey, as by his imposing, authoritarian figure the hypnotist took the place of the parents... The explanation of the ease of hypnosis, said Ferenczi, is that, 'In our innermost soul we are still [spiritually unconscious] children, and we remain so throughout life.'"

 
 
 
Ferenczi: "There is no such thing as a 'hypnotizing,' a 'giving of ideas,' in the sense of psychical incorporating of something quite foreign from without, but only procedures that are able to set going unconscious, pre-existing, auto-suggestive mechanisms... According to this conception, the application of suggestion and hypnosis consists in the deliberate establishment of conditions under which the tendency to blind belief and uncritical obedience present in everyone, but usually kept repressed ... may unconsciously be transferred to the person hypnotizing or suggesting."

 

the secret compulsion to merge with power-figures

Ferenczi saw that the hypnotist convinces people to hypnotize themselves via the secret compulsion to merge with power-figures.

But this “hidden slavishness” is active in a field much wider than that of classical hypnosis. The “hidden slavishness” also sends people on a journey to merge with all sorts of external power-figures; anything that will bolster the “Needy Little Me.”

Dr. Ernest Becker: "Man could strut and boast all he wanted [trying to deny his fear of death and the inner neediness], but he really drew his 'courage to be' from [the things he identified with,] a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, the fetish of money, and the size of a bank balance."  

 

 

Eckhart Tolle:

true love is transcendental; without recognition of the 'true self' within, there can be no authentic romance for couples

 

"What is commonly called 'falling in love,' in most cases, is an intensification of egoic wanting and needing.

"You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person.

"It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever." 

 

"True love is transcendental.  Without recognition of the formless within yourself, there can be no true transcendental love. If you cannot recognize the formless in yourself, you cannot recognize yourself in the other. The recognition of the other as yourself in essence – not the form – is true love. 

"As long as the conditioned mind [run by the 'false self'] operates and you are completely identified with it, there’s no true love. There may be substitutes, things that are called “love” but are not true love.  For example, “falling in love”… [the] aspect of affinity with another form [in terms of] male/female. You can be drawn to another body in a sexual way, and it’s sometimes called “love”. 

"What is commonly called 'falling in love' is in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting [that is, neurotic craving based on a sense of emptiness and neediness] whatsoever."

how we fail to meet the other person's real self

 

 "[Relationships] do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you."

 

The False Self sizes up others, makes comparisons, analyzes how they might "fit into my story" or help me get what I want." The silent job-interview becomes "are you better, higher, more wealthy, better looking, more spiritual ... perhaps I can add her to my sense of self, make her my wife, she'll look good next to me."

And in this interview "you're not meeting anybody at all! - you're meeting your own thoughts. You think you're meeting people, entering into relationships with them, but you're only having a relationship with your [own thoughts and] your own mind.

"And then you marry her and she has the same problem. A little later they can't stand each other anymore. Two minds meeting that [do not really meet at all; they never met the real person, only their egoic desires superimposed upon that person]."

 

The distillation of Tolle's advice becomes: You have to find yourself, your true self, before you'll be able to find your eternal mate. 

 

the essence of cultism defined once again

It’s not just about drinking the kool-aid, the problem is much deeper, more widespread, and closer to home. Cultism is about “pruning and paring,” about "crafting and sculpting" a view of life and reality. Only you have the right to create your own future and your part in it.

However, when this principle is breached, the cult-leader will make claims that s/he alone has the “one true” interpretation of reality, to “systematize and control” all of life’s threats, the ability to offer a doorway to utopia; such assertions, of course, are patently bogus.

The cult-follower agrees, or is led to believe, that some external authority-figure is “the answer,” embodies a divine agency, is endowed with super-human ability to “fashion and shape,” to “pattern and order,” the vicissitudes of life and the universe, offering stability and safety;

these conclusions, too, are illusion, as no one can sell you a “bag of magic beans” or a “get out of jail free” card.

one cannot arrogate to oneself authority over another, nor grant license to another, in one's stead, concerning building a good life, a safe future, and the evolving of oneself into a mature son or daughter of God

Some things we are not allowed to delegate away. In fact, there’s an entire unpleasant, albeit temporary, world on the other side, a place of “detention” and “time out,” specifically designed to sit people down and require them think about their lives, and what they want to do next. They themselves, by themselves, have to do this. That this “duty that cannot be delegated away” is the apostle Paul’s point exactly in Galatians chapter six.

we must access and live from the "true self"; no one can do this for us; and until we do, we will be blinded to the ways of lasting success and happiness; suggesting that a "strong father figure" can save us from an existential requirement of self-determination is one more definition of cultism

 

 

 

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