THINKING= the Devil

[blownawaytheidahoway]

I'm surprised nobody has identified this more.
Under the CEDU model there were many evils. All of our "games", all of our "automatics", our reactions, and issues stemmed from ONE thing: FEAR. Fear,  the feeling, manifested itself by way of negative thinking.
Every action done with Me's Body was put into motion by the "I" or "thinking". Whether it was hurting or killing one's self, "I" putting drugs into "me's" body, or making me "eat to forget".
The thinking was responsible for getting us sent to our shitpit. The thinking was to blame for coming in and making our "little kid's" (inside of our selves) grow up too fast and made us fight with and hate our parents, teachers, authority, and the program itself. Surrendering to one's own negative thinking was the chiefest sin at CEDU. Yet, there was no other way to live than in a constant state of keeping this devil phantom at bay, at all times, and AT ALL COSTS.

help me explain/ explore these concepts for some recent (very very brave) outsiders to this forum.
-blownaway

[Anonymous]

interesting...hadn't really thought about this before. However, when I reflect on this, what was "thinking" was defined by whoever was in charge. Whoever had power over you was basically allowed to define your reality and what your "thinking" vs "feeling" was.

How often did you have to really delve deep in your brain to come up with something good that your "thinking" was doing to you??? Something that would satisfy all of those people screaming at you in the rap?

[Anonymous]

yes i agree with guest's response.

cedu philosophy does not apply to real life.  it does not apply to the actual biological structures on which our experienced is based.  cedu, christianity, feminism, many many many different kinds of groups and people have come up with ideas about what is right and wrong, good and bad, and all these are just ideas, thoughts, that we then try to apply.

some people self apply, others apply to others.  the sad thing to remember is that when people like rudy and mel wasserman decide to live out their ideas at the expense of their own and other people's actual experience they really do go crazy.  when people like bush and the neocons try and take over the world, they really are crazy, the stories they tell themselves, the structures of their thoughts become ongoing self hypnosis, and to try and structure your thoughts around the way cedu structured things you are inviting that hypnosis into your own mind.

i feel the whole country needs a new language.  i see what was done to us as very similar to what the bushies are doing to 'terrorists' in other countries by torturing them.  i think it comes from the same place of detatchment that occurs when you are totally deluded about something.  this can happen from trauma, from addiction, and sadly, as we all have experienced this, from social rejection.

[Psianide]

Ah yes "thinking".  I remember being hit with that stick a lot. I was one of "the headsiest people" a lot of the staff had ever met. They were always telling me about how headsy, or in my head, or gamey I was.

Here is my assertion. The head and "thinking" needed to be the bad guy, while the heart and "feeling"  were the savior, in order for CEDU to exist. This would be because even the mind of a student of profoundly mediocre intellegence would be able to murder the sorts of absurdities and non-sequiters that were trumpeted daily by the program. I remember a lot of arguements starting between students and staff members that were terminated by either applying a lable to the student relating to the head (stop being a game!), or reframing the entire content so as to indict the student for falling victim to the evil mind and failing to "take care of your feelings".

This sort of side-stepping is great for defending a doctrine that cannot otherwise defend itself. You cannot attack an ideology when its proponents will deny the utility of logic itself, and ridicule you for using it.  Unfortunately for CEDU and its defenders, I think that this approach to quelling dissent was much more effective at making staff members feel powerful and vindicated, than at quelling actual doubt about the place.

"Its an agreement if I say its an agreement!"
Joel Stinton
Former team leader of team Orion

 :rofl:

[dishdutyfugitive]

Excellent insight - well said.

[blownawaytheidahoway]

yeah. great response.

"Unfortunately for CEDU and its defenders, I think that this approach to quelling dissent was much more effective at making staff members feel powerful and vindicated, than at quelling actual doubt about the place."

All of my doubts turned towards myself. The thinking and the fact that I still had "negative thinking" weighed on me most heavily.What could I do to slay the thinking. I ran my anger all the fucking time. I got myself into a tizzy yelling how I doubted myself and I JUST KNEW I was going to smoke pot when I left and I was ugly and stupid, I'd never be the leader, never have a lasting relationship of value, and especially all the anger at my parents about, well, everything, and how I hated myself for being a fuck up and always resistant and getting yelled at, I ran my shit until I was in tears. And for a little while, I did feel better. The thinking could be beat, it seemed. It went completely away, until the I stopped crying. Crying always came after running your shit.
Didn't you hate it when sometimes the staff would arbitrarily stop you before you got to that point and tell you really needed to sit in that feeling. They always threw some shitty comment your way to rub it all in at the end of those raps.
Then they'd go to your senior counselor and say whatever they said. Goodbye trip to Shweitzer, that you were working towards. I gotta post more about THINKING= DEVIL at CEDU. It's so true.

[try another castle]

Easy:

Any possible thing that could float through your brain that wasn't conducive to the program..... that was thinking.

Even negative thinking. While not directly subversive and on the surface, strives to make you feel as shitty about yourself as the staff do. The program demonizes it because most of the self-hating thoughts that we endured were either created or exacerbated by the program. If they actually bothered to explore where those thoughts came from, it could possibly trace back to them. So what do they do? They make you scream and cry and tell it to fuck off. That's it. No insight. No understanding. And the cause in the program's eyes? Almost always traced back to a pet issue that they have assigned the student. divorce, death of relative/friend, adoption, drug abuse, etc. AND, on top of that, the pet issue is also often a complete and total fabrication to begin with!!! "Do you feel worthless? Kind of like that time you sucked an epileptic organ grinder's dead monkey's cock out by the abandoned ferris wheel for a hit of ecstasy, right? How does that make your little girl feel? Come on, give her a voice."

Fabricated or not, it is a total fucking red herring.

Didn't you hate it when sometimes the staff would arbitrarily stop you before you got to that point and tell you really needed to sit in that feeling.

OMG I totally forgot about that!! They would say "No! We're moving on. Just sit in it." Caroline was notorious for that. I would say that it's essentially the cult version of a cock-tease maneuver. But I am actually reminded of something else...

One thing that is sometimes used in torture is what is known as a false execution. They blindfold the prisoner, put him up against the wall, and then have anywhere from one torturer to an entire firing squad shoot him with blanks. The prisoner almost always falls to the ground, totally freaked out, thinking he has been shot.

In both instances, you are anticipating that something traumatic is going to happen, and then it doesn't.

And as we all know, the alternative to the anticipated traumatic event is almost just as awful. Why? Because you are stuck in some shithole out in the middle of nowhere, and whether you are a soldier who is getting the worst brand of grade A torture in a POW camp, or you are trapped in a cult, or stuck at a TBS, the fact of the matter is, you are surrounded by shit. Everything is shit, and you are trapped in a world of shit. If shit A doesn't happen in a rap, then the shit B you are stuck with isn't much better. Could even be worse. "Wait, you mean I'm not dead? The squad used blanks? Oh joy. More time in my cell while someone peels my fingernails back."

[Anonymous]

The old faux execution trick... that's how I felt every time I was stepping into raps... waiting to be executed. Bracing myself. It was bad to go through it, and I hated myself for feeling gratitude every time others got the shaft. (Instead of me)  On the other hand, I was tenterhooks waiting for the bullets four hours a day, thrice weekly.

[dishdutyfugitive]

castle - well said!

the thought of caroline interupting me in the middle of a 'running my anger' session and telling me "to just sit with that" makes me want to ....................

That move by a staff member was the coup de gras, the holy grail of mind fucks.  No wonder the staff's  egos grew exponentially larger every day. Think about it - in that situation - you were completely incapcitated. Espicially incapcitated in the CEDU world. For the rest of the rap you were forbidden to talk, indict, run your shit, cry. You were forced to sit there like a pathetic, discarded piece of fucking human garbage. The best part is your parents were being sucked dry financially to put you in this humiliating destructive situation    -     the icing on the fucking cake. Your parents were sitting at home with a grin on their face - ear to fucking ear - patting themselves on the back for sending you to the best place possible. While at the same moment you felt like the biggest piece of shit on the planet just for trying to drink the Kook aid they were mainlining into your jugular.

[Anonymous]

YES. that IS right!

[dishdutyfugitive]

Kind of like that time you sucked an epileptic organ grinder's dead monkey's cock out by the abandoned ferris wheel for a hit of ecstasy, right?


That's some funny shit.
Reminds me of a 3 way I had with some midget carnies behind the the Kootenay hotel during a PCP binge while I was on a town trip in challenge.

[psy]

I'm surprised nobody has identified this more.
Under the CEDU model there were many evils. All of our "games", all of our "automatics", our reactions, and issues stemmed from ONE thing: FEAR. Fear,  the feeling, manifested itself by way of negative thinking.
Every action done with Me's Body was put into motion by the "I" or "thinking". Whether it was hurting or killing one's self, "I" putting drugs into "me's" body, or making me "eat to forget".
The thinking was responsible for getting us sent to our shitpit. The thinking was to blame for coming in and making our "little kid's" (inside of our selves) grow up too fast and made us fight with and hate our parents, teachers, authority, and the program itself. Surrendering to one's own negative thinking was the chiefest sin at CEDU. Yet, there was no other way to live than in a constant state of keeping this devil phantom at bay, at all times, and AT ALL COSTS.

help me explain/ explore these concepts for some recent (very very brave) outsiders to this forum.
-blownaway

Well.  CEDU came out of synanon so it inherited much of the thinking from it's predecessor (AA).  Even though Dederich was booted out of AA, it wasn't for his belief system per-se it was because he was focused on drugs rather than alcohol (which AA cators to).  He kept the philosophy that AA is the only way (or his derivative) and the idea that "addicts" are always "addicts" (whether sober or not).

Among other things that came from AA was the concept of "stinkin thinking" - the idea that "addicts" cannot trust their own thinking since the drug is "cunning, baffling, etc..." and "addicts" are ultimately sick in the head.

The whole idea revolves around the concept that you can't trust your own mind, it isn't safe for you to think for yourself (you might relapse and die) and must look to somebody else to make decisions for you (regardless of how abusurd or personal).

This was significantly more pronounced at Benchmark where Jayne inforporated her own version of AA on top of the CEDU doctrine (the two are very compatable).  Blownaway is right. This core idea goes to the heart of the problem.

Rational thinking threatens any cult.

[Psianide]

I'm surprised nobody has identified this more.
Under the CEDU model there were many evils. All of our "games", all of our "automatics", our reactions, and issues stemmed from ONE thing: FEAR. Fear,  the feeling, manifested itself by way of negative thinking.
Every action done with Me's Body was put into motion by the "I" or "thinking". Whether it was hurting or killing one's self, "I" putting drugs into "me's" body, or making me "eat to forget".
The thinking was responsible for getting us sent to our shitpit. The thinking was to blame for coming in and making our "little kid's" (inside of our selves) grow up too fast and made us fight with and hate our parents, teachers, authority, and the program itself. Surrendering to one's own negative thinking was the chiefest sin at CEDU. Yet, there was no other way to live than in a constant state of keeping this devil phantom at bay, at all times, and AT ALL COSTS.

help me explain/ explore these concepts for some recent (very very brave) outsiders to this forum.
-blownaway

Well.  CEDU came out of synanon so it inherited much of the thinking from it's predecessor (AA).  Even though Dederich was booted out of AA, it wasn't for his belief system per-se it was because he was focused on drugs rather than alcohol (which AA cators to).  He kept the philosophy that AA is the only way (or his derivative) and the idea that "addicts" are always "addicts" (whether sober or not).

Among other things that came from AA was the concept of "stinkin thinking" - the idea that "addicts" cannot trust their own thinking since the drug is "cunning, baffling, etc..." and "addicts" are ultimately sick in the head.

The whole idea revolves around the concept that you can't trust your own mind, it isn't safe for you to think for yourself (you might relapse and die) and must look to somebody else to make decisions for you (regardless of how abusurd or personal).

This was significantly more pronounced at Benchmark where Jayne inforporated her own version of AA on top of the CEDU doctrine (the two are very compatable).  Blownaway is right. This core idea goes to the heart of the problem.

Rational thinking threatens any cult.

Good extrapolation. Its always intresting to see how the roots of these things trace back.

You might be interested to know (if you didn't already) that NWA has now included a 12 step program alongside whatever Dederich/Wasserman/Lifespring crap it retained from its CEDU era. Nothing new under the sun eh?

[Psianide]

All of my doubts turned towards myself. The thinking and the fact that I still had "negative thinking" weighed on me most heavily.What could I do to slay the thinking. I ran my anger all the fucking time. I got myself into a tizzy yelling how I doubted myself and I JUST KNEW I was going to smoke pot when I left and I was ugly and stupid, I'd never be the leader, never have a lasting relationship of value, and especially all the anger at my parents about, well, everything, and how I hated myself for being a fuck up and always resistant and getting yelled at, I ran my shit until I was in tears. And for a little while, I did feel better. The thinking could be beat, it seemed. It went completely away, until the I stopped crying. Crying always came after running your shit.

Our approaches to the place seem to have differed significantly. I always took specific behavioural feedback or suggestions seriously, but on some level all the emotional shit totally rang hollow even as I tried to take it seriously. I always trusted my thinking, most of my doubts were focused outward, and I couldn't make myself feel emotion.  I would be running my shit, and inside there would be no emotion, and I would be thinking "this is really fucking weird, why the hell am I doing this", or I would just get some sort of adrenaline/endopsychosin rush, and literally disassociate from my body for a little while like I was tripping DXM. I actually copped out for not connecting with emotion while running my shit in my dreams propheet after the experience, and the facilitator just looked at me blankly. I guess that must have been hard to fathom. I did have genuine emotional discharges at CEDU, but they emerged organically and I dealt with them as they did.

The Irony is, by the end of my first year, most of the staff looked at me as a shining example of what a CEDU student should be.

[psy]

bump