The Path - a Cult TV series about a Cult.

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ex-l

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The Path - a Cult TV series about a Cult.

Post05 Apr 2016

The Path” is a new cult TV series about a family in upstate New York that is deeply enmeshed in a "self-help" movement called the Meyerists, a commune with all the telltale signs of being a scary cult based on a powerful vision of a paradise to come (“the Garden”) along with a set of life instructions that foretell the End of the World ... salvation attainable by achieving ladder rungs of knowledge

Sound familiar, anyone?

Other elements become quickly but subtley obvious, e.g. targetting victims of natural disasters (BKWSU - check!), targetting victims of familial abuse (BKWSU - check!), mumbo-jumbo language (BKWSU - check!), think the outside world is corrupt and about to collapse (BKWSU - check!), mystical manipulation of audiences (BKWSU - check!), sexual-emotional intrigues between leaders and followers (BKWSU - check!), power struggles and personal ambitions of leaders (BKWSU - check!), ex-members' websites exposing the truth about the cult (BKWSU - check!) ... however, there's no indication that it was directly inspired by the BKs - like Jane Campion/Kate WInslet's Holy Smoke! (1999) had unless the writer took a trip up to Peave Village - and more that it was inspired by elements of Scientology (electronic meters to measure levels of consciousness, military like codes, punishment routines, and a David Miscavige-like ambitious heir to a sick or dying founder).

I'll be interested to see how the FBI interest is portrayed.

Like both the BKs (shudras) and Scientologists (wogs), they have their own term for non-believers, that being “Ignorant Systemite”, or I.S.



The writer had one very telling and interesting aside ... before they started shooting, while there were setting up a scene in the cult's high street bookshop and meditation centre (BKWSU - check!), people would wander in and want to know what was going on ... not "what they were filming" but "what the movement was, and how they could join"! "People were ready to sign up on the spot" ... proving that you can never discount the power of branding when launching a new sect.

Big eye in the sky radiant logo on t-shirts and walls, "the only art work you need" ... (BKWSU - check!). Look BKs, it's a memorial from last Kalpa.

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Pink Panther

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Re: The Path - a Cult TV series about a Cult.

Post05 Apr 2016

... and Scientologists (wogs), they have their own term for non-believers...

Scientologists call them wogs? Really?

In Australia a ”wog” is a term used to racially vilify immigrants or their children, mainly used against migrants from Italy, Greece and later Lebanon from about the 1950s till about the 1990s, when it was appropriated by comedians from those backgrounds and it lost its hard edge.

That a TV show about a cult can be considered likely to draw a large audience shows the producers believe the wider public has now had enough exposure to cults to accept the drama has a base in reality.
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ex-l

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Re: The Path - a Cult TV series about a Cult.

Post05 Apr 2016

Pink Panther wrote:Scientologists call them wogs? Really?

Indeed. Down from LBH himself.

Allegedly, they claim it's an acronym for "Without Goals" now, but I suspect Hubbard was well aware of its pejorative meaning as he had colonialist like pretensions ... if you've ever seen him interviewed, you'd know what I mean. If you swopped wog for wog, or won for "Shudra", as it's used by the Brahma Kumaris, I'd say it all came across pretty much the same.

I once spent some time with an ex- long term Scientologist and was surprised at how many similarities there were. Similar structure/experience, different terminology. You'd have to wonder if all the possessing spooks floating about start cults all went to the same college to learn how to run a religion.

It would be an interesting exercise to take the BKs' god or leaders comments about "Shudras" ... and then replace them with nigger or wog to see how they looked.
“We live in a very woggy world at this time. The wog is so out-ethics he is living in what amounts to a criminal society.”

LRH, HCO PL 16 October 1967, SUPRESSIVES AND THE ADMINISTRATOR HOW TO DETECT SPs AS AN ADMINISTRATOR

“The dangerous environment of the wog world, of injustice, sudden dismissals, war, atomic bombs, will only persist and trouble us if we fail to spread our safe environment across the world.”

LRH, HCO PL 5 April 1965, SCIENTOLOGY MAKES A SAFE WORLD

“I am not interested in wog morality.”

LRH, HCO PL 15 August 1967, DISCIPLINE SPs AND Admin HOW STATISTICS CRASH

“Newspapers of the wog press almost exclusively deal in entheta as their ‘news’ specializes in sexual degradation, disasters, violence, crime, failure, etc.”

Probably a TV series like this will actually increase interest in joining a cult ... especially if it means taking drugs, "altering consciousness" and kinky sex!

And there's no kinkier sex than the celibate's forbidden fruit.
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ex-l

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Re: The Path - a Cult TV series about a Cult.

Post06 Apr 2016

Woah ... watched two episodes in a row and had the freakiest dream about being pursued and attacked by alien possessed culties. Something about them being controlled from a big hidden computers ... and someone trying to build another one.

Interesting, if one takes it to be my sub-conscious talking to me, the way to "cure" or defeat the culties was to hold their head to the ground at which point they 'woke up' and remembered their own purpose for life (rather than the cult's).

Steve Hassan comments on its veracity to Vanity Fair.

The series focuses on a core marital couple whose marriage splinters when one spouse begins to question their faith. To that degree, it might have a lot in common with BK couples, or where one party is a BK and the other only going alone with it for the sake of their partner.

Hassan comments on cults like the Brahma Kumaris preying on survivors of national disasters which, in his opinion, is more for P.R. and getting wealthy donors to help than for recruiting members.

In the case of the BKs, as with most "service" campaigns they adopt, I think it's something that probably came out of fairly sincere interests of individual (trust funded) BKs, keen to do something good, that was later adopted by the org as they saw its PR value.
Hassan wrote:There are so many different types of cults that go after different populations, but in general cults really want to recruit smart, talented, intact people who can have trust funds, and who have skills, and who have education, because then they’re going to be more effective for the organization.

For most of their history, the BKs have been "charity avoidant" ... it was actually seen as a spiritually negative thing. The money only went one way in BKism. Their way. In my opinion, I think the Indian tsunami was the changing point but that it happened because if they were seen to do nothing, it would have made them look bad.
When people ask me what drives people who are leading cults, I talk about power, money, and sex — money is not always number two but power is always number one ...

A mind-control cult, or a destructive cult ... in my definition, is an authoritarian, pyramid-structured group, or relationship even.

Although sex is - largely - off the agenda for BKs, power appears to have grown from just power over others to real political power in India and entirely pyramidic in structure.

What is going on with the BK leaders sexual energy? Are they investing it into power seeking?

At the very least, removing sex ... and all the effort, emoting and break up involved in it ... frees up a great deal of time and energy for BKs and keep adherents focused on the god head and leadership. Therefore I tend to think it is a far more practical thing than for some dubious "spiritual" benefit.

This dramatised cult is a real party and utterly normal in comparison to the BKs! Real people having relationships, children, enjoying their own houses and gardens ... unthinkable in the BK world.
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Pink Panther

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Re: The Path - a Cult TV series about a Cult.

Post07 Apr 2016

... the way to "cure" or defeat the culties was to hold their head to the ground at which point they 'woke up' and remembered their own purpose for life (rather than the cult's).

Coming down to earth is, figuratively speaking, back to reality, to humanity and humility.

”Humility”, ”humble” and ”human” all have the Latin root ”humus”, meaning "earth” or "soil".
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ex-l

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Re: The Path - a Cult TV series about a Cult.

Post07 Apr 2016

I thought that was the meaning and it interested me for being the "advice" from my sub-conscious.

No, unlike a BK would say, I am sure "Baba was not telling the soul" what to do in a vision.

And sometimes bringing someone "down to earth" requires bursting their balloon (ego ... illusion). I'd argue, far from "removing ego", BKism actually encourages a false but expansive one ... a sort of mini replication of Lekhraj Kirpalani's own complex delusion of grandeur, and that institutionalised delusion of grandeur is what they call Spirituality™, e.g. wafting around as a "pure" and "royal" angel, criticising humanity and wishing it eradicated so they can enjoy their Heaven.
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Pink Panther

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Re: The Path - a Cult TV series about a Cult.

Post08 Apr 2016

Indeed.

BK-ism comes out of the dualist traditions that splits the ”whole” into convenient binaries, in this case tangible / intangible, mental/physical, or, metaphorically, spiritual / material.

This approach invites correlations to other value binaries like good / bad, superior / inferior etc.

Guess which one is which? Obviously the aspect making that judgement, the mental-intangible, will consider itself superior to it’s nominal opposite despite the fact that one has never been found to exist without the other. Hence ego will always consider itself superior to the unconscious. Ego is the ‘talker’ in the conversation between ourselves and life rather than the listener.

Your explanation about the ‘expansive' ego encouraged by BKism follows that pattern to extract binaries, to further abstract the totality of what’s real into convenient multiple separate realities.

So with BKism, and many new-age wankeries, we get ordinary consciousness versus elevated consciousness, higher and lower self, soul versus body consciousness.

Instead of working toward wholeness or one-ness or ”samma ditthi” , which literally means 'complete view' or 'total seeing’ (samma is not literally ”right” as it’s often mistranslated, but similar to the latin ”summa” i.e sum total) the BKs and those with similar conceptualisations of life boost their ”self-esteem” by thinking that at least they can distinguish higher self from lower self. Well, I can distinguish between my elbow and my arse but both co- exist , to think one part of the anatomy is ‘better' than the other to say a screwdriver is better than a hack saw.

It’s the same arrogance that had the racially prejudiced believing themselves superior because they could discern which race was superior and which inferior.
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ex-l

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Re: The Path - a Cult TV series about a Cult.

Post08 Apr 2016

Pink Panther wrote:BK-ism comes out of the dualist traditions that splits the ”whole” into convenient binaries, in this case tangible / intangible, mental/physical, or, metaphorically, spiritual / material ... conceptualisations of life boost their ”self-esteem” by thinking that at least they can distinguish higher self from lower self.

To be honest, I don't even think Lekhraj Kirpalani BKism made it 'into' any tradition.

Speaking to the one academic with any reasonable understanding of Indian traditions and a fondness for the BKs, Lawrence Babb, it seems the only religious foundation the cult had ... before the intervention of the mystic Saddhu to whom Lekhraj Kirpalani paid a fortune to gain an intitiation ... was from Lekhraj Kirpalani's wife's simple Hindu tendences (Vallabhacharya Pushtimarg), and that Lekhraj Kirpalani's spiritual endeavours did not go much further than a typical Hindu shopkeeper's propitiations.

The rest is just a corner store religion selling little bits of other people's religions ... anything that will sell.
Propitiate

To win or regain the favour of (a god, spirit, or person) by doing something that pleases them.

As a relating aside ... I just watched another cult related documentary called, The Source, about The Source Family, what looks like the seminal 1960s/70s West Coast American "crazy cult".

This, folks, sounds like the cult you would have wanted to be part of ... health food, utopian living experiments, its own psychedelic rock band, lots of (naked) attractive hippies and so on, instead of one run by uptight, menopausal old Indian aunties with a Krishna fixation over their sugar daddy millionaire financier.

But so did this one too! They dressed up in white too, only the music and dancing was much better.

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Having watched it, it's quite fascinating how close - again - to the same model as BKism it is. A millionaire businessman, called Father ... calling followers children, deciding he was god and having a party surrounded by loads of young women. The BKs could put him down for being a lowly, "Fag End of the Kalpa" spiritual founder having his Golden Age at the end of their Iron Age. What interested me is how he ended it, or at least what realisation he reached at the end of the mad trip ... I wonder if Lekhraj Kirpalani did as well?

As, yes BK readers, Lekhraj Kirpalani did indulge in familiarities with the young women, including bathing half naked, lying about in cots, sitting them on his knees, kissing and feeding them mouth to mouth (confirmed by Om Radhe herself) and "pulling their breasts" to quote the Bhaiband's records. I wonder what that means ... massaging or playing at Krishna with them?

This is all logical, Krishna stories are replete with stories of the nipple caressing and gopies crushing him with full, swelling breasts. The Bhagavata Purana, the Vishnu Purana and Harivarnsa are unambiguous in asserting that the girls eluded the restraints of their mothers, fathers and Brothers to indulge themselves with Krishna ... and the BKs did with Lekhraj Kirpalani ... that the gopis were prohibited in vain by their husbands, Brothers and fathers ... as did the Bhaibund husbands do to their BK wives ... and that they indulged in erotic emotional love play that was, however, considered "pure" as they were with their god ... as exactly says Om Radhe in her witness statements.

The large bathing tank still remains in Lekhraj Kirpalani's old property in Pakistan.
By stretching out his arms and embracing them; by playfully caressing their hair, by pleasurably stroking their thighs, loosening their waist cloths and fondling their breasts; by engaging in battles with fingernails; and by playful derision, glances and smiles the Lord aroused the women of Vraja to the peak of passion, and made love to them.

Fulfilled in their desires, the gopis begin to look upon themselves as superior, conceit and pride enters their feelings, and to remove these Krishna suddenly disappears from their midst, leaving them utter distraught (as Lekhraj Kirpalani did leaving them during Om Mandli).

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ex-l

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Re: The Path - a Cult TV series about a Cult.

Post29 May 2016

The Path series - starring Breaking Bad actor Aaron Paul - continues onto its 10th episode, and final of the first season. That's it until Autumn now.

I think it's surprisingly reasonable in the way it is covering the cult issue given that it also has to be interesting or exciting enough to be sold as a TV show and all the actors do a credible job at portraying life inside. The last few episodes have covered the breakdown of a family when one of the partners' faith falters, and the division of priorities between cult or family, very well. Even perhaps the reactions after leaving.

Underneath that, there has been the issue of second generation members (children of cult members) and how they deal with growing up, starting to have relationships without outsiders etc.

It's not a reflection of BKism, it's more of a Scientology/New Agey thing, but I think older Western BKs might recognise elements of the early days. And some of the forced positivity and wonder.
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Mr Green

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Re: The Path - a Cult TV series about a Cult.

Post01 Jun 2016

pulling their breasts.....sweet!

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