A current RSE student called me twice last week endeavoring to "reason" with me.
(which I was wondering why she was in the first place)
After the first 45 minute conversation, it dawned on me that she was speaking from one mindset (one that I understood, as I had been that way for 18 years) and I was speaking from another.
Every statement that she made started with
a Ramtha-ism.
I told her, "you will have to preface your argument WITHOUT a Ramtha-ism, other wise it will not be understood by an 'outsider'.
So she brings up the subject of doubt.
The infamous "teaching" from 1991.

I want to insert right here, a woman who
left the Jim Jones cult BEFORE the group went to Guyana:
Debbie's first steps across that line came when she met an articulate, handsome man in San Francisco who persuaded her to join the Peoples Temple. She was 17 at the time. Her first thought was 'Gosh, I don't know about this.' But Jim Jones had all the answers.

'Debbie, you know that's selfishness,' the father told her. That's what Jones called himself. The father. 'I know it's hard to give of yourself. It's hard not to see your mom and dad and it's hard not to go out and smoke with your old friends. But this is for the greater good of mankind, Debbie. Don't you think you could help the poor and the needy and give up that selfishness of yours?'

Debbie explains what took her so many years and so much pain to finally understand. 'That voice inside me that Jim Jones told me was selfishness, that's your ability to reason. That's your conscience. When you're told to mute that, you've lost your inner compass. You become a blind follower.'

Which is what Debbie became. Along with hundreds of others.

You are special

'Jim Jones made every person who came to a meeting feel so special. We're all yearning for that,' Debbie tells me.

Ironically, perhaps the grandest delusions belonged to the one who conceived them in the first place. According to Debbie, Jim Jones spun a web of lies around himself so thick eventually there was no way out. It's this end-justifies-the-means type of thinking that can color our perspective, make us do things, believe things. And the next thing you know, we've stepped over the line. A line that suddenly looks awfully thin and awfully blurry.
_______________


'That voice inside me that Jim Jones told me was selfishness, that's your ability to reason. That's your conscience. When you're told to mute that, you've lost your inner compass.


____________________

That is exactly what I told this person who called me.
The term she and all Ramsters use, "doubt", is what people on the outside consider as "critical thinking".

JZR hammers on doubt continuously, followed by extreme put downs of "you are greater than your body!! What are you doing??!!! You should be focusing on your card!!! You shouldn't be thinking about going to the latrine, or eating!!"
Naturally guilt comes, and then shame, and then you are back to blowing like a banshee only to get bombarded wih another round of "you are greater than your body!!"

Doubt, my a$$.
How about, " I am brainwashing you!" ?

oh...and p.s.
this person directly told me: yes, my mind was cluttered and dirty, and I would rather have Ramtha wash my brain than any one else.
wow.

Good analogy. Isn't it slightly suspect that these groups need to re-interpret reality and feelings in order to give new meaning to our senses...? Rhetorical question of course. It plays into the feeling of being special again, that only we (as students) know the true meaning of selfishness/doubt etc.

Also another case for the level of intelligence it takes to get sucked into this. One actually has to be pretty broad minded and able to entertain unusual concepts to fall for this.