Elizabeth: Exit Story
Posted: Wed May 22, 2013 1:15 am
Hi Everyone,
I submitted the following as a Letter to the Editor to the Nisqually Valley News this week. I don't know if they'll print it, but I wanted to add it to the database of former students' experiences. I've been reading EMF for a while, and I appreciate the insight, support and information that this site and everyone on it provides.
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Visiting my childhood home, I am contemplating how I drifted from the happiness of childhood to the turbulence of young adulthood, to becoming a student of an Ancient School of Wisdom for the past 20 years.
My steps beyond the master teacher, known as Ramtha, are enlightening in themselves--although others would call them by a more familiar term: cult recovery.
In my opinion, my cult recovery has been un-traumatic because sometime in the past 20 years I have processed through the reasons why I was vulnerable to being harvested by this cult in the first place. By the age of 19, I was lacking basic joy in my life. I grew up in a densely populated city and from my perspective the world around me did not look sustainable. I felt the world was headed in the wrong direction. I was very troubled by that, and it was too big a problem for me to solve. I did not feel part of society, I was always watching it from an outsider’s eyes. I felt very different from everyone around me, and I was critical of what most people’s lives were about. So I was disturbed by the world, I was disturbed by society, I was disturbed by my peers, I was disturbed by my family. I was ill at ease with everything, and I was highly critical of everything around me.
Despite spending the past 20 years in a cult, I developed an understanding, acceptance, and fondness for the world, and myself. Now when I see problems, I also look for ways to contribute to solutions. I see myself as part of this world. I find great virtue, intelligence and compassion in those around me. So this past autumn, when the rug of my imaginary friend was pulled out from under me, I did not return to the 19 year old version of myself minus my safety blanket. I got myself back with all the burdens of my disturbed self lifted.
Do I credit the ‘knowledge’ ‘taught’ by Ramtha for my progress? Absolutely not. It was from going back to college and learning critical thinking. Even more importantly, while at college I was exposed to and surrounded by people whose minds and integrity I learned to respect. I began to be open to different opinions. I became skeptical when, for instance, fundamental concepts of physics were disregarded in favor of Ramtha’s latest unreliable explanation of how electrons really have a positive charge. “Ohhh... that’s why ‘those’ scientists don’t know the super-science we are being taught.” (gag) I was carefully studying the experiments and theories that led to the conclusions of fundamental physics principles. It was not some mindless indoctrination, unlike what Ramtha would have us believe. Learning physics, math and biology is a thoughtful, engaging process.
I established trust in the scientific community, as imperfect as it is at times, and it drove a wedge in my implicit trust in the ‘master teacher’ that was constantly making nonsensical, unsubstantiated, scientific claims. With less of an attachment to RSE, I drifted away from Yelm and the influence of the RSE Thought Police. Over the past five years, working in Austin, San Francisco and New York City were further extensions of that, and it has been a long time since my world was hemmed in by Yelm’s city limits, where I was once fearful of even working in Olympia.
So now I am back in the home where I was a little kid, and I have the incredible good fortune to have a parent who is still alive and healthy, and my childhood home is still standing and beautiful. New Yorkers, I always found so... self-centered, materialistic, and uninspiring, I now find hilarious, boisterous, and very welcoming. It has taken me a very long time to appreciate the beauty of tons of people crammed together in a city, working, socializing, tolerating (and yes, being regulated by a government--sorry but sometimes, it’s a necessary evil). For the first time since I was very young, I feel like I belong here, I have something in common with these people. I am from here and I am a part of this thing around me.
Only now, out of RSE, do I feel the connection that I was missing and it has taken coming back home to see it. When I was fully immersed in RSE, the only thing I felt connected to was the small RSE community; that was the size of the world in which I felt safe. Everything beyond it was perceived as threatening, unstable and misleading. Developing knowledge and trust in science was a gradual process that helped me to grow beyond that ignorance, which led to questioning other mythologies taught at RSE, which led to more information... Along the way I began to see the larger community, and this society, as something worth being part of.
If I had been more isolated by the social conditioning at RSE, and then dumped back into the person I was when I was 19, with the same issues but without being able to rely on JZ Knight’s plagiarized-and-then-copyrighted wishful thinking techniques, and 20 years had gone by... wow, that would be traumatic. I think I would be in a major depression and feeling quite hopeless. To all of you that are in that place... I don’t even know what to say, it sounds insufferable. I can only offer that relying on others for help, experiencing the “milk of human kindness”, and following that biological urge to give to others (Something I believe we all have), is a good way to participate more fully in our own lives.
To all the Yelm locals who have treated those of us who are/were caught up in the control of this ‘school’ with kindness, tolerance, and support, please know that by offering your friendship to Ramsters, even in passing, you may be helping to bridge an important connection to the outside world. Please continue to reach out to “those weirdos.”
Wherever I go now, I will know I belong. This is my generation, this is my life. I’m not forever trying to make it something perfect, in fact, I think the pursuit of happiness is a madness-generating spiral. I’m the opposite of what I was straining to be in RSE, and I am the happiest I have ever been.
I submitted the following as a Letter to the Editor to the Nisqually Valley News this week. I don't know if they'll print it, but I wanted to add it to the database of former students' experiences. I've been reading EMF for a while, and I appreciate the insight, support and information that this site and everyone on it provides.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Visiting my childhood home, I am contemplating how I drifted from the happiness of childhood to the turbulence of young adulthood, to becoming a student of an Ancient School of Wisdom for the past 20 years.
My steps beyond the master teacher, known as Ramtha, are enlightening in themselves--although others would call them by a more familiar term: cult recovery.
In my opinion, my cult recovery has been un-traumatic because sometime in the past 20 years I have processed through the reasons why I was vulnerable to being harvested by this cult in the first place. By the age of 19, I was lacking basic joy in my life. I grew up in a densely populated city and from my perspective the world around me did not look sustainable. I felt the world was headed in the wrong direction. I was very troubled by that, and it was too big a problem for me to solve. I did not feel part of society, I was always watching it from an outsider’s eyes. I felt very different from everyone around me, and I was critical of what most people’s lives were about. So I was disturbed by the world, I was disturbed by society, I was disturbed by my peers, I was disturbed by my family. I was ill at ease with everything, and I was highly critical of everything around me.
Despite spending the past 20 years in a cult, I developed an understanding, acceptance, and fondness for the world, and myself. Now when I see problems, I also look for ways to contribute to solutions. I see myself as part of this world. I find great virtue, intelligence and compassion in those around me. So this past autumn, when the rug of my imaginary friend was pulled out from under me, I did not return to the 19 year old version of myself minus my safety blanket. I got myself back with all the burdens of my disturbed self lifted.
Do I credit the ‘knowledge’ ‘taught’ by Ramtha for my progress? Absolutely not. It was from going back to college and learning critical thinking. Even more importantly, while at college I was exposed to and surrounded by people whose minds and integrity I learned to respect. I began to be open to different opinions. I became skeptical when, for instance, fundamental concepts of physics were disregarded in favor of Ramtha’s latest unreliable explanation of how electrons really have a positive charge. “Ohhh... that’s why ‘those’ scientists don’t know the super-science we are being taught.” (gag) I was carefully studying the experiments and theories that led to the conclusions of fundamental physics principles. It was not some mindless indoctrination, unlike what Ramtha would have us believe. Learning physics, math and biology is a thoughtful, engaging process.
I established trust in the scientific community, as imperfect as it is at times, and it drove a wedge in my implicit trust in the ‘master teacher’ that was constantly making nonsensical, unsubstantiated, scientific claims. With less of an attachment to RSE, I drifted away from Yelm and the influence of the RSE Thought Police. Over the past five years, working in Austin, San Francisco and New York City were further extensions of that, and it has been a long time since my world was hemmed in by Yelm’s city limits, where I was once fearful of even working in Olympia.
So now I am back in the home where I was a little kid, and I have the incredible good fortune to have a parent who is still alive and healthy, and my childhood home is still standing and beautiful. New Yorkers, I always found so... self-centered, materialistic, and uninspiring, I now find hilarious, boisterous, and very welcoming. It has taken me a very long time to appreciate the beauty of tons of people crammed together in a city, working, socializing, tolerating (and yes, being regulated by a government--sorry but sometimes, it’s a necessary evil). For the first time since I was very young, I feel like I belong here, I have something in common with these people. I am from here and I am a part of this thing around me.
Only now, out of RSE, do I feel the connection that I was missing and it has taken coming back home to see it. When I was fully immersed in RSE, the only thing I felt connected to was the small RSE community; that was the size of the world in which I felt safe. Everything beyond it was perceived as threatening, unstable and misleading. Developing knowledge and trust in science was a gradual process that helped me to grow beyond that ignorance, which led to questioning other mythologies taught at RSE, which led to more information... Along the way I began to see the larger community, and this society, as something worth being part of.
If I had been more isolated by the social conditioning at RSE, and then dumped back into the person I was when I was 19, with the same issues but without being able to rely on JZ Knight’s plagiarized-and-then-copyrighted wishful thinking techniques, and 20 years had gone by... wow, that would be traumatic. I think I would be in a major depression and feeling quite hopeless. To all of you that are in that place... I don’t even know what to say, it sounds insufferable. I can only offer that relying on others for help, experiencing the “milk of human kindness”, and following that biological urge to give to others (Something I believe we all have), is a good way to participate more fully in our own lives.
To all the Yelm locals who have treated those of us who are/were caught up in the control of this ‘school’ with kindness, tolerance, and support, please know that by offering your friendship to Ramsters, even in passing, you may be helping to bridge an important connection to the outside world. Please continue to reach out to “those weirdos.”
Wherever I go now, I will know I belong. This is my generation, this is my life. I’m not forever trying to make it something perfect, in fact, I think the pursuit of happiness is a madness-generating spiral. I’m the opposite of what I was straining to be in RSE, and I am the happiest I have ever been.