Happy sigh. Ahhhhh…. two for browsing at leisure, one for candy satisfaction:

Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings
Rob Brezsny

Diva Lion says:

Pronoia is a philosophy book of a most unusual stripe. It takes a lot of the ideas that Breszny has developed on the Free Will Astrology site and particularly that he included as themes in his amazing novel, The Televisionary Oracle, and expands on them, shaping them into a chaotically coherent philosophy of life. The style is undeniably Breszny– quirky, irreverent, soulful, linguistically athletic, challenging, hopeful.

The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark
Sera Beak

Synopsis:

The Red Book” is a nothing less than a spiritual fire starter—a combustible cocktail of Hindu Tantra and Zen Buddhism, Rumi and Carl Jung, Mary Magdalene and modern psychics, goddesses and Gnosticism, shaken with cosmic nudges, meaningful subway rides, haircuts, relationships, sex, dreams, humor, and intuition. It’s a book that encourages women to live more consciously so they can start making clearer choices across the board, from careers to relationships, politics to pop culture and everything in between. For smart, gutsy, spiritually curious women whose colorful and complicated lives aren’t reflected in most spirituality books.

Making Money (Discworld Novels)
Terry Pratchett

Publisher’s Weekly review:

Reprieved confidence trickster Moist von Lipwig, who reorganized the Ankh-Morpork Post Office in 2004’s Going Postal, turns his attention to the Royal Mint in this splendid Discworld adventure. It seems that the aristocratic families who run the mint are running it into the ground, and benevolent despot Lord Vetinari thinks Moist can do better. Despite his fondness for money, Moist doesn’t want the job, but since he has recently become the guardian of the mint’s majority shareholder (an elderly terrier) and snubbing Vetinari’s offer would activate an Assassins Guild contract, he reluctantly accepts. Pratchett throws in a mad scientist with a working economic model, disappearing gold reserves and an army of golems, once more using the Disc as an educational and entertaining mirror of human squabbles and flaws.

I’d like to set the stage with a satirical treatment of the benefits of being a JW. An illuminating example is this post by the Theocratic Joker:

1. Jehovah’s Witnesses can count the time they share their faith with nonbelievers door-to-door or with young children, thus proving to God, in actual hard numbers, how worthy they are to have everlasting life.
2. Jehovah’s Witnesses are encouraged not to attend college, which promotes independent thinking and is controlled by demons. They are happy to get a good job as a janitor or a window washer.
3. Jehovah’s Witnesses get to celebrate the birth of a child but not the anniversary of the birth. They also do not have to worry about birthdays, holidays and Christmas, all of which are pagan and controlled by demons.
4. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not pass a collection plate at their meetings like the demonized churches do. Instead there are collections boxes in their Kingdom Halls and Assembly Halls, and they are often reminded from the platform and in their literature not to forget to contribute. They are also urged to put in their wills that when they die, their house, CD’s, jewelery, life insurance, and cash go directly to the Watchtower Society. The end is fast approaching so their families really have no need for money that should rightfully go to them.
5. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate holidays so they do not have to be with their families during these special times to enjoy each other’s company and eat the cookies, turkey, ham, pies, and other such food.
6. Because Jehovah’s Witnesses are the only true Christians on earth, we do not have the problems that other churches have with broken families, adultery, fornication, pedophiles, over drinking, and gossip.
7. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not have to worry about giving food, shelter and clothing to the poor and needy in our community because we give them the Truth which will enable them to live forever in a paradise earth.
8. Jehovah’s Witnesses are in close contact with God as he speaks to them through the Faithful and Discreet Slave and through the Watchtower.
9. Jehovah’s Witnesses alone will live in Paradise where there will be no cars, TVs, computers, radios, theaters, washing machines, clothes dryers, refrigerators, stoves, airplanes, electric lights, or malls to buy or clothes. Just miles and miles of garden and lions to pet.
10. Jehovah’s Witnesses go to a summer District Assembly vacation every year, at the same city every year and have a picnic at their seats during the sessions and then stay at the fine hotels that they are told to stay in.
11. Jehovah’s Witnesses know the true meaning of the words soon, near, very soon, very near, so close, just around the corner, shortly, near future and rapidly approaching.
12. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not have to worry about getting old or having a retirement plan. See No. 11 above.

Hopefully, now you can understand the many benefits of being a Jehovah’s Witness.

Now, for the benefits of no longer being a Jehovah’s Witness, I would love it if former JWs would post on that topic and link it in the comments. My dear friend Richard Francis started this ball rolling, and I think it’s a good idea to revisit this from time to time – so as to keep remembering what has been gained, and to feel the sense of gratitude that such remembering can give.

The first link is Richard’s list. Reading it made me very happy. The second link includes a few of the lists made by others responding in kind. In the third link, the benefits of leaving are implicit rather than listed, but you can see some heartening trends across all of these.

• Ten Aspects of Freedom from Organization
• Freedom from Cult-psychology
• Narratives of Leaving the JWs

When I think of the benefits of being freed from “the organization,” it’s pretty overwhelming. Much of it is very difficult to describe to someone who has not been through that kind of experience. However, there are a few major categories into which the benefits tend to fall for me. I’m probably missing some, but here is the best I can do today:

• Freedom: As many of the posts suggest, this is the overarching category. All of the others assume this one, which has two movements – 1) Liberating freedom from the anti-loving beliefs and practices dictated by the Watchtower leadership – from totalitarian control and fear and arbitrary divisions of thinking and bad argument and small-minded judgments to the corrupting complicity with all of the above – and more. 2) Authentic freedom to grow and thrive and be a real adult in all ways: spiritual, intellectual, emotional, existential. That would encompass such things as thinking things through for one’s self, learning to discern who to respect and admire, being politically concerned and active, giving to charities of one’s choosing, fruitful experimentation with diverse spiritual ideas and practices, sharing authentic friendships with anyone of your choosing, paying attention to (and trusting) one’s own gifts and calling, and much, much, much, MUCH more.
• Love – as in a Deeper Capacity for, and Ability to: When you view other people only in terms of their possibly contaminating effect on you or their potential as a new convert or as points on your service report, when you view them as about to be murdered by God and as inferior to yourself, and when you are threatened by and suspicious of their ideas and feelings, it is pretty difficult to care and to be kind and to trust and to enter into dialogue and relationship with them. If agape love is reserved for the members of a small in-group, your capacity to love others is very restricted. And if there is no kindness even there, it’s a very stark and cold kind of existence. The love I used to know was always, always conditional – but the spirit is all about love, and the more there is love, the more love there can be. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love” (1 John 4:18). No-one is perfect in love because no-one is perfect, but when you can love others without restriction and prejudice, your capacity for love… increaseth (grin). Another benefit of this is that when you learn to love, you also learn that there is much that is lovable about yourself – and this helps to undo the habitual self-loathing that seemed to go along with the self-righteousness training.
• Spirituality: My spiritual life is much more authentic, more real, more attuned, more… spiritual. I could expand on this, but I’d rather take on that subject matter in terms of specific topics. Suffice to say that there are substantial qualitative differences in the questions I ask, the kinds of answers I consider, and a different perspective even on such things as the role of “I” on the path to God. My thoughts about who and what God might be are radically changed, and that has made a huge difference. I’ve also benefited from a range of spiritual practices that had been denied to me.
• Ethics: Yes, it’s related. There is a kind of immature ethics that can only define right and wrong in terms of what authority figures dictate or in terms of what results in rewards and punishments. Such an ethics keeps you in an infantile sort of relationship with others. A rule-based ethics can never account for the actual realities of people’s lives. Another kind of ethics is based on kinship networks and group loyalties, but is limited to those groups. As a post-JW, it becomes possible to develop meta-principles and relational thinking that try to take everyone’s interest into account, not just those of a few. When you do not fear to hear a wide range of thoughts and testimonies, you can ethically evolve beyond a reliance on projection, scapegoating and appeals to authority. It also allows you – if you choose – to consider the cultural and socio-political contexts of ethical claims.
• Laughter, Joy, Celebration: Enjoyment of all kinds, with only the restrictions of my own sense of ethics. I can laugh, be happy, and celebrate whatever I want to – large or small, in a manner conventional or eclectic. I love this.
• Creativity: I no longer have to feel that weird semi-ashamed veil that was thrown over everything to do with imagination and creativity. I can write, and dance, and sing, and paint, and imagine, and have reveries and insights and all the rest. I can be curious, and investigate, and think, and see new connections between unlike things, finding and constructing new meanings – those mysterious shimmery bits of radiance that I value so highly.
• Communities: Plural. It is an amazing thing to be able to participate at will in communities -groups of people that share something in common – anything! What an idea! Reading groups, political action groups, online groups, groups based on ideas or hobbies or anything! Wow! You can meet and form relationships with all kinds of interesting people you’d never have met otherwise. This one is a very special benefit, partially because when I realized that I could actually do this, it helped to counteract what was an initial skepticism toward all communities (once burned, twice shy). More than that, the sometimes-overlapping circles of my friends now mean so much to me that I can really compare it against how it once was and see what a difference my friends have made. I am thankful for true friends and for the occasional gift of a real spiritual brother or sister (in a sense that makes a caricature of the words as I used to use them).

Obviously, this post is written for former JWs (and the people who love them). I don’t really think there are a great many benefits associated with being a Jehovah’s Witness. If you are a current JW then you are also welcome to post real benefits that you feel as well, if you wish to do so, and link those in the comments. I have nothing against you, but only against the cruelties of the leadership. There are so many paths to God, and maybe – somehow – this is yours. God has a way of using everything, and I have no doubts about how the cosmos handles complexity.

One of the huge benefits of not being a JW is that I am no longer required to hate spiritual paths that are not identical to the one to which I am called. Nor do I have to fear you – or judge you to be worldly and/or evil – simply for the reason that you are not part of an organization to which I belong. That’s a really, really big benefit from my perspective – but of course there are many, many, many people from many religious traditions who do not agree (may they be blessed).

I have received a number of whisper-campaign communications, all based on the idea that the film The Golden Compass is evil and atheistic and horrible and we all need to boycott it and keep our children away from it and all sorts of other nonsense.

I have to admit that it was partly because of this pseudo-religious campaign that I made a special point to take my seven-year old son to the film. I wanted Ben’s thoughts on the movie. He’s a bright kid.

Ben enjoyed it. He liked “the girl” (the central character Lyra) best of all, and he really liked the daemons too. His only criticism was that the fighting scene near the end went on too long. For comparison – he wasn’t that keen on the Harry Potter series, and he found the Narnia movie disturbing because of the portrayal of the death of Aslan (the Jesus Lion).

The Golden Compass is a movie that prioritizes caring and freedom and love and the human spirit over monolithic imperial power structures that manipulate and control others in the name of religion.

I guess that’s pretty threatening to some people.

This is a fantasy work about a different world in which people’s souls walk beside them as animals. I think they made a mistake in pronouncing daemon as “demon,” but it’s a charming concept. When you are a child, your daemon changes – like your spirit/soul that is developing, changing. Once you grow up, your daemon solidifies into a shape that stays unchanged. The daemon expresses the spirit, the soul. Cosmic dust of some kind – a beautiful thing, like a visualization of the spirit of love – moves in a current through the daemon to the human being. There is a powerful image near the beginning of the film that shows the dust as it flows into an older, very joyful looking man through his daemon. It was like the aurora borealis, and I’ve seen religious paintings with that same kind of feel. The daemon mediates, like the Christ – close and personal, the expression of spirit. (I did their daemon quiz before the movie came out. My daemon is named Aeschylus. He’s been a butterfly and a spider and all sorts of other things, so I guess I’m still not settled into my spiritual form – hee hee.)

The Magisterium, a structure of authority without the spirit of love, wants to interfere with this arrangement in which everyone participates in the dust of the cosmos through the mediation of their own spirit, their own soul. Why? Because they are the “Authority” and this undermines their power. They look a lot like the most nightmarish Crusades version of the Catholic church, or like the structure of the Empire in the Star Wars movies. Draw your own connections.

I would think that many Christians (especially Protestants) would be inclined to feel that the church, if it is only an idol – a power structure that serves ultimately to be worshiped for itself – is against Christian doctrine in the first place. The “Authority” for Christians is God, not an institution that exists solely for command and control. Moreover, this Magisterium wants to control all the parallel worlds, not just the one in the story. Christopher Lee and Derek Jacobi are fantastic.

A sub-branch of the Magisterium has been kidnapping children (by attacking their daemons – whatever the daemon feels, the person does too) and bringing them to a horrible place in the north. Part lab, part camp – the installation is there to “help the children grow up.” Ultimately, it exists to cut the thread between the daemon and the child, thus cutting them off from the dust (the communion of the cosmos) so that they may be more easily controlled.

That the power figures in the Magisterium know that this is wrong is clear in every facial gesture of the main characters. Nicole Kidman is an amazing villain in this film (and it cracks me up that the name is “Mrs. Coulter” – who is her husband? We don’t know, but it’s possible that she is also Lyra’s mother). When Lyra is mistakenly put into the “machine,” Mrs. Coulter throws herself at it – in a total panic – to stop the “cut” from happening. Despite a room full of switches and tubes and chemicals, the machine is really nothing more than a cage made of the kind of metal fencing that you will find everywhere in a ghetto. The visual dissonance between the cage and the rest of the room is arresting, and suggestive.

An electrical charge slowly moves down the metal edge until the “cut” is made. The one child bereft of his daemon that we see is so traumatized that he would never be the same – and you won’t have missed that he had been the one to question a nurse-like monitor on the truthfulness of the letter that they were asked to write. It comes across as torture.

Lyra is a delightful character. Her name reminds me of the constellation that inspired the musical instrument. Interesting, too is that lyres were associated with Apollonian virtues of moderation and equilibrium – as opposed to the Dionysian pipes which represented ecstasy and celebration. Maybe that’s why her daemon is named Pan – and is often shown as a ferret… ferreting out the truth between the ideologies? For me, she was a bit like a tougher version of the girl in The Secret Garden – except that she is also a hero in her own right. She is helped by the cosmos every time that she acts with empathy and kindness, every time that she stands up to evil. It doesn’t hurt that she is self-directed and clever, either.

One thing that struck me is that the characters in the film seem taken from a wide variety of literary genres – futuristic sci-fi, a Mark Twain-like cowboy/pilot figure, a 40s film star, armored bears, children straight from a Dickens novel, pirates, beautiful flying witches, all sorts of things. I particularly liked the Gyptians – seafaring Egyptian Romani perhaps? The acting was great, and it’s clear that everyone had a good time making this movie. The characters of Sam Elliott and Eva Green will resonate with me for a long time.

The major problem I could see would be with the use of the alethiometer – the “compass” that can read the dust and which reveals truth to one who learns how to read it – some literal-minded people might see that as a form of divination, I suppose – but it’s a small point and I haven’t seen anything that even talked about that.

The larger story of the film is one in which an authentic spirituality – full of caring and curiosity and all sorts of other qualities – is threatened by absolute power. For some people, this power might be the institution of the church. That’s how it is imagined here. But it’s really about the grasping for power in itself – the kind of power that kills all possibility of human happiness, self-determination, community, and truth.

The books are written by a “secular humanist” – so what? Many religious values and questions are still very active within the hearts of people who do not believe in the God that is described to us by the institutions of our time. I don’t care what the beliefs of an author might be. Great literature has always wrestled with religious questions from a variety of perspectives. The secular humanist, the atheist, and the pious can certainly share the value judgment in which power used to manipulate people is wrong. Jesus spoke against the religious power structure of his time, after all. People are confusing goodness with loyalty to an institution if they feel that this film is morally wrong for their children to see. Authentic spirituality cannot come from ignorance or from blind obedience to the institutions of men.

The message of the film is a good one. You could even do a religious reading here – Lyra as a savior figure, the Magisterium as the control of the planet by satanic forces. Religion as corrupted by power is attacked – as it should be! A little girl protects and defends her friends. Good prevails over evil – at least for the time being.

The movie is not a masterpiece, but it’s a fun movie and we enjoyed it.

The movement against the movie is a symptom of the deep pathology of some of our “religious” communities.

Care. Love. Laugh. Think.

I redid the Daemon Chooser. Now it chooses Pereus (a tiger) for me.

It turns out that many of my favorite blogs are not terribly open-minded (grin).

Politics – generally speaking – turned out to be a dud. I started exploring to see what I could find. Not much, I’m afraid. For one thing, I think it’s really a very difficult time in the United States for finding open-mindedness in politics. My personal disgust and depression about American politics is a hard thing to overcome – at least for the moment. I agree in theory that open-mindedness and civility are the right way to go. However, I think there are too many issues and problems that need straightforward statements and positions – many of them in outright opposition to current policies and actions. Compromise isn’t working. In addition, the whole discourse is so contaminated and overdetermined by various interests that I almost despair of seeing the kind of change that I think we need to survive and thrive in future. So, overall, I don’t think I’m in a position to extoll the virtues of open-mindedness in political opinion just now.

So then I turned to religion. You might think, given recent posts, that the topic would be more difficult than even politics. It isn’t, though. I already have a number of favorites, and found many more with spiritual and religio-political themes.

Some of the best ones are actually institutions, or group blogs, and I got the impression that this award was really for discovery, not reinforcement. On top of that, many blogs I read don’t actually have a great deal of interactivity, or they don’t post on a regular enough basis. More than a couple had decided to take some time off.

After the initial weed-through, I had a list of about thirty blogs – to whittle down to five choices. This was not easy. At all.

There a number of great blogs with spiritual concerns of various kinds. I tend to prefer the ones that deal in some way with other concerns as well. There are many who are worthy of the award. Finally, I just picked five on the list that I have enjoyed. They have the requisite qualifications of civility, openness, receptivity and interactivity – and I feel comfortable recommending them to others. They are grounded in somewhat different traditions/perspectives, but I like the vibe on all of these.

1. T h i s * i s * i t – “Life. This is all there is. Start living.”
2. Blog of the Grateful Bear – “ramblings of a freelance panentheist { “all things are in God, and God is in all things” } . . . musings on spirituality, mysticism, Sufism, lost gospels, cats, music, healing, interfaith dialogue, gay and lesbian issues, and more.”
3. The Cartoon Church Blog – Delightful cartoons and observations.
4. Even the Devils Believe – “I hope that this blog can serve primarily as a forum for talking about spirituality, liturgy, and the many paths to love and humility.”
5. slacktivist – “Knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.”

Winners, go here for more information.

Please comment if you can recommend additional open-minded, kind and civil blogs on the topics of politics and/or religion. I would really like to add to my list.

As always, take what is helpful to you and reject what doesn’t ring true to your inner self…

If there is a spirit of the cosmos, and if that spirit is what we mean when we talk about “God”, then I have to believe that the spirit is a spirit of Love that holds everything together and makes everything related and connected in a million, mysterious ways. All our words about God are simply ways to place God within a human frame of reference. It’s all metaphor, all of it. We don’t really have the words to describe or understand.

Don’t get hung up on names. Only humans care about names. Come back to that question later, when you don’t have so much scar tissue about it (smile). Yes, pray. Pray if you can. Pray for wisdom and understanding and forgiveness and compassion and clarity and joy and laughter and caring.

Listen to yourself breathe. Maybe you remember the old childhood mantra, “In with the good air, out with the bad.” Let strength and caring in, breathe out despair and depression.

Find and follow your own path, your own light, your own connection. You are unique and all the cosmos wants of you is to be yourself in the best way you can. Support others, care for others. You have an internal sense of ethics and care and attentiveness already – build on that from within. Even biblically (and please remember that the collection of texts that we call the bible is just that, a collection of texts – from several cultural moments and places, and it’s been censored and edited to please very specific audiences), it is said that the kingdom is within you. Spirituality is a lifelong journal journey, not just a moment when you have all the right answers and then you are done.

As for family, what can I say? Yours is being spectacularly intrusive. I would intervene if I were you, but that’s entirely your own decision. At the very least, some basic ground rules for contact with your kids should be established. If it gets any uglier, you could consult a lawyer for the best way to proceed. Meanwhile, tell your daughter something like that some people believe in the end of the world, but that you don’t believe that God wants to torture and kill people. Something like that would go a long way toward undoing the damage. Tell her something, something calmly, lovingly, to ease her fears. Something at a level she can understand.

My son (6) asked me if I thought my father had gone to heaven. I told him that some people believe in a heaven, but that I didn’t know, and that nobody else really knew either.

He asked, “Do I have to decide for myself what I believe?” Yes.
“Do I have to decide _right now_?”
No – (smiling inside) and you might change your mind from time to time.
“Well, then maybe do you think his skeleton will come out and dance with us on Halloween?”

I sort of don’t think so, but if you like, we can do a dance, and pretend that he’s laughing, which is what he might do if he were still here.

We did a dance, and Ben laughed the whole time. It was fun.

With kids, you’ve got to be creative, and not let it get so heavy. Your words mean more to your kids than anybody else’s – but if you’re upset, they’ll know that too. Keep it light and reassuring.

Even without these issues, you are not the only one who cannot rely on biological family! It’s sad, but it’s reality. Even Jesus said – these are my family, these are my brothers and sisters.
And he really didn’t have anything to complain about with his own family if you believe the stories….

I have “adopted” parents and brothers and sisters and cousins. Friends can be family too. Somewhere there is a father and an older brother to give you advice. Somewhere you already have a friend to call, and you’ll have more, because as you refocus you will have more and more to offer to others – understanding, caring, welcoming, laughter, joy.

I read a study not long ago that said that the words that people most wanted to hear from someone else weren’t “I love you”, but instead, “It’s going to be all right.” So let me say to you – Everything is going to be all right. It is. It might be hard, but you’ve gotten this far, and you’re strong enough to refuse abuse and to step out of situations of abuse – physical, emotional, spiritual. Your own self-respect and sense of self-worth is what you have to continue to build on here.

Not all Jehovah’s Witnesses believe they are “better than everyone else.” There are solid good people who are rank and file JWs. The odds are against them, because JWs are so set up – in all sorts of ways – to believe that they are better, that God likes them more, that they are superior. They are told that they are the only ones who matter, and that the only good work that matters is to make more of them. They also block internal questioning or criticism or debate – and train the JWS to believe that independent thinking and reflection and research and meditation are somehow displeasing to God.

JWs are also so controlled by the dictates from the Watchtower publishing corporations that it is easy to understand the longing for personal power, even in these hidden forms. When the lack of power is at issue all the time, when the people willingly take on the identities of sheep and slaves with “overseers”, then the whole issue of free will and religious self-determination gets cross-wired with other things. Statistically, there is also more mental illness, sexual abuse, domestic abuse, pedophilia, and so on as well. It’s a pathological situation.

Still, there are good people in every religious group. Some of it depends on simple timing – when they were brought in, with who, what they are used to, how things connected for them, and so on. Many people are just simply doing the best they can, believing that what they do is right. But yes, of course I have noticed what you’re talking about. To be fair, I think most religions at the edges have people who miss the whole point in just that way –

When kindness and caring are lacking, so is love. Cold, hard, rule-based, totalitarian forms of religion are anti-spiritual (at least, that’s my opinion). They are actually anti-religious, since they don’t “retie or rebind together” but rather “split apart.” There is some form of that, some legalistic fanatical wing, in every organized religion – as we see on the news every night. Is it a war god, a god of death, that they worship? I don’t know – but you have to decide for yourself which is better, what kind of god would be the god of love, and worthy of praise.

It is easy to let someone else take over your spiritual responsibilities. Self-righteousness is very comforting. Humility is more difficult.

The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society hardly ever talks or writes about grace – actually they reject the word “grace” altogether, and their alternate word “loving-kindness” is employed only under very specific conditions. They want that free salesforce out there under their control…

But what kind of God would count the hours selling books and yet turn attention away from the fundamental cruelties to others that JWs endorse? You can’t “earn” some kind of salvation, redemption, or love – least of all by counting hours knocking or by mindlessly following the (often-changing) dictates of a set of corporations based in New York. Actually, I think it’s very funny that they started calling it the “Truth” – with a capital T! That signals enormous insecurity.

Ask yourself every kind of question you can and watch the questions get better. Grow into habits of caring and tolerance and kindness, and watch what happens to you. Small moments matter. Love grows. Kindness blooms. You’ll feel it.

Think of how you are with your children in the most special kind of moment, and imagine:
THIS is how God would view you – as precious, as unbelievably beautiful and real, with kindness, with love.

I really wanted to say hi and to thank you for taking the time to create a humourous and humanitarian approach to deconstructing the internal witness! It is great for me to read your advice and discover an affiliation with my own methods of survival over the past 16 years. Just recently, I have been observing some parts of me that have been raising there head that i have been puzzled by and not particularly enjoying, its like “where is this coming from ???” and I had this ephiphany, “I was taught my whole life to think that I was right and everyone else is wrong …..in everything !!” So for the first time I decided to get on the net and check out what might be going on for the others of us, and i have found your site to be really right on for me. Then I realised you are a woman….. but of course !!

It took me also about a decade to come to a point of feeling like i was getting a grip on myself, starting to learn who I am, cultivating my own sense of spirituality, coming to understand the powerfulness of woman, bearing two children, travelling the world and always studying culture, myth, meditation, scriptures of all kinds in my own ways, thoroughly and with a passion that I feel like was the gift that I received from being a witness.

It was beautiful for me to discover your encouragement for others to seek the positive in their experience. It seems through my discoveries on the net over the past few days that there are several sites there to help those on the way out, or something, yet the focus seems to be on the pain.

I can really relate to this, yet I feel like the key to getting through it to being a healthy happy productive human being is in finding the way to turn the experience into the positive for yourself. I felt very akin to the record of your advice on this level (right down to the watching of monty python), and it seemed to me really necessary to be said after reading much of the other stuff that is out there. So thanks for saying it.

I too feel a diffinative certainty as to my never returning to the organisation, much to my families dismay (you’d think by now they would have got the picture ) And for me the concept of it being a religious issue has long since passed. I have a rich spiritual life which is my own in the making, its very liberating, exciting even. I am definately enjoying having political opinions and being able to activate myself in those directions feels like a privilage. Yet every now and then I notice things arising in me, qualities, or opinions that I still need to check out, like layers of an onion that I feel like are in some way or another related to my upbringing. I wonder whether I will ever get done processing this ?? Its a bit of a drag, but its cool too in its own way. So thus I write this letter to you, my more than sister if you dig, to ask if this happens to you too ??

I hope to keep some correspondance with you, if you feel so inclined, and once again thank you for taking the time to nourish a different perspective than victim consciousness. Blessed be.
Love -N

I dig. Yes, let’s correspond. Thank you so much for your words, and for discovering resonance and value in what I’ve said. There are others who aim for a more positive and healing set of approaches, but it’s true that we are probably a smaller fraction. Take what you can use and disregard anything that doesn’t feel right for you and your experience.

It’s easy to give in to the substantial feelings of anger, frustration and sense of betrayal. I get bitter once in a while myself, but you are right that expanding one’s ability to pursue one’s own unique spiritual path is the more healing and productive way.

My own feeling about the things you mention – that bubble up from time to time for me as well – is that this is what happens with all reflective people. We are reinterpreting our experiences throughout our whole lives. Something will remind us, and we will view it from where we are at that moment. I think that it part of living and and thinking and as you say, processing – very natural, part of growing. We do this throughout our lives. I still get a sick feeling in my gut when I hear words like “worldly” and “district overseer.” Psychological traumas, basic brainwashing, and even nostalgia are very powerful.

In every repetition, there is always a difference. You have more choice about this than it seems, but it requires close attention and self-awareness. Some memory materials (and some of the frameworks within which we interpret them and feel about them) are configured in certain kinds of fairly predictable ways for anyone who has been a member of an authoritarian group such as the JWs. This is especially so for someone who was raised as a JW from birth. We are so trained to be self-righteous and sure about our (actually the Watchtower Society’s) judgments, that we tend to close down our own curiosity – and imagination – and empathy – and compassion.

So if we want to thrive and grow we are always processing our issues and trying to heal or remake the way we think and react – to gain more insight and wisdom, to pull out what is redeeming and what has contributed in a beneficial way to our growth and thriving, and to grant less power to what has been destructive to ourselves and others.

The fact that you are noticing these moments (these things that you see in yourself that seem somewhat uncharacteristic or preset in some way) is a terrific advance! They remain blind spots for many. Treat each recognition as a gift and decide for yourself how to accept, reject, or transform it – for now.

No, I don’t think the process ever stops – and actually I think that’s a good thing because it creates depth and understanding. If you feel overwhelmed, there are ways to create islands, temporary resting places. You can’t stay on them forever since everything changes, but you can learn how to change along with it. Like surfing, floating, riding – creating an internal center of gravity that can itself move.

For me, it’s learning to ask better questions. It’s a kind of constant concern that I can ride through different perspectives. Maybe later I won’t even need to be focused on forming better questions, but it’s been a good kind of path for me so far. I’ve noticed that the more the questions are in service to others, the better they ring inside. When I get too self-absorbed, I get a bit morbid.

Still, one can go too far. When I get too self-sacrificial, I lose a sense of self-worth. You have to have something to give. You have to care for yourself to care for others. You’re a mom, so you know that – but it bears repeating to any female former JW!

Blessed be, and be blessed.

I was raised by parents who converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses (from the Catholic religion) when I was five years old (I am now 32). My father is an elder and he and my mother are very active. I have six younger brothers and sisters who are all active JW’s.

When I was 18, I married a “brother” I had met at a quick-build. Five years later we had a daughter. After seven years of marriage, I found myself very unhappy and I decided to leave. My husband (a Ministerial Servant), along with the elders help, tricked me into signing custody papers that were not as they were presented. My ex and his wife have primary physical custody of my daughter. I see my child every other weekend and six weeks during the summer (they moved 3 hours away). I tried to regain custody of her, only to fail. Can you say “Parent Alienation?”

After I remarried, I tried to return to the Kingdom Hall in 2003 to be reinstated. I attended meetings faithfully for six months. I decided to write my letter in order to be reinstated. The elders on my committee told me that everything seemed to be going well and it would only be a couple of weeks before they made the announcement of my reinstatement. When I met with the elders a week later, they informed me that my ex-husband did not think I was ready to be reinstated… and the elders wanted me to drop my appeal that was currently in progress for custody of my daughter. I gave up and almost went crazy with grief for the sudden loss of my daughter, my family and all of my friends. I had to receive intense counseling to deal with the emotional pain.

Since 2003, I had allowed my daughter to attend meetings with my family during my weekend and summer visits with her. Things have recently taken a turn. I told my seven year old daughter that Jehovah’s Witnesses do not know if they have the only true religion… no one knows. Well, apparently she told one of my sisters who in turn retaliated with a very nasty letter that stated, “you are basically trying to kill her (my daughter) by telling her or trying to convince her that she does not have the true religion!” and “you now have the name of an apostate in my eyes.” That letter made me sick. My sister who had been my best friend had written these horrible hurtful words. She had been disfellowshipped at one time, but I took her in despite being chastised by the elders.

Since that letter was written, I have not allowed my daughter to attend a meeting at the Kingdom Hall while she is with me. She is around those people enough with her father. This decision that I have made will probably result in another nasty custody battle because my ex husband will not respect my decision… he will try everything in his power to program our daughters mind. She has already started asking me why she can’t go to the Kingdom Hall this summer. Her father must have her convinced that God will look unfavorable upon her if she doesn’t persuade me to let her attend the meetings. He’s making her feel torn between two worlds.

I too am in limbo. No one seems to understand how it feels to lose all of your friends and family in one day. No one understands how it feels to be treated like dirt on someone’s shoe. I have never done drugs, been a drunkard, beat my children, or murdered anyone… yet I am treated (by JWs) as someone who is beneath those type of people. The lowest scum of the earth. What gives those imperfect humans the right to judge me as unworthy of God’s love??

I have just begun to explore websites that are created by former Jehovah’s Witnesses. In the past I was afraid. I am only full of anger now. I want to relate to someone. I want to talk to people who understand what I’ve been through and what I am still going through. Thank you for taking the time to read about what I’ve been through.

Angela, I hope you know that you are not unworthy of God’s love, which is endless and does not depend on human organizations like the one in Brooklyn. Show your daughter better examples of caring, compassion, and kindness. She will remember, and in the long run, it is the best thing you can do for yourself and for her.

You are not alone in this, but it is a difficult path to navigate. Start building a more authentic life for yourself, and let go of some of your anger if you can. Document everything that happens (and do not respond in kind, no matter how tempting it might be). Take control of your own religious path and your relationship to God – prayer helps a lot, if only to focus and meditate. If you can, turn your focus outward toward acts of friendship and service – not door-to-door service, but the kinds of “helping” gestures that can mean so very much to others. This will help lift you up, stabilize you, and help you to rebuild a sense of yourself that brackets out these unfair judgments.

There are some JW boards where you can thrash some of this out if you want to, but ultimately it’s up to you to find inner strength (if not for yourself, for your daughter). Think of the mommy you’d most like to be, and start moving in that direction. The more you act out of the center of your soul, the more it becomes habitual. Take the good things you’ve learned, and dump the rest. God is bigger than their vision – explore your ethics and your spirituality for yourself.

As for your family and “friends” – I can only mourn with you. It’s heartbreaking, and I’m so sorry. Again, the best thing you can do, when you can manage to do it (it’s not easy sometimes) is to set an example of ethics, compassion, caring, and love. It is the only thing that might make any difference at all.

I have a good feeling about you because you took in your sister when she had been cast out. That means you have a sense of ethical priorities, which JWs usually have trouble ordering. You already know that the highest priority is not following the rules of an organization, but rather caring for others (and for yourself, too! don’t forget that). Take care of yourself first, so that you may then care for your daughter.

Arm your lawyer with any documentation that you have of any of this. Alienation of a child’s affection is a serious matter. That the JW elders sat down with you (!), misrepresented the agreement, and so on may be basis for coercion, and the judge may take that into consideration. Also, your situation is changed now, and that also has to be taken into account. As you have discovered, JWs will hit hard for children to remain in the custody of the JW parent. They could even lend your ex one of their own lawyers. I recommend that you do a little web research on Jehovah’s Witnesses and custody battles – there are perhaps some previous cases that may be of help to you and your lawyer.

Keeping you in my daily meditations, and sending you waves of healing and love.