Mentally and emotionally I have been to lots of strange, aberrant places. I’ve been neurotic [frequently], depressed, paranoid. I was once diagnosed as bi-polar. I have visited any number of folks who treat these things. I have been prescribed a number of medications. But in order to rid myself of these maladies never, ever have I felt the need to find [let alone serve] anyone or anything analogous to a “Master”—either spiritually or otherwise. So it is hard for me to really empathize with the folks who do. It’s simply a frame of mind I am not familiar with. Even as a Christian I never experienced my faith as in “service” to God. God was just an anchor I could attach “I” to.
Some note there is an [obvious] connection between this film and Scientology:
slate.com/blogs/browbeat/201 … bard_.html
Personally, I can’t even begin to imagine a mind able to go along with something as preposterous as that sort of thing. Yet many, many do. And many of them are hardly lacking otherwise in intelligence. Go figure the places a human mind can – and will – go. At least when it comes to finding the “meaning of life”.
To me, embracing a “spiritual community” like this is sort of just like putting your life [willingly, willfully] into a straitjacket: A proper place for everthing and everything in its proper place. And for lots of folks that can be sublimely comforting.
Why else would someone allow himself to endure the sheer absurdity of “processing” into something like The Cause? Auditing in other words.
at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_(2012_film
trailer: youtu.be/phozNwKGlp4
THE MASTER [2012]
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
[b]Freddie: What do you do?
Dodd: I do many, many things. I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist and a theoretical philosopher. But above all, I am a man, a hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you.
…
Freddie: Well, I’m sorry if I got out of hand last night. It was cold and…
Dodd: Don’t apologize. You’re a scoundrel. And as a scientist and a connoisseur, I have no idea the contents of this remarkable potion. What’s in it?
Freddie: Secrets.
…
Dodd: There’s a cycle, like life. Birth, excitement, growth, decay. Death. Now… now. How about this? Here comes, a large dragon. Teeth! Blood dripping! Red eyes! What do I got? A lasso. And I whip it up, I wrap it around its neck, and I wrestle! Wrestle! Wrestle him to the ground. I snap up, I say “Sit, dragon!” Dragon sits. I say “Stay!”, dragon stays. Now it’s got a leash on. Take it for a walk. And that’s what-where we’re at with it now. It stays on command. Next we’re gonna teach it to roll over and play dead.[/b]
Praise God?
[b]Dodd [from a recording]: Man is not an animal. We are not a part of the animal kingdom. We sit far above that crown, perched as spirits, not beasts. You are not ruled by your emotions. It is not only possible but easily achievable that we do away with all negative emotional impulses, and bring man back to his inherent state of perfect.
…
John More [the obligatory skeptic]: Some of this sounds quite like Hypnosis. Is it not?
Dodd: This is a process of dehypnotization, if you will. Man is asleep; this process wakes him from his slumber
John More: I still find it difficult to see the proof with regards to past lives that your movement claims.
Dodd: Would you care to submit yourself to processing? You’d look through the telescope, as my friend said.
John More: Perhaps another time. You’ve also said that these methods, cause methods can cure leukemia. According to your book…
Dodd: Some forms of Leukemia. In being able to access past lives we are able to treat illnesses that may have started back thousands even trillions of years
John More: Trillions?
Dodd: With a tee, sir.
John More [chuckles]: Earth is not understood to be more than a few billion years old.
Dodd: Well even the smartest of our current scientists can be fooled, yes?
John More: You can understand skepticism, Can you not?
Dodd: Yes, Oh yes yes. For without it we’d be positives and no negatives. Therefore zero charge, we must have it.
John More: Good science by definition allows for more than one opinion, doesn’t it?
Dodd: Which is why our gathering of data is so far-reaching.
John More: Otherwise you merely have the will of one man. Which is the basis of cult. Is it not?
Dodd: Tis, tis. And thankfully we are, all of us, working at breakneck speeds, in the unison towards capturing the mind’s fatal flaws and correcting it back to its inherent state of perfect. While righting civilization and eliminating war and poverty and therefore the atomic threat.
Jon More [chuckling]: Well, I find it difficult to comprehend, or more to the point believe, that you believe, sir, that time travel hypnosis therapy can bring world peace and cure cancer.
…
John More: I belong to no club, and if you’re unwilling to allow any discussion…
Dodd: No, this isn’t a discussion, it’s a grilling! There’s nothing I can do for you, if your mind has been made up. You seem to know the answers to your questions, why do you ask?
John More: I’m sorry you’re unwilling to defend your beliefs in any kind of rational…
Dodd: If, if you already know the answers to your questions, then why ask PIG FUCK? We are not helpless. And we are on a journey that risks the dark. If you don’t mind, a good night to you.
…
Peggy [reacting to More, to the skeptics]: And this is where we are at. At the lowest level. To have to explain ourselves, for what? For what we do, we have to grovel? The only way to defend ourselves is to attack. If we don’t do that we will lose every battle that we are engaged in. We will never dominate our environment the way we should unless we attack! And the city, city’s just noise. I know the city. I know its rotten secrets, its filthy lies and secrets. They… invited us here and welcomed us. Only to throw us down. And kick us out. It’s a grim joke.
…
Peggy [to her husband while masterbating him]: You can do whatever you want…as long as I don’t find out. And as long as no one that I know knows about it. Other than that, stop with this idea. Put it back in its pants. It didn’t work for them and it’s not going to work for you. We have enough problems as it is. Can you come for me?
Dodd: Oh, yes.
Peggy: Okay, come for me. Come for me.
…
Val [to Freddie]: He’s making all of this up as he goes along. You don’t see that?
…
Dodd [Lancaster and Freddie have been imprisoned in two separate cells, sharing a wall]: Your fear of capture and imprisonment is an implant from millions of years ago. This battle has been with you from before you know. This is not you.
Quell: SHUT THE FUCK UP!
Dodd: It’s not you.
Freddie: SHUT. THE FUCK. UP!
Dodd: It’s not you. You are asleep. Your spirit was free. Moving from body, to the next body. Free. Free for a moment. Then it was captured by an invader force, bent on turning you to the darkest way, you’ve been implanted with a push-pull mechanism that keeps you fearful of authority and destructive. We are in the middle of a battle that’s a trillion years in the making and it’s bigger than the both of us!
Freddie: You’re making this shit up! You make this shit up! You don’t know what you’re talking about!
…
Peggy: This is difficult for you, listen.
[she begins reading Victorian pornography]
Peggy: “It’s really a damn shame to tease you so, my little whore, he laughed. So I will get the dildo out of my cabinet in the next room. He was scarcely gone many seconds before he returned and I felt his fingers opening the lips of my cunt. Oh oh ah who is that? I screamed for my…”
Freddie: I don’t want to hear any of this.
Peggy: Just listen, no reaction.
[reading]
Peggy: “Kiss her, put your tongue in her mouth, my boy. Fuck, fuck, fuck away.”
…
Peggy [to Freddie]: The Cause is something you do for a billion years or not at all. It’s not a fashion.
[she turns to Dodd]
Peggy: This is pointless. He isn’t interested in getting better.
…
Dodd: Free winds and no tyranny for you, Freddie, sailor of the seas. You pay no rent, free to go where you please. Then go, go to that landless latitude and good luck. If you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you? For you’d be the first in the history of the world.
…
Dodd: If you leave here, I don’t ever want to see you again. Or you can stay.
Freddie: Maybe in the next life.
Dodd: If you leave me now, in the next life you will be my sworn enemy. And I will show you no mercy.[/b]