Red Flags of Mis or Dis-information (Page 5 of 6)

Yes, and this phenomenon is getting worse.

A few weeks ago we had one of those surprise busy nights in the restaurant, and of course, I am the only one scheduled.

So here I am playing manager, server, and bartender.  I've got 12 tickets open, and the entire floor to myself.  One of them is this 8-top.   I had to go over to the table twice to get their drink order, and then another two times to get the food order, the second of which they made me (hehe "made me") stand there for five minutes while they all decided what they wanted.  Then while ordering every other person has to stop and ask me if I am going to write anything down.  No I'm not.  Why not?  I don't know because I'm a super-genius.  I dunno, what do you want me to say. . just place your freeking order already!

So then they get their food, exactly as ordered.  But of course that doesn't count for anything. Now if somebody's water glass is empty for more than 10 seconds they're craning their neck around to see where I am.  Um. . . attending to the other 40 people, maybe?  I know you are out of water. . I'm a super-genius remember?

Anyhow I give them their check, with gratuity added, cause I know where this is going.  They get up to leave and one guy stops. . not the one who paid the bill mind you. . . and points his finger at me and yells in the middle of the restaurant "This was the worst service EVER! You gave us -no- attention the entire night, and then you've got the gall to add a gratuity onto our bill?  You're a bad person!"

"A bad person?"  Alrighty then.

The funny thing was, in addition to the four times I went over to their table before they placed their order, I went over another three times to check on them, ask how everything was and if they needed anything.  Oh and also, the food runner had been over there four times herself.  So let's see that's 11 points of contact during an hour and a half visit.  Oh I see. .. you didn't get enough attention.

So there I am standing behind the bar with a counter full of regulars staring at this guy like he is out of his mind.  I just calmly look at him and say, "Would you like the gratuity back?"

Oh no. . he didn't want the money back cause of course that would give him nothing to bitch about.  Nevermind that it wasn't even his money.  Completely defused his tirade, by the way, since his whole strategy was based on the assumption that I was going to argue with him in order to defend the 20 bucks.

Funny. . I had a 22% tip average that night.  Guess my service really sucked donkey balls.

That, of course, is just one example.

Point being that this kind of thing is EVERYWHERE and rapidly becoming more and more frequent.  Especially since last November.

I'm just hoping it's like the final death throes of the collective ego or something. . .

***LONG POST***

All right, after having "A Course in Miracles" pop up in my life a couple of times in the last week, I decided to apply my list of possible signs of misinfo that I posted above.

Beforehand I want to say that I find concepts and practices put forth in ACIM helpful, but my gut reaction to the book has always been "Unh-uh."  Perhaps it is my ego revolting, but I don't feel that that's it entirely.

Also, before I dive into the list here's a few "from-the-hip" observations I had about the book:

(1) It was printed so that it would look like the Bible or a scripture.  It has no pictures on its covers, the cover is the faux blue leather, and the pages are the light-weight, crinkling, Bible-like pages.  It's generally seen in a 6x9.  The publishers didn't choose this format by mistake.  It was intentional.

(2) It's in chapters and verses like the Bible.  (Apparently, this was a later change.  Prompted by the voice?  Or decided upon by the scribe?  The introduction doesn't specify.)

(3) It always uses the "Him" form for God and, as far as I can tell, always refers to the reader as a "he."  Most writers do that, but well, I can't help but feel it's intentional and not just a convenience because it's so prevalent (although it's never explained as far as I can tell--I haven't read every word).     

(4) The tone is authoratative throughout the book:

Okay, here's how it did with (part of) my list:

On Logic
The first lesson from the workbook tells you to constate that "Nothing I see in this room means anything."

The twenty-ninth lesson is "God is in everything I see." ("God is in this coat hanger, God is in this magazine," etc.)

However, the thirtieth lesson is "God is in everything I see because God is in my mind."

So...okay, by the Voice we're told to disconnect from the illusion and to constate that there is no meaning in anything we see.  All is Maya.  Then we're told God is in everything you see.  And then: God is in your mind and your mind creates what you see, so everything you see is God. 

But don't forget lesson #10: "My thoughts do not mean anything."  Or, lesson #11: "My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world."

What the Hell?!  Which is it?  Is God everywhere?  Is God meaningful?  Is God in the illusion?  Is God an illusion?

The book directs you to repeat these statements to yourself like mantras.  What does it do to a mind to say to itself back-to-back: (1) this is coathanger isn't real, and then (2) God is in this coathanger?

On Consistently Extreme POV
The book opens with the statement: "Nothing unreal exists" and then later defines the ego as not real. 

If the ego is capable of keeping one from realizing the truth and returning to "Him," in what way is it not real?  It seems to be a contradiction.  Yet there is an absolute insistence on this or that being not real throughout the book.   

Also, this isn't so much a review of the book, but the two friends I know who are ACIM-fans vehemently insist that negative entities do not exist because evil is not real and nothing unreal exists.  They've quoted the book to me to "prove" there are no Negs.

Here are collection of quotes from another forum I frequent from a guy who was recently pushing ACIM, too:

Namedropping
In some ways I feel that the book is a giant Jesus Christ namedropping.  I only make that argument because it's my perception that big-time ACIM-fans are ex-mainstream-Christians who've made a transition into the New Age.  If the book used a gender-neutral form for God and wasn't said to be written by Christ, would it have a smaller audience?  A bigger one?  I don't know.   

Verbosity Without Substance
The book is hefty.  And when I'm flipping through it I have the impression of reading the same statement reworded on different pages.

Here's an example of what I mean:

There is definitely substance in that quote, but it is verbose and redundant.  And it's a thought that should be obvious to somebody who's read only ten pages of the book, but that quote is from a hundred pages in or so.  So it has little substance at the point in the book that it's at (if you're reading linearly).  It's like a re-run.

On Vagueness

This is a quote from the "Clarification of Terms" section:

Oh.  ...Actually, I think that's quite poetic and I like it, but thrust of the book (as I understand it) is to dispel the ego and forgive yourself and return to "Him."  And I guess you do this ultimately by realizing that there's no ego to dispel..."Whew! It was all a dream.  Thank goodness."

It's like: "We're sorry, we can't tell you WHAT the ego is because then you'd think it was real and it isn't real.  Meanwhile, please stop being egocentric..."

Is it a paradox being presented or just nonsense?  If it's unreal then why do we perceive it at all?  Why is there a book discussing it at length?  If it is possible to put our attention into it and thereby to stop ourselves from an objective knowing, then how is it unreal again?  If it doesn't exist, then why do I need to do exercises in order to know that it doesn't?

On Obligating or Commanding Verbiage
See the bolded quotes near the top.

*In favor of ACIM there is no labeling, emotionalization, the tone is commanding but is calm, there isn't a "chosen people" routine, and its overt focus is upon unity, forgiveness, and love.     

I won't overlook the latter. 

As for the source (or scribe), very little is revealed about Helen Schucman in the introduction.  She was an atheistic psychologist who, shortly after the head of her department--William Thetford--announced that "he was tired of the angry and aggressive feelings [their] attitudes reflected" and that there must be "another way" she began hearing the Voice and transcribing its words in shorthand.  It also mentions that three months before the Voice began she had "highly symbolic dreams" and "strange images" coming to her.  She said that the transcribing process "made me very uncomfortable, but it never seriously occurred to me to stop."  (Made her ego uncomfortable?)  It took seven years to complete the book.

This highlights again the issue of artificial synchronicity for me. 

I remember when I was a teenager and I read "The Celestine Prophecy."  I've never gone back to that book series and it served its purpose for me, but there is a concept pushed in the book that could lead to trouble.

The book's first insight is that "there are no coincidences." 

A person who wholly accepts this as truth and takes any coincidence as a nod from her higher self could find herself in deep crapola.  I mean, who is to say that coincidences can't be triggered by the energies of the ego as well as arranged by the Higher Self or the purified energies of the person?

A psychic reader also told me a while back about a trick that other, profit-driven psychics use: they read the energy of a person corresponding to a probable future, tell the person about it, and then intentionally spit energy into that "probability bubble" (or whatever you want to call it) and then...Lo and behold that probable future manifests and the person returns to the psychic.

The closest example of I personally have of this is from last summer.  I was camping with friends, talking about aliens and UFOs.  My skeptic friend was saying, as usual, how he didn't and couldn't believe in it all. 

No more than a minute later a UFO flew over us.  I'm pretty sure it was a government craft, but I'd definitely never seen anything like it: dark, diamond-shaped, unblinking red lights at its corners, a circle of random fast-flashing lights along the bottom, fast, and as far as I could tell, soundless. 

It was uncanny.  My skeptic friend laughed at the coincidence. 

The experience didn't feel "organic" to me, but arranged.

I think you really have something in "designed to persuade."  Natural synchronicities, to me, don't feel persuasive at all, but are just there, saying "Yoo-hoo."

I can't think of a concrete example right now, but I know I've had meaningful coincidences in the presence of others.  And we both notice the coincidence.  And then the other person says, "Wow.  I guess you should do it" or something like that.

I totally agree with you on the *coincidences*.  I did read all J.Redfields books. I have had many coincidences that if I had taken them as ...*ooh, this must mean something positive*, I would have been screwed.     

On the psychic reader...has anybody ever watched Sylvia Browne on the Montel Williams show?  People are absolutely spellbound by her. I think its great that she helps the police and such with crime solving, she seems pretty accurate there, but let's face it, she did say that she is channeled the information from her *guide*...what people dont seem to get it is....what makes them think that her *guide* has accurate info? She tell everybody that aliens are ALL friendly and that there is no such thing as demons.  There are a lot of people that would disagree with that!   When people ask her questions about their future, maybe somehow she does send energy into  a probable future for that person, especially when they aske generic ?'s like, when will I get married?...blah, blah, blah...Sylvia could say..in 2yrs..and it happens in a year and a half and the person is like...wow, she was right! Sylvia would be much better off just sticking with the crime-solving...it scares me to see these people blindly believe everything she says, and need people like her inorder to make any decisions in their life.

Watch this space, something's coming in the next couple of weeks

I'm almost finished with a mini-article (okay, seven pages) that condenses this thread--or at least my own take on it all--narrowing it down to nine possible signs of misinfo or disinfo. 

The nine signs I chose were:

(1) propagandizing
(2) poor logic
(3) falsehood (finding any falsehood)--obvious but important
(4) consistently extreme point-of-views
(5) vagueness
(6) authoritarianism
(7) specialness
(8) jargon
(9) discouragement of critical analysis

I feel that these, while I don't pretend it's a definitive list by any means, are good indicators of misinfo or disinfo--in full combination especially, but also in pairings.  There are weak pairings--pairings that don't necessarily reveal a negative intent but just reveal weakmindedness.  But I think most combinations of those signs allow a person to evaluate whether information is "good" or "bad" information.

Also, I purposely narrowed it down to a list of signs that could be detected by a reasoning process instead of an intuitive process.  I figured that if you're really in doubt about some information then your intuition is probably on the fritz and what you need is reason.

I chose them based on these four assumptions:

(1) logic is helpful in evaluating spiritual information

(2) information from a high spiritual level is:
(a) non-judgmental
(b) non-nepotistic

(3) genuine messengers of spiritual information are clear and concise, although the ideas they present may be complex

(4) genuine spiritual messengers encourage going within, testing the information, deconstructing it, re-synthesizing it (making it your own).  Spiritual information isn't copyrighted and its messengers aren't profit-motivated.