The Gateway, Teal Swan, and the message vs the teacher

[Mandy]

23 minutes ago, Jonas Long said:

It's not about one person, it's probably not what you keep assuming it is at all, and your comments here are basically a distraction from the conversation I'm proposing. 

Well, Adeptus watched the first episode and wrote a great in depth response that you have yet to respond to, so just respond to Adeptus and your conversation is back on track. 

[Jonas Long]

8 minutes ago, Mandy said:

Well, Adeptus watched the first episode and wrote a great in depth response that you have yet to respond to, so just respond to Adeptus and your conversation is back on track. 

What is the point in telling me this?  I'm waiting for him to keep listening to it and say more, or other people to chime in. So far I'm basically in agreement with him, not much to add. 

Fine, I'll stop responding to you I guess.  Why is it that the person who requests my presence here is always the one who dislikes the way I am here the most? 

 

Edited September 15, 2023 by Jonas Long

[Mandy]

@Jonas Long Little else pleases me as much as a challenging, productive conversation, you just don't seem to also see it as challenging or productive right now. It's not that I dislike the way you are. 

[Jonas Long]

5 minutes ago, Mandy said:

@Jonas Long Little else pleases me as much as a challenging, productive conversation, you just don't seem to also see it as challenging or productive right now. It's not that I dislike the way you are. 

Are you kidding me?  You've been coming at this with nothing but assumptions, about the podcast, about me, my motivations, challenging, yes, but I don't see this as productive at all!  I'm sorry I derailed your other thread ok!  I should have said nothing there and started this thread making no reference to yours, probably. 

[Mandy]

@Jonas Long The thread isn't what I care about. 

[Adeptus Psychonautica]

@Jonas Long

I’ve listened to some more of the podcast.

Rather than me writing my individual thoughts on each episode, is there some specific part of it you would like to discuss?

[Jonas Long]

6 hours ago, Adeptus Psychonautica said:

@Jonas Long

I’ve listened to some more of the podcast.

Rather than me writing my individual thoughts on each episode, is there some specific part of it you would like to discuss?

Yeah, was is worth it for me to cause all this fuss here over my concerns about Teal? lol

 

I find the "recovered" memories of being in a satanic cult that sacrificed babies and all that satanic panic bullshit particularly interesting/concerning.  Idk if you've gotten to that.  

 

Is it overall not that big a deal and I shouldn't be bothered by her videos being spread around if on their own they contain a "good" message, or is it?  Is she a mostly harmless, eccentric charlatan, or is the whole thing dangerous, or is she legit "enough"?   

 

You answered my larger question about the source damaging their message, does this fall into that to you? 

Edited September 16, 2023 by Jonas Long

[Adeptus Psychonautica]

3 hours ago, Jonas Long said:

Is she a mostly harmless, eccentric charlatan, or is the whole thing dangerous, or is she legit "enough"?   

 

I lean mostly towards the former with a few caveats.

I think the "danger" element is being overblown. Given that her audience contains a large percentage of people with suicidal ideation, and that confronting suicidal ideation is her bread and butter, then if what she was saying was considered dangerous enough to push people over the edge then I would expect to see a fairly long list of corpses - that isn't the case. Instead we have this one particular case of a woman who was troubled years before she ever met Teal Swan, and who was also seeing a therapist throughout the same period - i'm honestly not sure that anyone could have saved her based on the story told in the podcast. 

 The whole satanic abusive cult baby murdering thing I think is complete fantasy. Whether she actually believes that or not I have no idea, but my gut feeling is that its something she said when she was younger, and now its just been so long that she probably realizes how ridiculous it sounds and just can't get out of the lie. Does this discredit her whole message, I would say not because its not the core of what she is preaching, its just an anecdote.

She is not my cup of tea at all just because of all the new age quantum mysticism, but if the worst thing on her is that she had one already suicidal follower commit suicide, then I think its hard to justify the claim that she is dangerous. I think its more that people just aren't comfortable with her talking about suicide so brazenly - which I think is a good thing tbh

[Jonas Long]

@Adeptus Psychonautica the satanic cult thing is so interesting to me though because it isn't a story she told or made up as a child, it didn't come up till much later in her life when she did hypnotic regression therapy and "recovered" the memory.  It's like, if somebody's mental state is that fragile or disturbed to then work in a mental health related area is worrisome.  If someone is so convinced of something so seemingly obviously false, it seems to me like that damages any other message they have too.  It would for me, I think.  But, should it, maybe not, maybe people totally can take the real and leave the false.  

 

With the suicide stuff it's statements like "suicide is a beautiful gift to give yourself" and how great death feels, and that its just like hitting a "reset" button, all obviously without being a certified mental health professional in any way, doesn't sit well.  But it is a fair point that she hasnt had many suicides happen amongst her followers.  I did think it was more than one though, don't remember exactly.  

Edited September 16, 2023 by Jonas Long

[noomii]

47 minutes ago, Jonas Long said:

With the suicide stuff it's statements like "suicide is a beautiful gift to give yourself" and how great death feels, and that its just like hitting a "reset" button, all obviously without being a certified mental health professional in any way, doesn't sit well.  But it is a fair point that she hasnt had many suicides happen amongst her followers.  I did think it was more than one though, don't remember exactly.  

She has said that she is against suicide, those statements sound very strange. Have you watched her videos on suicide on Youtube?

[Jonas Long]

2 minutes ago, noomii said:

She has said that she is against suicide, those statements sound very strange. Have you watched her videos on suicide on Youtube?

No, I just heard her say those things on the podcast.  Maybe they were "out of context"

[noomii]

Just now, Jonas Long said:

No, I just heard her say those things on the podcast.  Maybe they were "out of context"

 

 

Long time ago I watched these so I don't remember much of it, but here it is

[Jonas Long]

@Adeptus Psychonautica did you feel like the podcast was fair, or was it leaning toward having an agenda to discredit her?

[Jonas Long]

I've been accused of pessimism, and this is one of the highest viewed threads in a while.  Maybe human curiosity has a natural "pessimistic" bias.  I'm not actively trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator but maybe I am.  

[Jonas Long]

2 minutes ago, Jonas Long said:

I've been accused of pessimism, and this is one of the highest viewed threads in a while.  Maybe human curiosity has a natural "pessimistic" bias.  I'm not actively trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator but maybe I am.  

I actually don't think that's true, I think curiosity is essentially an "optimistic" emotion.  A "negativity" bias comes from an optimistic attitude, because we want what's best for ourselves and others, so we are hypervigilant to threats, right?  Obviously politicians exploit it.  Am I a politician?  I hope not...

[Adeptus Psychonautica]

6 hours ago, Jonas Long said:

@Adeptus Psychonautica did you feel like the podcast was fair, or was it leaning toward having an agenda to discredit her?

Somewhere in the middle of those two options.

 

It was a lot fairer than I would have expected. He had certainly done his due diligence in getting a lot of different perspectives and talking to everyone involved.

 

…but IMO he was clearly working the “this weird chick keeps talking about suicide, suicide is taboo therefore dangerous cult” angle. I don’t think that in itself is a bad thing because it is an angle worth unpacking, but I don’t think he fully followed his own argument through to its logical conclusion, and if he had done so then it would have been a completely different narrative which I don’t think he wanted.

 

His argument is essentially

 

“this woman attracts LEGIONS of  vulnerable people who are already suffering from suicidal ideation. She talks very openly about suicide in ways that people find shocking. She is not a trained therapist - we should be concerned “

 

The logical conclusion that jumps out to me is that if she is indeed attracting an audience of deeply suicidal people, and that ONLY ONE  of those went through with it - then thats actually an amazingly good argument that what she is doing seems to work. That would be a better result than any western therapy which would tend to be focused on antidepressants or antipsychotic medications.

 

Here’s an analogy - If I deliberately cultivated an audience of thousands of raging alcoholics, and out of that audience only ONE went back to drinking, am I doing something good or bad? Would you question my method because I am not medically trained, swear like a motherfucker, and make videos about getting off my tits on DMT?

 

I do think she has some of that guru arrogance, pettiness, and I think she is susceptible to talking out of her ass for dramatic effect, but she is walking the walk getting out there meeting people, doing events, building the retreat, and getting results (so it seems), and its all pretty consistent.

Compare this to our favorite YouTube potato who devotes the bulk of his time and energy into a shithole forum, so that he can tell his followers they are idiots, that if they disagree with his teachings he will fucking kill them, and who might actually have a higher number of suicides within his community than the woman labeled “the suicide catalyst” - then like I said at the beginning, I don’t think we are in the same ballpark here.

[Mandy]

If all of spirituality is essentially challenging the materialist paradigm, a lot of what people react to as "wrong" is their own discomfort with this, and the beliefs that are being challenged.

 

"You really gotta get over this death thing." -Abraham Hicks  In ignoring the beauty of it, and the actual message there as it is felt, if we aren't feeling it, we go to "SHE is promoting SUICIDE!"

 

If someone's teachings are essentially stating that glory, goodness and superiority over other unworthies comes through totally ignoring suffering on behalf of the pursuit of truth or their "work", the more that's said about this someone as a separate self, the more their message is believed because anyone saying this (and therefore what they are saying) is immediately written off as one of the unworthies. 

 

If we aren't willing to sit with that discomfort, and question what the source of it is really in that moment, the go-to reaction is demonizing the messenger. Most of the criticism of cases of spirituality being used to cover up or condone abuse, whether the allegations of abuse are founded or unfounded are completely impotent because they fall into the same category, of demonization of the person themselves.  It's too bad because it has the same effect of the boy who cried wolf, followers may be very open-minded and have had spiritual openings or experiences and experienced resonance with unique ways of seeing things that the teacher presented. By challenging the status quo or what society accepts, many beliefs may have been let go of. Rather than seeing the relief and open mindedness and the letting go of beliefs, all this good feeling is credited to a leader or teacher. Then the expectation is in place that everything this person says going forward will be helpful and open-mindedness is gone, and it's as if they are asleep again.  If I decide that this forest is 100% safe and I deem it so, I don't need to keep my head up and be aware of a tree that might be ready to fall overhead. 

 

The opposite case of blind demonization of the person, is blind acceptance of the person but both are the same belief at the root. It's easy to write off all criticism of someone they follow as closed-mindedness without considering each comment or decision. Neither is gonna cut it, both result in danger in the name of safety. And without doing that you're in concepts, and you're believing the materialist paradigm and you aren't being present with anything presented, you're asleep. But can a conceptual person be asleep or be awake? NO. YOU are only ever here and now. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Phil]

Listened to the first episode, as well as a Netflix documentary on Teal. The overall difference seems sort of obvious. Teachers of spirituality, truth, nonduality by & large speak of the truth. Leo & Teal speak of my truth, how great, high, better I am and what I know and or understand and how you need it. Suicide seems the same essentially. If there’s thought attachment, ego, there’s suicide. If there isn’t, it’s obviously the thought ‘suicide’. Similar to brains vs my brain. 

[Loop]

@Phil

 

Yeah, seems to be beliefs about separate self to improve more, understand more, getting stuck in a never ending loop of ‘self-improvement’. Which is essentially like decorating, & rearranging the chairs on the titanic. 😂

 

Re-programming vs De-programming.

 

[Mandy]

9 minutes ago, Phil said:

Leo & Teal speak of my truth, how great, high, better I am and what I know and or understand and how you need it. 

That's not always the case though, both are capable of saying wise and profound things, of being in the Vortex or out of the Vortex, like all apparent human beings. I don't think that can or should be denied. And I also don't think saying such is giving them a dangerous amount of credit. The only thing to be questioned of value is the credit given or refused itself.