Excellent parallel and analysis. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
I will have to agree with "sincere huckster." In retrospect who he reminds me of the most in terms of the fluidity of his delivery and his seeming honest comfort with the outrageous stories he's telling is Carlos Castaneda. When I met him, he was exactly the same way -- so sure of himself and so fluid in the way he described "don Juan" and the magical things that went on around him that you felt you almost *had* to believe it. Then later I learned more about Carlos. Turns out that there was strong evidence of him being a "serial liar" and "psychopathic liar" all of his life. It was a pattern that was already present long before he came to the US to study at UCLA. In gaining his original student status he'd lied about his original name, where he came from in South America, and failed to mention that he'd abandoned a wife and kid there. Later, it seems that he'd taken this same...uh...less-than-truthful approach first to his research as an antrhopologist and later to being a big, best-selling New Age author. At first he took *other people's stories* and claimed that they were his own, and then later he began making them up entirely. But the thing is, in person he was so fluid and natural-sounding when *telling* these stories -- either in person or in his writing -- that he convinced people to believe them. What I think is going on with George Hammond is that he is not very clueful about the workings of his own mind. He falls into altered states of consciousness in which his dreaming mind becomes active as it is processing weird stuff he's read about all day about Western religions and the stuff he's interested in. In that partially-awake dreaming state, his mind introduces other characters because of his fear of death, his desire to see loved ones like his sister and Maharishi again, and his desire to be "special" and "important" and the center of all cosmic action. So he lays there for a while, indulging these quasi-dreaming states, and then tells stories about them to anyone who will listen, insisting that they are real "visions." And, as with Castaneda, every time he tells the story it becomes more natural and more fluid for him, and he himself becomes more convinced it was real. This becomes a self-reinforcing cycle, because every time he tells the stories a few people go "Wow" and that increases his self-importance. Anyway, that's my take on it all. Entertaining, but in the end he *really* doesn't have the charisma he would need to attract a younger audience, one that is not on death's door and panicking about it like the audience he was talking to yesterday. THOSE are the people who will believe him and flock to him, because his spiel is meant to convince them that 1) they are "important" and at the center of great events, 2) they are eternal and will never die, and 3) they're part of a big Movement of Woo Woo guys (did you notice there were no gals) who are officially The Biggest, Baddest Spiritual Movers The Planet Has Ever Seen. From: "Michael Jackson mjackson74@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: "FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2014 9:38 PM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Live Stream | 30th November I am going back and looking at this from the beginning - what a bunch of crap. I think this guy is using the "I talked to Marshy" deal as a platform to attract an audience to get 'em to listen to his off the wall beliefs. Just another (sincere) huckster following in Marshy's footsteps who was himself as one of the most successful hucksters in the 20th century. From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2014 3:19 PM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Re: Live Stream | 30th November ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <noozguru@...> wrote : Everyone is "merged" with the absolute, the process of enlightenment is realizing it. The absolute is all that is and everything else is just an illusion. This is where I go wrong. I'm utterly convinced it's the other way round!
