In Reply to: the problem is posted by lydia on November 06, 2006 at 14:51:44:
I'm always impressed by how TFI's leadership can create what family therapists call the double bind situation. Essentially, a double bind situation is a set of conditions where the individual family member is "damned if I do, damned if I don't."
In family therapy, the result of the double bind situation is that the individual goes mad in an attempt to escape two irreconcilable and contradictory choices. This is what brings the family into treatment: A sick family member who disrupts the balance of power with his/her behavior.
Which gets back to my original thought about spirit helpers. If belief in the intervention of personal spirit helpers can be reduced to mental illness or perhaps a childhood developmental problem of dependency, we could say that TFI's prophesy machine is producing an outlet of officially sanctioned insanity for people who live daily with tensions inherent in the double bind: You're a powerless schmuck when it comes to all the contradictions of Family life, but you can fantasy trip off into la-la land and gain power over your situation through calling on the keys.
I don't really think spiritual matters can be totally reduced to interpersonal and psychodynamic processes, but there is a level at which the Family's belief system in spirit helpers functions as a safety valve and cultural coping mechanism: Just go insane with delusional thought processes--you don't have to think about stuff that doesn't make any sense, because you can escape the intolerable conflicts and double binds of Family life by calling on the keys and naming your personal spirit helpers. Now, that's POWER!
In my book, it's really just a pile of delusional crap that reinforces itself at every turn. The double bind = trapped.