Post by Advice TeamGuys, this is a new insight into why Twitchell and his successors use jargon (eck, living eck master, soul travel, etc) quite so much: to condition members' minds into an attitude of obedience to the Master.
http://youtu.be/9wDjypS6JF4
Unfortunately the Master is consigning the obedient to what Twitchell quaintly called 'an astral hell.'
Twitchell meant this to describe where he would send a disobedient member. In fact, it's where Twitchell himself resides - and always has (see The Truth about Eckankar book for more on that).
A lot of people believe the "jargon" was necessary to make Eckankar unique. And that's the whole thing in a nutshell. Right? Advice Team? I think it is right.
Ekankar changed to Eckankar. The authors of Paul's copied books become eck masters, etc. Right? That's how you make something unique. That's how you take from preexisting knowledge and make it your own. You have to change it. Right?
The problem I see is that one can't do this with historical events. Can't take actual, verifiable already happened provable events, change the facts and expect them to stand for long. IOW the fictions have not the same integrity as the actual real facts! The fabrications will exist only so long as people are convinced they are true, but it doesn't change the actual truth.
Paul Twitchells fabrications and the Eckankar controversies are precisely the result of what I just described. Fact and fiction with people taking sides. Those who want to preserve some of the fictions worthy as facts go to extreme lengths to do so. They have to constantly attack the truth as if to change it, make it less than what it really is. Adding on more fictions does not help. Advice Team has it's own beliefs. IMO some of those beliefs are about true events and some of them are certainly not, even though Advice Team might think they are.
We're actually talking about two different things. You're focused here on truth/falsehood, ie, relating Twitchell's assertions to actual third party authorship, and his versions of events to actual events. That's all fine, though, if he did not care that much about being accurate, query to what extent his departure from reifiable truth tells you much. After all the objectively ascertainable world is in fact a not fixed, but a composite of continually changing human level thought, emotion and physical inputs. It is not a reliable reference point for assessing the truth or falsehood of anything.
Of course Twitchell was a serial fabricator. However, our point is different. That is that probing the core thought and emotion structures hidden inside the surface theology/practice of Eckankar yields a more useful insight into (1) what Twitchell was actually doing when he set out to fabricate a group, to earn money, (2) what his creation has turned into.
For us, the core thought and emotion structures are filled with low level passions (fear, greed, hatred, need for attention). Those passions infuse the words. Secondly, Twitchell's knowledge of words and their uses was put to use to convert the words into a selective language that remodelled existing words into new sounds and apparently new (but not new) concepts. Whether or not that makes his language unique tells us only a little about whether he succeeded or not in his fabricating efforts.
For us, the more interesting point is what the jargon is trying to do. The talk is about the use of these jargon words to condition eckists, as part of the obedience aim.
I think we are looking at Eckankar from two different angles. Yes. I am looking at it in context to history and true events. You wrote:
"[...] After all the objectively ascertainable world is in fact a not fixed, but a composite of continually changing human level thought, emotion and physical inputs. It is not a reliable reference point for assessing the truth or falsehood of anything. [... .]"
Well, yeah. People are free to go around thinking / believing whatever they want in spite of the objectively ascertainable world. If all the objective world indicators point to the fact it is a Monday, people are still free to believe that is not true; at a cost.
My angle looking at Eckankar when I started in chat groups has focused on isolating the true history from the fabricated history. Those who can't deal with this, I don't know why. Except that they can't easily drop their precious illusions long enough to follow the disciplines of historical research.