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CrashLanded:
Reading jlm post sent a shiver down my spine and instant recognition of shared experiences.

I too was in the ashram for several years, and when I left I was a ghost of a human being, beaten down and sick.

Cowardly, I left only when I KNEW that if I had staid just a while longer, I would be dead. Dead for what I was doing to myself: accepting a life filled with mistrust, fear, dishonesty, saying only what was expected.
All what I did was to trust God, Master and SRF, to genuinely offer my life in service for the highest cause. How did I end up like that?

After all that training inside SRF...Ah...the lack of self-esteem, of self-confidence, and of practical skills to just live a normal, healthy life, Ah...my inability to make life decisions, to find a job, a car, a place to stay. Defeated, after weeks of trying to fit back into the world --after years of isolation in the ashram-- I had to call SRF back and ask for help; could they give me a room in one of the so many houses they owned? Just for a few months, just enough to create a 'credit history' that will allow me to rent a place ? How hard was for me the accept the "NO", my SRF-family of many years told me so promptly!
But the hardest thing was the feeling of betrayal of friends and people I had trusted for years, the emptiness left by the realization that I had given my life to such a fake!

Still, after I left, I was so deeply into the SRF myth, so totally brainwashed, that it took me 2 or 3 yr. of life outside, before I even realized that it wasn't all my fault. That SRF had a large share of responsibilities and neurosis, so to speak. Naturally, after starting to see things for what they were, I got really angry toward SRF, the organization I served for so long. In reality, I was angry toward myself for having believed so blindly, having trusted so much, having loved so much, having given myself up so completely to a bunch of fools convinced they were infallably doing Master's work.

Often, longtime SRF members would ask me why I left, and occasionally, if I felt they were asking sincerely, I would tell them my reasons.... their inability to believe my assertions, to trust even the most common-sense explanations, to acknowledge SRF imperfections and wrong behavior; their unshakable, dogmatic belief in SRF's faultlessness, to explain everything away to karma, training, and their conclusion that it must have been all my fault....is really frustrating...and has given me an idea of how effective SRF public relation mgt. is, and of how many others are caught by such delusion.

Starting a new life, has taken a tremendous effort. Emotionally, mentally, financially has been a nightmare! When I left there was no assistance, no support, no Transassits(?).
Slowly, one step at a time, I did create a new beginning.... it has been very hard, but harder still, is seeing how SRF cannot practice one of the main points it so often preaches: the ability to change!

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