Intrusion. Much of what we learn in New Age or New Thought Modalities teaches us not to intrude. Not to attempt to change others.
Real Love ( www.reallove.com) teaches us that we cannot expect to change another person. That change comes from within. Still, even in Real Love, we sometimes see the mirror of truth being held up before us lit awfully brightly, albeit to someone who has asked to be shown them self to them self as they are seen by the one holding the mirror for them. Even here, the formula is Love, Teach, Love.
The Buddhist Monk from the interviews in the “What the Bleep” Movie tells us that pain is part of the path to enlightenment ( http://choose.ws/2009/07/02/questions-surveys/transformative-media/yucel/ ).
Can it be right to cause pain to aid another in transformation?
Werner Erhard ( the Founder of EST Erhard Seminars Training, the employees of which started The Forum when Erhard left the USA after character assassination by a 60 Minutes TV segment ) was said to be the father of the term Transformation and a slew of other vernacular we take for granted in the self help world today.
The title of this excellent documentary was also “Transformation”.
To bring transformation to seminar participants, who paid Erhard large sums to attend and be transformed, Werner would attempt to unstick pain from the past, so people could move into the future.
He would do this often through causing mental and emotional pain.
His discourse and questions would bring the individual’s traumatic events from the past into the present and then teach the participant to take personal responsibility for their holding onto of past pain. A kind of mental slap.
A bright mirror of self showing how clutter from the past creates more of same in the future unless it is emptied out.
A mirror held up to show how by clinging to the victim story of pain endured in the past, the individual was taking the payoff of victim celebrity and also choosing through this payoff to being held back from moving into a brighter future unencumbered by any weighty story.
A future not defined by and thus limited by the past. A wide open, a transformed future.
Thus a slap, or pain can under the right circumstances, bring about transformation, if it unsticks us from a past as victim and frees us to move without a story into a future we can make, by being authentically present to our true desires in the now.
I assume other transformations are also possible. I am focused on positive aspects.
Thus, this does not address the moral implications of attempting to transform another. And yet, if they paid, were they not asking to be transformed?
When is it right? Is it always wrong? How can it be used well? What is the path to stay on?
Transformatively yours,
Yucel