The Bible and Scripting

by purplesofa 17 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  purplesofa

  When I was a teenager I became familiar with Transactional Analysis.

  It says we all have life scripts we live by. Here is some information I got from various sites online.

  It introduces the idea of a "Life (or Childhood) Script", that is, a story one perceives about ones own life, to answer questions such as "What matters", "How do I get along in life" and "What kind of person am I". This story, TA says, is often stuck to no matter the consequences, to "prove" one is right, even at the cost of pain, compulsion, self-defeating behaviour and other dysfunction. Thus TA offers a theory of a broad range of psychopathology.

  Life (or Childhood) Script

  Script is a life plan, directed to a pay-off.

  Script is decisional and responsive, ie decided upon in childhood in response to perceptions of the world and as a means of living with and making sense of. It is not just thrust upon a person by external forces.

  Script is reinforced by parents (or other influential figures and experiences)

  Script is for the most part outside awareness

  Script is how we navigate and what we look for, the rest of reality is redefined (distorted) to match our filters.

  Each culture, country and people in the world has a Mythos, that is, a legend explaining its origins, core beliefs and purpose. According to TA, so do individual people. A person begins writing their own life story (script) very young, as they try to make sense of the world and their place within it. Although it is revised throughout life, the core story is selected and decided upon typically by age 7. As adults it passes out of awareness. A life script might be "to be hurt many times, and suffer and make others feel bad when I die", and could result in a person indeed setting themselves up for this, by adopting behaviours in childhood that produce exactly this effect. Or it could as easily be positive.

  Life scripts. A large part of your life story unfolds like the script of a drama or play. You are "in script" when your life is mostly under the control of family influences and childhood decisions. The nature of your script, whether positive or negative, depends on the kinds of permissions and prohibitions you received as a child, and the resulting early decisions you made.

  People are OK - thus each person has validity, importance, equality of respect.

  Everyone (with only few exceptions) has full adult capability to think.

  People decide their story and destiny, and this is a decision, it can be changed.

  Freedom from historical maladaptations embedded in the childhood script is required, in order to become free of inappropriate unauthentic and displaced emotion which are not a fair and honest reflection of here-and-now life

  My life script was taken from a story Snow White and Rose Red. Most peoples scripts are from thier favorite childhood story and then the story and characters are supposed to be played out in thier lives. Think of someone that has Wizard of OZ, or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as their favorite story and how they might play that out in their lives.

  I have thought alot about the bible.......and how it is a story with a script. Genesis to Revelation. Do we merely have to be destined to play this out, this script in the bible? Is that why so many strive so hard to figure out the future from the bible, so that we(mankind) can play the parts? What if there were never a bible and people did not have to think about these things? Try to figure out the different characters and put people in them.......ie, sheep, goats, FDS, harlot, beast, etc etc etc......

  Maybe if the script of the world was totally different.......The bible were a different story altogether, maybe we would not have the world we have today.

  What are your thoughts on this? Is there any validity to it? or am I nuts(don't answer that one)

  Thanks

  purps
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  purplesofa

  oh, I forgot to ask................Must we have a script?

  Thanks
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  kls

  Purps, i know what you asking just never thought of it the way you have . I just thought some were dealt with a great hand in life and others always getting the worst of it .

  Well if my life was a script i would have burned it ,so i guess not a script and am really having a hard time trying to find a way to answer this.
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  littlerockguy

  I can't think that deep after 5 p.m. to answer that post. I will think about it and come back to it. It sounds interesting. :)
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  theotherside

  I geuss everyone can only relate 2 where they have been in life..but I think deep down everyone knows what type of person they are and if they happy with who they are they keep doing the things it took 2 be that way. If not they change the script and seek another way.....but what gets me is, in my experience , if we living by scripts it runs the gamut..all the way from meladrama to comedy to down right horror stories.......if u dont agree just keep living.....Life seems 2 always throw u a twist
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  luna2

  At the moment I have only a very imperfect understanding of what you are describing here, so my comments may be way off the mark. LOL

  Oddly enough, I have been thinking lately (for the past week or so after having been awakened to the fact that being a JW was not what I thought it was) that all of the major decisions I've made in my life that have turned out badly may have partially been a result of trying to live my life like the stories I love to read.

  The Wizard of Oz was huge for me as a child. The idea of a secret, magic place full of wonder and romance, that only a very few humans could enter with much difficulty and only for a limited amount of time (can't remember which book, but at some point the Land of Oz was made invisible and inaccessable to any humans that weren't already in residence) was very appealing to me. You can see the obvious parallels with the "truth" as put forth by the WBTS. Not to say that I looked forward to billions of non-JW's being exterminated forever at Armageddon, in fact, I hoped that some "new light" would be flipped on to sort of fix that horrible prophecy, but I can't deny that I liked the idea of being special and "in the know". Kind of sad, huh?
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  Terry

  I would say people who don't see a purpose to life are compelled to "buy in" to the current script (or Ethos, as the Ancient Greeks would say).

  It is really the society as a whole who create the Mythos through the stories they tell each other. Think of adolescent guys sitting around telling about their love life. Now how many are lying? How many think the lying ones are telling the truth and, consequently, tell their story more in line with the lie to avoid being singled out?

  Significance in life is a biggie. To appear significant we have to pass major TESTS. The family tests us, our friends test us and the tribal leaders test us as well. How we pass these tests either disables us or enables us to taking a leading role.

  Buying in to the current Mythos avoids singling you out as an innovator (i.e. troublemaker).

  A person who is self-motivated and thinks for themselves could still pretend to go-along; but, this would be a strategy in order to function in the social groups as a whole. But, each person of subterfuge (a closet self-thinker) gives the impression to the group at large that the TRUTH of their mythos is validated.

  We don't need any script at all.

  But, to function in our group of choice we have to present ourselves as non-threatening. Often, this only leads us to assume a false identity.

  It is easy to become lost in a group. The energy level, the group dynamic is huge.

  A purpose in life is much to be preferred to a script. One is an active and logical mind at work and the other is a puppet of others.

  Terry
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  zen nudist

  oh, I forgot to ask................Must we have a script?

  I too have studied TA...and partly thanks to it, I discovered my script as more of a to do list.... I realized that there were many things

  I felt compelled to do to fullfil that list and how little input I had on shaping that list until I learned to see it.

  my life up until that point had been about checking those things off that list.....

  there are still a few items on the list but I now realize that I dont have to fullfil them and perhaps never will attain some of the items like this gal I met back in 1998 (^_^)

  I think they were largely shaped by the religion and culture and traditions of my family and neighbors.
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  Narkissos

  Interesting topic.

  I am not very familiar with TA, as I was definitely not attracted to the pretty mechanistic and utilitarian TA typology and method I have been in (limited) contact with. However, I think there is much truth to the idea that from the very beginning we are struggling with an existing "text", reading and writing out our lives (our novels?) at the same time. From a slightly different perspective, Jacques Derrida's work would suggest that we can't escape the cultural "text," just deconstruct it from inside, while we draw our own self-erasing trace into its boundless differance.

  The Bible is a very interesting example as it is made of many strata of writing, each writer struggling with earlier texts, reading them in a new perspective and modifying them into his own text. When we see it from this perspective it loses its aspect of a self-contained script calling for a slavish play-out (either as a good or bad character): we are not (only) playing out, we are writing it further and writing ourselves into it (even here on an internet db); thereby changing it.
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  Markfromcali

  I was just talking to a therapist friend of mine last night about someone that has a rather "far-out" story, we didn't talk about TA in particular but now that you mention it it is certainly related.

  These days a lot of spiritual circles have people who are "working on" this too, the idea is to see through this core story rather than some kind of adaptation to a spiritual story, which evidently is what happens more often than not.

  The thing is a story can just mean something you refer to and not necessarily in the sense of a story book kind of thing, in which case a lot of people who are otherwise free and relatively mature psychologically speaking are still caught in particular ideas about how life should be and so on - it could just be a philosophy.

  A more fundamental underlying principle is not referring to any kind of thought/belief pattern, which gets to be confusing or stretches the mind because you have to step outside of that - but that is what it means to be free from it. This kind of thought based barriers may appear to provide some security, but there is no question that it is limiting. What does it protect except the existence of that very pattern which is so confining?

  But you can play the game if you want to, if you know better then you're not lost in it.

  http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/27/12364/1510622/post.ashx#1510622