The following is an excerpt from chapter one of A Course in Graduating From Scientology.
At its core scientology revolves around the auditing process. The word auditing comes from the Latin root audire which means to listen, or to listen and compute. The entire purpose of a scientology auditor is to provide an environment in which an individual may look at his or her life in such an honest fashion that that which is viewed no longer has a hold on that person. Scientology postulates that ‘charge’ (mental energy) ‘erases’ through that process. One could just as easily consider that one’s witnessed experience objectifies. That is, one’s experience moves from the subjective (part of, and affecting oneself) to the objective. In that construct, matters of the mind that tend to drive one on an automatic basis are no longer hidden and automatic. Objectivized energy of the mind is no more capable of driving you than any other person or idea that you can clearly see as apart from yourself. Given a workable methodology for pursuing such objectifying, your own choice in the matter of what to do, what to choose, what to pursue and what to react to can be restored to you. Each time one honestly witnesses in this wise one recognizes a little more about the true nature of self and its relationship with matter, energy, space, time and life. Witnessing is what led the Buddha – and many other sages – toward recognizing the impermanent nature of matter, energy, space, time, and life forms.
It is my view that any time devoted to honestly viewing the content of your mind, your experience, what arises in consciousness, is progress in moving the external world back out of one’s head where it no longer drives you. That is so provided one is permitted to do so on a self-determined basis and to cease once one’s attic is cleared to one’s own satisfaction. Hubbard once described the mechanics of auditing in this very wise in the book Evolution of a Science.
There used to be a saying in scientology, ‘any auditing is better than no auditing.’ No matter what processes, what grades, what levels attained or not, every hour spent objectivizing the subjective was net gain. As we shall see, all that radically changed along the development path. At the upper reaches of the scientology way one is indoctrinated to believe that viewing certain aspects of the mind is a potentially deadly activity – not only possibly killing one today but keeping one comatose and crippled for millennia to come. Because of indoctrinations like this and because there is so much emphasis included in scientology about the attainment of static grades and levels, and purported permanent states of consciousness, the failure to attain very high on the Scientology Bridge (the chart of progressive grades and levels of spiritual attainment) tends to serve to invalidate the work a person did execute in witnessing his or her own mind.
Scientology contains so much dogma asserting superiority to and difference from all other forms of witnessing that people tend to lose sight that they spent a tremendous amount of time and effort doing just that, witnessing. I use the term ‘witnessing’ because it is a generic term that captures what is at the heart of all effective psychotherapeutic and spiritual practices. Most forms of meditation (Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, etc.), most forms of psychotherapy, and Scientology too, create a desirable effect to the extent the individual applying it honestly views what arises within her own consciousness.
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NOTE: To those who have already completed venture one, you’ll notice this passage has been revised. As I learn from you all I find myself going back and adding to and revising. I will continue to post significantly revised passages like the above as previews for blog readers, and a heads up to you that changes were made.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 
Preamble:
Today, 30 years after I left The Church of Scientology, The Sea Org as NOTS Lead Auditor at the AOEU in Copenhagen, Denmark, in the condition of Kha-Khan awarded by Ron, I feel it’s time to address the current state of affairs.
The moaning and the groaning
This is because so many years after I left, I still hear people who left at the same time, moaning and groaning about all the bad things they experienced in Scientology and others who condem the ”Free Zone” saying it’s squirrel and not Ron’s tech etc etc.. I think, that now, 30 years later, some persons need to put all that behind them and snap into the present and get on with life and livingness and help others along too, if they want to!
Intermezzo:
Live in the past, and you won’t last,
Live in the future, you’ll have no future.
Live in the now, you have the know-how!
”Standard” and ”Bridge”
So, how does it look right here and now… I see several people being scolded for not being ”Standard” because they are doing something, which is not Ron’s tech or not following Ron’s ”Bridge” etc etc… Well, first of all, if there is any goal of freedom for anyone, then I think that everyone should be recognized as free beings who can do exactly as they want to and let the rest assume that they have enough commmon sense to be able to observe their own actions and decide when they are good and carry on with it and when they are not so good and change moodus operandi. I have the trust in my fellow players here, that they will be able to do just that. For that is the way of enlightened, well-intended beings
”Standard Tech”
There are many definitions of Standard Tech. The one I like the most I learned when I did the Class VIII Course where he said that Standard Tech is following the rules of processing handling the case in front of you. This means that you find out where the person in front of you lives, first of all. What are his/her problems? What exactly does he/she want to improve? What hinders the person’s life quality and abilities? You MUST know this. If you are not 100 % sure that you know this, you do NOT start auditing, no, you find out until you are damned sure that you know exactly what’s going on with this client.
What ”Bridge”
There are several ”Bridges” to follow (or not). There is the ”Bridge” as presented in The Church of Scientology, there is Cpt. Bill’s ”Bridge”, There is Andreas Buttler’s bridge called Spiritologie which is now changing into SPIRITOLOGY and then there are a lot of false bridges. But the most important bridges of all is: ”Your Bridge”. That is that route that YOU have to follow in order to reach YOUR goals or to handle YOUR stops in reaching those goals. NOT someone elses ”Bridge”, and not any other C/Sed steps suggested just because they were suggested for another case – never….
Church ”Bridge”
Is what you learn in the Church. Since it is 30 year since I left the Church I do not know exactly how their ”Bridge” looks now, but from what I gather from the rumor line it’s NOT what Ron prescribed, and that is why a lot of very well trained auditors left the Church, myself included. For my own part, it was not possible to help PCs or Pre-OTs in the Church any longer. Overts and bad deeds revealed in session was leaked by the C/S to ethics and people started spending more time in ethics than in session. I had to put down my pen at times in order to be able to fly the rud’s and make false auditing reports in order to get and keep PCs in session. This could not go on. I tried to correct it but they only brought out the axes and guillotines and nooses then, so I left.
Cpt. Bill’s ”Bridge”
I worked a lot with Bill in The Sea Org and we had a very nice way of handling things together. He would come out to my org on Thursdays on his motor bike, summer and winter, no hat, no gloves and say: ”Where is the hot chocolate”? We has some and then looked over the weeks stats and discussed what to do next week. THAT was the entirety of the management. He was the best back-up I ever had. Once we did a marriage in the course room and the old ship’s bell, which we used to start, break and end courses with, was used too. Next day I got a Knowledge Report from the GO saying that church image was out and that : ”They even had a (ship’s) bell there”. Next day Bill called the A/G and asked if he had ever seen a church wihout a bell.
Piloting
When Bill became active researching new OT-levels I had a center in Copenhagen and piloted a lot of his tech and new levels with the public in the centre. He would write the procedure or programme and fax it to me. I would C/S the auditing which was done solo or by one of my auditors who was trained by Bill. We would then report back to Bill. This was a fine line. I did not agree with all that Bill made, but it went well until he got sick. I and others offered to give him some sessions, but he didn’t want it at that time. Then he died, but his creation RONS ORG has been very successfull sinceand it is NOT following Ron’s original tech verbatim to the hilt.
Andreas Buttler
In 2008 I went to Berega in the then-East Germany (now Germany) where my old Dutch friend from the AO in Copenhagen Caspar de Rijk had moved to from Holland and started Multiple Genius Technologies. The multiple should be understood, as far as I understood as not limited to only Ron’s tech. I liked this because to me that felt more like auditing the case in front of you than just putting everybody on the same ”Bridge”. Later Caspar connected himself strongly to Andreas Buttler who claimed he was the reincarnate of Ron and had developed Spiritologie which I was told had NOTHING to do with Scientology. I completed a translation of Andreas’ book into Danish and from that I would say, it had everything to do with Scientology. There was nothing new to me, but maybe I didn’t understand it all anyway. Now just here in the beginning of the new year 2014 Andreas apparently has resigned completely from Spiritologie and disconnected himself from the group and Caspar will do a re-boot and call it Spiritology, and if that is going towards what was his Mega Tech thing, then that sounds good in my ears as to me that was more flexible and more like handling the case in front of you.
Different other Tech persons
As the years that have gone by more and more people have appeared who are active in the field and develop tech to handle the cases in front of them. Examples could be (some that I know of, I’m sure there are more) Alan Walters (Knowlegism), Robert du Charme (R3X), Rolf Krause (Clear Bird, Deep Processing), David St. Lawrence (entity handling) Dexter Gelfand (Power Processes applications) and myself too in developing a very fruitful way of handling PTSness. Etc etc…
Why new tech?
Here in Denmark, if you go back to the 60’s and 70’s when I was trained mostly, it was very common that ALL PCs coming in had been on some sort of drugs, street drugs, medical drugs, or other euphoric substances and being part of ”7 resistive cases” it had to be handled. I remember that I usually could list 30, 40 or even 50 different specific drugs on a case. Cases are not like that btoday. Today, a person who takes drugs is considered ”a loser. Drug R/Ds are seldom used these days and sometimes it’s enough to just rehab the taking of a few medical drugs. As common it was with drugs then, as common it is today that people are into false beingnesses and identities and have a hard time figuring out from where the charge comes. This can be handled very easily with NOTS auditing. It will run 2 – 5 hours, cool off and attention will go to other subjects or the person will say THANKS that’ it, that’s what I wanted to handle, by by… and I might never see them again, or they might go on, get trained etc etc.
Current state
It is my observation and experience that there is a lot more handling of actual cases today than earlier. This means handling the case in front of you, not an imagined case somewhere else. Handling cases on a ”Bridge” means that it’s already decided what is the next action, the auditor and the C/S do not really have to observe much, it’s all laid out there, not much thinking needed. This is what I call robot-auditing. A robot can’t think. A free person or able auditor would not feel very comfortable being treated as a robot. Just getting the daily charging up and lubrication is NOT enough. He would sooner or later leave that mechanical work shop and start out all by himself using the tech he knows he can create results with. Being only responsible for himself and his own actions with clients he can have full attention on just THAT and not splitting it off in parts where some of them are around being up-stat, Thursday 2 o’cloc’k, writing nice reports for others to see, ”putting his TRs IN”, dressing like a minister etc etc.. This is a fantastic opportunity, and it does not take a lot of training to have some actions going in the helping business.
Another aspect of the current state is people whom have left the Church of Scientology staying focused on, and focusing attention on how awful it has become there. How terrible it was, so bad they had to leave. I understand this. We all left for similar reasons. The BPC has to be gotten rid of somehow. BUT it is my opinion that there is too much of this unproductive yak yak… I would love to see people who leave write up their condition if they need that, get the BPC off and then get the show back onto the road. They were there for a purpose. Why not get that purpose rekindled and lets’ hear the success and the progresses and the new ingenious ways of applying Rons tech in new incredible ways… HAVE FUN !!
EverLove,
Per
Denmark
NB: I would love to hear from you, and if you have any problem applying what you know or want to do, then give me a buzz and I would gladly lend a hand !!
I am waiting patiently, even though you tease.
Well said Per. This brings to mind several issues for me. It is all well enough and good to tell people to “keep it moving”.
You see Marty, has not only been able to “keep it moving” with the right hand, but has handled the suppression with the left.
I have managed to do that in a much smaller way without 1/100th of the burden.
Many are out here auditing daily and ignoring all of the ch ch ch ch changes.
Some are completely stalled in awe and wonder.
Some have reversed from being a fanatic to being a anti anti hate participant.
At the bottom of this I think people discount the fact that Hubbard had emotion and was more than capable of being emotional. He said and did things because he was emotional and/or even misemotional.
There are people that depend heavily on being led by others, and when the leader falters so do they. It is a type of personal inertia.
All the “yak yak yaking” is still from some want to KNOW. So I do not see that as a bad thing. I have come to understand there is a reverse CDEI scale. People can become curious about or desirous of out of ARC issues. But the sensation so parallels earlier positive interests it seems “all good”. As does being in ARC with out of ARC purposes and goals.
A lot of people expected Hubbard or David Miscavige or the Sea Org or their Mission Holder or Org E.D. or their F.S.M. to hold their hand and think for them all the way. They feel let down.
All of this is not only in the arena of Scientology, it is in all groups across the world. For several decades we had to listen to people blame it all on their parents. And people are only starting to rise above that because they see others have opted not to.
It is all easy to say, “Keep it moving”. Some people can and some people can not. Many people “drop out” all over the world every day. They drop out of school, they drop out of marriages, they drop out of families, they drop out of the military, they drop out of the office, they drop out of society. People unsubscribe everyday.
Some people become so riveted on the Scientology arena they see themselves and Scientology as uniquest. That they have unsubscribed to Scientology is a very unique or that they are still subscribed as a very unique. But if they could take their eyes off the drama they would see, it is happening all over the world in every activity across the dynamics, and it is not just part and parcel to this arena.
This whole activity got very balled up with a lot of noise. Like a train wreck. It is a train wreck. And people are trying to figure out who / where they are in this train wreck. People who do not have that figured out can not just “keep it moving”.
Now, the interesting thing I see, is that those people are still in a better condition than before the train wreck. Because they see at this point, the burden of living belongs to them. And though that may bring about great feelings of inertia or despair, they are owning it and not passing it to the person on their left. (Hubbard)
There is and always two unique benefits to be had from a dance with a Scientology group.
1. The opportunity to look through Hubbard’s eyes. (By reading his memoirs) Called books, policies etc.
2. The conversations. The conversations between the auditor and P.C..
There are plenty of people mixed up on this train wreck that do not want to view through Hubbard’s eyes, or have a unique conversation. You can see that in the results of conversations between people that get laid on the table.
However, this was the only unique value to be had in Scientology.
From all the verbal ass whippings I have taken out here, and the judgements passed upon me for continuing, not one single person hostile towards me, has ever come up with the idea that I am still interested in THE CONVERSATIONS. And that is why I, am still getting auditing. Because conversations that I always though would be impossible, become possible.
So, I see a magic still flowing through the YAK YAK YAKing. A lot of people just took the conversations onto another platform where they could be possible to have at all. And I see this as very much part of any reward to be has from exploring life in this arena.
Rather than say, “At its core Scientology revolves around the auditing process,” wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, “The auditing process revolves around Scientology.” ?
And isn’t that part of the problem? and hasn’t that been part of the problem since the earliest days?
“This is a cold blooded and factual account of your last sixty trillion years.” From ‘What to Audit’ by L. Ron Hubbard, 1952.
Words and designations can be used to create distances between people. I have found there have been great distances created between in Scientology. The mere fact that women can be carted off to abortion clinics, turn on their own children, staff can turn on someone they have worked with for decades. Yes, words can shoot someone people into very lonely corners. Yet, why are we all still here having the conversations? Where do we all come to stand on the same platform with some understand between us today?
We are all in the healing game. Standing in that understanding, we come together again.
I’m not so sure this is correct. It may apply to Dianetics, but, at its core, Scientology revolves around control, both of the PC and the environment. In fact, until the PC is subject to control, the tech cannot “go in”. There are any number of Tech and Admin references which confirm this. In fact, such is the level of control required, Auditors train so as to be able to physically restrain a PC who wants to end the session without the Auditor’s permission.
Again, I am not sure this is correct. Another purpose of a Scientology auditor is to collect personal information for subsequent use against the person, or any other person mentioned during the auditing session. Again, there are plenty of references which confirm this. Auditors also guide the PC towards pre-determined “realisations”. LRH wrote in 1952, for example, that “the auditor who insists on auditing the current lifetime only, when he has the whole track technqiue available, is wasting time and effort and is, in fact, swindling his preclear”. In short, auditing is the procedure by which Scientology stops telling a person to look into their mind and starts telling them what’s there.
This sort of true but, coming where it does, is non sequitur. “Witnessing”, as it is commonly understood, has little to do with an examination of oneself and much more to do with maintaining an external view of the world and what’s going on in it. I accept that there is some psychology-type references to “witnessing” but, again, these are more to do with meditation which has nothing to do with Auditing. For example, Auditing only starts after a person has been convinced in the existence of Engrams, where as meditation requires no prior conditioning nor agreement with any external concepts. Buddha achieved his feats without an Auditor and without being subject to the level of control required by Scientology for its claimed benefits to accrue and without agreement on any concepts. He actually threw out any concepts of the material world including those which provide the emeter.
I could go on but I think you get the idea that I see multiple flaws in this OP. All in all, it reads like an attempt to reframe Scientology as some sort of self-enlightenment therapy coupled with the standard Scientology tactic of framing it in such as manner as to garner reflected glory from the likes of Buddha. (The use of the term “witnessing” also carries with it the implicit link to Christianity and further reinforces the religious cloaking). Its the same standard Div. 6 approach taken when Scientologists attempt to frame the subject with science and, almost inevitably, the name Einstein pops up along with a bunch of quantum woo.
I suggest that the OP could be vastly improved if it is commenced with the first few words of the second paragraph. You may also wish to consider providing definitions in relation to some of the concepts being discussed. What, for example, is “mental energy”? Using “charge” to define the term obfuscates rather than clarifies and falls into that trap of suggesting energy is a substance.
On the other hand, you may well be addressing the already converted believers, in which case, go for it and ignore this comment. The more verbal tech, the better, I say.
To Per…Denmark:
Excellent, brilliant post. It aligns with but is more specific than the “Bitchy little girls, clean that ashtray, get your ass moving” comment I posted a few months ago.
A few years ago I brought in a couple of people to my local church. They both got a little data and some book auditing. Both thought it was interesting but had no desire for anything else. I found out then that when you intend to help someone, FIND OUT WHAT THEY REALLY WANT. I was disappointed that the regs. weren’t skilled at this and didn’t seem to have this as a basic operating procedure. The real problem was that I did not take this responsibility myself and come up to professionalism at it.
I have a few things I would like to comm. with you about. Drop me a note if you get a chance.
MarkNR@hushmail.com
Mark
The way I have taken all of the complexities, doubts, shades of grey, friends, enemies and friendenemies (1.1’s), been able to sort them onto one side of the highway, and some on the other, and keep the middle path clear to walk for myself, is to let everything go from my mind that is “Scientology” (word compelled emotion), and look at WHO is in the healing game, and WHO is not.
There are people mixed up in this theater that couldn’t heal an ingrown toe nail if they were paid big bucks to do it. There are people that have never healed anyone or anything. There are people claiming to be healers that would and punish everyone they come into contact with.
The only reason I have Marty on the right side of this highway is BY HIS ACTIONS in the healing game.
The healing game is UNIVERSAL and not a game only owned by “Scientologists” or “Scientology”. If that were true, there would not have been a civilization here when Hubbard was born.
Everybody matters in the healing game is they can actually HEAL.
In Scientology groups, you find people in the “healing game” that are actually serial killers and sociopaths. Forget their name tag status and org board origin, they are NOT in the HEALING game. Thospeople can be filed for reference on the left side of any road carved out for those in the healing game.
This video illustrates perfectly well people who wormed their way into this arena who are clearly not part of any healing game.
Take the words and status and uniforms and corporations and all these significances out of the picture and just LOOK at who is REALLY in the healing game, and who is in the killing and wounding game.
This is PURPOSE and is senior to policy anyway! As is that can’t be seen by now.
And I don’t care what name they go by or under what banner or group or race. If they are in the healing game, we are united in purpose. That travels all the way down to the school nurse in Kindergarten.
What confuses people, is people who are standing in a healing game, who are not healing anybody:
Re Marty’s opening: I agree that objectifying one’s experience has great value. It can release one from silence, from isolation, from fear, and it externalizes and puts in perspective what can grow in odd and painful ways when internalized. In research, it is broadly agreed that the truly objective can be sought but not fully attained. Our sense of what is real, or what is objective, is a construct that (we hope) ever more closely approximates truth. Accordingly, research is peer-reviewed. The more eyes — especially rational, trained, intelligent, non-judgmental eyes that are aware of their biases — look at something and agree on what they are seeing, the more we approach an agreed upon objective reality. And here is where Scientology utterly fails in objectifying things.
Hubbard’s insights have never been objectified. He did have some good insights that I believe would be valuable and could be confirmed. He also ran off the rails in many areas (evolution, history of man, where volcanoes were or were not 75 million years ago, age of the universe, nature of radiation, why radiation damages living organisms, supposed life on Venus, pronunciation of galaxy, speed of light as a constant, his own marital history, his military service, his education, and a gazillion other details big and small). In such a mix of insights and baloney, every grain of sugar must be taken with a grain of salt — it must be studied and verified objectively. So that’s where Scientology fails to meet basic tests of objective reality.
And it gets worse in session. Part of what works in standard psychotherapy is that the therapist can give _feedback_. It is this feedback that helps a patient (or client if you will) to understand that he or she is not the only one to have gone through a certain thing, that his or her feelings are typical of others in similar situations, that there are many resources of people and groups in like situations that can share how to resolve situations. That is all cut off in auditing. Yes, an auditor might smile at the end of the session and say “your needle is floating.” But an auditor will not share any of the preceding — and it is well that it is so, because auditors are not trained, knowledgeable, or capable in that regard, at least not solely through auditor training. At a time when a PC’s case might be advanced greatly by simple empathy, the auditor cannot provide it. Empathy is too much like sympathy (in the Scientology world) and sympathy is forbidden. Thus auditing is rigged so that it can often be done rotely, robotically, with complete lack of empathy, and with none of the feedback and guidance that would truly help someone objectify a charge-laden experience. I believe this can and does lock PCs into a profound isolation, a cage of lostness built of bars consisting of the inability to communicate — one cannot talk about case. Practices rotely and robotically, as the cult does, auditing can degrade the soul and spirit and silence the passion and drive of someone. In short, witnessing is not enough for one to gain objectification of troubling memories and experiences in standard Scientology auditing. Hubbard missed some very big pieces.
Re Pers: I would argue that the ongoing discussions are healthy and necessary. They are what psychologists might call _processing_. Processing what one has gone through is crucial to the healing process. Discussing the good, the bad, and the ugly has also shined light on the criminal abuses of the cult as perpetrated against individuals, courts, governments — and its own members. In my opinion, these conversations need to go on.
And when the fear of looking within, without the need for “standard looking” ceases, because that fear is cognized as a control ploy for regimented membership and a deliberate assult on intellectual sovereignty, a new world of spiritual possiblity will unfold with all it’s hope and glory.
I for one have gone back to the real basics. The land of the Vedas were it all started. The techniques for soul freedom abound from Mother India.
When you have relinquished that fear that Ron himself instilled in your consciousness, many things await you. Many things and many friends. Friends old and new and very ancient ones. Who’s loyalty has not been marred by the rudeness of death.
“When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous.”
~~~ Albert Einstein
“India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe’s languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy.
~~~ Will Durant (American philosopher)
“The motion of the stars calculated by the Hindus before some 4500 years vary not even a single minute from the tables of Cassine and Meyer (used in the 19-th century). The Indian tables give the same annual variation of the moon as the discovered by Tycho Brahe – a variation unknown to the school of Alexandria and also to the Arabs who followed the calculations of the school… “The Hindu systems of astronomy are by far the oldest and that from which the Egyptians, Greek, Romans and – even the Jews derived from the Hindus their knowledge.”
~~~Jean Sylvain Bailly (French astronomer)
You look through the Scientology track, and where Hubbard set others up for losses. You will find at that point he stepped out of the healing game into some other game. And he wasn’t alone. All over the Internet in this arena right now, you will run across figures who ARE NOT part of any healing game.
You get confusions about identity in the Church:
“Well Hmmmm, what am I? Who am I? Am I soldier, a cop, the thought police, the stitch, the loyal officer the unloyal officer, the celebrity, the patron, the Guardian, the judge, the court reporter, the soldier on mission?????”
For every ONE person in this “healing game” there are 400 others who are there for different reasons. And Hubbard did offer up new reasons to be there. “Power, altitude, ethics presence, money, etc etc” These are ALL purposes NOT related to the healing game.
He bought everyone in under the same banner. Healing. Then he set up new purposes and cross purposed people. As HE established new purposes for himself.
And that is all he did. But it has been up to people themselves, to remain on a purpose line that is true for them. And I think the people was able to pull off the healing game, had other purposes they preferred to dabble in, than the healing game.
Do you think DM standing down in Texas with a restraining order on him paying to obtain a license for domestic terrorist as part of his “religious rights” is part of any healing game? I don’t.
Where do you see the balm in that theater? The possibility that Monique can establish her rights to live in peace and pursue freedom and happiness as guaranteed by the constitution. Forget “religious rights” if they can OVER RIDE constitutional rights. That is the old game of making it appear “new rights” are being granted while in fact he is making sure people are LOOSING rights. Their constitutional rights! Look for where he is REALLY setting everyone up for a loss, because that is how you will figure out what he is REALLY up to. And it is NEVER “the healing game.”
All of that said, I have pondered for years what Hubbard could have possibly meant when he assured this is a game where everybody wins.
Well, invitations to all sorts of games were extended in this game. And there were takers. There were people that wanted to be cops, there were people that wanted to dominate, there were people that wanted all sorts of things to do outside the healing game.
All of that does not end the healing games. Those have been going on since before the sun in this galaxy ever rose. The Church of Scientology will never have a monopoly on that.
So for those of us that ARE part of the healing game, we can just keep it moving. I don’t care if it your local P.T.A..
This dream of spiritual liberation is still alive. India has given so much. Without it, there would be no Buddha, no Christ, no Hubbard. One historian has said,” when we travel back to the dawn of history, the dawn of vedic culture, what we find is not a barbarism but refined knowledge.
We are the legacy of that ancient civilization. And now Vedic culture is main stream. Splane that one to me Lucy!
We are all on a solo journey. Go within and know. Direct perception of relative and ultimate truth and the techniques to get there are the free gifts of the ancient and present sages of India.
Tat Tvam Asi, Thou Art
“I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, – astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc. It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganges to learn geometry…But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange journey had the reputation of the Brahmins’ science not been long established in Europe.”
Voltaire
Schopenhauer: “Vedas are the most rewarding and the most elevating book which can be possible in the world.” (Works VI p.427)
Hu Shih, former Ambassador of China to USA: “India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.”
Henry David Thoreau, American Thinker & Author: Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I have felt that some unearthly and unknown light illuminated me. In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climbs, and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I read it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night.
Sublime post Marty asks for a repost of this video
“The Beginner’s Guide To L. Ron Hubbard”
“Empathy is too much like sympathy (in the Scientology world) and sympathy is forbidden. Thus auditing is rigged so that it can often be done rotely, robotically, with complete lack of empathy, and with none of the feedback and guidance that would truly help someone objectify a charge-laden experience.”
Sympathy is forbidden but empathy isn’t – it comes into play inTRs, especially TR-2 and TR-4. An ack works like magic in the witnessing process.
Regarding the posted video: Coerced abortions in the Sea Org began in the 1960s on the “Flagship.” See Hana Eltringham’s talk on this topic.
The anti baby outlook dates back to 1952, with Hubbard’s (PDC lecture) description of “Homo Saps” as “GEs” (Genetic Entities), that can only think in terms of “family,” with the family unit being described as a “GE” fixation that does not make good groups. My guess is that, with Hubbard’s 1982 “Pain and Sex” whole track implants “discoveries,” and the accompanying HCOB, the anti-reproduction view became further enforced.
The “mystery management” of the early 1980s was supposed to secretly run Scientology under Hubbard, who was in deep hiding after the 1977 FBI raids and other complications, IRS, civil cases, etc.
In fairness, Marty’s earlier recent articles do explain the problematic nature of the word “Scientology.” Scientology has been hopelessly corrupted by its own founder.
The statement, “At its core Scientology revolves around the auditing process,” modified to become “AS INITIALLY PRESENTED TO PUBLIC AND NEW SCIENTOLOGISTS, at its core Scientology [is said] to revolve around the auditing process,” I think, says it more completely, and says it in a way that fits with Marty’s earlier statements.
As one descends more deeply into Scientology, of course, auditing become something other than it was first presented as being. BAIT AND SWITCH.
I agree Norwood. There seems to be a thought stopping tendency for some to equate revealing suppressed perceptions about Ron with whining. It all still comes down to, in my opinion, a successful mind control campaign that Hubbard expertly layed into the mind of believers, past and present.
To perceive criticism with something wrong with you.
“come on ladies and gentleman! Stop being wussies and stuck in the past. Stop disrespecting an old dead man.
Basically: stop looking. Stop looking, there is something wrong with you!
The very elect, the very well educated in Scientology who now consider themselves free from the regimentation are still under the spell of: stop looking.
He’s long dead, you are so negative, you are stuck in the past, you have overts, you’re being critical on and on and on.
Yes Norwood, History of Man is the problem. Telling human beings what their past is is part of the cognitive dissonance. Good auditors do not evaluate for the pcs. But the OT levels are a total evaluation.
AND
The upper levels is where we get justification to harm others to protect the only way. the upper levels define the war, define the enemy, define the heroes.
Judging Ron is not judging the past. Pointing out the flaws in Hubbard is not stuck in the past. L.Ron Hubbard is alive and well in present time pages and present time CDs in present time books that instruct present time people to do present time things.
Calling those who judge Hubbard as whiny stuck in the past trouble makers that help nobody is evidence, to me, that they are still under the spell of criticism=overts, judging Ron=evil, observation=attack.
To not cognize the conceptual causation between past writings and the revealed character of Hubbard and the present insanity is in itself evidence of the hypnotic effects that decades and decades have had on the mental health of Scientologists.
Dissent and freedom of speech, to be able to talk about anything to anybody at anytime, to look at anything……….. Is a sign of strength, condidence, intellectual sovereignty.
Never let anyone stop you from pondering anything you want by sounding high and mighty with elitist intellects. That model has not worked so well for Scientology.
I think Marty is right. He is not talking about the current culture. He is talking about the Scientology tech, from what I get. What draws any person into this arena? You are promising them a conversation. That is all auditing is, a conversation.
There are plenty of people out here and in there that are scared to death to have a conversation.
In people’s minds, are the conversations they should have had, but didn’t. Something they wanted to say, but didn’t. The “voices in your head” are still on some itsa, protest, whatever. Conversations that go ” in your head” are conversations misplaced in time. They should have happened earlier in another place and time, and it was not possible.
Per, I think you do a disservice to people when you equate looking at Hubbard with a free investigative mind as somehow whiny.
It is thought stopping to equate anybody who has a valid view of Hubbard, his tech and procedures as somehow not “getting on with it.”
To be able to look at anything at anytime. To be able to make an observation about anybody about anything is a sign of free speech.
You have lumped a whole catagory of people with being stuck in the past who have valid views that need to be said.
Scientology has had a singular distinction for having approved and dissaproved thinking enforced through sophistry, scientism and hypnotic rhetoric.
I say it is a sign of health, freedom and liberty to speak your mind without having the fundamentalist axe of thought stopping land on one’s capacity to be critical.
And saying people are stuck in the past is such a thought stopping technique.
It is also a standard Scientologist thought stopping technique.
There….. ha ha ha. That felt good.
People, say whatever you want and let no one tell you that there is something wrong with being constructively critical!
That is part of the sickness that was drilled into you. It is ok to be critical. In fact, your mental health may very much depend on it.
“On the other hand, you may well be addressing the already converted believers, in which case, go for it and ignore this comment. The more verbal tech, the better, I say.”
According to Hubbard, you are being Tone 4 on the Human Chart of Evaluation”, that is being able to talk about “deep seated religious beliefs” IIRC.
So, yes I agree, verbal tech. LOL
But that verbal tech got stopped by a few Policy Letters. LOL
My impression is that Marty is trying to find a way to talk to people coming out of scientology, encouraging them to come up out of scientology, away from it, not by crashing and burning along with it but by grabbing some of its useful tools and understandings such as auditing and the auditors code and pointing out that these are relatable to spiritual and healing modalities that are and can be found and practiced in world at large. He is correct that auditing is a form of (supported) witnessing (within) and has described elsewhere the auditors code that suggests an embodied practice of compassion and equanimity on the part of the auditor. These are good tools (misused by some, or even by a majority – doesn’t mean the tool is not good.)
While it is understandable that persons coming out of a cult will need to go over the past and that some terms and practices used about other modalities may frightened them because it sounds like the cult – distinctions can and must be made. But lets not drag everybody backwards by endless nit picking about what scientology is or isnt or what ron hubbard said and where he said it. These are not the subject of the post. The subject is “witnessing” as in yes if you know auditing you have had some experience with witnessing, how pure awareness (turned inside as in buddha) can change the mind, clean it up, bring it to “as is.” The subject is also “prohibiting” as in being locked in a cult not thinking for yourself, losing awareness of yourself, not being responsible for youself, doing harm to self and others because ordered, becoming utterly dependant…how do you escape that? And if you do, how to get back to self awareness and responsibility? Well, the subject is “witnessing” and that would be a way. For some, it will be good to hear how they can use something that they already have some experience with to get better. For others, they will feel an aversion because of past associations – so they can try something else and it will be called something else and it will work for them better or not. It will be of benefit to have a counseler who can tell them they have options.
Here and elsewhere it has been said that auditing is a form of hypnosis. It can be used that way. To create disassociation. But it can also be used to create an alert and observant attention. Human beings move in and out of trance states all day long ( without e meters) surrounded and very susceptible to manipulation and being manipulated by so many things. Most consumption is driven by being in a trance. Hormones are big trance inducers. People think hypnosis is some exotic thing. It is not.
Hey Brian, I watched this short video recently that I thought was an amazing viewpoint to consider for both the pro-gang and the critics of Scientology. It’s a whole new perspective!
It’s more than a few Policy Letters. Deviousness, manipulation, and coercion both subtle and not so subtle, can be found in Hubbard’s instructions to Scientologists, going as far back as the early 1950s. Hubbard was writing letters to the FBI reporting people he didn’t like as “communists,” and was at war with “squirrels,” since the early 1950s. Free speech and Scientology, if it was about Scientology or Hubbard, were never compatible.
As for the Hubbard Chart of Human Evaluation – before becoming too impressed with it, take a look at the fine print (in Science of Survival) about how those evaluated to be “low toned,” such as those who are anti-Dianetics/Scientology, or anti-Hubbard, should be isolated from society, and have no right of any kind.
„…keeping one comatose and crippled for millennia to come…“
I know this datum from the past. I had been beginner staffmember (comm course completion) and someone told me that. I put it into the „waste basket“ as I thought he only wanted to look important and knowing.
I think there is a MU on the word Sympathy and even Emphaty by LRH
The Zero Speeches & Spiritologie Convention Lectures 2011
Great post! So true.
Hey Miraldi, good day to you! What a beautiful message. One I seek to live. And in my circle of friends as well, we seek this way of living.
I know it doesn’t sound like I do, to some, because of my being critical here more than I am supportive of the “new Scientology.”
I may be arrogant, stuck in the past, brave and caring or just disgruntled; that is for others to decide.
But if I can shake only one mind over the “do not enter or you will suffer punishment for being critical” then I will be happy.
In this diaspora, something I wrote about over a year ago now, there will be Reform Scientologists, Fundamentalist Scientologists, the dreaded “Mixing Practices Scientologists” and those who stop calling themselves Scientologists all together and move on to newer horizons of spiritual practice.
The reason I am here is to simply share the fact that I am the latter. I have moved on from most of the procedural aspects of Scientology all together.
I know there are others moving out of the church that are similar to me. It is to them I hope my views are of value.
The key, the linch pin, the holy grail is rehabilitated critisism.
To reverse a diabolical suppression of criticism by being critical.
Very interesting. He did have some issues on family. But he was very possessive about Sea Org Members, the family he mocked up. “Family is bad” is a consideration and ser fac. Yet, he does say it someplace as an R factor. Still, what was the Sea Org but a family he created where everyone was to be obedient to him? The big daddy. I think it’s kind of funny. I also think a lot of the people who originally went into the Sea Org had some serious out ruds with their own families. Most of them threw their families under the bus. But the culture in Scientology is like one big dysfunctional family. Like, the worse family you would want to grow up in! What was the Sea Org but “let’s all start sleeping together now under the same roof and you are going to get an allowance.” “Everyone is going to have a nanny above them.” Geeze, no wonder……
All your views are valid for you. As Per’s are for him. It’s a two way street, the granting of beingness.
Did you know Per is a master musician also?
If someone puts hot buttered grits in front of me, I go unconscious, loose all will power and self control. I only snap out of it after I have cleaned every last grit particle off of my plate.
I agree with you to a point, Darkest H.
The ideology of Scientology creates an all-encompassing context while one is “witnessing” using Scientology auditing. The presence of a “reactive mind”, for example, is a part of the ideology which is a purely made-up construct and has no actual existence or reality, as it was described by L Ron Hubbard.
These false constructs in the ideology of Scientology cause a fantasy world to be the context of the witnessing. This happens so much that after a while, witnessing with Scientology auditing just serves to produce more Scientology-based fantasies, all within the made up construct of the ideology.
Witnessing with Scientology takes one further and further away from reality.
And that is the problem.
There is no such thing as a reactive mind, as described by Hubbard. So “auditing it out” to become “Clear” is a delusional activity, which then helps to hold in other delusions – all installed by accepting the ideology of Scientology.
Reality will never fit into any ideology. And in order to get anything good out of your Scientology auditing, you have to dump the scientology context in which that activity was done, and put your “wins” into a context that is more reality-based, and less delusional.
Alanzo
I totally agree with your stance on hypnosis, Darkest H.
Scientology auditing is a highly developed form of hypnotherapy. “Hypnotherapy” is the larger bin in which Dianetics and Scientology fits.
The use of TRs and Model Session produces a highly focused, hypnotic state where the pc focuses his attention onto one thing to the exclusion of other things in the environment. This is the main characteristic of a hypnotic state. And a hypnotic state is a hyper-aware state, and NOT a more “unconscious state” as Hubbard said a hypnotic state was.
And yes, hypnotic states can be some of the most therapeutic states that human beings can have. Prayer, meditation, even watching a great movie or becoming absorbed into a good book, or watching a camp fire while people tell stories, are all hypnotic states. And just as you said, they make people vulnerable to suggestion – which Hubbard capitalized on and did not safeguard against at all in his auditing like he claimed he did in the 50’s.
L Ron Hubbard was one of the most unethical hypnotherapists ever in this respect.
But if those real safeguards – that almost every real hypnotherapist practices – can be put into Scientology, then it MIGHT be an improvement.
Part of the ideology, though, is that “hypnotic states are bad”. Hubbard created that prestidigitation in order to hide what he was really doing with hypnosis in his therapy.
So again, the Scientology ideology is its own main failure. If all those false things from the Scientology ideology were extracted, then MAYBE something good would come from it.
Maybe.
But would it be Scientology at all at that point?
I say no, it would not be.
Alanzo
I think you are right — LRH had an MU on “sympathy.” (LRH had a number of MUs on different topics, so would not be surprising.)
Armstrong has an interesting discussion of “sympathy” at http://www.gerryarmstrong.org/archives/3272. Did putting “sympathy” so low on the tone scale create a lot of mini-sociopaths who were willing to do harm to others with no qualms as long as the acts advanced Scientology? I think the answer is self-evident.
In studies on sociopaths, there is conjecture that just having the right genetic makeup is not enough to make a sociopath. Culture is involved. A culture that has high demands for respect, collaboration, and so forth can dampen the otherwise sociopathic tendencies in some borderlines. Could a culture like that of Scientology, which fosters disrespect, criminal activities, disconnection, and even destruction, of “outsiders” encourage those on the borderline of sociopathy to move into that sympathy- and empathy-less terrain?
I think so. I saw it with how staff were treated. I saw it with how anyone who got sick, or ill, or had a car accident, etc. got treated. There was no empathy. There was only a sort of disdain at best, or disgust at worst, that someone could be so down stat or out-ethics to pull in such a motivator.
Whatever “religion” would refuse a mother (like Karen) a request to have a last view of the body of her deceased son? How can people lock people in chain lockers, in RPF or RPF’s RPF? To disconnect? To dispose of people silently and without regret? To force abortions (in direct contradiction of DMSMH by the way, where AAs or Attempted Abortions were considered a horrible crime), where execs are humiliated and assaulted, where people are bankrupted, where the “exchange” is always toward the church and away from the individual — leaving some people destitute and bankrupt, and so on? (literally, so on ad nauseum).
The MLs and ARC at the end of the memos are a lake of love that looks miles wide yet turns out to be a fraction of an inch deep. Any of those writers can turn on someone in a second if they do not toe the line. Scientology, in some ways, may prove to be a truly heartless religion. NOTE: I am not saying Scientologists, the people, are heartless, because I don’t believe that. I never became heartless; most people don’t; but I sure watched a number of people turn steely-eyed cold and even ruthless in their fundamentalist passion.
A good ack does wonders. I can remember one (1) truly good ack that I received that was genuinely empathetic, and that was outside an auditing session. And several other good acks in other situations outside auditing.
I got — and I hope gave — lots of good acks in auditing sessions. But about 90% of communication is non-verbal. And in the TRs you are trained not to use “vias” — which would include body language, expressions, tone of voice and so forth. Yes, if you are in that sacred space (what I would call it) with another person in a TRs-in mode, the ack can still be very powerful as a validation of witnessing, as you point out — and I agree on that.
At the same time, our human nature to care about others fights against indoctrination in the church not to not feel sympathy (no sympathy is actually higher on the tone scale than sympathy), to not validate someone who has pulled in a motivator (got ill, had an accident, lost a job, etc.), to not “collapse terminals” (in the pseudo-scientific lingo of what LRH thought sympathy was) and so on.
So good acks are great — I do very much agree with you on that. In terms of organizational / church culture though, I don’t see sympathy, or even empathy woven into the “beingness” of the church. You may find books or literature easily titled things like “the compassionate Christ” or the “compassionate Buddha.” I’ve yet to see a title of anything like “the compassionate Source” or “the compassionate OT VIII.”
Hey Oracle, yes, all views have their place. I would not be for free reasoned criticism if baulked at those with arguments against my views. Being agreed withis so boring ha ha ha.
I think I neeed me some Margaret to take my argument apart! Where is a good reasoned criticism when you need one!
I am up for public deconstruction anytime.
BTW Oracle, I am so glad we had our dialog on Mike’s site. I feel we became friends, as much as can be on a blog.
Also I truly respect how you have made it your own and kept your intellectual freedom.
Bravo!!
No I did not know that.
I think LRH saw sympathy as a weakness. Fatal and revealing flaw. The smiles and camera taking photos on Apollo, by LRH, while others were suffering the indignities of physical punishment illustrate, to me, beyond a doubt his disdain for that “weakness.”
Never fear to hurt another in a just cause: in the hands of the non sympathetic this one can mean big time pain for others.
Another disturbing illustration of LRH’s lack of sympathy: in that video on YouTube, The Shrinking World of L Ron Hubbard, a 1/2 hr interview with him, the one that he lied about his marriages; when talking about his first wife he says,”she’s dead.” And then proceeds to smile.
Smiling from ear to ear after saying that a past family member is dead always creeped me out. I could never smile when talking about the death of someone. Creepy.
But relegating sympathy below hate on the tone scale makes sense to Ron. Kinda like screaming and getting angry when Quinten commited suicide because it was bad PR for the old man. Not the sad loss of a family member, but anger about his bad PR.
Satanic coldness
David Mayo touches on Symphaty in auditing.
These are great comments you made here Oracle and it really is a healing game. That was the reason I started Scientology in 1972. And by the way, Van Morrison’s horn section and especially the gal on sax just healed me totally.
Something I’ve been wondering about for a while is, if Scientology does not achieve its advertised claims, what does it achieve? And what else in the world achieves the same result or better? I guess that information will be compiled over several more years, with hundreds of people trying out Scientology and other techniques while trying to be as honest about it as they can.
For me, the following quote from your description of Venture One, summarizes wisely an important concept: “Given a workable methodology for pursuing such objectifying, your own choice in the matter of what to do, what to choose, what to pursue and what to react to can be restored to you”, as this allows each individual to choose his path as he himself sees it.
I think the basic purpose of scientology is a trap, a trap most of us fall for, including me.the trap is that we can have control over matter, energy, space and time. ” The master does his joband then stops. He understands that the universe is forever out of control, and that trying to dominate events goes against the current of the Tao ” Tao Te Ching
no worries, I’m not impressed with the HUBBARD Chart of Human Evaluation. For one thing, it totally violates the auditors code as the chart evaluates. The joke was on us. Laughter.
As Brian has said in past blogs, it’s Hubbardology and it began in 1950 as written here if true.
http://ca-da.org/history/vanvogt_history.htm
“Ron refused. The Foundation certificate was finally sent to graduates of all classes in Los Angeles with the words: HUBBARD DIANETIC AUDITOR.”
Furthermore, it says HubbardPL, HubbardCOB. Smash his name into history.
In reading that article in the link I provided, I also find interesting these stats:
“Shortly after mid-summer, Hubbard arrived and gave the first course. It lasted 30 intensive days, and cost $500. Over 300 persons took the course, and more were signing up for subsequent courses. It was in early 1951 that I heard that graduate auditors had formed the California Association of Dianetic Auditors, a corporation. The date of incorporation was February 27th, 1951. Apparently in its formative stages, when Ron was asked to give it his blessing he did so.”
$500 x 300 people is $150,000 dollars. That was a lot of money in 1950/51.
Well thank you Brian. The respect is mutual. As soon as you said “Geltman’s mission” I knew we were related.
“Witnessing with Scientology takes one further and further away from reality.”
This is assuming there is only one reality?
I agree, Letting Go.
That is the real question that needs to be asked, and answered, by each person who was involved in Scientology.
Scientology definitely achieved something for me when I first got involved: A sense of belonging to something larger than myself, a healthier and more productive way of life than I had been living, the chance to escape my old self and become someone new. These were all definitely achieved by Scientology, and they all made my life better.
No doubt about it.
Alanzo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Mesmer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_magnetism
” For example baron DuPotet says:
the fluid is not a substance that can be weighted, measured, condensed, it is a vital force (Du Potet)[6]”
I always wondered were Hubbard got “static” or “theta” or “life force” from.
He redefined fluid to “theta” and “static”.
Napoleon Hill called it the ether.
http://archive.org/stream/Law_Of_Success_in_16_Lessons/law-of-success-napoleon-hill#page/n17/mode/2up
Laughter! Music is medicinal. It has it’s own healing power.
It’s invisible too. That is very supernatural!
Well Gretchen, I can only speak from own experiences. It was never an issue for me to be at cause over matter energy space and time. I preferred to be the effect of it all actually.
I don’t know what area of case original OTVll covers. But that auditing for me, was the BOMB! And oddly, since I have gotten it, it seems that all I have to do is wish, and the forces about me are at my command. And it is a very strange and wonderful feeling. Very, very magical.
I think it aligns with responsibility on some dynamic. Because just like I realized I was “mocking it all up”, I realized I had been causing it all too.
People are already cause over matter energy space and time. They just don’t want to own in on it.
as you stated
” I guess that information will be compiled over several more years, with hundreds of people trying out Scientology and other techniques while trying to be as honest about it as they can.”
Unfortunately one cannot try out other techniques while one does Scientology.
that’s called having an open mind.
And no comparison is allowed while doing Scientology.
I don’t know if Scientology can give a person abilities or knowledge they didn’t already have. I think though through the conversations, you can find out who you really are. And what you really are. The gift is really, that discovery. It comes from inside of you. Because mostly all of us are well meaning people. With good intentions. And this does align with knowing how to know. I don’t know what kind of conversations other people have with their auditors. But I know the conversations I have, just would not be possible anywhere else. And in Scientology you can talk your way out of your own doubts, frustrations confusions. It is still all on you to come to every conclusion. So all of the magic is coming from you. All an auditor ever does is ask a P.C. to take a look. Not out the window, at themselves. How scary can it be to look in the mirror? Well, if it is very scary, do the thing that scares you. Everything anyone ever wants in any arena, is standing on the other side of fear.
I think the ethics officers, the sec checks, the soldiers, the militia, I think that was all in very poor taste on Hubbard’s part.
But he really had it going on when he was translating the magic and he was in the healing game.
I prefer not to think of him as he became later on in life. But, he wasn’t at his best then. I have a cousin who did a lot of time in prison. I prefer not to think of her as a criminal either. Because she was and is other things too. It’s just kind of a mercy to cut people a break when they are not at their best. You go out, you get drunk. You don’t want the person you went out with to always think of you as a drunk after that. It was just a blip on the radar. I think Hubbard did alright in the first half of the book, I just put the book down when I found the second half of little interest to me personally. And I think it is true for a lot of people, because the culture has become more important and more interesting, than anything else issued from Hubbard in his act 2.
Did you know Frank and Helen?
Gretchen,
Exactly. The last view brings equanimity, peace, etc.
Silvia,
Yes! Thank you.
The strangest thing I ever read by Hubbard was that man suspects all offers of help. We live in a totally help dependent society. You can’t get to work with out the help of your car. We create gadgets that are not even human to help us. Mankind is insatiable for help.
But, if you get it, that Hubbard said that because he himself suspected all offers of help, and this was a handicap, a lot of what he organized and created makes sense.
Brian, what I basically got from this video with the teacher Adyashanti is that we may be doing the best possible work, but if we’re doing it from a divided state, where we see good and bad, right and wrong – that’s exactly what we’re putting into the energy field, into “the unmanifest,” the unified consciousness.
Whatever is put into the unmanifest is what is going to fuel what happens in the world, because everything is so much more powerful in the unmanifest. And if we’re in a state of division, we’re transmitting our division like a radio broadcast into the unmanifest. The universe registers division – no matter why we’re divided.
So the question is: Are we divided? Do we see an enemy? Because if we do, we’re not seeing things in the true light and we become part of the problem we’re trying to solve. Divided consciousness doesn’t actually have a lot of inherent power, so a divided consciousness needs a lot of people to make a difference. What has great power is a unified consciousness.
In other words, it’s not what I am AGAINST, it’s what I’m FOR, he says. The reason a lone person like Gandhi could do so much was because he was always telling people “We’re not against. It’s what we’re for.” And he transmitted the state of undivided consciousness to others – which is why it had so much power. It’s fine to love…but do I hate…? Wow, huh?
Amen…
“Did putting ‘sympathy’ so low on the tone scale…”
FOTF2012, I don’t disagree about the horrendous things that have gone on in the CoS, but I wanted to point out that LRH had a specific definition of sympathy as a level on the tone scale:
“Sympathy is commonly accepted to mean the posing of an emotional state similar to the emotional state of an individual in grief or apathy. This is a secondary reaction and has its own peculiarity but is nevertheless on the tone scale between 0.9 and 0.4… (Advanced Procedure and Axioms)
Also, Hubbard didn’t actually “put” sympathy (or any other tone level) at some arbitrary level of his choosing. The tone scale wasn’t something he invented – it was a discovery. And the fact that it does exist has been confirmed by scientists who calibrated the energy of various emotions and then plotted them on a scale – in the same order that Hubbard did. If you google “emotion frequencies” you’ll find a lot of data on it. Here’s a link to an article where you can see that the scale shows the common emotions in the same order as the Tone Scale : http://zoesoulspa.com/2012/01/06/vibrations-of-emotions/
And here’s a link to a review of the book the article refers to: http://www.wicca-spirituality.com/power-vs-force.html
FOTF2012, not using vias is not the same thing as being cold and robotic. And I don’t think it’s true that “body language, expressions, tone of voice and so forth” are necessarily vias. Here’s a reference that even mentions robotic tone level:
“Your beingness and attitude toward the pc are the things which your TRs measure. If you as an auditor simply go into a robotic imitation of a tone level or attitude or identity you aren’t there at all. It will be apparent in your TRs. It is the beingness which comes first and that gets reflected in your attitude and your attitude, in turn, is then reflected in your TRs.” (HCOB 10 Apr 80 “Auditor Beingness”)
Brian, sympathy hasn’t been “relegated” to a level on the tone scale. Please see my reply above to FOTF2012 regarding sympathy as a specific tone level – i.e. a specific frequency – and regarding the fact that the tone scale has been validated by science.
Also, definition #1 below shows that sympathy can have either a survival value or a non-survival value, and many Scientologists never got the difference so they think that Hubbard was against sympathy:
SYMPATHY, 1. a terrible thing but is considered to be a very valuable thing. The survival value of sympathy is this: when an individual is hurt or immobilized, he cannot fend for himself. He must count on another or others to care for him. His bid for such care is the enlistment of the sympathy of others. This is practical. If men weren’t sympathetic, none of us would be alive. The non-survival value of sympathy is this: an individual fails in some activity. He then considers himself incapable of Surviving by himself. Even though he isn’t sick actually he makes a bid for sympathy. A psychosomatic illness is at once an explanation of failure and a bid for sympathy. (HFP), p. 122) 2 . sympathy is commonly accepted to mean the posing of an emotional state similar to the emotional state of an individual in grief or apathy. It is on the tone scale between 0.9 and 0.4 . Sympathy follows or is based upon overt action by the preclear. Sympathy can be mechanically considered as the posing of any emotion so as to be similar to the emotion of another. (AP&A, p. 23)
Oracle:
As my martial arts instructor said after awarding my black belt, “Congratulations, you are now a beginner.”
Mark
Oracle:
This aligns with my paper describing the two original sins. “Denial of beingness” and “Denial of responsibility.”
It was really you all along.
Mark
Unsolicited help is often suspect. Classic reach and withdraw.
Communication offered without effort is often more easily received than communication impelled.
Mark
Marildi:
It never ceases to amaze me how an obvious communication by Ron can be completely ignored. This discussion about sympathy is a classic case in point. In the tone scale sense, it was an entirely proper use of the word. Next, clear the entire word, the rest of the definitions and usages.
You have a talent for duplicating the entire communication.
A friend once complained that Ron over explained everything. I believe that to some, it wasn’t nearly enough. This includes some well read staff members.
Mark
Where is this science that you refer to? I am assuming you do not mean Dr. Hawkin’s K-testing to “calibrate” truth.
And yet one must seek out datums of comparable magnitude, correct?
Yes seeing the good in all is the way. But also seeing good doesn’t mean being an idiot about violence, deception abuse etc.
In my opinion there can be a misunderstanding of unconditional love. Unconditional love does not mean unconditional acceptance abuse or being a door mat to other’s selfish intents.
And dealing with abuse head on with determination, courage and strength is not a sign of living divided.
Love can be fierce when principles are at stake.
Pointing out deception and lies is not creating division. It is possible that denial of these things can perpetuate them and thus help in creating the division.
Love is not blind. Differentiation is a much needed ability. Both love and differentiation makes for clear understanding.
If all as rosey here, looking in order to sort things out would not be neccessary.
Yay!!
Good morning, My Oracle!!
Actually, my assumption is a little different than that. The reactive mind was always part of a model for the mind – similar to the scientific model for a molecule – and not ever a factual or literal description of how the human mind actually exists.
As a model, its use was a function of attempting to explain how some things might work. As a model, it was based on the earlier Freudian psychotherapy models which were so popular in the 1950’s, but which since have been discarded by most people working in the field of the mind as too ideological and not based on any actual, measurable, phenomena.
Hubbard never stressed that the reactive mind was just a model. In fact, he treated the reactive mind as a factual, real life thing with “charge” sparking around it, and “GPMs”, and “R6 banks” and all kinds of things actually floating around outside the Scientologist. As a result of adopting this model quite literally, and treating this model as reality, Scientologists too often come to see this reactive mind as a real thing all around them.
This is not good for a person. It traps them. The person is mocking up the descriptions Hubbard made up for the mind and “seeing” them when they are not actually there.
In logic, this is called the fallacy of Reification, “when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity. In other words, it is the error of treating as a concrete thing something which is not concrete, but merely an idea.’
“Another common manifestation is the confusion of a model with reality. Mathematical or simulation models may help understand a system or situation but real life may differ from the model (e.g. ‘the map is not the territory’).”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)
There is an actual reality of a human mind. But again, it does not fit into any ideological or even scientific model. It exists as itself, like how atoms and molecules actually exist, rather than how the models for them depict them. Over time, it becomes a huge problem for a person when they keep mocking up this model that does not exist, calling it their mind, and seeing it all around them as they go throughout their day, and following the “rules” for this model.
It takes person farther and farther from the reality which actually does exist around them. Instead of what is actually there, they keep mocking up this fixed ideological model, and following its rules.
And that is the problem. Because that model can be used to do all kinds of things to a person, and make a person do all kinds of things to himself, which would never be possible had they not adopted the model and all its rules, internalized them, and mocked them up on themselves every day.
If you want to see an excellent dramatization of people who are stuck in an ideological model for the mind, and completely divorced from reality, watch “A Dangerous Method”. It’s a David Cronenberg movie about Freud and Jung and the early days of psychotherapy. It even features Jung’s E-Meter in it! The fascinating thing for me was listening to them talk to each other, trapped in the prison of the models and languages of the ideology of psychotherapy, and never really seeing the reality around them.
It reminded me very much of being a Scientologist, and sitting around on staff discussing things that don’t really exist, and never ever allowing myself to realize that – because that would be heresy.
Alanzo
Crepuscule,
I went to the Pali dictionary to sort out this idea of “witnessing”
in Theravada Buddhism since Marty’s post sparked my attention.
“Witnessing is what led the Buddha – and many other sages – toward recognizing the impermanent nature of matter, energy, space, time, and life forms . . .”
Modern translations would use the term “right witnessing” and this would be acceptable in the Theravada school.
Much Metta,
GMW
Oracle,
“It’s just kind of a mercy to cut people a break when they are not at their best.”
I think you are missing the point of what we are doing here.
Scientology is a body of data, and Hubbard’s finger prints are all over the data.
Since it is not really a Science, but a Religion, and it is full of Hubbard’s personal goals, intentions, confusions, etc. How do you propose that anybody audit the subject?
Do you think that Hubbard had anything to do with Scientology?
I understand that the pendulum has swung the other way and that there might be excessive criticism of Hubbard now, but given that he and his cult went out of the way to suppress ANY rational evaluation of Scientology, I think we are simply experiencing the backlash to that.
Philosophical conversations are dialectic in nature, and eventually you will see the whole subject come to a more balanced synthesis.
The reality now, unfortunately, is that Hubbard lies set in motion quite a bit of religious fundamentalism, and the lies have to be exposed and viewed.
Somewhere Ron wrote, but I don’t remember where, and I have quoted this to friends from time to time when some of Ron’s knowledge came in handy: “do not let your affinity over wump your reality.”
In other words: do not let emotions of how we feel define how they actually are. This could very well be a great definition of denial.
By the way, I find Hubbard’s ideas and procedures to increase our ability to handle force brilliant and therapeutic.
What I object to is that he eventually emphasized and spin the entire subject of Scientology to a quest for personal power and hegemony over all living things.
So Scientology, in my view, has to be brought to a balance with mainstream Eastern thought, without ditching any workable tech that Hubbard found That’s all
Letting go, I don’t want to get into a debate on kinesiology, but I think it’s a pretty amazing “coincidence” that Hawkins’ calibrations came up with the same sequence of emotions that are on the Tone Scale. Here’s a quote:
“David R. Hawkins, MD, PHD conducted a 29 year study that deomonstrated the human body becomes stronger or weaker depending on a person’s mental state using kinesiology, or muscle testing. Dr Hawkins developed a scale of 1-1000 that maps human consciousness…The lowest vibration rate is described as “Force”. This exhibits a weak kinesiologic response with a vibration under 200 which includes shame, then guilt, apathy, grief, fear and anxiety, craving, anger and hate.” http://www.starstuffs.com/physcon/thought.html
The above article also mentions other scientific sources of the fact that emotions are subtle energies, and thus have wavelengths – and thus can be plotted on a scale.
Hey Mark, thanks for the nice ack. I had the advantage of having had a lot of experience as a word clearer. And I’m still working on my understanding! The sheer volume of knowledge in Scientology is amazing – Ron had his work cut out for him – and, as you indicated, he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t with respect to trying to explain things.
I read that as having pitty on someone , almost as unhelpfull as selfpitty
I think I wasn’t clear enough, let me try again: do not let how we feel about something define the reality of something. Great piece of info from Ron.
Helen. Was a very good friend of mine.
So you would equate kinesiology with science? And you would link a video on the result of internal divisiveness/dividedness, yet rely on a system that divides the world into “below 200” (those who do not understand the system) and “above 200” (those who are more enlightened and do understand the system)?
The wonderful thing about this world is that it offers just about any path we could ask for. I am grateful to you for bringing Dr. Hawkins and his map of consciousness into this discussion, because looking into it and the similarities to Scientology has helped me to better understand that we are all moving on our own paths in our own subjects.
One thing that has bugged me for quite a while re the tone scale and wavelengths: how were these so-called wavelengths measured? What did LRH use to measure them? If it was possible with 1950’s technology, surely it would be possible today. I could imagine a gadget attached to a smartphone and app showing your current emotion. So how did he measure those wavelengths? Do you know for sure?
“I think you are missing the point of what we are doing here”
Conan, this is a writers group. Marty created a blog, like hundreds of thousands of other people. He writes on the blog. Other people write on the blog. We are essentially a writers group. The purpose is to have the conversation.
That he and his family have been terrorized because of a simple blog, and that his wife is now in the court system seeking protective assistance and working to secure her constitutional rights, which David Miscavige is working to deprive her of, is the situation.
What we are doing here is having the conversations. The forbidden conversations. What we are doing here is listening to one another and talking to one another. And making an effort to retain our rights to be here and communicate with out becoming the targets of domestic terrorism.
David Miscavige is in the courts paying entire legal teams for the right to dabble in domestic terrorism whenever the conversation is one that he does not want taking place.
All he is seeking is that everyone just “please stop talking”.
At least, that is my point for being here and this is the way I see it.
Thank you for sharing your reality about it with us.
She really got worked over by David Miscavige and his “finance police”. They unmocked her entire life. The worst case of injustice ……… They targeted a senior citizen mission holder and terrorized her until she was almost on the streets. Oh well, no need to tell that awful story. Besides, I see David Miscavige’s life has come to a tragic end.
I would be curious to know what your reality is based on though. For instance what auditing you experienced, if you ever audited someone else. Because I have noticed there are quite a few experts on Scientology that have never even had an auditing session.
I think the beginning of the end was NOTS. It wiped out half the bridge that people were already very happy with. And while I ran it, I did not run it in the way Hubbard described it and I did not find anyone being any body part. I found there were spiritual influences and connections. And most of them just had something they needed to say or convey, before they moved on. A lot were hung up in past situations. Just like your next door neighbor. But I can say this, after auditing slaves for six months, Egypt rose up.
I digress though.
With the advent of nots, the original bridge was cancelled. All of the original OT levels. I don’t know if that was ever Hubbard’s intention. But what you had then were TWO different groups and products and experiences under ONE banner called Scientologists.
Hello Per,
My wife got audited by you in AOEU back to 1982. She was key out for 2 years after one not’s intensive!
Is there a mail we can reach you?
Miraldi, let’s stick to the real definition of sympathy, not Ron’s dub in.
Sympathy noun.
1 he shows sympathy for the poor: compassion, caring, concern, solicitude, empathy; commiseration, pity, condolence, comfort, solace, support, encouragement; consideration, kindness. ANTONYMS indifference.
2 sympathy with a fellow journalist: rapport, fellow feeling, affinity, empathy, harmony, accord, compatibility; fellowship, camaraderie. ANTONYMS hostility.
Miraldi, which state of being would you rather have or expressed toward you………. Hate or sympathy? easy question. All that is required is one word, one answer.
^^^^
THIS
I can think with that.
Do you know what: I Disagree tottaly with Ron
Science moves on
I think Ron uses his own “special” take on the word.
Alsoo this is the od one out:
“Even though he isn’t sick actually he makes a bid for sympathy.”
That my friends is an disorder !!!!!!
“SYMPATHY, 1. a terrible thing but is considered to be a very valuable thing. The survival value of sympathy is this: when an individual is hurt or immobilized, he cannot fend for himself. He must count on another or others to care for him. His bid for such care is the enlistment of the sympathy of others. This is practical. If men weren’t sympathetic, none of us would be alive. The non-survival value of sympathy is this: an individual fails in some activity. He then considers himself incapable of Surviving by himself. Even though he isn’t sick actually he makes a bid for sympathy. A psychosomatic illness is at once an explanation of failure and a bid for sympathy. (HFP), p. 122) 2 . sympathy is commonly accepted to mean the posing of an emotional state similar to the emotional state of an individual in grief or apathy. It is on the tone scale between 0.9 and 0.4 . Sympathy follows or is based upon overt action by the preclear. Sympathy can be mechanically considered as the posing of any emotion so as to be similar to the emotion of another. (AP&A, p. 23)”
OMG, that really sucks. I loved Helen. She was kinda like my mom in some ways. She even helped me work out some difficulty I was having with my mom as a teen. She would coach me on how to listen to my mom. She said,” Brian, why don’t you just ask your mom what problems she has with you and you just listen to her. Don’t do anything else but listen.”
I did that and my relationship with my mom started getting better from that moment on.
Yeeoww! The karma that boy has coming down the pike. It is going to take some work within myself to not allow what my thoughts are toward that punk.
Thanks Oracle, for filling me in.
The Geltman Mission was a great place. Very personable, very homey.
And thank you for thanking me.
Alanzo
I guess you’ve forgotten all about me and gone on with your life since our time together on ESMB. (:>
I was in Scn for 16 years, a staff member in missions for 7.5 around the country. I am a “Clear”, and have studied to Level J of the BC. I have delivered hundreds of hours of Book One and Assist auditing to pcs right off the street wanting to know about Dn and Scn. I am also a Course Supervisor and an Ethics Specialist, a Data Series Evaluator, and a Fully Hatted ED with training to Exec Status 1.
I have probably 25 folders worth of auditing on me, and have generated much more than that worth of intro and assist auditing on others.
Fully hatted pcs, like you find in orgs, know how to answer auditing questions in Scientology. People who walk in off the street into missions don’t necessarily accept that they have a “reactive mind”, and they certainly don’t see their own minds that way until they have accepted Hubbard’s model and set it up all around themselves to “see it” when asked by their auditors.
I know what I’m talking about, Oracle. I’m just hurt that you would toss me aside like a used rag after all we’ve been through together.
Sniff!
Alanzo (:>
OMG this is why Cancerpatïents on Staff and in the Sea Org were frown upon !
THIS Marty THIS
Laughter! Who could forget you? Not me! In fact I had you on my Facebook, but you seemed to have vanished. I even went looking for you. Never mind, I just wasn’t sure how much of the “bridge” you actually did.
I’m impressed!
Still waiting for an answer to my question: “Tell me what is possible.”
He used mood rings.
In other words, pseudo-science. Why to this day has zero actual research from LRH been published (cases, names, dates, process, controls, independent reviews, etc.)? Because there is no such known research that would have any credibility in the real world of critical thinking and careful analysis.
The discussion on “sympathy” is a good point — forest vs. trees. Anyone can rationalize and justify Hubbard-think. We’ve probably all done it (at least those of us who were “in”). But “zoom out” and look at the forest: would you or would you not characterize the overall system of Scientology, as developed by Hubbard, as a sincerely compassionate system?
If you can characterize Scientology as fundamentally compassionate, your and my universes have diverged, and yours may have also diverged from the universes of all those hurt, bankrupted, regged to death, hounded, declared, disconnected, fed rice and beans, locked up, killed, sued, lied to about and sold states of consciousness that have not been routinely achieved, blackmailed, pounded by ethics, sec checked, given huge bills and low to no pay, and so on.
A little Mike
Thanks, Marildi. I know all that your are referring to. Let me ask it this way: say an auditor just had a PC go through an incident of rape for which she is still grappling with great and negative feelings, and is feeling self-destructive. Could the auditor refer the PC to a support group of people who have been through and overcome similar experiences?
If not, why? And how can one be truly helping another being if one is cutting off the person from knowledge of known resources for support, healing, and betterment? Would it not be an overt of omission to conceal knowledge that would of help?
If yes — if you can refer the PC to sources of support outside the auditing session format — please show me the HCOPL or other publication that authorizes this in Scientology.
Sigh, and face palm. There is _nothing_ I can find that there is any science at all behind the LRH tone scale, or Hawkins’ work, or Zoe Soul Spa, or Wicca-Spirituality. In Hawkins’ case, well, his Ph.D. is from a diploma mill — just like the Ph.D. Hubbard once claimed, though his was from a different institution.
These sorts of studies, as best I can tell, fall solidly in the range of New Age pseudoscience. They are interesting (at least I find these sorts of conjectures interesting) but these conjectures posing as science are not useful in bringing mankind out of the muck of superstition into enlightenment. They take us the other direction.
Truly, I would not be surprised if Hubbard’s tone scale influenced these other supposed rankings of emotions, or if they all sprang from some other, older source that they all sprang from.
I would love to see the actual research, methods, controls, safeguards, elimination of bias, identification of optional interpretations, peer review, and other factors that would make the LRH tone scale or these other scales worthy of more than a passing comment of “they made them up” using the intuition we all have about which emotions reflect a stronger sense of well-being and which do not.
So, sincerely, if you or anyone can point me to well performed research that leads to tone scale numbers, I would love to read the study and the peer reviews. Short of that … it’s back to sigh and face palm for me.
Oh gosh. It gets more interesting. Fake Ph.D. David Hawkins is indeed suspected of borrowing his ideas on levels of consciousness from Scientology.
So the similarity of these various “tone scales” is not evidence of rigorous science homing in on an objective truth. The similarity is quite possibly just due to different cults and pseudoscientists “borrowing” from one another. A different sphere of endeavor from science altogether.
LG, I have also wondered how Ron knew about the wavelengths. He never actually specified wavelength measurements for the various emotions. In 8-80 there’s a tone scale of wavelengths, but it only gives an approximation for emotion in general – which is .024 cm (and there’s also an approximation for thought and for aesthetics).
Per the definitions of Tone Scale in the Tech Dict, the numbers from 40.0 on down are arbitrary, but the numerical VALUES assigned are “not arbitrary but will be found to approximate some actual governing law in nature.” So what I get is that although the actual frequencies aren’t expressed, the ratios among the tones are in accordance with the assigned numbers. (And I got that Hawkins did a similar thing with his calibrations.)
That still leaves the question of how Ron determined the ratios. Here’s one idea about it, from the book *Excalibur Revisited*:
“…this technology existed before this particular time on what is known as the past track in its pure form and only vague remembrances have been reconstructed through the very personal and very brilliant recollections of L. Ron Hubbard.”
I always figured it had to be something like the above, or maybe channeling from some higher realm, or tapping into the Akashic records… You scientists are probably going to balk at that way of thinking – right up to the point where the evidence of such things is discovered. 🙂
You haven’t actually given definitions, just sentences and antonyms. And the definitions Ron gave ARE real definitions which have the same concepts as the English definitions below:
a : the act or capacity of entering into or sharing the feelings or interests of another
b : the feeling or mental state brought about by such sensitivity
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sympathy
David Miscavige’s finance police unmocked this mission. As well as Howard and Mary Rower’s West Village Mission. They took all the money, real estate, anything they could, and declared everyone an S.P.. They almost took Helen’s home and she did lose it shortly after. They just wiped out the mission network in New York in a few short weeks.
This caused a mass exodus in N.Y. as everyone connected to the missions, staff, public, friends and anyone who knew about it, blew off lines completely except four or five people.
Now there are more Sea Org Members in New York than Scientologists. As David set up a compound there. F.O.L.O. E.U.S.. It used to be a room above the org, now it is a building. They terrorize anyone left on the East Coast via telephone.
It is so refreshing to see David appealing to his senior now, down in Texas, with prayers.
And another gosh. “Applied kinesiology” is a known pseudo-science that has been repeatedly been falsified in double-blind studies — the only study more scientifically rigorous might be a triple-blind.
“‘Even though he isn’t sick actually he makes a bid for sympathy.’
That my friends is an disorder !!!!!!”
Right, CD. That’s why he says calls it psychosomatic right there in the definition you posted.
“But I can say this, after auditing slaves for six months, Egypt rose up.”
Nice metaphor!
That’s the thing, it doesn’t belong in a definition of Symphathy at all
It’s a pitty play
Calling things Psychosomatic makes the hairs in my neck stand up by the way.
I love her to bits and than some
when I read dianetics back in 1987, Hubbard installed “fear” into me,
by telling his story of the reactive mind, and saying words spoken during a moment of pain & unconsciousness, and those words would hypnotize me into performing and acting in an manner to the effect of those words spoken to me while I was unconsciouness. And Hubbard said a person could go nuts or insane at any moment if being restimulated by such an event.
I found this to be false.
Does anybody else agree?
If it was a “discovery”, where is Hubbard’s research data? Where are the raw mathematical calculations he did in order to ‘calibrate’ the energy of the emotions? Where are the painstaking records needed for any “discovery” to be replicated and confirmed per the scientific method?
Answer: There aren’t any such calculations; there is no research data. Sorry. It was all made up.
These other “scientists” (credentials, please?) are also not peer-reviewed and their studies aren’t accepted even by a stretch of the imagination.
If you want to study hard data on emotions, crack open the latest peer-reviewed journals in the field of neuroscience.
“Scientology postulates that ‘charge’ (mental energy) ‘erases’ through that process.” Indeed it does postulate that and I am glad to find you looking at this from another viewpoint and going deeper.
While we are at it I would like to add to this:
“That is, one’s experience moves from the subjective (part of, and affecting oneself) to the objective.”
One could also say that everything we experience gets subjectified. Even when we are staring straight at objective reality (which we do a lot) we don’t actually deal with objective reality but instead we deal with our own subjective that is called upon as a result of the objective reality. In this sense we could say that what really happens during auditing is that one discovers the discrepancies between one’s subjective reality and objective reality and thereby parallels objective reality closer. Thus as-ising doesn’t really make something vanish but instead it corrects and/or fills in information thus making the previous outpoint blend in and not be accessible directly by raw stimuli from the objective world.
Still waiting for an answer to my question: “Tell me what is possible.”
We would be here all day, if you really wanted me to answer that.
Alanzo
You haven’t answered my question Miraldi
It’s a nocebo.
It is one of many in Scientology, like the “you’ll get sick and die of pneumonia” one he installed for the OT levels. Or the “You’re at risk” one for “Clears”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo
Considering the terror he worked to place into the minds of Scientologists, simply for his own material gain, I have a very hard time thinking of Ron as “mankind’s greatest friend.”
Alanzo
My definitions are from my Mac dictionary. It is a real dictionary. But please answer my question. Would you rather experience hate or sympathy?
I have always loved your writing, Oracle. I love your viewpoint on freedom and responsibility which you clearly brought to Scientology in order to use it to turn your own life around.
Your loyalty to Hubbard, and just your sense of loyalty in general, is also very admirable.
You are an inspiring writer and a person with a deep well of goodness which is totally evident to me. And always has been.
With all my love and respect,
Alanzo
I find Jenna adorable!
I didn’t know that unsolicited help was suspect. Maybe it’s a man thing. When you grow up with people opening doors for you, people pulling over to help you if your car breaks down, carrying your groceries to the car for you, I mean, I think women view unsolicited help as natural as the sunshine.
Marty,
“Scientology contains so much dogma asserting superiority to and difference from all other forms of witnessing that people tend to lose sight that they spent a tremendous amount of time and effort doing just that, witnessing.”
I agree. The following is what auditing meant to me from day one, and why I never granted Hubbard, any ultimate rights to my mind, and why a lot of Scientologists, in or out, found me disagreeable.
REVERIE, 1. In reverie the preclear is placed in a light state of “concentration” which is not to be confused with hypnosis. The mind of the preclear will be found to be to some degree detachable from his surroundings and directed interiorly. Technical Dictionary, page 352
DHAYANA, (Skt., Pali jhana, Chinese ch’an, Japanese Zen). Meditation, absorption. In general, any absorbed state of mind brought about through concentration. Such state is reached through the entire attention dwelling uninterruptedly on a physical or mental object of meditation; in this way the mind passes through various stages in which the currents of the passions gradually fade away. An Introduction to the Buddha and His Teachings, page 317.
MEDITATION: The English word meditation is derived from the Latin meditatio, from a verb meditari, meaning “to think, contemplate, devise, ponder.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation
MINDFULNESS. (Pali sati, Skt. smrti, also translated as awareness). The active, watchful mind.
When practicing mindfulness, one must remember to maintain attention on the chosen object of awareness, “faithfully returning back to refocus on that object whenever the mind wanders away from it.”[10] Thus, mindfulness means not only, “moment to moment awareness of present events,” but also, “remembering to be aware of something or to do something at a designated time in the future”.[10] In fact, “the primary connotation of this Sanskrit term [smrti] (and its corresponding Pali term sati) is recollection”.[10]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness
The “four foundations of mindfulness” In Buddhism are described bases for maintaining moment-by-moment mindfulness and for developing mindfulness through meditation. The four foundations of mindfulness are:
• Mindfulness of the body.
• mindfulness of feelings (or sensations)
• mindfulness of mind (or consciousness)
• mindfulness of mental phenomena (or mental objects)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satipa%E1%B9%AD%E1%B9%ADh%C4%81na
Auditing for me has always being nothing more than a GUIDED form of meditation, and I still view it as wonderful tool to obtain release from the past and to answer to one’s satisfaction the nature of one’s mind and reality. I certainly did.
Auditing of course has to end, and it must end eventually, for the person to regain ownership of his mind and life.
Viewed in that context, Scientology and auditing, can be given their proper importance as helpful tools, not the out of bounds, entitlement to our minds that Hubbard usurped for himself.
FOTF2012, you echo my views. I hope you do not assume I have Scientology views on compassion.
Re the sympathy discussion, I actually referenced Brené Brown’s research on the difference between sympathy and empathy – isolation or inclusion earlier on this blog. I didn’t feel like bringing it up again.
What are mood rings?
marildi, I am not a scientist, but through certain experiences in my life have come to trust scientific explanations that have evidence to show for more than non-scientific explanations that I have to take on faith because the evidence provided must likewise be taken on faith. Think a life-threatening health issue where you believe the fear-mongering of alternative health care providers and rely on natural remedies, only to find when it is nearly too late that tried and tested medication would have worked all along. True story.
I remember that LRH drew pictures of wavelenths. In Scientology 8-80 you find pictures with peaks and descent. He provides (in chapter 4 of my version) a table of wavelengths in centimetres, saying at the same time they are estimates. That leaves me to assume he did not measure them, at least not at the time of writing. Yet the Oxford definition of wavelength is: 1 Physics the distance between successive crests of a wave, especially points in a sound wave or electromagnetic wave. (That sounds very specific and measurable to me.) Definition 2 a person’s ideas and way of thinking, especially as it affects their ability to communicate with others. (The latter does not sound like it has anything to do with patterns or crests.)
I generally enjoy reading assorted explanations of how the world works, including things like the Akashic records. I just prefer, at least at the moment, to not make any major decisions based on them. I can choose to believe them, but then I could also choose to believe David Icke (possibly to my detriment, possibly not). The thing is, I have no way of proving the truth of these fundamental underlying statements, and I think part of what we need to evolve from or grow out of in Scientology is taking things on faith. I think this really is like growing up. LRH told us what to do and told us how the world worked. As part of growing up it is only natural to challenge those claims and see if we find different answers. Kids do this all the time, and there are probably instances in your life where you have ditched some of your parents’ way of doing things while retaining or refining others.
I did not enter the discussion of Pip Threfall’s challenge involving validity of the axioms, but my question would have been: how is it self-evident that life is a static as LRH defines?
I think LRH also wrote that engrams contain uncoinsciousness, and that the unconsciousness (lowered awareness) would be active when an engram is restimulated (normally in a moment of reduced awareness anyway), thus you would not be aware of what is going on.
I have experienced moments when I was hungry and tired and got irrationally angry, but I would no longer attribute my subsequent actions to engrams.
I noticed a great irony just recently. LRH railed against psychiatry, and today the Church of Scientology via CCHR attacks the DSM on the basis that it is designed to manufacture patients and label sane people insane. CCHR attacks psychiatry claiming they are artificially increasing the number of insane people. And yet in DMSMH LRH assumes that everyone has a reactive mind and is thus “insane”.
You keep dichotomizing. “Authorizing” is not the same as “not forbidding”, for example. And all that is assuming PLs are “the Word”.
So, the home of the Vedas keeps making the news for their gang-rapes of random women. Can you offer evidence that the Vedas have done India any wholesale good at all?
Is there any such thing, in your universe, as a “non-hypnotic state”? Because if all are “hypnotic states”, the word becomes meaningless as a descriptive term.
FOTF2012,
There may not be any hard science evidence behind tone levels (at least not yet) and I agree that it would be preferable to have it, but there are many pc’s in the independent field who are happy to continue with feeling better and doing better in life. I see no reason why they should wait until science proves to others that this can be done, nor should they need for it to be proven by science to themselves. You may have a different preference and that’s your right.
Btw, I have benefited from alternative practitioners in various ways that medical doctors failed to do . So I’m glad I didn’t wait for science but relied on my own perception and reasoning from the available data. I guess it all comes down to the individual’s choice.
Thanks Oracle.
Ya know, I never really looked at it like that.
A fixed opinion of mine. VGIs, cognition.
Mark
FOTF2012,
Auditing is designed to handle such traumas on its own, other than with medical aid when needed (part of the tech). It’s no different from many other methodologies which would not send send their clients to another type of practice for the very thing it is geared to handle. Nevertheless, besides including medical aid, below is a general reference for valid ways to assist people:
“Anything which raises a person’s tone can be considered legitimate processing. This includes, of course, nutrition, environment, and education, as well as processing. (SOS)
“Anything which raises tone” is pretty broad. Also, I concur with what Valkov said about the independent field not being obliged to follow any PL’s.
Letting go: “…how is it self-evident that life is a static as LRH defines?”
Actually, in the Tech Dict he says they are NOT “self-evident truths” but are “self-evident agreements” (which I think was the idea Pip had). Here’s that part of the definition of Axioms:
“A self-evident truth is the dictionary definition of an axiom. No definition could be further from the truth. In the first place, a truth cannot be self-evident because it is a static. So, therefore, there is no self-evidency in any truth.”
Axiom 1 is qualified by Axiom 35: THE ULTIMATE TRUTH IS A STATIC.
Brian,
Who would choose hate? It seemed like a rhetorical question. I don’t know what you’re getting at.
Cat daddy
Hi
This is not an attempt for me to instruct you or anyone. It is merely an expression of my viewpoint on where and how discussions on this particular word can go off the rails.
I also think there are likely a good few misunderstoods on “sympathy”.
First, to understand it, one would seem to need to address which flow of “sympathy one is attempting to define. Are you looking at the tone as it is experienced on an incoming or outgoing flow?
And secondly, as “sympathy” has many connotations, which one is being addressed? Are you looking at it from the point of view of “sympathy” of “resonating” with another? Are you looking at the aspect of attempting to bring another into resonance with yourself? Are you looking at the tone of blubbering…”oh me oh my… You are so cruel. Can’t you see how hurt and upset I am? Surely you do not find me any threat”. etc.
I find that when different connotations are being addressed they end up seeming to belong at different places on LRH’s tone scale. (even though LRH has only placed it in one.)
I find that the last one that I gave above seems to be rightly placed below “Fear, Terror, and Despair”, and just above Apathy, on the tone scale.
However. It seems that without some aspect of “sympathy” (as “resonating with another”), communication, and or any aspect of ARC, or Perception itself, would not be possible.
Lots of room for different views and misunderstandings on this one.
Eric
Ha Valkov, you are funny! That one won’t even get a reply!
so true, Letting go,
and thanks Alanzo.
as you state Letting go,
“And yet in DMSMH LRH assumes that everyone has a reactive mind and is thus “insane”.
That statement compels one to achieve the state of “clear”, and in any less state of “clear” why one is insane, and thus clear the planet.
or that statement convinces one to achieve the state of “clear”, and thus the journey begins to go up the “bridge to total freedom”.
for sure,
and that’s the problem with PTS/SP tech & KSW
Valkov asked:
Is there any such thing, in your universe, as a “non-hypnotic state”? Because if all are “hypnotic states”, the word becomes meaningless as a descriptive term.
Yes, Valkov, looking both ways when you are crossing the street, navigating your way around a mall to find the clothing store you are looking for, preparing your lines before giving a speech, preparing dinner – these are all NOT hypnotic states.
One of the characteristics of a hypnotic state is that you are absorbed onto one thing to the exclusion of other things going on in your environment.
If you compare that to what I wrote above, you can start to get the idea. For more on this, see this article.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-hypnosis-a-distinct-form
And many other such articles and websites discussing the subject which are available to you with a simple Google search.
Alanzo
One thing you should know is that the “definitions” in the Tech Dictionary are often merely quotes where LRH has mentioned something about the particular term being “defined.” That’s what the first definition of sympathy was – a quote.
Hi Marty and all
I see this thread opens with the words “at its core Scientology revolves around the auditing process”. That is an interesting statement, but for me underpinning this is L. Ron Hubbard, so I would suggest that the core of Scientology revolves around L.R.H.
Mr Hubbard wrote a paper once about “beingness”, in which he used “a buzz saw” as an example pointing out that you can know all the parts and not know its beingness. What I got out of this article is that everything has beingness, and so it is with L.R.H. So the central question is “what is Ron’s beingness”? The tech the ethics the admin are all the parts, not the beingness.
Ron has said and I quote “I developed Scientology because of my love of understanding”. That for me gets close to the man’s raisen de’tre, and why I have much affinity for L.R.H. because we share the “love of understanding” and the reason I only lasted about a year in the Church before I was in big trouble with ethics. I have never stopped loving Scientology because I have never stopped loving understanding.
The difference is as a Scientologist I never had a working definition for LOVE, which meant my “love of understanding” was very selective, and looked for faults. Since being “born again” and realising the true nature of love, that is, it is unconditional (in ‘sinospeak’ Co-existence of Static) I am more aware of when I am being critical and hopefully try not to speak if what I am going to say is not uplifting. This has increased my ability to UNDERSTAND markedly hence I promote LOVE and UNDERSTANDING or when I really want to “pin my colours to the mast” refer to it as ChristianScientology.
Love and ARC
Pip
Beautiful Marildi. Love and Understanding the unified consciousness.
Amen to that Marildi. What this guy is saying completely aligns with the teachings of Jesus who says “Resist not an evil person” Matthew 5:39. Also he says we cannot serve two masters for we will love the one and hate the other. What I believe this is saying is that if we love one thing and hate another it is an indication that we are serving two masters, which is a DIVIDED CONSCIOUSNESS.
Hubbard, confidentially, instructed Scientologists to ‘use enemy tactics’ on ‘enemies’. What isn’t realized is that Hubbard used ‘enemy tactics’ on Scientologists.
Hi Brian
I appreciate your opinion, however unconditional love is unconditional. When one realises that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God, and that “God is love”, it follows that any behaviour that is unloving must be an additive to who they truly are. With this realisation as the first step it is possible to apply UNDERSTANDING to those actions that are deemed inappropriate. I am sure the way forward is to love the being and understand the additives.
Love
Pip
P.S. As per the ARC triangle it would be impossible for your affinity to be anything but equal to your reality.
If by how we feel about something you mean affinity, then it is bound to affect our reality. Feelings to me have more to do with The Tone Scale than Affinity.
Marildi, you have not answered my question.
FOTF2012 – Here is what some people in the church believe is the reason David Miscavige is head of the church:
1. He has brains in his head.
2. He’s real smart.
3. He went to college.
4. His whole family is in the church.
5. He has a real high IQ.
Those are MU’s, those are ARC X’s! 🙂
That was because often when doctors find nothing wrong they in the past said: “It must be Psychosomatic”
But now they know more and I shouldn’t fuzz so much
6 to the day years ago something happened
Tottaly wrong and thats why Scientologists don’t understand outsiders and us outssiders do not understand Scientologists.
Sympathy is a good thing
Putting on a pitty-play is not
http://www.lovefraud.com/beware-the-sociopath/how-to-spot-a-con/the-pity-play/
The pity play
Tip-off trait of a sociopath
Look for the pity play
Is there any mannerism, any type of behavior, any use of language, that can identify a sociopath?
According to Martha Stout, Ph.D., author of The Sociopath Next Door*, the best clue that you are dealing with a sociopath is the pity play.
“The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness,” Stout says. “It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy.”
The combination of consistently bad or inadequate behavior and frequent pity plays, Stout continues, is the closest thing to a warning you’ll ever get that you are being manipulated by a sociopath.
Sociopath manipulation techniques
In her book, Stout also describes other techniques that a shameless sociopath will use to keep the rest of us in line. They are:
Charm
Risk-taking, and convincing others to do it with them
Recognizing a person who is decent and trusting—the perfect target
Sexual seduction
Crocodile tears—especially when sociopaths are about to be confronted
Righteous indignation—Plan B when sociopaths are about to be confronted
Exploiting social and professional roles
Gaslighting—making victims doubt their own perceptions
The term “gaslighting” comes from a 1944 movie called Gaslight, in which gold-digging husband marries a rich, innocent woman and tries to make her feel like she is going insane. Sociopaths are experts at it.
I’m meeeeelting.
Deffinately mistunderstood in that contesxt. Thank you for your insights. Look at a post I made below or click on this link.
http://www.lovefraud.com/beware-the-sociopath/how-to-spot-a-con/the-pity-play/
“The pity play
Tip-off trait of a sociopath
Look for the pity play
Is there any mannerism, any type of behavior, any use of language, that can identify a sociopath?
According to Martha Stout, Ph.D., author of The Sociopath Next Door*, the best clue that you are dealing with a sociopath is the pity play.”
I Sympathize with her plight
Or in Scientology terms :flow admiration towards her postulates
*grin*
marildi, thanks for that clarification. Then how is it self evident as an agreement? I am asking as someone who has not experienced that sort of enlightenment.
That’s cool, Brian. Not to mention the caste system which is entrenched in India, having existed for thousands of years, and I believe also goes back to the Vedas. India – nice place to visit (unless you are a woman), but I wouldn’t want to live there.
There’s your SRA for this month, Brian. You’re welcome! 🙂
Yes, realising the latter is part of the journey. It can take working through a lot of denial to get there, shedding many dreams.
There is virtually no “hard science evidence” about the effectiveness of any psychotherapy or meditation. So people should just abstain from engaging in any of those practices until there is? Or perhaps until Hell freezes over?
Thanks Al. I submit that one can navigate the materials of Scientology in just the same way as one crosses the street to find his way somewhere, alert and with eyes open. Without falling into the delusion that it’s all bad.
Ah Thank you Mirildi for answering.
From your answer I will conclude that you would choose to have sympathy over hate. OK, fine, so would I.
You have now chosen, according to Hubbard’s “scientific” measuring stick to be lower toned than higher toned. Scientology trumpeted that we will get you up the tone scale not down the tone scale. Yet you have chosen, according to Hubbard a lower tone as more desirable. Something is not right with that. That requires some reasoned criticism.
It is not logical.
Now it is quite obvious that if I asked you the question,” would you rather experience Antagonism or Cheerfulness?…” anyone would say Cheerfulness. Because this sequence makes sense and is obvious which one is better. We all want to be more uptoned, right?
Yet you have chosen a lower tone to be more desirable: sympathy over hate.
Inherent in this inconsistency is one very important fact: the emotional tone scale is not true or partially true. And Scientologists have been unquestioned adherence to a falsehood.
It makes no sense if Scientology is suppose to process a person “up” the tone scale, to have a Scientologist, you Mirildi, consciously choose to be down the tone scale as a more survival place to be.
My question was far from rhetorical. My question just blew a hole in the “logic” of the tone scale as being a scientific or even workable device with such inconsistencies.
And one more thing it does, in my opinion:
It is Ron himself who considered sympathy lower than hate. That was his personal experience. And the many revelations of his cruelty to people, the many written works to harm people, the betrayal of friends and family, kids in chain lockers, people over board blind folded and hog tied who could not swim who broke bones, the nurturing of violence in his intelligence organization……………… all point to the fact that he himself considered hate above sympathy.
This one fact I have pointed out is only one………….. only ONE inconsistency that you guys have to find out for yourself.
And the royal path to resolving the cognitive dissonance is reasoned criticism of Ron himself and his written word.
Good luck, you have my support. It took me years.
Namaste
That is a false statement. There absolutely is hard science evidence for the effectiveness of a wide variety of mind and spirit practices. Scientology, almost uniquely, by hardbound policy prohibits it be included in the research mix.
“Bazinga” good post by the way bro
Elana Miller, MD
Psychiatrist and writer at Zen Psychiatry
Mindfulness and Psychiatry: The Next Fad or a New Revolution?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elana-miller-md/mindfulness-practice_b_4047100.html
“As a psychiatry resident with both a personal interest in meditation and a professional interest in integrating Eastern mindfulness practices into Western psychiatry, I like to keep up with the latest research on the subject. And I can’t help but notice how trendy the topic has become.
My last literature search turned up articles like “Pilot randomized trial on mindfulness training for smoking in young adult binge drinkers,” “Mindfulness-based program for infertility: An efficacy study,” and even “Mindfulness-based cognitive group therapy vs. cognitive behavioral group therapy as treatment for driving anger and aggression in Iranian taxi drivers.” These days one can hardly read a magazine or medical journal with seeing some reference to this simple concept being the new wave in self-help wisdom.”
I think you’ve misunderstood me, Valkov.
The state of “in session” which is produced by the auditor’s use of TRs and Model Session, is most definitely a hypnotic state – even though Hubbard told Scientologists that it was the “opposite” of one.
And yes, hypnotic states are not all bad. In fact, most anything good produced in Scientology is produced through the use of them – as long as no one is exploiting the vulnerabilities of people in those hypnotic states.
Alanzo
Addendum to my argument, I hope it goes in the right sequence in the thread:
I have successfully brought people up the tone scale by the application of it. So I am not saying it doesn’t work when it is based on truth.
But if you were a carpenter, would you give any value to a measuring tape that was correct a majority of the time and incorrect some of the time?
No, you’d try to get your money back for a faulty product.
And how much more important is a human being than a table or a desk?
Evaluating and judging human beings is what Scientologists have been trained to do.
Elevating hate above sympathy is psychopath training. Straight up!
OK Marty. I don’t know what data you’re looking at, so I can’t comment on it. However in my experience with clinical psychology, I stick by my evaluation. What “scientific evidence” is there that backs up the efficacy of Rogerian therapy, for example. I don’t know of any. There have been, I believe, some surveys done which have led to the broader acceptance of “cognitive-behavioral” approaches and many therapists incorporate c-b ideas into the therapy they do.
I framed my post within what I think are the parameters of FOTF2012’s ideas of what constitutes “hard science”, with it’s single and double-blind studies, control groups, duplicability and peer reviews etc.
And I didn’t say there was “no evidence”. I said “virtually none”, which I believe is true, in terms of “hard science”. If you’ve read Wilbur, which I know you have, I think you know those kind of “hard science” standards with their emphasis on the “outer”, and the neglect of the “inner”, mostly inapplicable to endeavors like meditation, clinical psychology, auditing etc. Most of the evidence is considered “anecdotal” by the hard-core empiricists, meaning it is not “hard science” because there is a subjective element, which they don’t consider to be quite “real”.
I have no doubt that saying there is “no evidence” at all can be falsified (disproven). But there is precious little “objective” evidence, nor is it being sought for, because those kind of studies are expensive to implement, and who will put up the money for them?
Actually, It’s been 64 years since DMSMH was published and it has been available to anyone to study. I personally think it has been studied more intensively than we might think; however, those studying it never had a reason to make their results public. If they found anything efficacious about it, they would simply incorporate that into what they were doing and keep quiet about it. In early lectures LRH referred to the view that anyone was welcome to investigate Dianetics; later he tried to build a monopoly around it all and we now see the results of going that direction!
Well your little post provoked a mouthful from me, but I doubt we disagree to any great extent. I think we are simply looking at different parts of a very large elephant.
Congratulations Monique and Marty!
Judge W rocks again!
Judge W is part of the healing game now!
“…Shedding many dreams”
I hear that, Letting Go.
Alanzo
Oh and:
Church Member Q: “Wasn’t David Miscavige the Captain of the Harvard University football team?
Int Baser A; “Yes, for several years”.
🙂
Cat daddy
Thank you for the link.
Yes, so here we have someone in covert hostility who is using a lower tone to accomplish his/her purpose.
This gets back into the complexities of cleanly determining emotional tones since evidence shows that several can be overlapping at the same time, as well as someone in one tone feigning other tones (and not just in covert hostility) in order to achieve some “survival” purpose.
Lots of fun.
Eric
I was reading M rinders blog and the appointed moderator made a comment which was such a clear statement about e meters in response to a comment that they are bogus. I appreciated that clarity but did not want to comment back there as I was never in scientology. But I have worked with bio feedback devices and know they greatly leverage one’ s ability to notice mental contents and shifts due to the fact that feelings and thoughts, conscious or unconscious are processed by the body and are neuro- muscularly expressed. Often the Expression is so swift and micro that a human will not notice but a piece of technology can detect it. And so it can be used as a training tool and is in hospitals where people are taught to lower their blood pressure and slow their heart rate. I am experienced with meditation where one isolates (closes the sense doors) and quiets and then is able to notice even the smallest shifts and yes they come in the form of memories and thoughts of past and future – buddha exactly describes it as being like this and says to pay them no mind they are not real only the present is real but even, already what is present is past so don’t make a big about that either. In the long work of meditation one builds up a lot of stability, practicing awareness simultaneous with equanimity.. My interest and concern about e meter is that it accelerates the process of awareness but what about equanimity? At the moment of their awareness I have heard from many of the scientologists that it is as though their past is dissolved and they have equanimity with that but then they describe being in a high state, and having power ( over mest) and it seems they do not have equanimity with the present or with the future as they have ambition to be winners and this makes a big vulnerability and susceptibility for them, perhaps. In my own experience I felt awareness without equanimity is like being adrenalized, yeah, fast and smart but irritable and hating any impingements. Don’t get me wrong, I am really glad the emeter is in the world but perhaps it should be used as a training tool for helping people learn to notice within and perhaps it needs to be partnered from the get go with a practice of equanimity toward the past present and future. My fav tai chi instruction – “invest in loss” – and let the law of nature turn the wheel.
The way I come to see it is first there has to be the willingness to see the truth.
And there are the ones hesitating to see it as it conflicts with their stable data. So they will never find it and stay put in their current state and knowledge.
Then you have those that find the truth and it blows their mind and they forget that the sum of the parts is not the whole and the whole is not the sum of its parts.
The key is not to let the truth blow your mind, but keep your cool.
Let me try an analogy. Somebody got artfully deceived into believing a tank is a tractor and its purpose is to pull a plow. All the grenades emitted from it are just “wrong application”. One day the person finds out the real purpose of the tank. Having his false beliefs shattered he is quick to accept a new belief: the tank is a bad thing.
If they keep their cool the will find the diesel engine is great to do work, the radio is great for communication, the tank track is great in muddy terrain and so forth.
The purpose of the whole is not the sum of the purposes of the parts.
Understanding the true purpose of the whole and knowing the purpose one desires will enable one to re-assemble using many of the parts to accomplish the purpose one desires.
While attempting doing so and taking of the machine gun and canon off one will be criticized by those who believe the tank is a tractor and accused of destroying a good working “tractor”. At the same time one will be exposed to the ridicule and hostilities from those who think the tank is bad and therefore the parts must be bad as well. In reality both sides suffer because they are in denial of the truth.
That is what I think of when I look at discussions between fundamentalists and people who throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There are several different types of meditation, producing different results. Mindfullness is not a universal panacea and can be overused. Here’s an article about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/magazine/breathing-in-vs-spacing-out.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0
Thanks.
Nice data, it finally has arrived to mainstream.
Pip,
Got it.
I think we are almost there, and hopefully we’ll be done with all this analysis and criticism.
Gerhard,
I totally see your point.
So you know, I’m being purposeful intense and heavy on pointing the out points, to bring the imbalances into full view. I’m trying to get through the wall of religious agreement. I know that here is a lot of good in Scientology.
Yes, I will think of it too it is such a good analogy. Thank you. both sides need to work through their own healing from anger and disappointment. But I am interested to look at these parts of the whole and consider their good uses and best uses in other contexts and am grateful for the opportunity to learn here
Sounds more like covert hostility, guys that tone scale is arbitrair at best.
wrong place for this comment sorry
The tone scale is arbritrair at best.. Many “tools” in Scientology shouldn’t be taken as gospel.
It is not set in stone
I said on occasion that I am all over the tonescale
The tonescale is flawed and a reflection of Rons own case.
Now when you climp,into your bed tonight.
And when you lock and bolt the door.
Just thing of those,out in the cold and dark,
’cause there’s not enough love to go ’round.
And sympathy is what we need my friend,
and sympathy is what we need.
And sympathy is what we need my friend,
’cause there’s not enough love to go ’round,
no there’s not enough love to go ’round.
Now half the world, hates the other half.
And half the world,has all the food.
And half the world, lies down and quietly starves,
’cause there’s not enough love to go ’round
Letting go, I don’t know either how Axiom 1 would be self-evident as an agreement. As I indicated earlier, it seems to me that this particular Axiom is qualified by Axiom 35 as being a truth rather than an agreement:
AXIOM 35. THE ULTIMATE TRUTH IS A STATIC.
A Static has no mass, meaning, mobility, no wave-length, no time, no location in space, no space. This has the technical name of “Basic Truth”.
Brian, in addition to fully clearing the various definitions (even in English) of the word sympathy, you might want to check out Eric’s exchange with Cat Daddy. He did a good job of further clarifying the confusions about the meaning of sympathy.
Hi Pip,
Good post! Thanks as usual for your input. I don’t know much about Christianity and I’m glad to know that it has the same great concept expressed in that video.
Love, marildi
Pip, I think you have something there. In life, we need the increased Understanding=ARC that can be achieved with Scientology, along with undivided Love, which I think is expressed in Scientology as pan-determinism. Would you agree?
Brian, I am not familiar with that idea. I would like to see the quote and its context. Otherwise, for all I know you might have misinterpreted what you read or heard.
Valkov, thanks for this great contribution of information to the discussion.
Wow Gibby, Thanks for sharing that. I myself did have a button on going insane as a fear. Umm, because I saw a few other people do it. But I like to do the thing the thing that scares me.
I took LSD twice daring myself to go mad. Both times I hallucinated at animated cartoons until I couldn’t stand it anymore. The whole world turned into a cartoon. My “demons” turned out to be cartoons. I got so sick of “theetie wheetie”.
I am a believer of contact assists. I thought if I could go mad in Scientology, I should open myself up to let the buttons get pushed and the potential happen. Losing my mind just turned into a positive situation for me. Once I lost my reactive mind, I went to work on losing my analytical mind. I found the analytical one was an even bigger burden. I am still working through it. I have risen above it,from time to time, and the freedom is very intense. It is like stripping off all of your clothes on a beach and running naked. Perhaps a drop in havingness if you are into fancy clothes. It is very scary to have the power that falls under your wings in that moment. You have to be sure. Very very sure, to own it. 100% sure. I am at 92%.
I was just thinking about this today. How many of us didn’t take the power of this Scientology movement because we felt “unqualified” to carry the torch? Well, all but one. David Miscavige.
How right were we? Not very. We have to own that. And next time around, reach. Take the power, take the whole power and own all of it. We WERE ALL more qualified than David Miscavige.
I guess the reason I am so awed with Marty, is that he did step forward to establish some control and sanity. He reached out and took the torch.
He still hasn’t even been acknowledged for that yet. And he isn’t even too bothered about it. He chose to be a benevolent person.
Somewhere I know, he has done the things that scare him too.
Some people think I am loyal to Hubbard. It is not like that. He came into the marketplace selling info and I bought it. I don’t owe anything else.
I am loyal to the truth. I am dedicated to knowledge. Identities do not fall across one’s purpose lines. Identities are somewhere below purpose and goal.
If Hubbard was selling something invaluable why did he die with 480 million in savings?
If others want to discount it as nothing, well fine. It was worth it to me. And obviously many others. I am not a person with doubts that outweigh my purposes. I have risen above those kind of GPM’s.
WHO are the winners in any game? Only those that are happy. I am very fucking happy. And I am oddly in a position of needing to hide it to politically correct? Well fuck that.
That ain’t me Babe.
I listened for a LONG time, before I began to speak.
I tried to help the people that were wounded in this game. They wanted me to lay down broken or take some of the blame.
Fuck that. Wrong indications and wrong items.
To Darkest K.
Very good comment concerning the E-Meter.
As most solo auditors and some PC auditors can tell you, the meter is one tool amongst many in finding and resolving areas of confusion, stress, pain, travail if you will. It reacts to electrical changes in the body which is ONE attachment that beings have to the physical universe. For individuals who cannot be the auditor and PC at the same time, fully as each, it can be a distraction which prevents complete attention on what one is searching for.
When used as the primary indicator of one’s condition, it can prevent attention on other indicators such as interest and recognized mis-emotions. There are certain instances when it is the primary tool such as certain assessments. (Going over a list of possible areas to address, looking for reactions.)
In skilled and wise hands, it is a valuable and effective tool WHEN IT’S EFFECTIVENESS AND LIMITATIONS ARE KEPT IN PERSPECTIVE. Oddly though, it’s greatest value is in the hands of relatively unskilled users. The truth is, there are very few people who can effectively assist others in resolving painful and confusing areas. An average person with only a few hundred hours of instruction and practice in communication and metering skills CAN effectively help many others with many or their undesirable problems. As one’s skill and wisdom grows, other indicators become more apparent while the value of the meter increases only slightly.
There are areas in which the meter doesn’t work. During word clearing, if the individual “knows” with confidence the meaning of a word, although incorrect, it will not indicate. Very basic yet hidden fixed opinions which do not have significant conflicts attached also do not react. There are others.
But it IS possible to use it effectively and keep it’s use in perspective without distraction or dependency. A structured and methodical method of self improvement can be very effective. An E-meter can be of assistance.
Mark
Gerhard.
Brilliant and important message. I have attempted to convey a similar message but your wording and detail lay it out much more effectively.
Thanks
Mark
Hi Brian.
An interesting and actually valuable conversation.
Sympathy has several different yet related definitions. The tone scale definition is one valid use of the word. It conveys a specific thing and is understandable. A new word could have been invented and for a few instances it was necessary, but where does it end. Some other sciences went that route and turned out a mess. In this case, sympathy works just fine. Some people will mis-understand and misuse anything. This definition and other definitions are not difficult to distinguish.
As for hate vs. sympathy, in the lower tone sense, I would prefer hate. It is more recognizable and easier to defend against. It can have at least a partially useful purpose and will generally do less harm in the long run to those around the aggressor. There are obvious exceptions. A person in chronic sympathy will suck the life out of all those he interacts with.
A loving, caring sympathy for others is a basic and necessary part of life. Those who are devoid of it are quite insane.
Mark
Hey Marty, have you seen the slick new adds for scientology? I’m curious what you think about them. Mike
Marildi — you now state that there may be no hard science behind tone scale levels. My brief research made it clear to me that that is indeed the case — there is no science behind this.
My assertion of there being no science behind this was in response to your claim, which I consider falsified, that:
“The tone scale wasn’t something he [LRH] invented – it was a discovery. And the fact that it does exist has been confirmed by scientists …”
It sounds like you have moved away from that assertion, so we may be in agreement now.
iamvalkov — I think you would be amazed at the amount of scientific and social science research that is done in the “wog” world that creates standards of rigor far beyond the unlearning, unevolving rigidity of Scientology.
To be succinct, I’ll just recommend that you Google “research to show effectiveness of psychotherapy” and note that you come up with over 5 million hits. You can explore the links at will.
And if you go to the Pub Med website, which is governed by the US National Institutes of Health, and search for “effectiveness of pscyhotherapy” you get over 9,000 hits. And since Pub Med is very restricted on what it publishes, you can bet those are serious, peer-reviewed, papers based on well-crafted investigation and research.
And if that weren’t enough (Shermanspeak), there are the vast hard science fields of neuroscience, biology, genetics, epigenetics, physiology, evolutionary science, anatomy, biochemistry, and so on — all of which contribute to a rapidly evolving understanding of humanity.
Oh, and of course no one has to wait to follow a certain belief until science validates that it may be true. But that’s because we live in a free country. It does not mean that it is permissible to claim a scientific basis where none exists.
Marildi — you say: “the fact that the tone scale has been validated by science.” Not true.
We humans have an innate sense of “up” and “down” in our emotions. Ask anyone on the street: does it feel better to be in bliss or sad, for example. We know when we feel blue or down, we know when we feel up or high. There is no genius behind something that any typical four-year old can figure out.
Until someone can show rigorous research that led to those numbers in a way that can be duplicated by any researcher, it is pseudo-science plain and simple. In my view, it is a profound disservice to rational inquiry to say something is scientifically proven when it is not.
Even in Scientology terms, that’s a bad practice: it is alter-is-ness. And that makes lies persist.
iamvalkov — it is Scientology that dichotomizes. Either something is KSW or it is not. It is either written by Ron or it is not, and if it’s not written, it’s not true. It is true tech or false verbal tech. It is wog or Scientology. If it is Scientology, it is good; if it is psychotherapy, it is bad.
Of course authorizing and forbidding mean different things, but that is a logical deflection from the point. Nonetheless, let’s tease that out. Scientology authorizes some things (follow Ron’s word) and prohibits some things (misdemeanors, crimes, high crimes, etc.).
Where in Scientology’s belief system can an auditor say refer a rape victim to a support group? Where in Scientology’s belief system might an auditor be forbidden to refer a rape victim to a support group?
Can you answer the question from either angle?
Thanks Marildi. My point is that while auditing is designed to handle such traumas on its own, I have a strong sense that it fails to do so in some cases, and practitioners are then blocked off from pursuing (or even knowing about) other resources that are also proven to be of great help.
Thank you
Ah, Valkov, now there is a better question than simply equating a revered culture with rape. Which could be interpreted as bigotry. But as I know you don’t know what Vedic Culture is and equate it with the some backwardness in India let me simply steer you to what Albert Einstein, Thoreau, Emerson, Mark Twain, Max Muller, Johnstone, Schopenhauer, Will Durant and many more have to say:
http://hinduism.about.com/od/history/a/indiaquotes.htm
And here is a quote from Ron regarding his indebtedness to India/Vedas.
In a 1954 lecture, Hubbard said, speaking of the Hindu Vedas, “A great deal of our material in Scientology is discovered right back there” (04). Further, “We find Scientology’s earliest certainly known ancestor in the Veda … we can look back across a certain span of time, across a great many minds and into a great many places where man has been able to sit long enough to think, through this old record, and find where it joins up with the present and to what we, in Scientology are rightly indebted. For to say that out of whole cloth and with no background, a Westerner such as myself should suddenly develop all the things you need to know to do the things they were trying to do, is an incredible and unbelievable and untrue statement.”
The ball is in your court.
Thank you Mark, you are consistent. You would choose hate over sympathy. So for you Mark the tone scale is still valid. Fine, I respect the consistency. Yet, Miraldi would choose sympathy over hate.
This same argument would never take place with anger vs cheerfulness. Although I am sure Ron apologists will use incredible sophisticated “logic” to twist this simplicity into a complex mumbo jumbo of plausible but fallacious argumentation.
It is my view that this topic is revealing the essence of cognitive dissonance.
My opinion is Ron has redefined words and confused the issue.
And it is my opinion that it is insane to prefer hate over sympathy. Maybe not that you are insane Mark, but that the some of the twisted logic that Ron has successfully propagandized is cemented in so diabolically that a sane person as yourself would prefer hate over sympathy.
I will not attempt to unravel that one. That one is all yours my friend.
The fact that a human being could actually prefer hate over sympathy is the work I hope Marty can help unravel.
Pretty scary stuff. iieeeks!!!!
1) Ask Martin Luther King which he would have preferred sympathy over hate when he was championing equal rights. It was hate that put a bullet into his body. Hate is higher than sympathy? Insane!
2) Ask the Jews, children, men and women, being gassed and incinerated which “tone’ they would have been preferred. It was hate that killed 7 million jews. It was hate that made their skin into lamp shades. It was hate that did torturous psyche experiments on live people! Sympathy would have freed them. Your argument is insane Mark!
Sympathy would have never done that!
3) Was it sympathy or hate that ripped open Mahatma Gandhi’s chest? It was hate that pulled the trigger.
4) Ask Paulette Cooper if she would have preferred hate or sympathy from Ron. It was Ron’s now well known hatred for her that attempted to destroy her. If Ron was sympathetic toward dissent maybe Scientology could have been great!
There is a very scary element to a person, a sane person who could actually say they prefer hate over sympathy.
It is a definite sign of brainwashing that a human being could say hate is better than sympathy.
Mark, you have revealed the dangerous nature of cult mentality. I know you don’t think so, but you have.
To prefer hate over sympathy is insanity and unquestionable evidence of cult brainwashing, self deluded reasoning, inability to see clearly and more importantly………………………. in the hands of a person with sociopathic tendencies, this is justification for atrocity.
Inherent in this singular argument is the heart of cognitive dissonance.
No wonder the church of Scientology is so fucked up.
To FOTF:
A few years ago, I had a mini stroke. A few months later at a follow up to a neurosurgeon, I mentioned I was feeling a little sorry for myself, Having never before been sick, other than a stuffy nose. He VERY quickly said “I can give you something for that.” and encouraged me to take Psych. drugs. He jumped to enthusiasm during that conversation. He never mentioned any methods of preventing future body problems other than asking if I smoke.
My mother had some problems with her knee and went to several doctors before finding the source of the problem, which turned out to be not unusual. I have known of several friends and relatives who have experienced incompetence in the med. field.
A close examination of the research on Global Warming reveals rampant cherry picking of data and outright falsification in order to prove a pre-existing idea for one purpose or another. When I went to the Fla. Keys a few years back, the coast line and water level was exactly where it had been for hundreds of years.
Psychiatry, with a few exceptions, has a long and well documented record of sordid behavior. I have not seen any research in this field which produced significant data, other than pointing out a few common phenomenon, often used to sell more goods or design better highways. Again, there are a few exceptions which came from particular individuals, not the group as a whole.
Political Science. Well, do I even need to say any thing.
I trust my observations, although anecdotal, far beyond any so called ‘research’ in the established sciences with the exception of the engineering arts. Does the bridge stand up or does it fall. No way around that.
I have seen people move up and down the tone scale and Hubbards description is pretty much correct. I have seen persons become happier using Hubbards techniques, which have shown to be largely workable. There are a few errors and missing items which people seem to spend inordinate amounts of time pointing out I recognize the out points, disseminate the data and move on. Simple.
Research projects in the past have been largely (not completely) without significant value. Perhaps you could change that trend.
Mark
Brian:
My comment was clear and understandable.
Your reply was not accurate.
Calling me a Hubbard drone is not consistent with my comment history.
No use beating a dead horse, except to tenderize the meat.
We’ll talk again.
Mark
What idea?
What a shame Oracle. BTW, were you there in there 70/71?
FOTF2012, kinesiology is a science and my error was that I assumed applied kinesiology was too. But then I read that it’s not considered to be a science, so you are right about that.
A “strong sense” doesn’t sound like you are basing your viewpoint on actual data. That’s what we should be interested in.
Ok if that is the case, why is the god of the bible sending people to hell forever for not joining the thought club.
You can love someone but not like them. You can love humanity but not invite a burglar to dinner.
The point is that love is a spiritual quality native to the soul. We can recognize the sacredness in each person while at the same time not be stupid to the reality of unscrupulous people.
To see the God in all is the way. To pray for those who persecute you is the way. To send silent beams of radiant love to those who cause hardship is unconditional love.
But love is not stupid, love is not unconditional permissiveness.
To harm another in a just cause can be done with love, with compassion. And harming another to protect the innocent is not against unconditional love.
I am coming from my experience and do not need to quote others.
Brian, you asked which I would rather have expressed towards me, hate or sympathy, and I thought you mean one definition of sympathy (the positive one), but I see now that you meant the other. If you would just clear up the different definitions – which exist in English and which Ron used in those different ways – I think you would no longer be setting up such confusing situations for yourself and others. Did you read Eric’s post here: https://markrathbun.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/scientology-witnessing-and-prohibiting/#comment-286142
The dangers of Ron’s deliberate propagandist re definitions of common words, have created a twisted psychological state for those who granted Hubbard, at one time, infallibility, but now claim independence is demonstrated in these terms and associations.
Criticism with evil
Reasonable with lacking obedience
Sympathy lower than hate
Open minded with something wrong with freedom of thought
Grief as banky
Disagreement with can’t study properly
Quitting an abusive environment with your overts
Citizenry as wogs and raw meat
The associations go on and on.
Only a well trained Scientologist indoctrinated into the MU’s of Ron’s understanding of the word sympathy could put any type of definition of the word lower than hate.
Non of you would have thought that way before you became Scientologists. None of you!
Through mental trickery and Ron’s talent for propaganda through word definitions, that he consciously perpetrated on you, you have been brought to a state of mind that makes hate more desirable than sympathy.
You are deluded. Because any normal person who is asked this question with any definition you want of sympathy would never put hate above sympathy.
It is ignorant and it is insane brainwashing.
Why in the …. is this so well produced
Gerhard: Your skillful metaphor of a tank being sold as tractor illustrates your point very well. Nicely done.
But tell me this: What should be done about the people who are driving around in tanks and blowing up people with its guns and its canon, and continuing to insist that it is just a tractor – totally oblivious to the damage they are causing to others?
And what about the people who are still selling tanks and telling people they are buying tractors?
It isn’t a matter of “throwing the baby out with the bath water”. It’s recognizing a machine gun and a canon when you see one, and making sure that everyone knows that’s a canon right there, and canons are used to blow people up. And this is a machine gun, and when you point it at someone and pull the trigger, you can cut them in half.
In your metaphor of tanks and tractors, people should still speak up and spread information about the dangers of tanks, right?
Alanzo
The wrong items and wrong indications floating around out here are just as oppressive as the ones in the Church.
“If you had a win, you were hypnotized” “If it helped you, you are brain washed.” “The emeter measures prickly skin” “If you had any success, you were hallucinating”. etc etc. All of this is inval, eval, and it crosses the line into other types of mind fucking and discounting all that may be true for others.
http://tonyortega.org/2014/01/16/judge-waldrip-grants-monique-rathbuns-discovery-request-snubbing-scientology/
David’s comm ev is moving right along in Texas!
RightOn at WWP
https://whyweprotest.net/community/threads/debunking-the-2013-ias-vids-for-the-lulz.116386/
This thread is for debunking the 2013 IAS vids. I painfully plowed through the vids and took notes and
wrote down stuff that I felt was worth mentioning. And the entries may be totally out of sync.
I am not going to include the times. Don’t beat me up on mistakes, typos or misspellings. I just don’t give a
shit. It was hell to go through and to listen to Poodle drone on and on.
Even that definition is above hate. Hate kills people, hate rapes women, hate kills Jews.
This definition is simply a victim who has lost the power to create.
A person who is victimized by their own self delusion and hurts nobody is a higher toned person with self confidence and kills.
Ron redefined a beautiful word. There is not Ron’s definition and the real world definition. There is not a good and bad definition of the word sympathy.
Putting sympathy below hate, an emotional state that kills people through racial bigotry, greed and animal like behavior could only be accomplished by a person who lacks the reality of sympathy.
Ron could very well be that person
“He told me he first read about the “engram” from a 1915 book by a German.”
http://www.scs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/miller/interviews/barbkaye.htm
Now, THAT was a right indication! I wish it would get duplicated.
Just for you, Oracle – “It ain’t me, babe”:
FOTF2012
Hi
I am going to leave answering your comm to Valkov, if he chooses, but there is one point that I would like to attempt to shed some light on.
It is the issue of the phrase “if it isn’t written it isn’t true”.
If you read the original quote and the context that it is written in, I believe you will find that Ron used this phrase to handle Scientology staff, or whoever, from simply acting on communications where someone says that Ron said something or another. (For instance, someone coming into an Org and saying “Ron said that I could have four intensives for free.”, and then being delivered the four intensives without any supporting communication from Ron).
Hence the policy of “If it isn’t written (by LRH) then it isn’t true.” This policy only applied to things someone “said” Ron had said, not that truth was to be determined generally by whether or not it was “written”, or that its “truth” was dependent on whether RON wrote it or not. It was also suggested that one not accept such orders, from others, where the gist of it is “so and so told me to…….”, when they could produce no written order from the stated source.
This same policy has been advanced in various issues (Verbal Tech Checklist, for example) to not accept anything that Ron supposedly said unless it could be shown in writing or in a recording given by Ron.
Ron did not apparently say that “if it is not written it does not mean that it is not true, simply that one should not accept it as Ron’s data unless it was recorded by RON.
Earlier on he even went so far as to state that just because he said something didn’t make it true. In fact he was adamant that one check out things for themselves. (Hence the policy “If it isn’t true for YOU, it isn’t true.” ( for you)
I will not vouch for how it is currently being used, but I believe you will find that what I have given is a rough layout of its original intention and use. (I leave it to you to read the original LRH if you care to do so. Remember… “If it isn’t written, it isn’t true.” … Sorry… I just had to throw that in there)
Anyway… I hope that was of some value.
Eric S
Eric, great comment! It amazes me how many of the criticisms – repeated over and over – are based on missing data or incorrect interpretations of what Ron said. (Not particularly to point the finger at FOTF2012.)
Marildi, Valkov and Espiritu
Your toughts of confront
Brian, have you ever heard of “Stockholm Syndrome”?
“Criticism with evil
Reasonable with lacking obedience
Sympathy lower than hate
Open minded with something wrong with freedom of thought
Grief as banky
Disagreement with can’t study properly
Quitting an abusive environment with your overts”
I’m sorry Brian, but it seems to me that LRH did no equate any of those in
the way you are saying he did. It seems to me these are your own oversimplified interpretations of his meaning, for god ony knows what reason (or unreason). Just one example:
By “open-minded” I distinctly recall him defining as “unable to decide or commit himself to a position on something, even in the face of obvious evidence”.
and so on with the others. It is all your own A=A, as I see it. Obviously you can think and feel whatever you will, but I see these as false interpretations of those words and phrases.
So emote away.
Yes on all your comm above –
Music puts wings on the human spirit. What I mean is with a song in your heart, it’s the only way to fly, buster. Music and flying, I’m irresistibly mad for both.
–Frank Sinatra
My point, Brian, is that the Vedic knowledge may be all you say it is, but it apparently has not been used by the people of India to enlighten themselves to any great extent, or to create a more enlightened civilization. Do you think a rigid caste system is a good or true way of organizing society, or is it a doctrinaire trap on a par with anything LRH created?
So perhaps there is something lacking in the Vedas? Or perhaps there is something lacking in the people who fail to apply the knowledge? If the Veda is so sublime, why was a rigid caste system prscribed and imposed?
With all due “bhakti” to the Vedas, let’s get real here, just as we are attempting to do about Scientology and it’s originator. So LRH credited the Vedas. Is it possible he was inspired to develop his own “cult” and system of traps by that very “source of wisdom”, that led to the development of that suffocating caste system??
For a Western take on India from recognized intelligent observer, I recommend Arthur Koestler’s book “The Lotus and the Robot”, based on his observations of India and Japan.
I don’t think I have misunderstood you. I do think you have evaded me. Congrats, I guess.
In re: your earlier post about “constructs” and “reification” I think you conflated 2 definitions thereby confusing your meaning.
There is a big difference between the reification of abstract notions, and the use and purpose of “constructs”, if those constructs are based on observation and intended as a theoretical explanation of the observations.
Science indulges in constructs. Those kind of constructs are not reifications of abstract things. They are quite different. freud’s, Jung’s LRH’s constructs of the mind are based on observations of phenomena and attempts to explain the “unseen” fields and causes that may be tying them together. Thus dismissing them as not really existing except as “considerations” is fruitless, unless like Vinaire, you want to postulate an “Unknowable” realm.
The point is to identify what of the construct in question is verifiable and what is not. That is how knowledge and science progress – by progressively refing the constructs to more and more closely approximate reality.
For example, you may not detect the presence of a “reactive mind” in yourself. This may be simply because you do not have one. This particularly makes sense since you have depicted yourself as “Clear”. However, this does not mean that many or even most other people DO have a “reactive mind”. How would you know? What makes you able to say that such a thing does not exist? You’re mind reader that can see other’s minds?
I see your general statement that there is no such thing as a reactive mind as a vast overreach, a totally unwarranted evaluation for everyone else in the world.
As marildi said, the Tech Dictionary is a book of LRH quotes “cherry-picked” from his writings and lectures by others. LRH did not write the Tech Dictionary, although I do think whoever worked on it did a pretty good job. Since quotes are from different eras of scientology development, different meanings of the same word sometimes appear, and sometimes there are a lot of them for a given word. It’s not always apparent how they are related.
Alonzo, thanks for the acknowledgement. This may not exactly answer your question. In my journey I was deeply disturbed and took it as an injustice when I was attacked for simply telling facts and got expelled from the Indie 500 list, because I had stated factual data about an indie auditor using executive C/S-sing to achieve an outcome to her benefit and against the declared interests of her PreOT. Or another Indie declared me publicly her enemy, because I dared to make accurate statements about LRH, she didn’t approve. Not to mention many other more hideous derogatory statements born out of religious fever of the righteous and knowing.
The bottom line though is they have no power; the only power is with oneself. They are not driving a tank and are shooting at others, they are just carrying it around with themselves, and it’s a heavy load almost squashing them.
When I look at myself today and how I deceived myself, I really can only laugh about myself, – for the most part at least. It was my own doing going out and trying to soak up all the answers from somebody else, instead looking at it as data somebody spouts off and getting to work on my own path. Trusting like a baby, I have done some growing up since.
I have nobody other to blame than myself in this matter.
Communication and telling the truth so others have a change to hear it is wise and important and as long as one gets attacked from either side, one can take that as an indication to be not too far off a good path.
If somebody is bound to take a tank for a tractor he will take it. Fundamentalists and the CO$ have no power, only the power we give them the same applies to the cynics. All one can do is promote the truth and be smart about it like Marty is.
If I would share my current insight, I believe LRH pulled data out of the shadow to attract followers for his own brand of control. But some of the data he pulled out of hiding are useful and in part brilliant and I take this as his gift to me. I am not buying his tank, but I do like the diesel engine.
CD, actually virtually every very young child tries to use “pity-plays” on his parents and others. Whether s/he continues to use them as a teen and as an adult largely depends on how s/he is responded to. If the pity-plays work th person continues to use them.
Or perhaps I have misunderstood you. How do you define “a hypnotic state”? Some of the older philosophers believed that virtually all of humanity was more of less in a hypnotic state. That is in fact the origin of Siddhartha’s title – Buddha- “the Awakened One”, or “he who is awake”.
Ever think about the implications of that?
I don’t agree, except to the extent that sometimes one can only test one thing at a time. It’s OK to test how drunk a bottle of whiskey makes you, except it’s not such a good idea to test how driving a car at 100 miles per hour feels at the same time as testing that bottle thing.
It has nothing to do with “an open mind”. Has more to do with common sense and reality.
If you mix, for example, meditating and auditing every day, you are not doing a “controlled experiment” in the scientific sense and muddying your own results. When you feel better or worse, how will you know which one caused it?
Still, there is nothing to prevent you from smoking some weed and then trying to do some Self Analysis list questions. Who’s to stop you?
Al, according to your own statements on Geir’s blog and his earlier “The Scientology Forum”, you have not done much if any of the Bridge as we know it, that you were identified as a “past life Clear” by someone in the CoS and were grandfathered onto the SHSBC because of that, without getting audited up the Grades, doing the Academy Levels, or the HSDC or NED course, or any of the Internships.
I don’t doubt you have a lot of experience in the cult, including those courses you listed, but I feel you have recently started representing yourself as having done more of the Bridge than you have actually done.
I seem to recall that most of the auditing you received were sec-checks and FPRD, and those are not Bridge actions.
CD, tomorrow you’ll read or watch something else, and you’ll “totally agree with Ron”! 🙂
I was really mystified by LRH’s warnings about OT3 and the wall of fire. I bought it for a while. But I kept thinking that I heard all those same threats before and in that kind of tone.
And then it dawned on me: H.P. Lovecraft!! My favorite horror stories growing up, his crazy “Myths of Cthulhu”.
Here are some snippets, enjoy and have fun:
“The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
“The only saving grace of the present is that it’s too damned stupid to question the past very closely.”
“If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, who’s merest mention is paralyzing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it.”
“Likewise are there dread survivals of things older and more potent than man; things that have blasphemously straggled down through the eons to ages never meant for them; monstrous entities that have lain sleeping endlessly in incredible crypts and remote caverns, outside the laws of reason and causation, and ready to be waked by such blasphemers as shall know their dark forbidden signs and furtive passwords.”
“Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic entity — never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry.”
“I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth. I guessed — from hints which made even my informant pause timidly — the secret behind the Magellanic Clouds and globular nebulae, and the black truth veiled by the immemorial allegory of Tao.”
H.P Lovecraft, beyond the Wall of Fire!
OK, I am amazed. To some extent only. Because there are 18,000,000
results when I Google “research to show effectiveness of scientology”. By Shermanspeak, that’s a real validation – or is it? The sheer number of Google results tells us very little. But I admit I am 15-20 years behind in my awareness, and it has been about that long since I was actively interested in the area. The “effectiveness” of psychotherapy is very qualified at best.
However I did look at a few results and thought I would post this link here which is among the first 10 results for anyone who actually has the grit to read it without passing out:
http://horan.asu.edu/cpy702readings/seligman/seligman.html
I can’t respond to Brian (thread to long?) but to clarify what Marildi asked to Brian. She wants to know where you got this concept from Ron:
“do not let your affinity over wump your reality.”
And I agree with you both and the video Marildi posted – Scientology divides in that it has ‘enemies’ and is very outspoken about them. It is this very action that has turned away so many that joined in an effort to help this planet one at a time by freeing each individual with processing and training which is the only way to help truly. Once one gets into the game if you will, the effort is not workable. I don’t hate phycis, governments, IRS, Wogs, DBs – I just want to help individuals and thus will help the planet. Scientology divides into right and wrong and to be a part of that is supporting the ‘difference’. Scientology divides right from the outermost of the universe down to the family. It divides as that is it’s attitude. It even divides right down to fragrances, how to water a plant and how to dust a house.
Well I am touched with pain for it to reach to my children now divided from me but I already had that pain seeing it done with so many others. That pain will be there even when my children have figured it out or been ‘released’ from this division until they too and all the others can decide to not judge. Know what is going on, confront the evil but do not judge in a way that divides you or you will never have the peace you foresee by your actions as you are actually strengthening the ‘fight’ by being part of it. “I just want every one to get along” Leah Reminie.
Clarify I said –
each individual with processing and training which is the only way to help truly. Helping each individual is how to help. There are other ways then ‘training and processing’. Setting a good example is a good way.
I will put my full auditing and training history in Scientology up on my newly revised blog. I’ll make sure that you get the link when it is up.
I’ve received much more auditing than just sec checks and FPRD. As a “clear” (verified 3 times), I did get onto the BC without having to do the academy levels or their internships.
If you feel that I have started representing myself as having done more of the Bridge than I have actually done, then I am sorry that you got that feeling.
This will be corrected, once and for all, by the thorough history I will post so that I can terminally answer these questions that are repeatedly asked by Scientologists on the Internet in their effort to appeal to my authority. If you still have that feeling after I post my full training and auditing history in Scientology, let me know.
And if you would like to post all of your auditing and training history in Scientology now, that would be great.
As I understand it, you were an illegal pc from the very beginning when you started in the 1970’s, is that right? And although you could have availed yourself of training in the Church, you did not. So you have no auditing and training experience in Scientology at all.
Is that correct, Valkov?
Alanzo
Also, Valkov, I was trying to impress The Oracle with all my auditing and training in Scientology, and I actually succeeded until you came along.
I was spreading out my Big Scientology Peacock Display for her and you came along and made into something more like a Scientology Pigeon Display.
So thanks alot.
Alanzo
iamvalkov — I suspect Cat daddy may have been speaking tongue in cheek — something hard to get via rote word clearing.
“The Michael Teaching” was likely borrowed from Scientology; they list Scientology as one of their partners.
A convergency of pseudosciences does not truth make.
PS It is their “tone scale” that Cat daddy linked to that I am referring to as likely borrowed from Scn. Not familiar with the rest of “The Michael Teaching.”
Please study the history of India, the Muslim and British invasions and the devastating effects on its culture.
What you are saying is akin for blaming the descendants of slavery for not being more productive and prosperous.
Study the history of Vedic Culture. It has spread into all corners of the world. Have you read the quotes I sent you.
I think you argue about a subject you have no idea about. A history you have no idea about.
Do a little study. The subject is amazing Valkov
But I think you won’t Valkov as you love being right!
Sure, I’ve thought about the implications of that: It has very little value to see Man as “asleep”.
Being human beings is all that we have, so instead of making blanket, derogatory statements like that about all of mankind, it is better to take what we have and work with that.
Much very specific and detailed scientific research has been done on hypnotic states since the time of Plato, Buddha, Hesse, and Hubbard.
So it is best to dump the human being hating and be glad that you are alive now and have this wonderful chance to be a human, and learn from the best, most useful data you can find – which is ABUNDANT on the Internet these days.
Have you been to Google lately?
Alanzo
Gerhard –
What a fantastically constructive response to having been in Scientology!
I’ve been out and talking about Scientology on the Internet for over 13 years. And if there is one thing that has happened in the last 4 or 5 years, since Mike and Marty switched sides, it is Marty’s and Geir Isene’s, and others, emphasis on a positive and constructive evolution out of Scientology. It has changed the whole environment for people coming out of the Church.
Being a “critic” of Scientology necessarily meant exposing the abuses so that others would not be harmed, and evaluating the things in Scientology in a context that would allow for greater insight than the context LRH gave them. As you know, all too often, LRH created a cultic context which did not allow a free examination and exchange of ideas.
But being a “critic” also meant engaging in an environment that was constantly under attack and fair game from the Church, and this left a bunker mentality that too often just got more and more negative.
Our experiences in Scientology can not be fully understood and re-categorized on just a Flow Zero basis (I did it all to myself). Flows 1 through 3 in Scientology must also be inspected for a thorough evaluation and re-examination. Too often, as a critic, having to keep going over these negative experiences so that others could be warned of the “machine guns” and “canons” in Scientology, it just got so negative for a person dwelling in that for so long.
The great thing that I have seen – over the last few years especially – are many new and very positive and constructive ways to respond to what was done to ourselves and to others (flows 1 through 3) in Scientology.
In my experience of watching people come up out of Scientology, your post represents an extremely intelligent and constructive trend in the right direction.
What you see about the behavior of someone who is under the influence or thinking with the ideology of Scientology really exists. I have seen it too.
Thanks for your well thought out and intelligent response.
Alanzo
Thank you, Marildi. Here is a research abstract that I found interesting. It is fairly recent (2011), and it discusses how scientists have not yet been able to correlate measurable brainwave patterns with human emotions: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21596060
For the record, I do believe that emotions as experienced by humans probably do have some sort of “frequency” or “vibe” or other “recognition pattern” — otherwise we would not be able to distinguish between them.
My objection is to those who claim a scientific basis for their “discoveries” which are merely pedestrian observations labelled with numbers and rankings that foster a perception that they are science-based.
In research, there are various ways of organizing data. The first several are nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio.
Nominal is just a listing of the names of things — say just a list of emotions, like hate, envy, love, joy, despair, etc.
Ordinal scales take things a step further. Ordinal ranks things relatively but does not give a value for the difference in ranking. Say we rank emotions from more positive to less positive (those terms would have to be defined). We might, from the person on the street, get an ordinal list like joy, love, envy, hate, despair (or something along those lines) — or to take another ranking from off the tone scale, serenity of beingness > action > body death.
Intervals start measuring the ranges between things. So in Scientology, serenity of beingness is at 40; action is at 20; and body death is 0. Aside from the questionableness of calling action an emotion, Scientology has now made the claim that per some measurement, serenity of beingness is exactly as far from action as action is from body death. Huh? By what measurement technique exactly?
The Scientology tone scale also makes the implicit claim that exhilaration, aesthetic, enthusiasm, antagonism, and body death are not only ranked in ordinal fashion from “better” to “worse” but are each exactly 2 points apart from their neighbor on the tone scale. Huh, again. By what system, equipment, technology, or at least objective reasoning was this supposed precision measured?
As to the ratio organization of data, Scientology fails the test. A ratio scale has a zero point where there is no more of what is being measured. For example, if you are measuring height, there is a zero point — no height. The Scientology tone scale does have a zero point (body death), but that is not the “bottom” of possible emotions, which go well down into the negative numbers.
So I’ll leave ratio out of my conclusion about Scientology’s research error on the tone scale: Scientology has taken an _ordinal_ scale (whose rankings are debatable and somewhat subjective) and assigned unvalidated numbers to it to make it look like a scientific _interval_ scale.
The scale is thus pseudo-science.
But, let’s give everyone who supports the tone scale a way out: just show the research, the equipment or technique used to make the measurements, the experimental controls, and the peer review, and then maybe the pseudo-science label can be lifted.
Re Brian’s post that includes a list of Scientology’s dichotomous thinking:
“Criticism with evil
Reasonable with lacking obedience
Sympathy lower than hate
Open minded with something wrong with freedom of thought
Grief as banky … (etc.)”
The list expresses Scientology culture (including before Miscavige) very well in my experience.
Black and white thinking is also a key indicator of a cult. See for example: http://leavingscientology.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/black-and-white-thinking/
I was struck by how Hubbard clearly exhibited that he considered hate higher than sympathy in any variety of actions toward staff, crew, even family, and especially his real or imagined enemies. That ranking strikes me as an invitation to sociopathy. Perhaps Hubbard was of a nature where he could not experience true empathy for others? That certainly seemed to be the case with his wives, children, and some of his followers.
As to preferences of hate vs. sympathy, I think sympathy is obviously the more pro-survival for everyone. Did Scientology’s hate for say Paulette Cooper do Scientology any good? No. It has forever marked it with the shame of being — or at least having been — a homicidal-bully organization. Scientology could have taken a totally different approach of being sympathetic to the valid concerns that Cooper noted, and through that learned how to better itself and head off any number of later crises.
From Cooper’s vantage point, would it have been more pro-survival to her to have Scientology sympathize with her concerns, or have them hate her and destroy her life?
For those who want to rank hate higher on the tone scale than sympathy, have at it. I would refer you to the work of Marshall Rosenberg and others who point out that things like anger are a tragic expression of your own unmet needs. Sympathy, on the other hand, is genuine caring about the welfare of another.
Valkov –
In 63 years of intense delivery of all of the ethics, tech and admin of Dn and Scn, no “Clear” has ever been produced as LRH described one.
This means that, even if the idea that something like a “Clear” exists, then Dianetics and Scientology, with its constructs of “reactive minds” and “R6 banks” and “GPMs”, do not create one.
So it’s not just me. It’s anyone who has ever been involved in Scientology at all. No one has gotten rid of their “reactive mind” in Scientology and reached the “State of Clear” as LRH described it.
So where is the evidence that the construct of the “State of Clear” is real?
It doesn’t exist.
And remember, a lack of evidence for something is not evidence that it might exist elsewhere. There is no evidence for unicorns, either, and that does not mean they exist elsewhere, does it?
Your whole post assumes the existence of the State of Clear, for which there is absolutely no evidence. LRH did not say that the State of Clear was a religious belief. He said that it was a factual state of existence, tested on the order of the physical sciences, and was found to occur every time what he said to do in Scientology was done.
After 63 years of lots of people trying to do exactly what LRH said to do, there is absolutely no evidence for that either.
So….
Bob’s Your Uncle.
Alanzo
Hi Brian
Just as it is not helpful to confuse Scientology with the Church of Scientology, so it is unhelpful to confuse the teachings in the bible with the Christian Church.
There is in fact no mention of “eternal damnation” in the original Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic, this concept has come about through bias in the translator’s perception. More and more Christians are accepting “Universalism” Tentmaker Ministries
Love and like are two different concepts. Love in its true sense is AGAPA – unconditional. Liking on the other hand is more in the nature of AFFINITY, which in Scientology is defined as “the consideration of distance” i.e. that which one likes one wants close to them that which they dislike they would prefer further away.
Jesus tells us we should be both gentle and wise. It is perfectly O.K. to invite a burglar to dinner so long as you remember to lock up your valuables, or as a good Muslim might say “put your trust in Allah but don’t forget to tie up your camel”.
Love is not native to the soul, in fact it is unknown to the soul, and the soul only knows AFFINITY. Love is an attribute of THE SPIRIT. God is Love and God is Spirit. To know God is to see God in all!
I Corinthians 13 tells us what love is and “stupidity” is not one of its attributes.
You write of “to harm another in a just cause”; do you really mean HARM or HURT? Off the top of my head I can’t think of a “just cause” for harming someone but I can for hurting them. The scripture says “spare the rod and spoil the child”, you may hurt the child but the intention is not to harm that child.
Its fine to come from your own experience, but that can be a 1st dynamic approach. Ethical behaviour is defined as “those actions that bring about the optimum solution for the greatest number of dynamics.”
Love and ARC
Pip
For me pan-determinism is the “game where everyone wins”. Therefore God is pan-determined. It’s like a referee in a game of football, a good referee is not interested in who wins and who loses he wants it to be a “memorable” game, where each team did their best and the referee encourages that to come about so that when the game is over every person involved can know they played their part to the best of their ability and can say as in the poem by Kipling “I have met with triumph and disaster and treated these two imposters both the same” ( my amendment)
Hi Marildi
Truth is truth and whenever anyone is coming from “the Spirit” and expressing the NO-THING there will be harmony.
Hi Conan
It can’t come too soon for me. There is this concept from A Course in Miracles that in truth we are lying daydreaming on a grassy knoll in heaven, and experiencing this whole dream/nightmare and what we need to do is WAKEUP!!!
Unlike you, huh? LMAO! 🙂
In other words, Its a mess
Auditing and a couple of quotes and alsoo a couple of toughts he has in this lecture:
Al, you say “In 63 years of intense delivery of all of the ethics, tech and admin of Dn and Scn, no “Clear” has ever been produced as LRH described one.”
But I have met plenty of people, back in the 1970s, who, looking within after achieving what indicated to them as “Clear”, perceived that they were free of their own personal “reactive minds”. And that is pretty much the EP or definition I seem to recall from the Grade Charts of the time – no longer having one’s own reactive mind.
I think it is arrogant in the extreme for you or anyone to state “there is no such thing” unless you claim to have the ability to look within the minds of others and actually see that they do not have a “reactive mind”. There have been and are plenty of people to whom the concept “indicated”, going all the way back to the publication of DMSMH, just as various other psychological constructs have appealed to people over the years, regardless of whether or not they represented the realities or actualities of the mind 100% perfectly. That’s not the purpose of such constructs and theories.
To me you sound like just another wanna-be cult leader guru of the “No Reactive Mind Cult”. 🙂
So how come you have Buddha as your avatar? Just to create “altitude”?
It sounds like you don’t subscribe to the concept of “awakening” or “awakened beings”.
I use Google everyday. But I don’t have the time to read the (literally) millions of results each search produces.
Buddha was not an expert on hypnosis, Valkov. In fact, I don’t know exactly what he was an expert in, besides Buddhism.
As for subscribing to the concept of awakened beings, I learned a lot about that subscription in Scientology. That subscription has been cancelled until I actually see one.
Alanzo
Valkov wrote:
I think it is arrogant in the extreme for you or anyone to state “there is no such thing” unless you claim to have the ability to look within the minds of others and actually see that they do not have a “reactive mind”. There have been and are plenty of people to whom the concept “indicated”, going all the way back to the publication of DMSMH, just as various other psychological constructs have appealed to people over the years, regardless of whether or not they represented the realities or actualities of the mind 100% perfectly. That’s not the purpose of such constructs and theories.
It has nothing to do with arrogance, Valkov, it has to do with knowing the difference between a construct, or a model, and reality. It also means knowing when someone says something like the reactive mind is a fact, as LRH continually told Scientologists, that it is an important distinction to make.
I understand what you say about the purposes of constructs and theories, but do you understand how important it is to constantly be aware that something is only a theory when it is only a theory? And to never fall into the trap of believing a theory or a construct is a fact?
If that had been kept in mind, at least by the people who were running Scientology, including LRH himself, then most of the abuses in Scientology would have never happened.
I really don’t think you are getting the importance of this, especially since you believe that it is “arrogant” to make this very important distinction.
Alanzo
“Scientology has taken an _ordinal_ scale (whose rankings are debatable and somewhat subjective) and assigned unvalidated numbers to it to make it look like a scientific _interval_ scale.”
OMG, FOTF2012, it actually IS an interval scale. You just hit upon the basis for the numbering of tones – i.e. it’s a matter of harmonics! The idea of harmonics of wavelengths exists in both physics and music, as you probably know – and LRH did talk about the harmonics of emotional tones.
I remember too that he said boredom, for example, is a high-toned apathy. Well, lo and behold, the assigned numbers are 2.5 and .05, which would be a wavelength harmonic of 1/5. Another example is conservatism, which he said is a high-toned fear, and their respective numbers are 3.0 and 1.0, a harmonic of 1/3.
Wow, I’m jazzed! That has to be the whole meaning of the assigned numbers. It’s not that their irregular progression represents a ratio of actual wavelength values, but I’m pretty sure it does represent a ratio of those wavelengths.
Btw, as regards the questioning of Action being called an emotion, in the Tone Scale in Full it shows a range of emotion with plus emotion (starting at 8.0, Exhilaration) and minus emotion (starting at 2.0, Antagonism). Below the whole Emotion band is the Effort band and above Emotion is the Thought band. So in the final expanded Tone Scale, Action is in the Thought band.
Thanks again for inspiring the realization about harmonics being the basis of the numbering system – I’m positive it relates to the ratio of wavelengths of tones!
p.s. Actually, the assigned numbers would represent a RATIO of wavelengths – but that would not mean LRH knew the precise values, as I had previously inferred. Just the ratios.
Thanks Eric — it helps to have that context.
Those are words of wisdom for Scientology to heed: open yourself up to double-blind studies and impartial research. If the product delivered is as great an predictable as claimed, it will stand up to scrutiny.
For concrete, well-documented failures of Scientology and/or limits on its effective scope, review touch assists, Narconon, Criminon, Purification Rundown toxicity, pseudo-scientific claims regarding radiation that can result in harm, pseudo-scientific claims regarding cigarette smoking that result in harm, failure to handle treatable medical conditions with modern medicine, failure to prevent child abuse and in fact promotion of some types of child exploitation, inadequate counseling for pregnancy decisions leading to some forced abortions, abysmal financial planning for members leading to financial ruin, ignorance of effects of long-term sleep deprivation on staff (actually, I think this one is not ignorance but deliberate mind control), and — since I was talking about rape victims earlier who cannot in Scientology be referred to other support resources — consider the stories of rape victims revictimized due to Scientology: http://blackrob.largerhosting.com/category/uncategorized/.
Does that give you a more concrete idea of why I have a strong sense that Scientology fails to handle some things?
Al, did I already respond to this? I don’t recall. To be sure, here goes, maybe again: The definition I go by, and I have met many people who feel they achieved this state, is “no longer has his own reactive mind”. This is an “inner” state. One looks within, and either sees something there or does not. In this case, one used to see(perceive) something there, and now no longer does, because he is “clear” of whatever that was. You savvy? A person perceives it about himself, about his inner world or whatever you call it. Maybe you don’t call it anything because you don’t believe in it or whatever. Maybe like some materialistic neurologists or psychiatrists you think it may exist but is irrelevant, that all that matters are the outward manifestations of a person, objectively visible behavior.
You have said that “the mind does exist, but no accurate construct of it exists”, words to that effect.
What makes you think that any kind of “mind” actually exists? What is the evidence for your belief about that?
The other question, which I believe I have already asked, is how do you know that I, or that guy over here, do not have something like a “reactive mind”? Maybe you do not have one, by reason of actually being “Clear”, but how do you know others do not have reactive minds? There are many psychologists of the behavioral school, for example, who believe Man is a stimulus-response animal. In other words, that Man is “reactive” and does not have “free will”.
So your global statement that no-one has a “reactive mind” seems a bit (!) extreme and self-centered at the very least.
Al, the fact that you “see little value in it”, is clearly your value judgement about it, and not necessarily anyone else’s. Are “value judgements” science?
Thanks Al, I can’t wait to get the link to your complete and unembellished track record in Scientology training and processing!
So you were “verified” as Clear 3 times! Wow! Yet you deny the concept has any validity. Don’t YOU know whether you are or not? Maybe the reason you don’t perceive a reactive mind is, you no longer have one, by reason of being “clear”?
Do you accept the validity of the idea of “illegal pc”? Were you ever labeled an “illegal pc”? No one ever told me I was. How about you?
Hey Al, is your last name Lumbergh?
“And if you would like to post all of your auditing and training history in Scientology now, that would be great.”
Wpw. You used th eword “important” and “importance” 4 times in that shot post. I guess it’s very important to you to convince me and others of something. Your post sounds like what that other guy wrote about “the whole agonized future of very man, woman and child on this planet” or
some such….. Something about KSW or something ….. I guess I ‘d better listen up, huh? ‘Cause you, Al, KNOW, and I don’t, huh?
Brian! Brian! Veda-disser Alert! Al just said the traditional views from India through Buddha are “derogatory” and “human-hating”!
Surely you want to come set him straight!
And Al, this is quite true: “Much very specific and detailed scientific research has been done on hypnotic states since the time of Plato, Buddha, Hesse, and Hubbard.”
But have you grasped the implications of this? It means that Hubbard and others were not operating off the same definition of “hypnosis/hypnotism”. You see to be trying to apply a definition that did not exit in Hubbard’s time, to Hubbard’s use of the word.
This of course leads to a false interpretation of what Hubbard said and meant.
So if you want to accurately understand and represent what Hubbard meant by it, you will have to search out and understand what he (and perhaps those others) meant by it. The definition has been changed and expanded a lot since Milton Erickson’s time dude, and Erickson changed it from what it meant in the 1950s. Hubbard was obviously referring to pre-Ericksonian definitions of it.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as someone once said. And can read to muddy thinking and wildly wrong conclusions.
CD, “confront” is simply the ability to be there comfortably with something or someone and seeing it or them as it/they are.
Al, some say liquor is quicker. Maybe you shoulda just showed up with a couple of bottles of Schnapps.
At least it wasn’t the Scientology Turkey Display! That’s the worst!
That is why children are not Big Thetans in little MEST-bodies.
Alsoo many teenagers have behavior not unlikely of the behavior of Psychopaths
I will maybe give in on that the brain instrumentarium that the Thetan is using is in devellopment abd thus not fully functional untill age 25 even.
Than development ogf the Thetans instumentarium is fully functional.
He is keying you in 😉
Alsoo I like this
I see
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/confront
Are these your kids with Heber ?
So Valkov, you have had no training or auditing of any kind in Scientology – is that correct?
Alanzo
Rather than say “the Matrix has you” I’ll just point out that it is not a valid interval scale iff (if and only if) it can be validated by actual measurement performed by researchers in a way that can be repeated and confirmed by others. There is no evidence of any such valid research.
Until then it is pseudo-science / New Age belief, and that is fine — as long as it is clear that it is belief and not science.
As to your feeling that it is actually a ratio scale, well, that does not quite work. Ratio scales require an absolute zero. Hubbard’s zero point is body death. His scale goes lower.
Take temperature scales as a simple example. Fahrenheit and Centigrade are interval scales based on the freezing point of water. You can say that Centrigrade looks like a ratio scale because boiling is exactly 100 (degrees) above freezing water at zero (degrees). But it is not a ratio scale because there is still something to be measured of “temperature” below the zero point. Therefore it is an interval scale, not a ratio scale.
In temperature, Kelvin is the true ratio scale. Its zero point is a true zero point — Absolute Zero. There is nothing left of what is being measured (“temperature”) below that point.
Thus the Scientology is an unvalidated, and until validated, pseudo-scientific _interval_ scale and is not a ratio scale.
I forgot to mention two other reasons I have a strong sense that Scientology fails to handle some things — at least one of which every one should be well aware of:
The insane practice of Type III PTS “baby watch” (mis)handling that has even led to death, perhaps most infamously in the Lisa McPherson case. (Google a phrase like “type iii baby watch scientology” for many discussions of McPherson’s and other such cases.)
The other that people may or may not be aware of is the people dying in Scientology because they try to use auditing to handle physical conditions that are medically treatable. For example, this has led to actual death from cancer as people try to “audit out” what does not have a mental cause. (See for example http://theyshouldnothavedied.wordpress.com/, http://www.factnet.org/scientology-suicide, http://www.xenu-directory.net/mirrors/www.whyaretheydead.net/, and many more.)
Maybe that will give an even clearer view of why I say that Scientology fails to handle some situations. For anyone who can’t face the truth that (a) Scientology does not always work, (b) that it sometimes causes great harm, and (c) that it does sometimes cut people off from workable resources in the “wog” world, I’d say your TR 0 is out, you are alter-ising, and “don’t that Kool-Aid taste good!”
You have to remember that the numbers themselves are arbitrary and the zero point at death is apparently a way to indicate that the scale represents both the body-plus-thetan tones and the thetan tones.
Also, I wrote that it is an interval scale, indicated by the ratios of the numbers – not to say that it is a ratio scale. However, the scale of approximate wavelengths in 8-80, which gives approximations of actual values, I suppose is a ratio scale as it does have the absolute zero of theta – i.e. a zero wavelength.
Btw, no need to keep repeating that none of this has been scientifically proven. I got that. Alright already. Okay? I got that. 🙂
The 3rd definition is close to what Hubbard meant. It has the extended meaning of being able to face without running away from or turning away from, as you might from something or someone you find unpleasant. It is also along th elines of what Biddha did under the bodhi tree – he sat until he had faced(confronted) the realities of existence by looking at them without running away.
That would be “What Buddha did”, not “Biddha”.
No, that is not correct. Life Repair, CCHs by an HQS course student, lots of TRs, Purif, Op Pro by Dup, some ARC Straightwire, and some Self Analysis lists. Since I never got very involved in the CoS, I have done reading and listening to lectures on my own.
I see a human being as a compound of at last 3 elements – 1. Genetic makeup, 2. what the spirit brings with him/her from previous existence, 3. the education and socialization s/he receives after being born.
The “nature or nurture” controversy is not quite accurate, in that the “nature part is dual – it is the genetics and it is the spiritual also, both go into making up the “nature” of the person.
Well thanks for that, Valkov.
I did not know that. I had the impression that you had done no bridge services at all in Scientology.
So you are familiar with the state of being “IN SESSION” during auditing.
Have you ever had a session where you were really really IN SESSION? Nothing existed in your mind except the one auditing question and the incident you were telling your auditor about?
If your auditor had good TRs, and ran a good model session, then you were entirely focused onto one thing, and very aware of it, but not so aware of what was going on around you in the environment, what the auditor was doing, etc.
You seemed to lose track of time. You felt very relaxed, and at the end of the session you smiled and maybe even laughed and felt “keyed out”.
That’s a hypnotic state, Valkov. You were not asleep during that. You were awake and aware. Just as LRH described, and just as any other hypnotist describes to his clients.
Congratulations. So you DO know what I am talking about when I say “hypnotic state”!
Well done.
Alanzo
Maybe he had a son named Biddha 😉
And thank you
OK. You may define that as a “hypnotic state” if you wish, if it appeals somehow to your understanding.
Since you are fond of Google, you may want to search for “hypnotic state definition” and actually read some of the various results that come up in the first 10. What you mention is there, but it lacks the pivotal element of suggestibility.
If you really want to know something about hypnotism, try reading Milton Ercikson’s “Uncommon Therapy”. He is considered the father of such subjects as NLP. Also take a class in it or just go to a hypnotist and learn about what it really is.
AS far as auditing, reverie, etc goes, that is not what I mean and I do not define those as “hypnosis” or “hypnotic states”. AS I said, the pivotal benchmark of true hypnotism is degree of suggestibility induced. LRH wrote and spoke quite a bit about it and made it crystal clear what he meant by it, as opposed to what Erickson may have meant, or the definition the Hypnosis Society puts out for public consumption.
And actually, I recommend these 2 books by practicing hypnotists from the 1950s, like “Modern Hypnosis” by Lesley Kuhn and Salvatore Russo, which is a collection of actual research reports by various authors, and “Hypnotism” by G. H. Estabrooks, who worked for the government in military intelligence.
If you really not familiar with these materials, don’t bother to post about “hypnotism” to me.
Also, there are a ton of videos on Youtube about various aspects of hypnotism.
The issue here, I thought, is to
Thank you for your eleborate writings
I much enjoyed them
Intresting view and it makes me think. I hacve seen you post this view a few times before.
The nature is dual part you talk about is a bit what brain plasticity goes on about. A joined research project by the University of Winsconsin and the Dalai Lama.
Sorry Mirildi, It was something, I think I heard on a tape. My X wife and I use to go to CC on La Brea and listen to the Whole Track Tapes, PDC tapes and many more for hrs and days and days.
We would listen together and compare ideas afterwards. This one “Never let your affinity over wump your reality” was one of the many Ron thoughts that we agreed to and found useful.
I do not remember what tape it was on. But the strong effect of it was that I have kept it alive as a truth all these years. Even when I was still married to LIkki we would bring that concept up from time to time when it was useful in dealing with people.
Sorry I can’t give the exact place.
I love being right, no doubt. But I love clarity more. I love having my argument dissected and deconstructed. I would rather be clear and know the truth.
Scientologists and Scientology has instilled in it’s practitioners a certain taste for defense and self-righteousness.
I have worked to resolve those issues. I may be still working on them. But being right is not supreme in my world any more.
I am here to share my story of de programing and inspire hope in others that spiritual advancement moves on way beyond Scientology for those so inclined.
You seem happy with the state of affairs philosophically Valkov. As I have stated to you before; there are others who may see value in what I say and you are probably not one of them. I’m happy for you that Scientology is your path.
Brian, you and Alonzo seem to have this in common: to him, if one is not a Critic, then he is automatically a Scientologist. There are many categories in between, ya know? Not to mention that individuals are idiosyncratically, well, individual?
“It is my view that any time devoted to honestly viewing the content of your mind, your experience, what arises in consciousness, is progress … ”
– Marty R
Scientologists certainly spend a lot of time trying to view the content of their own mind, that’s for sure! I don’t think that would be a bad thing, it wasn’t for the INDOCTRINATION … it just goes to show that there is a real thirst for knowledge concerning the human mind! Scientology exploits this, but not just Scientology. Political movements do the same thing. They quench people’s genuine thirst for knowledge with false, thought-terminating cliches. For example, when people were contemplating gender back in the ’70’s, “men are pigs” was a false statement that explained nothing, yet a lot a science-ignorant people bought into that.
It wasn’t too long ago that we humans were completely in the dark about the content of our own minds. For thousands of years, we overestimated our own consciousness, making us susceptible to false ideas.
Throughout history, philosophers believed our thoughts and deeds were all the result of a conscious decision. Thanks to the genius of Sigmund Freud, we now know that most of our mental life is unconscious at any given moment; only a small component is conscious.
Post-modernists, feminists and the science-ignorant may criticize Freud, but Freud made many discoveries that have remained true to this day. Even with modern brain science, certain discoveries that Freud made have stood the test of time.
So, in the human mind, conscious thought is just the tip of the iceberg. But how can the average person understand what that really means? And what does that have to do with Scientology?
In the nineteenth century, hypnosis was seen as a scientifically valid way of exploring the subject of the ‘unconscious.’ At first, Freud embraced hypnosis, but soon abandoned it in favor of ‘free association.’ Free association is where the doctor/therapist says a word, and then the patient says whatever it is that comes into their mind. That’s like an auditing session! But this is NOT hypnosis, it’s free association … and with free association, Freud noticed the phenomena of ‘transference.’ Transference is where the patient transfers certain feelings from their unconscious mind to the therapist. For example, these ‘feelings from the unconscious mind’ might be childhood feelings the patient had for his or her patents. These feelings are now transferred to the therapist.
Recently, in French court, a French psychiatrist testified that there is a huge element of TRANFERENCE in Scientology …. feelings one might have had for their parents in childhood are now transferred to the subject of Scientology itself.
So, if free association is not hypnotism, and if Scientology is like free-association, does that mean that Scientology is not hypnotism?
Sadly, hypnotism seems to be a catch-all phrase for any kind of mind control. Jon Atack tried to explain Scientology in terms of hypnotism. But, if you really want to explain how people become scientologists, the term ‘hypnotism’ is just too vague (which is no big surprise when you look at how much cognitive psychology has progressed since the nineteenth century).
When Jon Atack compares Scientology to hypnotism, he is correct in the sense that most thought (or ‘cognition’) has a lot to do with the unconscious mind, even though the term ‘hypnotism’ by itself does not even begin to explain that.
Unfortunately , most ex-Scientologists do not read books about the BRAIN. I remember Jon Atack saying he tried, he but found it revolting. This is why ex-Scientologists have a hard time explaining Scientology. They understand what it’s like to be a Scientologist, but they know nothing about the brain. And, generally speaking, cognitive scientists who understand the brain don’t know what it’s like to be a Scientologist.
And then there’s the ‘never-in,’ who doesn’t know what it’s like to be a Scientologist, and knows even less about the brain!
Needless to say, there’s a lot of bullshit floating to the surface on blogs like ‘the underground bunker.’
To me, spirituality is the subject of our thoughts and dreams, fantasy and reality … the human experience of “I exist.” If that can be explained by biology, it doesn’t make it any less spiritual.
Freud was a biologist. Inspired by Darwin, he saw the ‘connectedness’ of all life. Evolution isn’t saying ‘man is a monkey,’ it’s saying we are all connected … ultimately, to me, science is about connectedness.
Helen died a while ago, and Mary Rower passed away about 3 years ago.
True dat, Brian!
Additionally,
“Be skeptical! But be an *Intelligent* (investigate) skeptic; not an ignorant skeptic” -Tom Campbell
“We are all very ignorant, but not all ignorant of the same things” – Albert Einstein
So, imho, we can all learn something from each person, even LRH.
FOTF2012: Thanks for your insights. It def puts some of my thoughts in perspective. esp like ” In such a mix of insights and baloney, every grain of sugar must be taken with a grain of salt — it must be studied and verified objectively. So that’s where Scientology fails to meet basic tests of objective reality”.
Although, I would like to point out that, while in general I share your disapproval for lack of sympathy (totes lame-o), it technically is reserved for outside of session! In session (if the auditor is actually any good at it) is calm and serene at all times so as not to interfere with your process, bc as humans we naturally take on the attitudes of others very easily (mimic). And not to invalidate your feelings but *maybe* we feel annoyed with this “lack” of sympathy bc we are working through a fear of some kind. Or he is just a shitty auditor or whatever.
Switching gears slightly, Lrh stable datum “What is true is what is true for YOU…if it is not true for you, it isn’t true.” should’ve been it’s qualifying mantra. In practice, not the theory it usually is. Seems kinda simple but would’ve saved a lot of Arc breaks and subsequent hostility. But in the end, “you” are still the one who gave in.
My point is this: it’s a 2 part problem. 1. Corporate Scn. (or Lrh..don’t know/care) doesn’t *truly* allow people to be self-determined if it upsets the status quo. 2. Each individual has the personal responsibility to walk away if personal integrity wasn’t respected.
Quick note: Maybe I am wrong but i recall Lrh clearly stating “Snc is NOT to replace medical treatment” referring it to using the right tool for each problem or something. Whether that is yet another butchered bit of tech I don’t know as I haven’t been behind the scenes in awhile. Also, if one takes it upon himself to thwart medical treatment despite that, pretty sure that is on them..?
Personally, I would rather meditate and eat flax seeds 24/7 then subject myself to chemo.