I have an old high school friend [John] who went into Scientology.
He and I have spoken about our respective belief systems numerous times [well in the mid-1980s we did].
Scientology openly re-programs your brain to think differently.
John was 'licensed' to operate their lie detector and to 'clear' a person. Under hypnosis they use a very sensitive lie-detector to determine when a subject has an issue with some idea or area of doctrine. Then they have very elaborate wall charts that layout exactly where you fit, and through a long series of these sessions they can walk you through each area where you disagree with scientology's doctrine, to get you to the point where you are at the next level.
You see 'Earth' is a prison planet. Everyone living here was sentenced to be here to live through an endless series of re-incarnations until they have finally worked through whatever their crime was. Everyone on Earth was convicted of either sexual perversions, crimes against the empire or they are simply too smart, too intelligent to be allowed to mingle in common society. Most of those who scientology has recruited interestingly enough were all of the 'too intelligent' variety.
Within scientology there are many 'levels'. The wall charts show that for each specific category of personality there are 'ranges'. Where you fit in these ranges determines where you are overall in your progress through re-incarnations toward your final release from the prison.
For each level of each category where you fit, you can take additional sessions to move yourself 'up' on the charts. If you can finally get every category up to the top of your chart, then you can graduate on to the next wall chart. Many times you can not fully appreciate and learn to overcome a given weakness or depravity, until you have put yourself into that place, and lived in that lowest level of depravity, only after that can you grow through it to be able to go higher on the charts.
To first walk in, and allow a trained operator to remove all societal prejudices from your mind makes you a 'clear'. Once you have finished with the first wall chart, in all areas of personality you become a 'Thetan'. I do not know of the levels above 'Thetan', as John did not tell me.
John did tell me however, that all Laws of Mankind of Laws of Earthly governments are not indicative of rights or wrongs. They do not teach that anything is 'right' or 'wrong'. You have to consider what you are doing and if caught that you will likely be punished. If you sit in a jail for ten years, you are wasting those ten years, and not progressing up on the chart-levels. So they do focus on staying out of jail, or at least moving around enough so that they are aware of what is illegal where they are currently located.
John is in a secret ‘spin-off’ group. They believe that the leaders of Scientology have become corrupted, and so some of them have been secretly working with each other to exceed their appropriate levels. ….. As a complete outsider, he does call me from time to time, to ask advice or use me as a sounding board, since I know none of his superiors I can not get him into trouble.
What bothered me was their lack of absolute rights and wrongs. To hurt a friend, might inhibit getting help from that friend in the future, but hurting someone in itself, is not a wrong, and their concern is primarily about avoiding detection from the Law Enforcement Community.
PS. When John had an odd youth. When he was 10, his father came home and shot his mother, his two younger sisters and John ran out of the home, before his father finally shot himself. The sisters lived, though his parents did not. I knew the three of them, as they lived with their grandmother, while they went through highschool. I always got the impression that living through such did have some effect on john. John was the second person to ever shoot at me. Well I should say the first guy used a shotgun, and fired over my head. John shot at me with a rifle while we were camping, he had gotten mad at me and was upset that he had not won an arguement.
A little bit on the "lie detector". I had a demonstration once.- I had droppoed out of engineering college and recognized the basic design as a Wheatstone Bridge which is used to measure an unknown resistance. In this case the resistor is the subjects body- I was holding a connection in each hand. They operator would ask me a question. At the instant I thought of the answer the needle would move. Kinda cool but not majic.
Also- the founder was L Ron Hubbard who was originaly known as a science fiction writer. One story I have read about him was that he and the guy who founded The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (heavily involed in the US space program in the 60's) both claimed that when they were out in the california desert together in the early 50's they had a close encounter of the third kind with aliens from outer space.
I don’t know much of anything about Scientology but I read that Tom Cruise has really been pushing the limits with the media by promoting Scientology big time in interviews so the publicists for his latest film have reduced his “face time” in the media.
It’s just so hard to believe that people really believe and follow science fiction as real. I wonder if the big stars have to go through the same kinds of processes, classes and dehumanizing treatments that everyone else does.
quote:
This current generation of thought reform practices, in the opinion of many researchers, poses a greater threat than did the politically oriented behavior control practices of the past because its primary attack is not just upon the individual’s political views but rather upon the sense of self. “Basic consciousness, reality awareness, beliefs and world view, emotional control, and defense mechanisms” are destabilized, with resultant loss of independent perspective and thus of the capacity for informed consent.
This statement is really scary when I stop and think about it. We weren’t zombies while in TWI, but we definitely gave up our personal perspective on things in lieu of TWI’s reality as it was taught to us. Now we know that the reality that they were projecting and having us believe wasn’t even the truth. There’s a whole ‘nother reality among top leadership that they will stop at nothing to prevent the lowly believers from learning because that would empower them and give them reason to question the validity and integrity of the leadership body. Once they start questioning those things, they quit passively allowing TWI to run their lives, thoughts and emotions.
quote:
Some of the influence techniques that attract and hold people in a thought reform environment are:
1) Creating a triad of “miracle, mystery, and authority…”
TWI had this one down. Leadership became the only ones who could receive revelation from God. If God told us something different from what they wanted us to believe they would point out our inadequacies and inferiority to their “mature spiritual insight”.
Those top secret WC meetings that we weren’t privy to and the different “levels” of information. The more “in” you were, the more information you were privy to. As assistant coordinators we heard more than once information that we were told specifically to keep to ourselves unless someone persistently asked or seemed to “need to know”.
Authority? Who wasn’t afraid of getting involved in a face melting session with some leadership over something petty? Who wasn’t afraid of being M&A because of insubordination or “genuine spiritual suspicion”?
quote:
2) Attributing “all individual suffering to misapplication, misunderstanding or even casual doubting of the group’s unfailing teaching.”
You’re not believing God big enough….not giving enough money….get your foot off the hose……you “misunderstood” the teaching….haven’t we heard all these enough times to make you wanna puke?
quote:
3) Inducing “sensory deprivation and sensory overload, guided imagery and visualization, trance induction through repetition of words or slogans…”
I don’t know so much about this one.
quote:
4) Controlling the environment, i.e., the group member “is deprived of the combination of external information and inner reflection which anyone requires to test the realities of his environment and to maintain a measure of identity separate from it.”
Definitely this went on, especially during classes, specials and wc training. On the field they kept us so busy and our time so manipulated we didn’t have time to stop and think.
quote:
5) Creating a mystique of importance around the group and its leader, so that the group and its goals are seen as more important than anything else.
We’re to be thanked for diverting the Y2K disaster and chaos from my time with TWI.
quote:
6) Requiring a level of perfection that is unattainable, with consequent guilt and shame serving as powerful control devices.
I think most of us are all too familiar with this one. Nothing was ever good enough.
quote:
7) Demanding extraordinary levels of confession, including confession to crimes that one has not committed, making it “virtually impossible to maintain a reasonable balance between worth and humility.”
How many times during a reproof session did you apologize just so the dang thing would be over? Apologize for doing or saying something you KNEW you were right about? I did more times than I care to think about. It seemed at times that my ex jumped at the chance to apologize for anything.
quote:
8) Claiming absolute infallibility of the group’s leader and doctrine.
No comment needed on this one. :)-->
quote:
9) Creating a unique language, often non-understandable to outsiders, the effect of which “can be summed up in one word: constriction…. [The group member] is, so to speak, linguistically deprived; and since language is so central to all human experience, his capacities for thinking and feeling are immensely narrowed.”
I never thought about the ramifications of this. I thought it was just part of establishing the uniqueness and superiority of the group as well as solidifying one’s “belonging”. Constriction….good word, good description of how I felt. I’m still working on building my vocabulary.
quote:
9) Giving the member a new identity by bringing his or her thinking into alignment with the group’s, prompting a redefinition of the self and a reinterpretation of the past in terms of the new present. The individual “switches worlds…and through socialization, discovers the ‘plausibility structures’ that make the new world coherent, fully tangible and fully believable…The formula for reinterpretation of the past is, ‘Then I thought...now I know.’
Gotta think on this one some more.
quote:
10) Relegating outsiders to the status of reduced value or non-person. (They brand people with the label "SP" for Suppressive Person, and order their followers to have no contact. They believe that if you are an SP, they can say anything they want about you, even blatant lies, because you are so evil, it's probably true even if there is no proof whatsoever.)
“Empties floating by” – “just body & soul” – “no better than the animals” – “unbelievers” – “Rank unbelievers” – “possessed” – “indigent” – “contentious woman” – “mole” – “natural man” – “sincerely wrong” – “religious” – “earthly family” – “without natural affection” – “an Achen in the camp”…… we could go on and on, couldn’t we?
And here I thought we were uniquely abused. Learning and reading more and more about cults and controlling groups I realize we’re just a dime a dozen in the spiritually abused world. Would that I had read and known all this stuff before getting involved with TWI! But, then again, don’t know if I would have recognized or believed that they were actually applying these techniques on me…. *shrug*
Galen- I looked in the book I’d read and have to correct my self.. The book does not say that Hubbard met aliens- I miss read it. The book is “Dimensions – A Case book of alien Contact. By Jaques Vallee. (Vallee was the inspiration for the french character Truffaut in the Movie Close Encounters- he was the program director and if I remember he was a technical advisor on the film)
Here is the one paragraph that mentions Hubbard.
quote:
This history of the interaction between flying saucer contact and politics goes back to the early California Contactees. In those days many occult groups linked to power hungry organizations were extremely active. Right after World War II, when a branch of Aleister Crowley’s neo Templar cult flourished in
Los Angeles, two of the most important members were Jack W Parsons, a propulsion engineer, and L Ron Hubbard, a science fiction buff. Jack Parsons claimed to have met a Venusian in the desert in 1946 and went on to be one of the founders of Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aero Jet Corporation, although JPL may deny the connection. L Ron Hubbard went on to found Dianetics and Scientology.
The tie in with a Crowley Cult is interesting. Hubbard went from being a major member to forming his own.
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outofdafog
Boy if I didn't truly believe I was in cult before....I do NOW......
No scientolgy, just a friend who is Hari Krishna .... is that how you spell that?
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Galen
I have an old high school friend [John] who went into Scientology.
He and I have spoken about our respective belief systems numerous times [well in the mid-1980s we did].
Scientology openly re-programs your brain to think differently.
John was 'licensed' to operate their lie detector and to 'clear' a person. Under hypnosis they use a very sensitive lie-detector to determine when a subject has an issue with some idea or area of doctrine. Then they have very elaborate wall charts that layout exactly where you fit, and through a long series of these sessions they can walk you through each area where you disagree with scientology's doctrine, to get you to the point where you are at the next level.
You see 'Earth' is a prison planet. Everyone living here was sentenced to be here to live through an endless series of re-incarnations until they have finally worked through whatever their crime was. Everyone on Earth was convicted of either sexual perversions, crimes against the empire or they are simply too smart, too intelligent to be allowed to mingle in common society. Most of those who scientology has recruited interestingly enough were all of the 'too intelligent' variety.
Within scientology there are many 'levels'. The wall charts show that for each specific category of personality there are 'ranges'. Where you fit in these ranges determines where you are overall in your progress through re-incarnations toward your final release from the prison.
For each level of each category where you fit, you can take additional sessions to move yourself 'up' on the charts. If you can finally get every category up to the top of your chart, then you can graduate on to the next wall chart. Many times you can not fully appreciate and learn to overcome a given weakness or depravity, until you have put yourself into that place, and lived in that lowest level of depravity, only after that can you grow through it to be able to go higher on the charts.
To first walk in, and allow a trained operator to remove all societal prejudices from your mind makes you a 'clear'. Once you have finished with the first wall chart, in all areas of personality you become a 'Thetan'. I do not know of the levels above 'Thetan', as John did not tell me.
John did tell me however, that all Laws of Mankind of Laws of Earthly governments are not indicative of rights or wrongs. They do not teach that anything is 'right' or 'wrong'. You have to consider what you are doing and if caught that you will likely be punished. If you sit in a jail for ten years, you are wasting those ten years, and not progressing up on the chart-levels. So they do focus on staying out of jail, or at least moving around enough so that they are aware of what is illegal where they are currently located.
John is in a secret ‘spin-off’ group. They believe that the leaders of Scientology have become corrupted, and so some of them have been secretly working with each other to exceed their appropriate levels. ….. As a complete outsider, he does call me from time to time, to ask advice or use me as a sounding board, since I know none of his superiors I can not get him into trouble.
What bothered me was their lack of absolute rights and wrongs. To hurt a friend, might inhibit getting help from that friend in the future, but hurting someone in itself, is not a wrong, and their concern is primarily about avoiding detection from the Law Enforcement Community.
PS. When John had an odd youth. When he was 10, his father came home and shot his mother, his two younger sisters and John ran out of the home, before his father finally shot himself. The sisters lived, though his parents did not. I knew the three of them, as they lived with their grandmother, while they went through highschool. I always got the impression that living through such did have some effect on john. John was the second person to ever shoot at me. Well I should say the first guy used a shotgun, and fired over my head. John shot at me with a rifle while we were camping, he had gotten mad at me and was upset that he had not won an arguement.
:-)
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ckeer
A little bit on the "lie detector". I had a demonstration once.- I had droppoed out of engineering college and recognized the basic design as a Wheatstone Bridge which is used to measure an unknown resistance. In this case the resistor is the subjects body- I was holding a connection in each hand. They operator would ask me a question. At the instant I thought of the answer the needle would move. Kinda cool but not majic.
Also- the founder was L Ron Hubbard who was originaly known as a science fiction writer. One story I have read about him was that he and the guy who founded The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (heavily involed in the US space program in the 60's) both claimed that when they were out in the california desert together in the early 50's they had a close encounter of the third kind with aliens from outer space.
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Galen
Well you know that Hubbard's writings, while they were marketed as Sci-Fi, are visions of life away from this prison planet.
'They' consider Hubbard's novels to be non-fiction.
So tell us more about these two egg-heads wandering in the desert, did the aliens probe them?
Inquiring minds want to know.
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Belle
I don’t know much of anything about Scientology but I read that Tom Cruise has really been pushing the limits with the media by promoting Scientology big time in interviews so the publicists for his latest film have reduced his “face time” in the media.
It’s just so hard to believe that people really believe and follow science fiction as real. I wonder if the big stars have to go through the same kinds of processes, classes and dehumanizing treatments that everyone else does.
This statement is really scary when I stop and think about it. We weren’t zombies while in TWI, but we definitely gave up our personal perspective on things in lieu of TWI’s reality as it was taught to us. Now we know that the reality that they were projecting and having us believe wasn’t even the truth. There’s a whole ‘nother reality among top leadership that they will stop at nothing to prevent the lowly believers from learning because that would empower them and give them reason to question the validity and integrity of the leadership body. Once they start questioning those things, they quit passively allowing TWI to run their lives, thoughts and emotions.
TWI had this one down. Leadership became the only ones who could receive revelation from God. If God told us something different from what they wanted us to believe they would point out our inadequacies and inferiority to their “mature spiritual insight”.
Those top secret WC meetings that we weren’t privy to and the different “levels” of information. The more “in” you were, the more information you were privy to. As assistant coordinators we heard more than once information that we were told specifically to keep to ourselves unless someone persistently asked or seemed to “need to know”.
Authority? Who wasn’t afraid of getting involved in a face melting session with some leadership over something petty? Who wasn’t afraid of being M&A because of insubordination or “genuine spiritual suspicion”?
You’re not believing God big enough….not giving enough money….get your foot off the hose……you “misunderstood” the teaching….haven’t we heard all these enough times to make you wanna puke?
I don’t know so much about this one.
Definitely this went on, especially during classes, specials and wc training. On the field they kept us so busy and our time so manipulated we didn’t have time to stop and think.
We’re to be thanked for diverting the Y2K disaster and chaos from my time with TWI.
I think most of us are all too familiar with this one. Nothing was ever good enough.
How many times during a reproof session did you apologize just so the dang thing would be over? Apologize for doing or saying something you KNEW you were right about? I did more times than I care to think about. It seemed at times that my ex jumped at the chance to apologize for anything.
No comment needed on this one.
:)-->
I never thought about the ramifications of this. I thought it was just part of establishing the uniqueness and superiority of the group as well as solidifying one’s “belonging”. Constriction….good word, good description of how I felt. I’m still working on building my vocabulary.
Gotta think on this one some more.
“Empties floating by” – “just body & soul” – “no better than the animals” – “unbelievers” – “Rank unbelievers” – “possessed” – “indigent” – “contentious woman” – “mole” – “natural man” – “sincerely wrong” – “religious” – “earthly family” – “without natural affection” – “an Achen in the camp”…… we could go on and on, couldn’t we?
And here I thought we were uniquely abused. Learning and reading more and more about cults and controlling groups I realize we’re just a dime a dozen in the spiritually abused world. Would that I had read and known all this stuff before getting involved with TWI! But, then again, don’t know if I would have recognized or believed that they were actually applying these techniques on me…. *shrug*
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ckeer
Galen- I looked in the book I’d read and have to correct my self.. The book does not say that Hubbard met aliens- I miss read it. The book is “Dimensions – A Case book of alien Contact. By Jaques Vallee. (Vallee was the inspiration for the french character Truffaut in the Movie Close Encounters- he was the program director and if I remember he was a technical advisor on the film)
Here is the one paragraph that mentions Hubbard.
The tie in with a Crowley Cult is interesting. Hubbard went from being a major member to forming his own.
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