Purple Rain
Crusader
At the moment I'm still working on establishing formal methods regarding Scientology.
One thing I am trying to do is separate out Dianetic and non-Dianetic processes and determine the interdependencies and such between them. I'm currently much more interested in the non-Dianetic processes and the types of mental states they induce. For theses processes I'm working on isolating them as much as possible from Scientology itself in order to judge each process on its own merits. Currently I'm only experimenting on myself to try to determine which things are the most interesting to (hopefully) eventually study for real - though that's years out at this point. Developing correct methodology is very important to me so I'm certainly open to suggestions on how to do things in the most correct way possible.
I want to be clear that I'm not looking to validate Scientology as a whole - I really could care less about Scientology being validated. I'm also not at all funded by the church - I'm pretty sure if they knew who I was I would be declared an SP very quickly but at the moment in the interest of research I'm trying to maintain an not-SP status with them without actually giving them any of my money.
Most of my research regarding other religions is very different than that regarding Scientology.
I'm currently working on sort of charting out the various cosmologies presented in the various Gnostic texts and at some point I plan to see how these map to in-built and developed archetypes that we have. I think that some of the more mythology-type stuff in Scientology can also be mapped to similar or the same archetypes so there might be some similarities between Scientology and Gnostic Christianity there but that's just speculation at the moment.
I've spent a fair amount of time researching the work of Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley in their "communications with angels", especially regarding the language that the angels spoke. They were given translations for parts of it, but the majority of it is untranslated. So I have been using various methods to find possible translations of untranslated words ranging from linguistic methods and writing a computer program to do statistical analysis on the works to inducing a trance and asking the meaning of word (and documenting how any possible translation was derived).
One thing I want to eventually research as well is the role of fundamentalism on the human psyche. Most of the bad things about fundamentalism are obvious, especially at the social level - but I wonder if there are some potential positive effects on the individual human mind and if so what they are.
I'm back in school starting in 2 weeks to work on psychology and religion degrees so the above is kind of hobby research at the moment that I hope to eventually evolve into more serious research.
Well, good luck with it. And I'd love to have the opportunity to discuss the validity of the methodology. That would be wonderful! Thank you! Not that I am any kind of professional, but that has never stopped me from feeling like I might have a contribution to make to something on some level. I think that if your methodology could withstand a critique by exes of the calibre we have here, you would have found a very strong starting point for your research.