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LRH death event Pat Broeker

Wilbur

Patron Meritorious
How many here think they would still be in Scientology if Broeker had assumed command? How many think the tech would be working and creating clears and OT's in abundance?
I think that if someone like David Mayo had taken charge, then Scientology could have been a force for good, regardless of whether OTs are being made. If they had gotten rid of the extreme emphasis on money and made it reasonably priced, gotten rid of the vulture culture, and just made the organisation more ***honest*** and more like a supportive religion, rather than a parasitic organisation, then it could have been a good thing to belong to.

How many people joined a yoga or tai chi class, and then bitched and moaned about how terrible it was years later? I suspect most people who did a meditation class, or yoga or some such thing, where the cost was reasonable, people were nice, and the atmosphere was positive, still have good things to say about it, even if they are no longer practising it. Scientology COULD HAVE been like that.

I joined the mormons for a while after Scientology. It was just an experiment. I didn't believe in their teachings, but just wanted to see how another religion well-known for being aggressive in recruitment dealt with people. I wanted to observe the process. I found my local mormon church to be very caring, supportive of families, and came away with a warm feeling towards them. I'm not trying to promote the mormons - I know that some people have similarly terrible stories about being a mormon (I suspect that the nearer you get to Utah, the worse are the stories, which I suppose is the analogue of getting nearer to Flag in Scientology). But the experience I had, in a local mormon church continents away from Utah was much more positive than Scientology, despite them having, really, nothing in the way of 'tech'. It was at least configured in a way that made it viable to spend a lifetime in mormonism. They WANTED you to get educated and get a good career. It benefitted them as well as you (through tithing). So it struck me as a much better 'business model' for a religion than Scientology, which just wants to pick you clean in the minimum time-interval possible, and then kick you out when you complain too much.

Scientology has many more tools than a religion like mormonism. So I think that such a version of the church could have been a good thing. I know that some will say that's not possible, since disconnection etc are hard-wired into the tech. I don't take issue with that. But I think a version of the church could have been designed that just focused on auditing people, and training them to audit each other. That took Ron at his word when he said "ethics is a personal thing", and just gave people the tools to 'get their ethics in' without trying to manage or dictate how they did that. On the other hand, isn't that what Ron's Org is, and yet I don't feel any great pull to become a member of that. But then maybe that's because I was promised the state of OT in Scientology - they over-sold themselves, offering states they couldn't deliver, and thereby wrecked the whole subject.

So to answer your question: if Scientology had been the 'friendly' thing that I have delineated above, none of the obsessive stuff about 'the CIA are trying to get us, and the psychs are trying to do us in', then I probably would have stayed for a lot longer. Would the tech be creating Clears and OTs in abundance? No. But it might be helping people to gain clarity in their lives about their life's purpose, and allowing them to unburden themselves of upsets and moral faux pas that they had committed.
 

DagwoodGum

Squirreling Dervish
Scientology has many more tools than a religion like mormonism
Oh but Mormonism is filled with tools among it's membership too.
I was involved with a woman in the Mormon Church 10 years after I left Scientology who claimed she'd been molested by her brother who burned alive in the seat of his farm tractor right in front of the picture window of the house where his 5 sisters and mother watched when his tractor's front end loader made contact with the power line.
Then when her father got back to the farm from a trucking run and learned of his only son's death he decided God was striking him down for screwing a parish member's wife during the many rendezvous they were having in their sordid affair so he confessed his sins to my former mother in law who'd just seen her son burn alive before her eyes so she had herself committed to a mental institution because she didn't want to live anymore.
Need more?
There's more if you do.
And the Mormons have little demi gods running amuck too, demanding you tithe 10% plus of your gross and that you give up 2 nights a week to be a visiting teacher and then to have a visiting teacher come into your home to make sure peoples interpretations of their gospels are according to Salt Lake City.
Then their Sunday service takes half the day, who needs that shit either?
What a grabby god damned cult that is too...
I watched the men, when we "elders" had our separate elders meetings after the main Sunday service gloat over how much they were tithing as it had become a competition to them and would flash their tithe checks to the young elders like me to guilt us into giving more and more and more...
Sound familiar?
It's all the same shit, just different bread.
 
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Wilbur

Patron Meritorious
Oh but Mormonism is filled with tools among it's membership too.
I married a Bishop's daughter in the Mormon Church 10 years after I left Scientology who claimed she'd been molested by her brother who burned alive in the seat of his farm tractor right in front of the picture window of the house where his 5 sisters and mother watched when his tractor's front end loader made contact with the power line.
Then when her Bishop father got back to the farm from a trucking run and learned of his only son's death he decided God was striking him down for screwing a parish member's wife so he confessed his sins to my former mother in law who'd just seen her son burn alive before her eyes so she had herself committed to a mental institution because she didn't want to live anymore.
My little backslid ex-wife became a drug addict and lost the job I'd gotten her at the bus company I worked for, told all of her drug friends that I was a narc and had gotten her fired when I had nothing to do with it.
She was on the hardest drugs, and we parted company and last time I saw her she had become a street walker in a seedy bus route bottleneck where I drove through as a city transit driver on some of my routes...
Need more?
There's more if you do.
And the Mormons have little demi gods running amuck too, demanding you tithe 10% plus of your gross and that you give up 2 nights a week to be a visiting teacher and then to have a visiting teacher come into your home to make sure peoples interpretations of their gospels are according to Salt Lake City.
Then their Sunday service takes half the day, who needs that shit either?
What a grabby god damned cult that is too...
I watched the men, when we "elders" had our separate elders meetings after the main Sunday service gloat over how much they were tithing as it had become a competition to them and would flash their tithe checks to the young elders like me to guilt us into giving more and more and more...
Sound familiar?
It's all the same shit, just different bread.
Oh dear. That sounds awful. But please don't misinterpret my point - I did give the disclaimer that I am aware that the mormon church is problematic - I was portraying MY experiences with a local church, and pointing out that if Scientology had been like THAT then it could have been a viable group. Your experiences are fascinating and edifying (and of course, awful). Thanks for sharing that, Dagwood.
 

DagwoodGum

Squirreling Dervish
Oh dear. That sounds awful. But please don't misinterpret my point - I did give the disclaimer that I am aware that the mormon church is problematic - I was portraying MY experiences with a local church, and pointing out that if Scientology had been like THAT then it could have been a viable group. Your experiences are fascinating and edifying (and of course, awful). Thanks for sharing that, Dagwood.
If you were a Mormon, how did you deal with the visiting teacher demands on your time?
As I always struggled to save 10% of my gross income when I was young and had mortgages, car loans etc., how did you feel about having their hands in your pockets as opposed to Scientology?
Were "The Pearls of Great Price" pearls of wisdom or poison pills of despair?
You might find that the Freezone is the Scientology "good" you speak of without the bad. I don't know as I've never checked it out. Terril Park could help you there. Hey, I just want people to find their happiness, wherever that may be.
 
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guanoloco

As-Wased
I think that if someone like David Mayo had taken charge, then Scientology could have been a force for good, regardless of whether OTs are being made. If they had gotten rid of the extreme emphasis on money and made it reasonably priced, gotten rid of the vulture culture, and just made the organisation more ***honest*** and more like a supportive religion, rather than a parasitic organisation, then it could have been a good thing to belong to.

How many people joined a yoga or tai chi class, and then bitched and moaned about how terrible it was years later? I suspect most people who did a meditation class, or yoga or some such thing, where the cost was reasonable, people were nice, and the atmosphere was positive, still have good things to say about it, even if they are no longer practising it. Scientology COULD HAVE been like that.

I joined the mormons for a while after Scientology. It was just an experiment. I didn't believe in their teachings, but just wanted to see how another religion well-known for being aggressive in recruitment dealt with people. I wanted to observe the process. I found my local mormon church to be very caring, supportive of families, and came away with a warm feeling towards them. I'm not trying to promote the mormons - I know that some people have similarly terrible stories about being a mormon (I suspect that the nearer you get to Utah, the worse are the stories, which I suppose is the analogue of getting nearer to Flag in Scientology). But the experience I had, in a local mormon church continents away from Utah was much more positive than Scientology, despite them having, really, nothing in the way of 'tech'. It was at least configured in a way that made it viable to spend a lifetime in mormonism. They WANTED you to get educated and get a good career. It benefitted them as well as you (through tithing). So it struck me as a much better 'business model' for a religion than Scientology, which just wants to pick you clean in the minimum time-interval possible, and then kick you out when you complain too much.

Scientology has many more tools than a religion like mormonism. So I think that such a version of the church could have been a good thing. I know that some will say that's not possible, since disconnection etc are hard-wired into the tech. I don't take issue with that. But I think a version of the church could have been designed that just focused on auditing people, and training them to audit each other. That took Ron at his word when he said "ethics is a personal thing", and just gave people the tools to 'get their ethics in' without trying to manage or dictate how they did that. On the other hand, isn't that what Ron's Org is, and yet I don't feel any great pull to become a member of that. But then maybe that's because I was promised the state of OT in Scientology - they over-sold themselves, offering states they couldn't deliver, and thereby wrecked the whole subject.

So to answer your question: if Scientology had been the 'friendly' thing that I have delineated above, none of the obsessive stuff about 'the CIA are trying to get us, and the psychs are trying to do us in', then I probably would have stayed for a lot longer. Would the tech be creating Clears and OTs in abundance? No. But it might be helping people to gain clarity in their lives about their life's purpose, and allowing them to unburden themselves of upsets and moral faux pas that they had committed.

You're right. Some people use a hammer to frame structures and houses to improve land and life and Ted Bundy used a hammer to stave in skulls and rape corpses. It's just a tool and how one uses it speaks mouthfuls.

The trouble is the Hu666ard taint.
 

Bill

Gold Meritorious Patron
I think that if someone like David Mayo had taken charge, then Scientology could have been a force for good, regardless of whether OTs are being made. If they had gotten rid of the extreme emphasis on money and made it reasonably priced, gotten rid of the vulture culture, and just made the organisation more ***honest*** and more like a supportive religion, rather than a parasitic organisation, then it could have been a good thing to belong to.
Oh, please. Assuming one could separate out the "good" from the evil, what would you have?

No Releases, no Clears, no OTs, no homo novis, no miraculous cures, no solutions...

If you ignore all the evil and just look at what's left, well, what IS left? Temporary "I feel good". That's it. That's the only thing that you can say for certain that Scientology does. Now maybe that's good enough. Not for the money they are asking but as a helpful temporary assistance, sure.

But "a force for good"? Not in a million years. It doesn't have that, except as false promises.

And there are many other ways to achieve a temporary "I feel good" without all the hype and complexity of Scientology.
 

Dave B.

Maximus Ultimus Mostimus
I think that if someone like David Mayo had taken charge, then Scientology could have been a force for good, regardless of whether OTs are being made. If they had gotten rid of the extreme emphasis on money and made it reasonably priced, gotten rid of the vulture culture, and just made the organisation more ***honest*** and more like a supportive religion, rather than a parasitic organisation, then it could have been a good thing to belong to.

How many people joined a yoga or tai chi class, and then bitched and moaned about how terrible it was years later? I suspect most people who did a meditation class, or yoga or some such thing, where the cost was reasonable, people were nice, and the atmosphere was positive, still have good things to say about it, even if they are no longer practising it. Scientology COULD HAVE been like that.

I joined the mormons for a while after Scientology. It was just an experiment. I didn't believe in their teachings, but just wanted to see how another religion well-known for being aggressive in recruitment dealt with people. I wanted to observe the process. I found my local mormon church to be very caring, supportive of families, and came away with a warm feeling towards them. I'm not trying to promote the mormons - I know that some people have similarly terrible stories about being a mormon (I suspect that the nearer you get to Utah, the worse are the stories, which I suppose is the analogue of getting nearer to Flag in Scientology). But the experience I had, in a local mormon church continents away from Utah was much more positive than Scientology, despite them having, really, nothing in the way of 'tech'. It was at least configured in a way that made it viable to spend a lifetime in mormonism. They WANTED you to get educated and get a good career. It benefitted them as well as you (through tithing). So it struck me as a much better 'business model' for a religion than Scientology, which just wants to pick you clean in the minimum time-interval possible, and then kick you out when you complain too much.

Scientology has many more tools than a religion like mormonism. So I think that such a version of the church could have been a good thing. I know that some will say that's not possible, since disconnection etc are hard-wired into the tech. I don't take issue with that. But I think a version of the church could have been designed that just focused on auditing people, and training them to audit each other. That took Ron at his word when he said "ethics is a personal thing", and just gave people the tools to 'get their ethics in' without trying to manage or dictate how they did that. On the other hand, isn't that what Ron's Org is, and yet I don't feel any great pull to become a member of that. But then maybe that's because I was promised the state of OT in Scientology - they over-sold themselves, offering states they couldn't deliver, and thereby wrecked the whole subject.

So to answer your question: if Scientology had been the 'friendly' thing that I have delineated above, none of the obsessive stuff about 'the CIA are trying to get us, and the psychs are trying to do us in', then I probably would have stayed for a lot longer. Would the tech be creating Clears and OTs in abundance? No. But it might be helping people to gain clarity in their lives about their life's purpose, and allowing them to unburden themselves of upsets and moral faux pas that they had committed.

What could have been.

In my opinion Hubbard's huge ego was the main driver/aspect of the downfall. His insistence on the para-military approach to dissemination and control was misguided and HE KNEW IT.
 

DagwoodGum

Squirreling Dervish
What could have been.

In my opinion Hubbard's huge ego was the main driver/aspect of the downfall. His insistence on the para-military approach to dissemination and control was misguided and HE KNEW IT.
Hubbards minions are always claiming protesters are stuck in electronic incidents, well they're stuck in military incidents vicariously through Ron, because he certainly was.
The 2nd OT3 "incident" has World War II and Nagasaki stamped all over it with it's bomber planes over the the Pacific.
He just couldn't let it go, even had to wear that commodore hat, jeesh whadda rube!
 
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Wilbur

Patron Meritorious
Oh, please. Assuming one could separate out the "good" from the evil, what would you have?

No Releases, no Clears, no OTs, no homo novis, no miraculous cures, no solutions...

If you ignore all the evil and just look at what's left, well, what IS left? Temporary "I feel good". That's it. That's the only thing that you can say for certain that Scientology does. Now maybe that's good enough. Not for the money they are asking but as a helpful temporary assistance, sure.

But "a force for good"? Not in a million years. It doesn't have that, except as false promises.

And there are many other ways to achieve a temporary "I feel good" without all the hype and complexity of Scientology.
Yes, but I think that is what I was saying: remove the 'hype and complexity of Scientology', and you would have a system that just involved a kind of therapy and self help that would be at least comparable in its benefits to other things people do for such, such as yoga, meditation, or whatever. If Scientology had been that in the beginning, this board wouldn't exist, and (assuming it did anyway) you wouldn't be starting your post with 'oh, please'.

I think people who can't even conceive of a Scientology version that would be beneficial are just fanatics, made fanatical by the damage that ACTUAL Scientology did to them. I personally don't see any harm in imagining what it would have been like had it been different. People who assume that makes me an apologist for ACTUAL Scientology are just fanatics.

The next post will be by someone saying something like "so if Naziism had been a bit kinder to the Jews, would that have been OK?'. Straw man, and being deliberately obtuse.

I'm sorry for those who lost decades of their lives to ACTUAL Scientology. But it doesn't make it illegal for those of us who got out relatively quickly to perform thought experiments about what it COULD have been like if the bad elements (including the lies about abilities achieveable) hadn't been present. If there were no good elements, nobody would have joined in the first place.
 

Wilbur

Patron Meritorious
If you were a Mormon, how did you deal with the visiting teacher demands on your time?
As I always struggled to save 10% of my gross income when I was young and had mortgages, car loans etc., how did you feel about having their hands in your pockets as opposed to Scientology?
Were "The Pearls of Great Price" pearls of wisdom or poison pills of despair?
You might find that the Freezone is the Scientology "good" you speak of without the bad. I don't know as I've never checked it out. Terril Park could help you there. Hey, I just want people to find their happiness, wherever that may be.
I got out around the time where they started making visiting teacher demands on me. And I never really bothered tithing. They didn't push the issue, as I was a student at the time. Never read the Pearl of Great Price - I already had my hands full trying to get through the Book of Mormon.

Yes, I did dip my toe (very briefly) in the freezone - I had a quick look at Ron's Org. I wasn't all that impressed, based on initial impressions. One Russian girl who was OTXIII was trying to tell me she had magical OT abilities, but I could see that her life was a mess (and I had the impression that she was giving me sex flows, despite the fact that she was married (to another Ron's Org member - their marriage didn't last)). That was the only contact I had with RO, really, but it put me off pursuing it.

Also, RO charge tens of thousands of dollars for their training, and charge by the hour for auditing. It looks like their training is about 50% of the price of the CoS, which still makes them expensive. I think it's about $30,000-$40,000 to get up through their Briefing Course. I paid £50 just for a D of P-type interview to establish what I needed. Alarm bells started ringing at that point. I don't think auditing works very well when the person delivering it is trying to make a living out of it. They now deliver training up to Class XII, apparently, but it ain't cheap. If you make comparisons with, say, college tuition then I suppose it's not THAT expensive, given how long it takes to finish a course, but for me the money thing is a sure sign that the motivations of the people delivering it are going to be altered in ways that wrecks it. It's like charging someone for being their friend.

I once had guitar lessons from a guy that just gave a few lessons a week to people, as a bit of a hobby, around his full-time job. The lessons were great. Then I went to a guy who made his full-time living out of teaching guitar. It was like being taught by a robot. And when the time was up, he shuffled me straight out the door, because his next client was already waiting. I think the money aspect isn't compatible with auditing. If you're gonna be an auditor, by all means charge for it, but don't try and do it for a living - it wrecks it, in my opinion.
 

Wilbur

Patron Meritorious
Oh but Mormonism is filled with tools among it's membership too.
I was involved with a woman in the Mormon Church 10 years after I left Scientology who claimed she'd been molested by her brother who burned alive in the seat of his farm tractor right in front of the picture window of the house where his 5 sisters and mother watched when his tractor's front end loader made contact with the power line.
Then when her father got back to the farm from a trucking run and learned of his only son's death he decided God was striking him down for screwing a parish member's wife during the many rendezvous they were having in their sordid affair so he confessed his sins to my former mother in law who'd just seen her son burn alive before her eyes so she had herself committed to a mental institution because she didn't want to live anymore.
Need more?
There's more if you do.
And the Mormons have little demi gods running amuck too, demanding you tithe 10% plus of your gross and that you give up 2 nights a week to be a visiting teacher and then to have a visiting teacher come into your home to make sure peoples interpretations of their gospels are according to Salt Lake City.
Then their Sunday service takes half the day, who needs that shit either?
What a grabby god damned cult that is too...
I watched the men, when we "elders" had our separate elders meetings after the main Sunday service gloat over how much they were tithing as it had become a competition to them and would flash their tithe checks to the young elders like me to guilt us into giving more and more and more...
Sound familiar?
It's all the same shit, just different bread.
Yeah, I remember those Sunday services taking away most of my Sunday. A service, followed by some sort of study group, followed by something else. Never ending. Probably pleasant for some retired person who needs more interaction with people, but not really doable if you have a busy life. You're right about Mormonism adding quite a lot of overheads to a person's life (time and tithing). I never even got to the temple. I imagine the time commitment gets higher and higher, the longer you've been in. Just before I left, I was asked to commit something like 15 hours a week to teaching visits to prospective members, tagging along with the missionaries. As I didn't believe the teachings, I didn't really want to 'own up' to being a Mormon (as I wasn't one really - I was just sort of observing what happens). I was nervous about what would happen if we knocked on someone's door, and they turned out to be someone I knew. I didn't really want to be known as a Mormon when I didn't actually believe in the teachings. So that was the point at which I stopped attending the meetings.

They didn't hassle me at all. No-one came to retrieve me, to my surprise.
 

DagwoodGum

Squirreling Dervish
If there were no good elements, nobody would have joined in the first place.
One good element that comes to mind would be the grades and they can simply be seen as an expansion upon Ron's positive affirmations grouped according to subject matter. The communication affirmations were morphed from "I believe that I can communicate to anyone on any subject at any time" and repeated over and over to leading, steering questions like "from where could you communicate to a mother?" Then going on down a list of possible communication terminals, expanded to four flows until the pc suddenly concludes his own affirmative statement of "I can communicate with anyone on any subject at any time" as the EP and then off we go to the next subject grouping of the next grade level of affirmative questioning.
But it's also important to me to reiterate what Ron's friend from the old days, Dillard Eubank introduced Ron to Mary Sue, had told me in that "Ron liked to delegate assignments to his research teams which became the basis for "his research" and one of these teams assigned with the task of coming up with preparatory "key out" processing that could set pc's up for clearing, came up with the initial format for the grades 0 to 4.
Ron would stay up all night reading and pouring overt their reports and session notations.
Hubbard flew by the seat of his pants and most of what developed in Dianetics and subsequently Scientology came from sheer force of will with less bearing on facts or real research while taking credit for everything and declared himself some kind of messiah figure as "Source".
The team that came up with the grades had backgrounds in other practices from which they cherry picked ideas for the grades and Scientology in general.
 
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DagwoodGum

Squirreling Dervish
Yeah, I remember those Sunday services taking away most of my Sunday. A service, followed by some sort of study group, followed by something else. Never ending. Probably pleasant for some retired person who needs more interaction with people, but not really doable if you have a busy life. You're right about Mormonism adding quite a lot of overheads to a person's life (time and tithing). I never even got to the temple. I imagine the time commitment gets higher and higher, the longer you've been in. Just before I left, I was asked to commit something like 15 hours a week to teaching visits to prospective members, tagging along with the missionaries. As I didn't believe the teachings, I didn't really want to 'own up' to being a Mormon (as I wasn't one really - I was just sort of observing what happens). I was nervous about what would happen if we knocked on someone's door, and they turned out to be someone I knew. I didn't really want to be known as a Mormon when I didn't actually believe in the teachings. So that was the point at which I stopped attending the meetings.

They didn't hassle me at all. No-one came to retrieve me, to my surprise.
Wow Wilbur, you and I really walked along the same paths with similar takes on it all. Glad to get to know you!
 

Wilbur

Patron Meritorious
Wow Wilbur, you and I really walked along the same paths with similar takes on it all. Glad to get to know you!
Hahaha yes, ditto Dagwood. I don't know what being in Scientology did to me, but I was craving to be in a cult after I left. If there had been a local chapter of the Moonies near me, I definitely would have joined it, just to see what they got up to.

I even looked at the Jehovah's Witnesses, but they were such a humourless bunch that I didn't get through more than a few home studies with them. And I got that book by Rael, the French former racing car driver (I forget the name of the UFO cult he leads, but the free love aspect of his cult piqued my interest at the time).

My perspective on cults has changed quite a bit recently, and I just see them as a waste of time, probably because I'm too busy to bother with them. But I was fascinated by them for years. I probably should have become a cult researcher like Steve Hassan. But it's not an interesting career nowadays, as the ethics of research have changed, and you're not allowed to be a covert participant-researcher anymore.
 

DagwoodGum

Squirreling Dervish
but I was craving to be in a cult after I left. If there had been a local chapter of the Moonies near me, I definitely would have joined it, just to see what they got up to.
Me too, and that is exactly what drew me to Mormonism and that it was a far cry from mainstream which is where I was afraid I'd drown.
I drifted in and out of Rosicruceanism with the problem being I found it hard to come by original works in books and manuscripts. They have what's called AMORC but I found the materials so watered down that they lacked enough real substance to satisfy me and I left that too.
But only after a couple of frightening, bizarre entity incidents after which I wanted to be nowhere near any freaky shit anymore whatsoever!
 

Wilbur

Patron Meritorious
Hahaha oh yeah, AMORC. I joined that too for a while. Similar thing - those monthly pamphlets that they send you were very watered down. I also joined this thing in the UK that was a mystical order, and they did similar things, sending you pamphlets every month. I was supposed to meditate for an hour each day, keep a journal of it, and send it to them. I got sick of that after a couple of months. I think it was called the Society for the Inner Light.

Amazing how similar our experiences are. I also looked at Ordo Templi Orientis, and did their zero degree initiation. The initiation was fascinating, but at the house party that followed, I noticed that some of the senior members were snorting cocaine, so I never went back.
 

DagwoodGum

Squirreling Dervish
Hahaha oh yeah, AMORC. I joined that too for a while. Similar thing - those monthly pamphlets that they send you were very watered down. I also joined this thing in the UK that was a mystical order, and they did similar things, sending you pamphlets every month. I was supposed to meditate for an hour each day, keep a journal of it, and send it to them. I got sick of that after a couple of months. I think it was called the Society for the Inner Light.

Amazing how similar our experiences are. I also looked at Ordo Templi Orientis, and did their zero degree initiation. The initiation was fascinating, but at the house party that followed, I noticed that some of the senior members were snorting cocaine, so I never went back.
Oh this is uncanny!
I remember the pamphlets all too well, the last one I was on was a little yellow one that covered what each color of the color spectrum symbolized and how meditating on each color brought one up to new states of being. It seemed a bit hokey to me even then.
I started out with a book I got off of Johnson Smith joke company called The Secret Doctrines of the Rosicrucians by Magus Incognito and the version they sold had some good stuff but I came across a version years later that seemed to have a lot of the meat missing from the first version I'd read back in high school. But it does occur to me that I "remember" there being more to it than there ever really was.
This all brings back vivid memories.
I remember that in high school I found my prized guppy dried up on the floor behind the tank after being missing for a couple of days. I cleaned the fuzz off of it and floated it in the top of the tank from where it had apparently jumped out. I mocked up gold energy around it and came back in a few hours and it was alive swimming around in the tank, I took this to mean I had "OT" powers and it validated my expansion into Scientology with it never occurring to me that it was still alive in its core all along as a survival mechanism and I'd merely put it back in a medium where it could revive itself.
Oh how we head tripped ourselves into these cults waiting for us with open arms and both hands in our pocket books at a time when we were most vulnerable, a time we were leaving the nest and had to learn to fly or we'd crash and burn in failure!
 
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DagwoodGum

Squirreling Dervish
Hahaha yes, ditto Dagwood. I don't know what being in Scientology did to me, but I was craving to be in a cult after I left. If there had been a local chapter of the Moonies near me, I definitely would have joined it, just to see what they got up to.

I even looked at the Jehovah's Witnesses, but they were such a humourless bunch that I didn't get through more than a few home studies with them. And I got that book by Rael, the French former racing car driver (I forget the name of the UFO cult he leads, but the free love aspect of his cult piqued my interest at the time).

My perspective on cults has changed quite a bit recently, and I just see them as a waste of time, probably because I'm too busy to bother with them. But I was fascinated by them for years. I probably should have become a cult researcher like Steve Hassan. But it's not an interesting career nowadays, as the ethics of research have changed, and you're not allowed to be a covert participant-researcher anymore.
Never checked out the Jehovah's but weirdly, I began dating the female missionary that was part of the trio that taught me the lessons. She wrote to me after completing her mission when she found out from the local Bishop I was now divorced. Turned out she had an attraction for me when all along I felt so guilty for having one for her. I felt like the proverbial heathen who stole the heart of an angel. After spending endless hours on the phone we started flying back and forth to see each other, she was living in Bountiful, Utah but from Boise, Idaho. I was smitten. We decided to marry but as she wanted to be married in the Temple, which I visited, I agreed that I would meet the requirements to be married in the Temple, contingent on full tithing for no less then one consecutive year. I felt like such a shit when I fell out with the Mormon faith and broke her heart, but mine was broken too. I just couldn't soil such an angelic young woman as I was doing coke again and in a downward spiral.
 

ILove2Lurk

Lisbeth Salander
in reviewing your tag line and you tube vid linked, I've listened to it before. Thanks to Jeffrey Agustine.
I've listened to it before too. Again today for some reason, while gardening.

Highlight: from 1:03:30 to 1:08:30, Bill Franks talks about a visit to Hubbard's doctor,
Gene Denk, and the doctor reveals that Hubbard is suffering from dementia, getting
worse and is highly paranoid. Asks if Bill could help out in any way.

But Franks had just been busted and was in no position of power or influence anymore.

I sorta knew about Hubbard's ignoble deterioration from cowboy's and face's postings
about the mid-to-late-70's era. Seems like Hubbard's slow un-OT-like drift into his
mental abyss was very visible to many who were around.*

Perhaps, Miscavige noticed it the most and moved aggressively with his coup d'etat plans.
Obviously the case. No mystery. :shrug:

*
1990.jpg

Interesting footnote: Bill Franks' WDC SP declare (pdf)

What delusional times!
 
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