Are OT3 and Dianetics the same?

[Udarnik]

Good stuff!

To really get the mindset of a Scientologist, one has to fully appreciate something that is not obvious from reading all of Hubbard's materials.

As Scientologists go "up the Grade Chart" they become more and more subjectively oriented and this culminates on OT III through OT VII where they are looking in their own minds (solo auditing) and talking to themselves, essentially.

This sounds obviously nutty to any normal person, but there is an inordinately huge value Scientologists place on "their universe". That term and concept in all it's conjugations (e.g. "my universe" et al) is perhaps the most precious one in all of Scientology because it symbolically represents the ascendance of the spirit out of the physical universe. The book title 8-8008 refers to the reduction of the "MEST Universes" power to zero and the rise of the person's own universe to infinity.

Scientologist become hyper-aware of their own thoughts and many of those are just intuitive impressions (akin to a mild hallucination) which they assign to something called "knowingness". This may sound terribly confused and it is--however, this manner of thinking is cultivated and practiced until Scientologists are living in their own day dreams and spouting off incessantly about what is "real in their universe".

It is somewhat hard to describe unless you have had a fair number of conversations with OTs, but what you come to learn is that they are forever fine-tuning their "perception" of all the many fleeting and random thoughts and impulses that run through their mind. They pride themselves on being so "aware" but what they are aware of is internally generated and based ideas. If you talk to an OT they will appear fairly normal except for the subtle "tell" that they are also talking to themselves at the same time and getting feedback on their "knowingness".

Jesus, this is much harder to describe than I expected! LOL

Let's have another try, shall we? By the time an OT is solo auditing on OT III or OT VII they have learned to mentally live within the millions of meaningless micro-thoughts that the mind generates and they believe themselves to have extraordinary spiritual skills with which to interpret and translate what they are "picking up". Think psychic advisor who just spews out a stream of "impressions" that they are channeling from another dimension. They have certainty that they are picking out the right messages from beyond as they rummage around their own minds in a deeply introspective state.

Scientologists cherish and admire the ability to be so aware of "their own universe" and they are actively seeking to make their own universe more real than the physical universe. This is by Hubbard's design and it is tantamount to training an individual to repetitively look inward until they become delusional.

That's what Scientologists are--delusional. They worked very, very hard to gain that "advanced ability".

Well, anyways, that's what's real to me in my own universe. LOL

You know, HH, I think I can sign off this message board, because with that post I have grokked much of what I came here to grok.

Thank you.

I have, through my various career incarnations, spent a little time in central nervous system agents. One would expect that from someone who worked on Chemical Weapons defense, right? Well, in the course of digging into that, I digressed into studying pain sensations.

I'm about to say something that's bound to piss a number of people off, so please read to the end of this post before responding. I believe that the group of people I'm about to describe has a very real condition and very real pain sensations. I am not negating their experience at all. I am trying to get at the underlying biological mechanism, and I'm going to reference a person who does not take this group of people very seriously. I DO NOT SHARE THAT ATTITUDE.

I have a friend who is a physician. Well, I have lots of friends who are physicians, some of whom I went to undergrad with, watched them party, helped them with their homework, and would never let them near me in a million years.

OK, I digress. This friend sees a lot of patients with Fibromyalgia. Anyone here familiar with that syndrome? It's a somewhat poorly defined constellation of symptoms that includes non-specific widespread pain. It also includes localized pain in a number of tender points that appear at remarkably reproducible areas in the body. In fact, until 2010, in order to be properly diagnosed with Fibro, a patient had to show pain in at least 11 of the 18 tender points*. It's the reproducibility of those spots on the body that makes me believe this is a real syndrome.

Back to the point, my friend says he's rather see patients with lupus or other "real" diseases, because the Fibro patients are, in his words, "nuts". I've done some interviews with a number of Fibro sufferers, and know a few IRL, and while I don't share his dismissive assessment, I can see where he's coming from.

Almost every Fibro patient I've known is a bit of a whinger. (And here is where I piss someone off. PLEASE KEEP READING).

Despite this fact, I don't think Fibro is all in the head. If I had chronic pain for years, especially pain that no one could identify and many dismissed as malingering, I'd be a bit of a whinger, too.

But the fact remains, that many Fibro patients have a bit of a low threshold for life's downs. This also is true of irritable bowel syndrome, and hey surprise, surprise, Fibro has a huge comorbidity with IBS.

Some of the basic science researchers I've talked to put this down to a phenomenon similar to the one called "wind up". When a nerve fires a signal, that signal is pretty small. The nervous system has an amplifier in it to get the brain to pay attention to that tiny electrical jolt from the peripheral pain nerve. If over-stimulated chronically, the amplifier starts to malfunction, and tiny stimuli send off pain signals, resulting in hyperalgesia and allodynia.

Fibro and IBS patients, according to some of the guys I talked to, have an abnormally large amplifier in their system for certain stimuli (including nerves that bundle in those tender points for Fibro, and nerves in the gut for IBS). If you take a poll of the gen pop and the Fibro / IBS pop, you will find pretty much the same symptoms and frequency in both sets of people. For example, IBS is characterized by alternating constipation and loose stools - but for pretty much everyone a constipatory episode is often followed by a looser-than-normal movement.

But because the gain is turned way up in these people, what barely registers to a normal person is perceived as a painful episode. And it is real. ALL pain is in your head.

But because this ramped up normal signal often translates into irritability and whining in everyday life, these people are often dismissed as malingerers. And that must piss them the hell off, because chronic pain is no joke.

So now, thanks to HH, I have a much better handle on the "how" question that I've been puzzling over for over 20 years. I thought that I'd never get it if I never went into $CN, and there is no fucking way I'm ever going to do that, so I thought the ultimate cog was going to be beyond my grasp. But I think I now grok a significant chunk (though by no means all) of the experience.

Hubbard has you spend most of your time on the Bridge turning up the gain on the noise that accompanies the signal of conscious thought. The random, fleeting urge to throw yourself off a bridge. The maybe less fleeting urge to strangle your spouse or your kid.

Shit like this flies through everyone's head. Masturbatory impulses - making that a crime was a stroke of fucking genius. All kinds of weird thoughts. Most of us ignore or rapidly shitcan them.

But $cienos turn up the gain. And frankly, it's probably something akin to the beginning stages of schizoaffective disorder- listening to all the transient noises in your head, and turning your attention to them all the time, increases the strength of the noise signal. Until you either blow or let the noise drown out the real signal like Hubbard shrieking at his BTs in the Bluebird.

Thanks, HH. I didn't expect to come to a cog like this so soon after joining this board.


* Unfortunately, the 2010 criteria removed that requirement for diagnosis, and I fear Fibro will become a "garbage can" indication docs will use when the patient's illness beats their pair of jacks. But billing code idiocy is another rant for another day on a different forum.

 

[Gib]

You know, HH, I think I can sign off this message board, because with that post I have grokked much of what I came here to grok.

Thank you.

I have, through my various career incarnations, spent a little time in central nervous system agents. One would expect that from someone who worked on Chemical Weapons defense, right? Well, in the course of digging into that, I digressed into studying pain sensations.

I'm about to say something that's bound to piss a number of people off, so please read to the end of this post before responding. I believe that the group of people I'm about to describe has a very real condition and very real pain sensations. I am not negating their experience at all. I am trying to get at the underlying biological mechanism, and I'm going to reference a person who does not take this group of people very seriously. I DO NOT SHARE THAT ATTITUDE.

I have a friend who is a physician. Well, I have lots of friends who are physicians, some of whom I went to undergrad with, watched them party, helped them with their homework, and would never let them near me in a million years.

OK, I digress. This friend sees a lot of patients with Fibromyalgia. Anyone here familiar with that syndrome? It's a somewhat poorly defined constellation of symptoms that includes non-specific widespread pain. It also includes localized pain in a number of tender points that appear at remarkably reproducible areas in the body. In fact, until 2010, in order to be properly diagnosed with Fibro, a patient had to show pain in at least 11 of the 18 tender points*. It's the reproducibility of those spots on the body that makes me believe this is a real syndrome.

Back to the point, my friend says he's rather see patients with lupus or other "real" diseases, because the Fibro patients are, in his words, "nuts". I've done some interviews with a number of Fibro sufferers, and know a few IRL, and while I don't share his dismissive assessment, I can see where he's coming from.

Almost every Fibro patient I've known is a bit of a whinger. (And here is where I piss someone off. PLEASE KEEP READING).

Despite this fact, I don't think Fibro is all in the head. If I had chronic pain for years, especially pain that no one could identify and many dismissed as malingering, I'd be a bit of a whinger, too.

But the fact remains, that many Fibro patients have a bit of a low threshold for life's downs. This also is true of irritable bowel syndrome, and hey surprise, surprise, Fibro has a huge comorbidity with IBS.

Some of the basic science researchers I've talked to put this down to a phenomenon similar to the one called "wind up". When a nerve fires a signal, that signal is pretty small. The nervous system has an amplifier in it to get the brain to pay attention to that tiny electrical jolt from the peripheral pain nerve. If over-stimulated chronically, the amplifier starts to malfunction, and tiny stimuli send off pain signals, resulting in hyperalgesia and allodynia.

Fibro and IBS patients, according to some of the guys I talked to, have an abnormally large amplifier in their system for certain stimuli (including nerves that bundle in those tender points for Fibro, and nerves in the gut for IBS). If you take a poll of the gen pop and the Fibro / IBS pop, you will find pretty much the same symptoms and frequency in both sets of people. For example, IBS is characterized by alternating constipation and loose stools - but for pretty much everyone a constipatory episode is often followed by a looser-than-normal movement.

But because the gain is turned way up in these people, what barely registers to a normal person is perceived as a painful episode. And it is real. ALL pain is in your head.

But because this ramped up normal signal often translates into irritability and whining in everyday life, these people are often dismissed as malingerers. And that must piss them the hell off, because chronic pain is no joke.

So now, thatnks to HH, I have a much better handle on the "how" question that I've been puzzling over for over 20 years. I thought that I'd never get it if I never went into $CN, and there is no fucking way I'm ever going to do that, so I thought the ultimate cog was going to be beyond my grasp. But I think I now grok a significant chunk (though by no means all) of the experience.

Hubbard has you spend most of your time on the Bridge turning up the gain on the noise that accompanies the signal of conscious thought. The random, fleeting urge to throw yourself off a bridge. The maybe less fleeting urge to strangle your spouse or your kid.

Shit like this flies through everyone's head. Masturbatory impulses - making that a crime was a stroke of fucking genius. All kinds of weird thoughts. Most of us ingore or rapidly shitcan them.

But $cienos turn up the gain. And frankly, it's probably something akin to the beginning stages of schizoaffective disorder- listening to all the transient noises in your head, and turning your attention to them all the time, increases the strength of the noise signal. Until you either blow or let the noise drown out the real signal like Hubbard shrieking at his BTs in the Bluebird.

Thanks, HH. I didn't expect to come to a cog like this so soon after joining this board.


* Unfortunately, the 2010 criteria removed that requirement for diagnosis, and I fear Fibro will become a "garbage can" indication docs will use when the patient's illness beats their pair of jacks. But billing code idiocy is another rant for another day on a different forum.

FWIW

http://www.freezoneplanet.org/6a.html

 

[Gib]

You know, HH, I think I can sign off this message board, because with that post I have grokked much of what I came here to grok.

Thank you.

I have, through my various career incarnations, spent a little time in central nervous system agents. One would expect that from someone who worked on Chemical Weapons defense, right? Well, in the course of digging into that, I digressed into studying pain sensations.

I'm about to say something that's bound to piss a number of people off, so please read to the end of this post before responding. I believe that the group of people I'm about to describe has a very real condition and very real pain sensations. I am not negating their experience at all. I am trying to get at the underlying biological mechanism, and I'm going to reference a person who does not take this group of people very seriously. I DO NOT SHARE THAT ATTITUDE.

I have a friend who is a physician. Well, I have lots of friends who are physicians, some of whom I went to undergrad with, watched them party, helped them with their homework, and would never let them near me in a million years.

OK, I digress. This friend sees a lot of patients with Fibromyalgia. Anyone here familiar with that syndrome? It's a somewhat poorly defined constellation of symptoms that includes non-specific widespread pain. It also includes localized pain in a number of tender points that appear at remarkably reproducible areas in the body. In fact, until 2010, in order to be properly diagnosed with Fibro, a patient had to show pain in at least 11 of the 18 tender points*. It's the reproducibility of those spots on the body that makes me believe this is a real syndrome.

Back to the point, my friend says he's rather see patients with lupus or other "real" diseases, because the Fibro patients are, in his words, "nuts". I've done some interviews with a number of Fibro sufferers, and know a few IRL, and while I don't share his dismissive assessment, I can see where he's coming from.

Almost every Fibro patient I've known is a bit of a whinger. (And here is where I piss someone off. PLEASE KEEP READING).

Despite this fact, I don't think Fibro is all in the head. If I had chronic pain for years, especially pain that no one could identify and many dismissed as malingering, I'd be a bit of a whinger, too.

But the fact remains, that many Fibro patients have a bit of a low threshold for life's downs. This also is true of irritable bowel syndrome, and hey surprise, surprise, Fibro has a huge comorbidity with IBS.

Some of the basic science researchers I've talked to put this down to a phenomenon similar to the one called "wind up". When a nerve fires a signal, that signal is pretty small. The nervous system has an amplifier in it to get the brain to pay attention to that tiny electrical jolt from the peripheral pain nerve. If over-stimulated chronically, the amplifier starts to malfunction, and tiny stimuli send off pain signals, resulting in hyperalgesia and allodynia.

Fibro and IBS patients, according to some of the guys I talked to, have an abnormally large amplifier in their system for certain stimuli (including nerves that bundle in those tender points for Fibro, and nerves in the gut for IBS). If you take a poll of the gen pop and the Fibro / IBS pop, you will find pretty much the same symptoms and frequency in both sets of people. For example, IBS is characterized by alternating constipation and loose stools - but for pretty much everyone a constipatory episode is often followed by a looser-than-normal movement.

But because the gain is turned way up in these people, what barely registers to a normal person is perceived as a painful episode. And it is real. ALL pain is in your head.

But because this ramped up normal signal often translates into irritability and whining in everyday life, these people are often dismissed as malingerers. And that must piss them the hell off, because chronic pain is no joke.

So now, thanks to HH, I have a much better handle on the "how" question that I've been puzzling over for over 20 years. I thought that I'd never get it if I never went into $CN, and there is no fucking way I'm ever going to do that, so I thought the ultimate cog was going to be beyond my grasp. But I think I now grok a significant chunk (though by no means all) of the experience.

Hubbard has you spend most of your time on the Bridge turning up the gain on the noise that accompanies the signal of conscious thought. The random, fleeting urge to throw yourself off a bridge. The maybe less fleeting urge to strangle your spouse or your kid.

Shit like this flies through everyone's head. Masturbatory impulses - making that a crime was a stroke of fucking genius. All kinds of weird thoughts. Most of us ignore or rapidly shitcan them.

But $cienos turn up the gain. And frankly, it's probably something akin to the beginning stages of schizoaffective disorder- listening to all the transient noises in your head, and turning your attention to them all the time, increases the strength of the noise signal. Until you either blow or let the noise drown out the real signal like Hubbard shrieking at his BTs in the Bluebird.

Thanks, HH. I didn't expect to come to a cog like this so soon after joining this board.


* Unfortunately, the 2010 criteria removed that requirement for diagnosis, and I fear Fibro will become a "garbage can" indication docs will use when the patient's illness beats their pair of jacks. But billing code idiocy is another rant for another day on a different forum.

to grok.

Is this the definition:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok

 

[Udarnik]

to grok.

Is this the definition:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok

Yes. Despite his inability to see through Hubbard, and other personality ... caveats .... I am still a Heinlein fan.

Not to knock you, you're not the first person I've seen on my meander through the old posts in my new project to not know the definition of that word, but for a group of people snookered by an SF writer whom you knew was an SF writer, many of you don't know much about the genre. I'm puzzled by this. Was it because reading others' stuff was somewhat entheta?

 

[Gib]

Yes. Despite his inability to see through Hubbard, and other personality ... caveats .... I am still a Heinlein fan.

Not to knock you, you're not the first person I've seen on my meander through the old posts in my new project to not know the definition of that word, but for a group of people snookered by an SF writer whom you knew was an SF writer, many of you don't know much about the genre. I'm puzzled by this. Was it because reading others' stuff was somewhat entheta?

I'm not quite sure what you are asking.

I'm at the opposite end of "to grok",

I'm not part of the observer, as I have been there,

I'm at the tail end, or the observing end of it, scientology, being one hellvahoax. Or running scientology out, of my mind,

by comparing other data.

To compare scientology to scientology is a hamster wheel.

I've read other info since my departure from scientology just this last year.

 

[uniquemand]

I'd read Heinlein, but not all the Scientologists I knew were prior SF fans.

Personally, I would share water with Heinlein anytime.

 

[Udarnik]

I'm not quite sure what you are asking.

I'm at the opposite end of "to grok",

I'm not part of the observer, as I have been there,

I'm at the tail end, or the observing end of it, scientology, being one hellvahoax. Or running scientology out, of my mind,

by comparing other data.

To compare scientology to scientology is a hamster wheel.

I've read other info since my departure from scientology just this last year.

I guess I'm asking if $cienos read other authors of SF to get Hubbard's place in context. Or is that discouraged because you'd see how bad Hubbard was at it?

Heinlein was, according to Cowboy, one of the less than a handfull of non-$cieno friends Hubbard maintained to his last days.

 

[uniquemand]

I guess I'm asking if $cienos read other authors of SF to get Hubbard's place in context. Or is that discouraged because you'd see how bad Hubbard was at it?

Heinlein was, according to Cowboy, one of the less than a handfull of non-$cieno friends Hubbard maintained to his last days.

My position is that most scientologists that WOULD read science fiction STOP, for the most part, after they become Scientologists. Who has the time?

Those stats aren't going to 5.4x themselves!

 

[Gib]

I guess I'm asking if $cienos read other authors of SF to get Hubbard's place in context. Or is that discouraged because you'd see how bad Hubbard was at it?

Heinlein was, according to Cowboy, one of the less than a handfull of non-$cieno friends Hubbard maintained to his last days.

For me, Hubbard said in one of his lectures,

sci fi writers were dramatizing, by telling their sci fi stories, their whole track experiences.

And thus hubbarad implied the sci fi stories from the past were true,

you might say.

Those stories, kind of subtly fell into place of my mind. You might say.

But, I never thought as true or untrue.

Realize I never went up the bridge to the OT levels. I only just found out about Xenu last year. So I had my doubts, if you will.

But, the bottom line is this. I know OT's and Clears. Althought I am neither.

So I observed, and compared. I was living in the promised dream world that such things as clears and OT's were true.

And then that got refuted. And I opened my mind to the truth.

 

[Caroline]

You know, HH, I think I can sign off this message board, because with that post I have grokked much of what I came here to grok.

Thank you.

I have, through my various career incarnations, spent a little time in central nervous system agents. One would expect that from someone who worked on Chemical Weapons defense, right? Well, in the course of digging into that, I digressed into studying pain sensations.

I'm about to say something that's bound to piss a number of people off, so please read to the end of this post before responding. I believe that the group of people I'm about to describe has a very real condition and very real pain sensations. I am not negating their experience at all. I am trying to get at the underlying biological mechanism, and I'm going to reference a person who does not take this group of people very seriously. I DO NOT SHARE THAT ATTITUDE.

I have a friend who is a physician. Well, I have lots of friends who are physicians, some of whom I went to undergrad with, watched them party, helped them with their homework, and would never let them near me in a million years.

OK, I digress. This friend sees a lot of patients with Fibromyalgia. Anyone here familiar with that syndrome? It's a somewhat poorly defined constellation of symptoms that includes non-specific widespread pain. It also includes localized pain in a number of tender points that appear at remarkably reproducible areas in the body. In fact, until 2010, in order to be properly diagnosed with Fibro, a patient had to show pain in at least 11 of the 18 tender points*. It's the reproducibility of those spots on the body that makes me believe this is a real syndrome.

Back to the point, my friend says he's rather see patients with lupus or other "real" diseases, because the Fibro patients are, in his words, "nuts". I've done some interviews with a number of Fibro sufferers, and know a few IRL, and while I don't share his dismissive assessment, I can see where he's coming from.

Almost every Fibro patient I've known is a bit of a whinger. (And here is where I piss someone off. PLEASE KEEP READING).

Despite this fact, I don't think Fibro is all in the head. If I had chronic pain for years, especially pain that no one could identify and many dismissed as malingering, I'd be a bit of a whinger, too.

But the fact remains, that many Fibro patients have a bit of a low threshold for life's downs. This also is true of irritable bowel syndrome, and hey surprise, surprise, Fibro has a huge comorbidity with IBS.

Some of the basic science researchers I've talked to put this down to a phenomenon similar to the one called "wind up". When a nerve fires a signal, that signal is pretty small. The nervous system has an amplifier in it to get the brain to pay attention to that tiny electrical jolt from the peripheral pain nerve. If over-stimulated chronically, the amplifier starts to malfunction, and tiny stimuli send off pain signals, resulting in hyperalgesia and allodynia.

Fibro and IBS patients, according to some of the guys I talked to, have an abnormally large amplifier in their system for certain stimuli (including nerves that bundle in those tender points for Fibro, and nerves in the gut for IBS). If you take a poll of the gen pop and the Fibro / IBS pop, you will find pretty much the same symptoms and frequency in both sets of people. For example, IBS is characterized by alternating constipation and loose stools - but for pretty much everyone a constipatory episode is often followed by a looser-than-normal movement.

But because the gain is turned way up in these people, what barely registers to a normal person is perceived as a painful episode. And it is real. ALL pain is in your head.

But because this ramped up normal signal often translates into irritability and whining in everyday life, these people are often dismissed as malingerers. And that must piss them the hell off, because chronic pain is no joke.

So now, thanks to HH, I have a much better handle on the "how" question that I've been puzzling over for over 20 years. I thought that I'd never get it if I never went into $CN, and there is no fucking way I'm ever going to do that, so I thought the ultimate cog was going to be beyond my grasp. But I think I now grok a significant chunk (though by no means all) of the experience.

Hubbard has you spend most of your time on the Bridge turning up the gain on the noise that accompanies the signal of conscious thought. The random, fleeting urge to throw yourself off a bridge. The maybe less fleeting urge to strangle your spouse or your kid.

Shit like this flies through everyone's head. Masturbatory impulses - making that a crime was a stroke of fucking genius. All kinds of weird thoughts. Most of us ignore or rapidly shitcan them.

But $cienos turn up the gain. And frankly, it's probably something akin to the beginning stages of schizoaffective disorder- listening to all the transient noises in your head, and turning your attention to them all the time, increases the strength of the noise signal. Until you either blow or let the noise drown out the real signal like Hubbard shrieking at his BTs in the Bluebird.

Thanks, HH. I didn't expect to come to a cog like this so soon after joining this board.


* Unfortunately, the 2010 criteria removed that requirement for diagnosis, and I fear Fibro will become a "garbage can" indication docs will use when the patient's illness beats their pair of jacks. But billing code idiocy is another rant for another day on a different forum.

Helluvan exchange between HH and Udarnik.

Udarnik, I'm not sure whether your expertise extends in this direction, but I wonder if you could comment on an issue that has come up over the years to do with the E-Meter.

Does the electrical current put out by the E-Meter contribute in any significant way to the generation of the psychological condition or conditions HH and you observe or deduce in Scientologists? You say you are trying to get to the underlying biological mechanism, and the meter current and its fields in the body are biological.

Scientologists at OT 3 and above rack up hundreds and even thousands of hours on the device, but even before then Scientologists have usually had hundreds of hours on it. Does the current reinforce, or hardwire in, the thoughts, the gain, the alignment with the meter, Scientology, Hubbard, etc.?

Arnie Lerma has some technical info on the E-Meter that may be helpful, here: http://www.lermanet.com/e-metershort.htm

Now, therefore, the mechanisms' release have to do with these factors. And at the lower grades the individual is so composited that he thinks he is one individual, and he very often hears little voices and so on, but he doesn't let this bother him too much. That's just natural. And as you come up the line, as you bring him up the line, why he of course gets closer and closer to this phenomenon.

Hubbard, L. (1968, 25 September) What Standard Tech Does. Class VIII Course (6809C25).

(Even so, there's a set of Scientologists that still their thoughts, and know that listening to all the transient noises in your head and turning your attention to them is for customers, or suckers, or elemental staff members. The DMs, Moxons, Rathbuns, et al. focus the attention, ding in the memes and want that gain rising.)

 

[Udarnik]

Helluvan exchange between HH and Udarnik.

Udarnik, I'm not sure whether your expertise extends in this direction, but I wonder if you could comment on an issue that has come up over the years to do with the E-Meter.

Does the electrical current put out by the E-Meter contribute in any significant way to the generation of the psychological condition or conditions HH and you observe or deduce in Scientologists? You say you are trying to get to the underlying biological mechanism, and the meter current and its fields in the body are biological.

Scientologists at OT 3 and above rack up hundreds and even thousands of hours on the device, but even before then Scientologists have usually had hundreds of hours on it. Does the current reinforce, or hardwire in, the thoughts, the gain, the alignment with the meter, Scientology, Hubbard, etc.?

Arnie Lerma has some technical info on the E-Meter that may be helpful, here: http://www.lermanet.com/e-metershort.htm



(Even so, there's a set of Scientologists that still their thoughts, and know that listening to all the transient noises in your head and turning your attention to them is for customers, or suckers, or elemental staff members. The DMs, Moxons, Rathbuns, et al. focus the attention, ding in the memes and want that gain rising.)

I'm not sure if my expertise truly extends to the E-Meter, so grain of salt and all that.

I have a bit of familiarity with medical devices, I have patents from grad school that might form the basic technology of implantable nerve gas detectors. But I don't have much expertise on electrical systems - mine were biofeedback systems. But I do flatter myself that I know a little more than the average bear on this stuff.

Here's my thoughts relative to HH's post. E-Meters are less than useless because they sometimes read real emotions, and sometimes give you just noise. There is no way to tell which is which. When I argue with the true believers on here, I tell them what it would take to change my mind. Take a group of people with real secrets (childhood abuse, etc.). Ascertain those before hand. Do a double blind controlled trial where the placebo is a meter that makes random readings, and the active group gets a real meter. Use the same auditors for both groups. See if the results come out any different on average.

I'm betting (heavily) on "no".

I've looked at the schematics. There is nothing magical in there. Why does anyone think a human's inner spiritual being reads out via skin conductivity? If it had any real power wouldn't it manifest itself - reproducibly - in other ways?

How many people have you read on here talking about being sent to ethics on rock slams who were innocent, or talking about floating needles when the auditor was missing something?

The E-Meter is a bullshit device.

And I think it's been bandied about here on a few threads that a random intermittent reward is more addictive than a constant one. It's the human desire to solve puzzles, which probably has some origin in our evolutionary adaptability to new environments, more than pretty much any other mammal. At any rate, that intermittant reward, that chasing the elusive high, is addictive.

And because it's random you spend hours you otherwise would not have, looking for a pattern in a mess of noise. And just as with true noise, there will be flashes of seeming patterns that aren't. If you flip a coin 100 times, it's pretty likely that you'll get a string of 5 or 6 heads or tails in a row. It's not that the coin is rigged, that's just how probability works. Every bell curve distribution has a tail on both ends, and those strings sit on the tail. But on the E-Meter, you're training yourself to pay attention to those random strings on the tails of the normal distribution as if they were a real signal.

That helps keep you hooked on the meter, and hence the introspection that turns up your sensitivity to random crap, whereas if you had a reward right away, you'd wander off and do something else. So that repetition is key in keeping you at it long enough to turn up the amplifier's gain as I talked about to HH.

I don't think Hubbard planned it that way, but I think he did realize the truth once he saw the impact on his subjects.

But then again, I've never done these drills, with or without a meter. This is just my $0.02. Keep or toss.

 

[Caroline]

I'm not sure if my expertise truly extends to the E-Meter, so grain of salt and all that.

I have a bit of familiarity with medical devices, I have patents from grad school that might form the basic technology of implantable nerve gas detectors. But I don't have much expertise on electrical systems - mine were biofeedback systems. But I do flatter myself that I know a little more than the average bear on this stuff.

Here's my thoughts relative to HH's post. E-Meters are less than useless because they sometimes read real emotions, and sometimes give you just noise.

Those can't be the only possibilities, can they?

And I never believed meters read real emotions. I was taught they read on other factors, and these factors could be present at any emotion, in fact necessarily must be for the meter to read anything different than "dead body." My experience actually bears out much of the E-meter theory and functions I was taught. The purpose to which they were put, of course, was evil.

There is no way to tell which is which.

I was able to tell as an auditor. That's like saying persons running lie detectors doesn't know which is which. They do, accurately enough that intelligence and security services credit and use them.

When I argue with the true believers on here, I tell them what it would take to change my mind. Take a group of people with real secrets (childhood abuse, etc.). Ascertain those before hand. Do a double blind controlled trial where the placebo is a meter that makes random readings, and the active group gets a real meter.

From an auditor's perspective, that doesn't make sense. Within seconds, a trained auditor getting random reads or random TA readings or random sensitivity would know the meter is broken.

But what do you mean by a meter that makes random readings?

Use the same auditors for both groups. See if the results come out any different on average.

I have no doubt that auditors would know

So I can't see this as a workable test for your desired proof of the meter's efficacy, or the determiner of your joining the cult.

I've looked at the schematics. There is nothing magical in there.

I don't know of anyone who associates the E-Meter with magic. Actually, galvanometers were used in psychological research experiments many years before Volney Mathison and Hubbard.

Why does anyone think a human's inner spiritual being reads out via skin conductivity? If it had any real power wouldn't it manifest itself - reproducibly - in other ways?

But I don't think anyone is making the claim that an E-Meter has real power. An electrical current runs through the preclear's body through the electrodes. That's all the power, or current, I was asking about.

How many people have you read on here talking about being sent to ethics on rock slams who were innocent, or talking about floating needles when the auditor was missing something?

The E-Meter is a bullshit device.

Well, both of your statements above may be true, but they don't really relate.

And I think it's been bandied about here on a few threads that a random intermittent reward is more addictive than a constant one. It's the human desire to solve puzzles, which probably has some origin in our evolutionary adaptability to new environments, more than pretty much any other mammal. At any rate, that intermittant reward, that chasing the elusive high, is addictive.

And because it's random you spend hours you otherwise would not have, looking for a pattern in a mess of noise. And just as with true noise, there will be flashes of seeming patterns that aren't. If you flip a coin 100 times, it's pretty likely that you'll get a string of 5 or 6 heads or tails in a row. It's not that the coin is rigged, that's just how probability works. Every bell curve distribution has a tail on both ends, and those strings sit on the tail. But on the E-Meter, you're training yourself to pay attention to those random strings on the tails of the normal distribution as if they were a real signal.

That helps keep you hooked on the meter, and hence the introspection that turns up your sensitivity to random crap, whereas if you had a reward right away, you'd wander off and do something else. So that repetition is key in keeping you at it long enough to turn up the amplifier's gain as I talked about to HH.

I don't think Hubbard planned it that way, but I think he did realize the truth once he saw the impact on his subjects.

But then again, I've never done these drills, with or without a meter. This is just my $0.02. Keep or toss.

Thanks, Udarnik, I appreciate the effort. Your thoughts and conclusions are interesting, but you'd need to understand how the E-Meter functions in auditing sessions to go down this particular research trail.

 

[Mimsey Borogrove]

I'm not sure if my expertise truly extends to the E-Meter, so grain of salt and all that.

I have a bit of familiarity with medical devices, I have patents from grad school that might form the basic technology of implantable nerve gas detectors. But I don't have much expertise on electrical systems - mine were biofeedback systems. But I do flatter myself that I know a little more than the average bear on this stuff.

Here's my thoughts relative to HH's post. E-Meters are less than useless because they sometimes read real emotions, and sometimes give you just noise... ....But then again, I've never done these drills, with or without a meter. This is just my $0.02. Keep or toss.

You are off the beam - please go to:

http://therealaskthescientologist.wordpress.com/2010/06/12/the-scientology-e-meter/

http://therealaskthescientologist.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/more-on-the-scientology-e-meter/

 

[degraded being]

You know, HH, I think I can sign off this message board, because with that post I have grokked much of what I came here to grok.

Thank you.

I have, through my various career incarnations, spent a little time in central nervous system agents. One would expect that from someone who worked on Chemical Weapons defense, right? Well, in the course of digging into that, I digressed into studying pain sensations.

I'm about to say something that's bound to piss a number of people off, so please read to the end of this post before responding. I believe that the group of people I'm about to describe has a very real condition and very real pain sensations. I am not negating their experience at all. I am trying to get at the underlying biological mechanism, and I'm going to reference a person who does not take this group of people very seriously. I DO NOT SHARE THAT ATTITUDE.

I have a friend who is a physician. Well, I have lots of friends who are physicians, some of whom I went to undergrad with, watched them party, helped them with their homework, and would never let them near me in a million years.

OK, I digress. This friend sees a lot of patients with Fibromyalgia. Anyone here familiar with that syndrome? It's a somewhat poorly defined constellation of symptoms that includes non-specific widespread pain. It also includes localized pain in a number of tender points that appear at remarkably reproducible areas in the body. In fact, until 2010, in order to be properly diagnosed with Fibro, a patient had to show pain in at least 11 of the 18 tender points*. It's the reproducibility of those spots on the body that makes me believe this is a real syndrome.

Back to the point, my friend says he's rather see patients with lupus or other "real" diseases, because the Fibro patients are, in his words, "nuts". I've done some interviews with a number of Fibro sufferers, and know a few IRL, and while I don't share his dismissive assessment, I can see where he's coming from.

Almost every Fibro patient I've known is a bit of a whinger. (And here is where I piss someone off. PLEASE KEEP READING).

Despite this fact, I don't think Fibro is all in the head. If I had chronic pain for years, especially pain that no one could identify and many dismissed as malingering, I'd be a bit of a whinger, too.

But the fact remains, that many Fibro patients have a bit of a low threshold for life's downs. This also is true of irritable bowel syndrome, and hey surprise, surprise, Fibro has a huge comorbidity with IBS.

Some of the basic science researchers I've talked to put this down to a phenomenon similar to the one called "wind up". When a nerve fires a signal, that signal is pretty small. The nervous system has an amplifier in it to get the brain to pay attention to that tiny electrical jolt from the peripheral pain nerve. If over-stimulated chronically, the amplifier starts to malfunction, and tiny stimuli send off pain signals, resulting in hyperalgesia and allodynia.

Fibro and IBS patients, according to some of the guys I talked to, have an abnormally large amplifier in their system for certain stimuli (including nerves that bundle in those tender points for Fibro, and nerves in the gut for IBS). If you take a poll of the gen pop and the Fibro / IBS pop, you will find pretty much the same symptoms and frequency in both sets of people. For example, IBS is characterized by alternating constipation and loose stools - but for pretty much everyone a constipatory episode is often followed by a looser-than-normal movement.

But because the gain is turned way up in these people, what barely registers to a normal person is perceived as a painful episode. And it is real. ALL pain is in your head.

But because this ramped up normal signal often translates into irritability and whining in everyday life, these people are often dismissed as malingerers. And that must piss them the hell off, because chronic pain is no joke.

So now, thanks to HH, I have a much better handle on the "how" question that I've been puzzling over for over 20 years. I thought that I'd never get it if I never went into $CN, and there is no fucking way I'm ever going to do that, so I thought the ultimate cog was going to be beyond my grasp. But I think I now grok a significant chunk (though by no means all) of the experience.

Hubbard has you spend most of your time on the Bridge turning up the gain on the noise that accompanies the signal of conscious thought. The random, fleeting urge to throw yourself off a bridge. The maybe less fleeting urge to strangle your spouse or your kid.

Shit like this flies through everyone's head. Masturbatory impulses - making that a crime was a stroke of fucking genius. All kinds of weird thoughts. Most of us ignore or rapidly shitcan them.

But $cienos turn up the gain. And frankly, it's probably something akin to the beginning stages of schizoaffective disorder- listening to all the transient noises in your head, and turning your attention to them all the time, increases the strength of the noise signal. Until you either blow or let the noise drown out the real signal like Hubbard shrieking at his BTs in the Bluebird.

Thanks, HH. I didn't expect to come to a cog like this so soon after joining this board.


* Unfortunately, the 2010 criteria removed that requirement for diagnosis, and I fear Fibro will become a "garbage can" indication docs will use when the patient's illness beats their pair of jacks. But billing code idiocy is another rant for another day on a different forum.

Am I a bit slow? I am not sure what your conclusion is.
Is it that you think you have found what keeps people in the cult?
What keeps people from leaving, once they are in?
What makes them whingers
Something else?

 

[HelluvaHoax!]

Am I a bit slow? I am not sure what your conclusion is.
Is it that you think you have found what keeps people in the cult?
What keeps people from leaving, once they are in?
What makes them whingers
Something else?

Please don't ask him so many questions, because he's in the Non-Interference Zone.

I don't want him interfered with because the Church of Hoaxology is currently trying to close him on paying for his Advanced Levels.

 

[degraded being]

Please don't ask him so many questions, because he's in the Non-Interference Zone.

I don't want him interfered with because the Church of Hoaxology is currently trying to close him on paying for his Advanced Levels.

And SO close to closing him!

 

[Student of Trinity]

I'm not an expert on either electrophysiology or auditing, but as a physicist I'm used to a pretty bare-bones look at the world, without much tolerance for mumbo-jumbo. And there's something I think I can clear up, that seems a bit fuzzy even in posts like Just Bill's (linked to above). I don't mean to say that Bill himself is confused, only that this one point seems not to be the focus in his post about the e-meter. No doubt what I'm going to say is well known to many. I've seen several discussions about this topic, however, that could have been clearer if this point had been clearly made.

The meter only directly measures simple physical properties of your body. It can't be directly measuring thought itself, because if thought itself could directly affect physical objects like electric currents, then Las Vegas would go bust, and it doesn't. Physical properties of your body, however, are obviously somehow correlated with thoughts. The motion of my fingers on the keyboard is a physical phenomenon, but you're reading the thoughts that made my fingers move. So there's no reason why the e-meter can't also be reading thoughts and emotions, indirectly: it doesn't measure them INSTEAD of measuring skin resistance; it measures them BY measuring skin resistance.

Compared to skin resistance or whatever, the movements a person's face and hands and eyes make, and the sounds they make with their mouths and vocal chords, are normally a much richer source of information about their thoughts and feelings. But it may be that sometimes the little bit of information that the e-meter will tell will be something that you wouldn't pick up just by watching and listening. So in principle there might well be a place in talking therapy for a thing like an e-meter.

Nothing I've ever heard about an e-meter is any challenge to my materialist understanding about the mind and brain. It's a crude electrical device. That doesn't mean that pinch tests don't work — I'm sure they do — and it doesn't mean that e-meters are crap for auditing. What they can do is inherently limited, but up to that point, I'm sure they do what they do. There's nothing scientifically surprising about them. There's no reason to hope for too much from them.

 

[Caroline]

Please don't ask him so many questions, because he's in the Non-Interference Zone.

I don't want him interfered with because the Church of Hoaxology is currently trying to close him on paying for his Advanced Levels.

I don't know why this came to me. Obviously misrouted.

Redge (2) <--HH---
via D of P (1) <--HL---
Dept. 12-2 C/S FSO

Re: Pre-OT Udarnik

The Advanced Scheduling Registrar requested a TE, attached. All we have is his PT folder and a slipshod FES. No info from Boston on who passed him on his metering course.

TLT high security clearance. PT Med/psych connections. FES shows a petition was approved locally, but Ethics is really going to have to work him over before we'll touch him.

Note for pc folder. This guy has MUs and false data. Elig sec check to include L. Ron Hubbard, "true believers" and past track implant devices and stations.

Tech Estimate:

OT Preps (First sign of out grades, transfer him to Dept. 12-1 for lower grades. Let's not have any more of these "none on 3" in 12-2. Obviously he's loaded.) 25 - 37 1/2 hours min.

Eligibility for OT Levels: 50 hours FPRD

OT 1-3

But tell him he can start with 2 intensives. You can always beef up his package with a Pro Metering Course when he gets here.

Love,
C/S

 

[uncover]

But I don't have much expertise on electrical systems....

I'm not an expert on either electrophysiology or auditing, ....

Then let´s have a look what an expert - the real inventor Volney G. Mathison himself - has to say about how the e-meter works:

Volney G. Mathison - Electropsychometric Monitoring
(March 1952)​

.....

The instrument (= E-Meter) utilizes simultaneously two reflexes: the psychogalvanic and the neuromuscular.

The psychogalvanic reflex phenomen manifests itself in the jetting of droplets of saline fluid from subcutanous glands by direct activation of nervous impulses from the autonomic nervous system. The human body has about 400 sweat glands to the square inch over most of its surface. However, in the palms of the hands, inside the thumbs and fingers, and on the soles of the feet, the number of these glands rises dramatically to about 2700 to the squre inch. The glands in the hands and fingers appear to be tiny "jetters", that is, they ecejt saline fluid in a matter of microseconds, so swift that when one makes a decision to grasp some object, the jetting action of these glands has already occured before the decision to perform the act was completed in the cortical awareness center of the mind.

An explanation of this reflex that is rather acceptable is that it is a biological inheritance from prehistoric times when early man has need of moisture in the palms of his hands and on the soles of his feet to gain adhesion to rocks and tree branches when running or climbing. This reflex is still with man; it is even more or less subconsciously fortified at times when he spits on an axe handle for better grip, spits on his hands before clmbing up a rope or pole, or wets his thumb with saliva to facilitate turning the pages of a book.

It appears that this jetting reflex action functions when man is in any situation equating a "predicament", however minor. More important in Dianetics, however, is the fact that this reflex operates when the individual is concerned with no visible physical threat but with a "mental" problem, predicament, or conflicts - even mental ones - as equating threats of survival causing the glands in the hands and feet to function - the blind reactive purpose evidently being to facilitate immediate physical flight.

However there is apparently a degree of cortical subvention involved, since the amount of "jetting" varies in relation to the seriousness of the immediate or recalled predicament as estimated by the cortical analyzer area of the organism. In a person who has developed an extreme degree of self-control, the jetting reflex may be almost - but never entirely - inhibited.
......

http://www.forum.exscn.net/showthread.php?20928-OT-III-A-new-look&p=822893&viewfull=1#post822893

 

[Caroline]

Here's some 1952 tech on entities. Obviously Hubbard had his sights on this phenomenon well before Xenu, and was "researching" it with the E-Meter.

Tonight I want to talk to you about theta bodies. The anatomy of a theta body itself and the anatomy of a composite which you are calling you, and you might find this of considerable interest. This is a matter of research which is quite old. People have been working in this field on Earth here, that I know about, for the last ten thousand years, and they’ve been working
elsewhere on this field for many more years than that. And the data which has been amassed has more or less up to this time, been one sided. Nobody went backwards on this data. That is
to say, they knew how to do things to theta bodies and they knew how theta bodies would behave when you did things to them, but they did not know what to do to a theta body to undo what was done to it.

In other words, the reverse process. Now by getting some thought, emotion, effort recordings, facsimiles and now the anatomy itself of the theta body it is possible for us to turn around and reverse vector on this whole problem. We can take apart what has been done to theta bodies. We can examine what theta bodies are natively and what are their, at least the greater part of their total potentials.

It becomes obvious that nothing that has been done to a theta body in the last trillion years, if you will pardon my statement, I’m merely following an electro psychometer’s reading preclear after preclear, trillion or trillions of years is about the age of the theta body, MEST universe time. It is discoverable now that the theta body at one time possessed enormous potentials and did not need very much of what we call experience. And that these potentials were seen and recognized for their potentialities, the potentialities of the theta body were such that at no time could anyone thoroughly control them. And today theta bodies can turn around and move out of this control sector.

So the whole effort of the last umpteen lord knows how long years, has been a bust. There, in other words, the efforts of controlling, localizing, centralizing, compounding, impacting, upsetting, turning around, using theta bodies has been fruitless. Nobody knew how to turn these things around until he knew something about thought, emotion, effort. Now all of a sudden we take apart the composite theta body which is you, into its component theta bodies, and we take these apart as regard to the experience, and we find the potentiality of which a central theta line is capable. And this is not slight, this is tremendous. We’re back at the potentiality as it was, plus the knowledge of how to take it apart if it gets any other way than how it was. So we’ve made a little bit out of this, if anything.

Now if anybody becomes uncomfortable while I’m talking here, be assured it is probably a temporary condition. Very few of these composite bodies are very well stuck together. They’re not well glued, in other words, and at the first signals of awareness, things start to happen. Actually at this time and with the subject matter which I’m giving you tonight, you won’t probably experience much more than a mild somatic or a hot somatic or feel an empty space or something of the sort. But what we’re dealing with is very root stuff. Up to this time we’ve been dealing with facsimiles. Now we are dealing with the theta body and part, partly with facsimiles. But if you can introduce the awareness of each part of the composite which is you, you get total awareness and you also lose a lot of parts; this is not bad.

It is interesting as we view the fact of theta bodies, how many people were very right on the subject. When I was a very young fellow in India, the things that I was told were to me undemonstrable to a large extent, and yet one had a haunting feeling that they were so. And one could go around and look at people here and there and see that there was some ghost of proof
about this. Now we have tools that take apart practically everything that has been stated correctly about the human soul, the human beingness and so on. And we can examine this for ourselves, which makes this very interesting.

[...]

And it actually can get down to a point where the composite you, fortunately very lightly so, can actually be influenced by thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of theta lines which you’ve picked up, but which aren’t your theta lines. You’re just sort of holding them trapped. And they’ve tried to go back, and go where they’re supposed to go between lives and they try to do this and they try to do that. Maybe they’re so groggy they don’t know enough to do this, and so on. You take somebody who is really sick and you run out an overt act, if he’ll get a grief charge on it or if you reduce this overt act, you have probably also jettisoned a captured theta body, just like that.

[...]

Now any one of the entities with which you are dealing, any one of the theta bodies with which you are dealing in a preclear, is capable of producing an almost unlimited number of psychosomatic illnesses.

Hubbard, L. (1952, 16 April)Theta Body Entities. LRH Recorded Lectures. Lecture conducted from Phoenix, Arizona.

Emphasis added^ to show Hubbard's use of the E-Meter in his 1952 research.