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Where is the damn treasure?

I'm surprised, AJ. That basically amounts to the assertion that "minds can't be changed". I wouldn't think that is somewhere you would choose to go.

Alternate viewpoints matter. You are correct in that the more rigid the mindset to begin with the more difficulty in producing an immediate impact. However, it will occur.

The best approach is to prevent undue rigidity setting in early through ongoing exposure and respect for alternate perspectives. Early intervention is ideal. However, even late in the game change happens. That is the reason Emma created ESMB.

Epiphanies have a remarkable way of breaking through established mental patterns.

Clearly it would be lovely if no one suffered from rigidity of thought. Nonetheless, these two tools, alternative views & epiphanies, are remarkably effective at altering conditioned patterns of thought and opening a person to the prospects inherent in spirituality. To argue otherwise is to argue that humans can not change of themselves.


Mark A. Baker

If you think what I wrote implies or even infers that "minds can't be changed" then you haven't understood at all what I have said. Epiphanies can be wonderful. But when an epiphany comes as a result of precise and strict questioning it is not pure, it is directed. And it is not the epiphany I am talking about.

My point is that the auditing and training effects the software of the mind, not the content. The software of the mind is what is being tampered with and channelled into monoideaism. The content of the apparent epiphany is irrelevant. It doesn't matter what the person cognites. It is that his mind is being reprogrammed to function in a monoideaistic way.

So agian, I am not talking about contents or culture, or beliefs, or customs. I am simply talking about altering the way a person's intuition (in the Kantian sense) operates. That is what auditing does.

The Anabaptist Jacques
 
If you think what I wrote implies or even infers that "minds can't be changed" then you haven't understood at all what I have said. Epiphanies can be wonderful. But when an epiphany comes as a result of precise and strict questioning it is not pure, it is directed. And it is not the epiphany I am talking about.

Every epiphany I've ever experienced, whether within the practice of scientology or not, occurred as the direct result of a period of intensive thought & contemplation. As such they were all "impure" in your regard. Frankly, based on my own experiences I am disinclined to believe in your doctrine of "purity" as it might be applied to an epiphany.

Nonetheless, no matter how "impure", the resultant epiphany invariably surpasses the limitations of prior thought. As such they serve more to break down mental conditioning rather than supporting it. Hence the suspicion with which many traditional communal ideologies have regarded an individual's experience of epiphany.

It's the epiphanies which I consider give "the lie" to your thesis. They are a "deus ex machina" and invariably reduce rigidity in the nature of an individual's thought patterns in a fashion that can be neither controlled nor predicted. They open a mind to possibilities from which it was previously barred.


Mark A. Baker
 

Veda

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"People have following the route mixed up with 'the right to have their own ideas'. Any one is certainly entitled to have opinions and ideas and cognitions - so long as these do not bar the route out for self and others."

From 'Keeping Scientology Working'.
 
Every epiphany I've ever experienced, whether within the practice of scientology or not, occurred as the direct result of a period of intensive thought & contemplation. As such they were all "impure" in your regard. Frankly, based on my own experiences I am disinclined to believe in your doctrine of "purity" as it might be applied to an epiphany.

Nonetheless, no matter how "impure", the resultant epiphany invariably surpasses the limitations of prior thought. As such they serve more to break down mental conditioning rather than supporting it. Hence the suspicion with which many traditional communal ideologies have regarded an individual's experience of epiphany.

It's the epiphanies which I consider give "the lie" to your thesis. They are a "deus ex machina" and invariably reduce rigidity in the nature of an individual's thought patterns in a fashion that can be neither controlled nor predicted. They open a mind to possibilities from which it was previously barred.


Mark A. Baker

Mark,

You are making what I say something other than what I said. I don't have a "doctrine" or a "thesis." I am telling you what I have concluded based on what I have observed, experienced, read about, and reasoned about.

People can get epiphanies from hypnotism, too. It still means they were hypnotized.

The Anabaptist Jacques
 
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