Facts on the Ground, People in the Field

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Facts on the Ground, People in the Field

Postby theeKultleeder » Sun Dec 09, 2007 4:11 am

I do not agree with the following narrative, but I do believe it may help to counter-act the diseased inflammation of conspiracy overdose.

Make of it what you will.

What you will - hah! could you do anything less?

Waitaminnit! If you start thinking something, and making theories, it is "what you will."

You are all Thelemites!



Kevin Brady
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More options Nov 30, 3:10 am

A clear (tm) distinction must be made between method and content.
For instance, the method of dianetics is quite simple, with about ten steps.
None of them require any particular belief system (other than that the steps
will work, on the part of the "auditor", and that something good might come
of it, on the part of the "preclear"), nor do they infer or imply the
existence of aliens, or any other wacky beliefs. However, once a session
begins, you will have no way of knowing what the content of a given incident
a person recounts will be, or what lies beneath it in the chain. If you
re-read Dianetics, you'll find a lot of talk about "lie-factories", and
other generators of illusions and delusory memories, or confabulations. Many
auditors were incompletely trained, and it served the Church of Scientology
and Hubbard himself for people to believe wacky ideas, sometimes, and even
to inculcate people with them.
When content becomes part of method, then you have blurred the line, and no
longer have soundness in your "tech". For instance, if you tell people a
story, and then ask them if they've ever had anything like that happen to
them, or infer that such a thing DID happen to them, then the "power of
suggestion" comes into play, and the possibility of "False Memory Syndrome"
becomes a danger. This was capitalized on by Hubbard (who was a hypnotist
prior to the explosion of Dianetics into the public awareness in 1950),
although he may not fully have been aware of how he was fucking people up
(including himself). He must have known, as time went by, though, how much
he was hurting people, and this is what probably drove him mad, leaving him
looking like a vampire, and screaming about the body thetans that were
destroying him or coming for him, or whatever it was. Hubbard crossed many
lines that a "good" man would not. He crossed the "tech" line frequently,
when it suited him. In Dianetics, this line was crossed when he assumed
that "basic" was birth, or attempted abortion, etc. There, he's proffering a
suggestion, rather than simply discovering what actually has happened to the
'preclear'. Interrogators are familiar with this. In fact, people can, in a
relatively short period of intense pressure/pain/stress, be convinced that
things have happened to them, or that they have witnessed things that they
in fact have not. If your survival, or escape from intense pain, depends on
you "remembering" that you did something horrible, and confessing to it,
then most people "find" that memory, and confess to it, if they can. Memory
and fantasy are tricky things to keep separate, particularly the further
removed from the original moment in time that the incident is purported to
have occurred.
I believe that Scientology's obsession with "whole track" and "aliens" or
"body thetans" comes from a failure to properly understand False Memory
Syndrome. Dianetics, applied improperly or incompletely, can result in a
person ascribing to very strange beliefs. If something doesn't feel right to
you, it probably isn't, when dealing with this stuff. If you stumble across
a memory, and it seems "wrong", or to conflict with the story you recall of
your life, then there are a few different possibilities. One is that the
memory you've recovered is the real memory, and other experience was
incorrectly confabulated to suppress this memory. Another is that the
recovered memory is false, a flight of fancy, whatever. Another is that the
recovered memory is a clue to something true, poking out of it's suppressed
location in a way that, stripped of full recollection, cannot be properly
interpreted. It's a tricky business, but practically speaking, the thing to
do is to go over the incident again, and see if the content is changing. If
so, continue the process. In the end, if the process is continued without
suggestion and without preconceived notions, falsehoods will be seen as
that, oddnesses will become better understood, and sometimes remarkable
clarity of a memory that had been suppressed will be recovered. Outside of
the Church, where people are expecting (auto-suggestion) "whole track"
recollection of sci-fi experiences or Godlike states, I've not found that
people have such memories or problems.
I find that most people, if you address them with dianetics, plain and
simple, benefit tremendously by it, and the complexities later introduced
were necessary to build a cult, rather than to help people.
...

As to the business about Thetans, consider that Hubbard's worldview was
shaped by science fiction and membership in occult lodges such as the Ordo
Templi Orientis. He was a channeler of spirits in LA before Scientology took
off. He had a big bag of tricks. The concept of the thetan is very similar
to the concept of "Atman", although Hubbard laced it with scientific
SOUNDING terminology and claimed it was completely new. (Truthiness!)
I don't believe we are immortal spiritual beings, but I do believe that
consciousness has many properties which haven't been fully understood, and
which may effect the physical universe in unexpected ways. Examples are the
"placebo effect", and the effect of intentions on random number generators,
or other quantum level phenomena.
My personal opinion is that our nervous systems are biological equivalents
of virtual reality generators, and that our consciousness is a dweller
within that environment. I think it develops when the body confronts
perceptual stimuli that force decisions. Our sense of identity, I think,
gradually evolves as "the one who decided", and gets more and more coherent
as we mature, until it becomes a full fledged sense of self sometime around
six or seven in most kids. I think this "self" could be portable into other
virtual reality environments, once the coding of the one it's presently
enmeshed within is fully understood, which may well still be many years
away: the brain is far from understood. You might want to look at a book
called "Humanizing Madness: Psychiatry and the Cognitive Neurosciences"
which advances this thesis, and describes current psychology and psychiatry
as pre-paradigmatic proto-sciences, rather than mature sciences. This is
immediately observable by the profusion of theories concerning the mind and
both mental health and mental illness. According to Thomas Kuhn and Karl
Popper, when there are a profusion of theories, none of them are fully
right, but all of them may have contributing planks towards a paradigm which
ultimately is more elegant and simple than any of it's forerunners, and
makes all of them seem like alchemy by comparison. The guy who wrote that
book, McLaren, is a psychiatrist, himself, and is very frustrated at the
present state of "science" with regard to study of the mind. The DSM IV is a
travesty, nothing more than a nosology of symptoms without any central
theory, which is pretty damning of psychiatry in general. However, when all
you have is a hammer, all you're likely to use are nails, unless you're
busting heads.
I'm quite aware that there are a number of very intelligent, good, and very
helpful psychiatrists, and that pharmaceuticals can improve quality of life
as well as grant a reprieve such that psychotherapy can be more effective,
and doesn't have to be a lifetime pursuit, but there are others who are in
it for the money, or who allow themselves to take the benefits with the push
of product. I have no idea what the percentages are, but human nature being
what it is (we are, after all, the most aggressive primates ever, and the
most xenocidal species ever known to us), I'd imagine that the rate is quite
high. It's not just my imagination, as in 1995, after separation from my
wife of six years due to meddling from the Church and already troubled
waters, I was not feeling so hot about losing my family and my work, and my
friends, and having such a heavy story hanging around me, and I sought help
for depression, and I'm glad I did: my situation was acute, I knew it, but
I couldn't tolerate it, and anti-depressants kept me alive and restored my
function. Since then, I've applied freezone scientology to some extent, and
now metapsychology, and no longer rely on antidepressants (they were always
intended [by me] to be a temporary solution). I don't hold psychiatric
medicine in contempt: it's a "best effort", and it's what we've got when
things have gone beyond a certain point where talking about it won't help,
or we're not ready yet to talk. You can take a blow that feels killing,
emotionally, as most of you probably have at some point or another, if
you've lived.
So, don't let my apparent disdain for psychiatry be interpreted as anything
other than impatience, and sometimes revulsion at research practices with
primates and other sentient animals of neurologists and other medical
specialties. It might be necessary for scientific advance, but it's
abhorrent, and if such methods could be avoided while spending more time and
money in something that might be more indirect but more humane, I'd be all
for it.
I get upset a little bit when it is considered scientific, because I don't
think treating clusters of symptoms with medicines is scientific, when those
symptoms are subjectively reported and an analysis for "correct level" of a
given neurotransmitter, or "within normal parameters" of fMRI scan for a
given condition is not done (because correct level is not known, nor are the
defining parameters of fMRI activity in the brain know for quantitative
measurement of existence of precisely defined conditions in the brain
chemistry for any psychiatric diagnosis: instead we have subjectively
reported conditions and incompletely understood medications (in terms of the
effect of long-term interference with brain chemistry, whose relationship to
our moods and tendencies is tangential, although influential, IMO), and
often no accompaniment with any attempt at psychological integration of what
has occurred, if their condition was brought on by some overwhelming
environmental stressor (broken strongly-bonded relationships, experience of
terror, exposure to strong psychedelics, experiencing combat or witnessing
combat zones without possibility of retreat, etc.), which can be a critical
component to a person recovering a balanced view of their life.
I don't claim psychology methods are a science, either, although they are
based on scientific research of intuitively understood common human
experiences, moreso now than during the days of psychoanalysis. While
talk-therapies are only helpful with helping a person focus their will and
abreactively re-experience a cognitive flood of imagery connected to what
may have been a disabling experience, I believe both of these to be
extremely valuable, and more broadly applicable than is at first obvious, as
they can benefit even people who haven't suffered such extreme stress, but
have still suffered losses, or other common human experiences that are
difficult to tolerate, or even just unwanted: sometimes just BITCHING
helps.
I sure have.
--
Kevin G. Brady
(415) 341-0022,
gomorr...@hotmail.com
http://www.myspace.com/clear_objectives


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