It’s been a busy afternoon here as my first video from my interview with J. Swift at Karen’s hit the Net. It was first featured at Tony Ortega’s blog. Then it got Slashdotted. Here’s the video:
FYI: The OSA meeting in LA where they first used me as a strategic advisor on Internet matters happened in late Autumn 2001. There will be more on my work for OSA in videos to come, including my proposal on how they should have handled the Wikipedia bar in 2009.
OMG! Brendan, Anette and myself did a US race in one week, with two days in New York City, one day in Phoenix/Grand Canyon and four days in Los Angeles. We met with more than 35 people in more than 20 meetings covering anything from business to Scientology, HP calculators, art and music. We had a blast!
A picture tells more than a thousand words. And this time I will let the pictures do the reporting:
Times Square – New York City is like the real Bladerunner
Anette & Geir kissing as part of the “making out in front of churches”-series
Beautiful Central Park
Two squirrels in the park
Brendan and Geir trying hard to follow the rules of the Soup Nazi
Had a late coffee with Tony Ortega. Intriguing talk with a highly intelligent man. And way too interesting to remember taking any pictures… so here’s his official FB pic.
Zana – we had an interesting chat 🙂
Meeting Victoria and her wonderful and loving family.
Meeting Dave in Little Italy talking about Life, the universe, everything.
Martin the genius DJ
A taste of Martin’s music (he’s half of the duo CLMD):
Visiting Chris (our resident blogger) and his gorgeous family. Love’em to bits.
Chris took us to Grand Canyon… OMG!
Got real close to an elk up there.
Saw the outside of Hubbard’s home in Phoenix (he lived there for about a year back in the early 50’s). No one answered when we rung the bell.
The almost staff-less but huge and beautiful Church of Scientology in Phoenix.
Making out in front of Celebrity Centre International (Scientology’s VIP church).
Meeting Jeff and Karen – what a wonderful, energetic and creative couple. The planning of some counter-OSA-ops was fun.
I did a series of videos at Karen’s detailing my various experiences in Scientology – from my work with OSA Int to my meeting with David Miscavige. I will do a blog post for each of these videos as the are produced and released on Karen’s channel. Karen has done lots of videos, like this one:
Attending a show on Scientology at the Silent Theater (Cine Family). Got invited by Karen and Spanky. Winged it… got on the panel and did a demo session. Awesome fun!
Here’s Tory and Mark’s video on what went down that night:
Doing a demo session with the organizer of the event, Hadrian. He was a good sport and as funny as they come. He even said he had some gain out of the two auditing questions he was asked.
JD Shapiro talking about his script writing for the movie Battlefield Earth. Some interesting insight right there.
Meeting the lovable Tory Magoo 🙂
Spanky and me in the garden behind the theater. You just gotta love that energy and compassion.
The happiest place on Earth 🙂
Doing the “Star Tour” at Disneyland.
Boat trip down at the wonderful Newport Beach with Mike and Betsy. Great couple. Very interesting talk.
I’d take it if someone had begged me to live there.
…especially with this pelican outside the door.
Jason the Writer and Video Producer with Brendan looking over Newport Beach.
Tom and Anette on Venice Beach. Tom’s a cool chap.
Meeting Garth and Joe at our “mini HHC” (the yearly HP Handheld Club is in the autumn). Great to meet with some fellow geeks and talk HP calculators. Yeay!
Talking Incas and her upcoming book and TV series with Theresa. Fascinating stories!
At Aida and Dave’s. The powerhouse Mexican served authentic food from her home country – all made from scratch. Oh yummy.
The view from Aida’s is not bad… not bad at all…
Jason the Writer invited us to the Magic Castle with a really fun show 🙂
Spent hours with Jason – but with him and us being so much into the conversations, we forgot all about taking pictures together with him and his family…
…but Anette did take a picture of me kissing one of Jason’s bunnies…
…and his duck. After which Angie took us on a Black Widow safari around their house. That woman’s got balls of steel.
Flying home
There are so many pictures we didn’t take in all our awe and rush. It was a week we will never forget. And with people we will have many years ahead with great friendship and lots of fun. Next time we’ll go to…
We are sooo looking forward to our US trip, Brendan, Anette and myself. We will meet with lots of people both in New York and in LA. And of course Chris in the Grand Canyon. There will be pictures and videos, laughter and fun. And you will get reports along the way. We leave on the coming Friday (June 14th) and arrive back in Oslo 9 days later. It’ll be a busy, busy trip 🙂
Tag along if you feel like spontaneously joining us – just drop me an e-mail – or if you are in the LA area, join us at Disneyland on Thursday the 20th or at Universal Studios on Friday the 21st.
To all the people we meet along the way; Let’s have some pure, unadulterated fun 😉
Note to OSA: Please don’t spend parishioner’s hard earned cash on PIs or silly surveillance. Just send me an e-mail (g@isene.com) instead to ask for whatever information you feel you need.
I have been thinking about my changing viewpoints on Scientology. How I started out back in 1984 when I first encountered the subject, how I became a Scientologist, when I discovered the church management was corrupt, and how it went south from there. Being a fan of simple models, it dawned on me that this can be easily represented in a simple matrix.
Although the model is simplistic and harbors several issues, it seems to serve well to explain my own path from a wog to a scientologist to an independent scientologist and to being me (with some viewpoints on it all).
I thought of a simple matrix where the X-axis represents a person’s sentiments on the subject of Scientology, while the Y-axis represents his sentiments toward the Church of Scientology and it’s management. I boxed it all in so that we get a 100% positiveness regarding Scientology to the right and 100% positiveness toward the church management at the top. Conversely, we get a 100% negative viewpoint on the subject to the left and 100% negative viewpoint on the church at the bottom. We end up with four quadrants that I have labeled:
In the middle, we find people that do not identify themselves with the quadrant where they reside, and remain fairly neutral in their views – somewhat positive or negative along either axis.
A Scientologist would be someone who are in the Church of Scientology, supporting it to a lesser or greater degree. An independent Scientologist thinks Scientology is great, but objects to the church and how it is run. A critic dislikes both the subject and the church, while a hired gun would consist of lawyers, PR personnel and the like who don’t have much good to say on the subject but likes how the church management give them money for the job they do.
At the edges of the matrix we find fanatics.
People move inside the matrix. They can move fast or slow, often or seldom, erratic or smooth. But as the person discovers new information on Scientology, he moves one way or the other.
A fairly typical path could be something like this:
Here the person starts off as somewhat critical to Scientology – both the subject and the church. He gets in contact with the church, gets convinced that there is something positive about it, experiences some personal gains and end up as a Scientologist. He then experiences some mismanagement, questions how the church is run, discovers that the church management is corrupt and ends up rejecting the church. At this time he becomes an Independent Scientologist. He is all of a sudden free to question everything Scientology. He start thinking for himself. This gets him gradually over to protesting elements in the subject itself until he protests quite a lot of it, ending up as mildly critical to the whole lot.
But people travel their own path in this diagram – and they end up at different places. It all depends on what information they acquire and how unafraid they are to question their beliefs, how willing they are to experience Scientology first hand and many other factors.
My path in the matrix is something like this:
I already see improvements that can be made to the model, but I have decided to present it like this for simplicity.
It would be interesting to hear your own journey in this Scientology Matrix. If you want to draw your own path, you can use this template:
If you’d rather just spell it out in words, we can use numbers to represent the axises. Each axis goes from -5 (left or bottom) to +5 (right and top). The numbers are (X,Y) – or (Scientology,Church). In this way you can indicate where you are at a given year or period of years, like my journey represented in numbers (rounded to integers):
1984: 0,0
1985-2006: 4,3
2007: 4,1
2008: 4,0
2009: 4,-1
2010: 3,-2
2011 – 2013: 2,-3
Want to share your journey? Want to improve the model? Leave a comment.
I have mentioned my gains in Scientology several times. Time for a a Top 5 list of what did it for me. No lengthy explanations, just a concise summary. Note: You can find explanations for the various Scientology services here.
The list could easily be extended with more tangiable and lasting gains from other Scientology services. I am aware of, and cull gains that can equally well be attributed to other factors in my life. The list above shows gains that can only be attributed to that specific service done.
Tonight I was showing Anette a wide variety of music that has inspired me. From Clannad, Isao Tomita, Vangelis, Klaus Nomi and Andreas Wollenweider. I stumbled across a work by one of Norway’s truly great composer, the late Arne Nordheim. I remember fondly how I discovered Nordheim at the age of 13. I used to sit at the main library in downtown Oslo working my way through number theory and calculus while I was listening to this:
Like I did with the book, “Six months in the open“, I have compiled a running record of all Scientology-related posts on this blog.
This new book shows my gradual changing views since I started this blog in June 2010.
The two books combined gives a unique insight into an OT8’s journey out of the Church of Scientology and into the realm of the Independent Scientologists (“Six months in the open”) and then the unraveling of a Scientology-conditioned mind resulting in a free mind (“From Independent Scientologist to just me”).
This book is the distillation of Scientology-related posts on this blog.
Get it at Scribd.com.
Or download it right here (291 pages, 5.4 MB).
As usual, it is free and available under a free license.
Happy birthday, Norway 😀
Questioning everything. Being open to radical changes. Or small changes. Working at removing my prejudices, my filters, my principles. Removing mental crutches, one by one. Planning and preparing less. Winging it. And to do it well, being fully present in the Here & Now. Really observing, listening. Not being mentally lazy and jumping to conclusions. But respecting others and myself enough to inspect and evaluate. And only then conclude and act. And as I become better at being fully present, the evaluations gains speed. I become better at what I practice. Never settling with the status quo. Always exploring new horizons to uncover more truth. Not being afraid of being wrong or disproven, but embracing my faults as a catalyst for progress. The progress is the goal, not the goals themselves. Chilling and being able to say “fuck it”. Doing what helps. Not doing what doesn’t help. And worrying seldom helps. Being better at controlling what I can control and not focusing on what I cannot control. Creating value for others. Catalyzing free will and helping others exercising their power of choice. Caring and being kind.
These are the ideals I work toward. I am a work in progress. I enjoy.
Geir Isene - uncut 