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…
“He will eventually turn around.” “He’s just going through a phase.” “He’s still a kool-aid drinker – give him a couple of more years and he will wake up.” Etc.
You may cringe at the arrogance of the ex-Scientologists and Anonymous when they condescendingly belittle you with statements like the above. Like they somehow “know” what you are all about. Like crack pot tarot card readers. Even when they themselves never even set a foot inside a Church of Scientology.
I used to cringe. Because that arrogance does nothing but create animosity. It serves only to prolong any recovery from the Scientology mindfuck.
But, they are more than half-right.
What I find in common among the majority of scientologists – in or out of the church – is a worrying introspection. A tendency to look inward, find faults with themselves, worry about being PTS, about committing overts, about having missed withholds, about being restimulated, about their postulates (not) coming true, about being effect (of SPs), about what might have caused that ulcer, etc. Much looking inward and toward the past. I used to do the same – but oddly enough it was OT 8 that got me out of that. Ironic it is. (Google the terms above if you need to)
Scientology is the opposite of the Fuck It ideology. It makes for over-serious people wrought with emergencies and nervous anxiety about not having control or “being cause”. In my experience, it tends to make people less productive.
When I recently assessed what could or even should have been a tailored and compacted Scientology route for me, it would have gone like this: TRs, OT 2, OT 5, OT 7, OT 8. Interestingly, these are among the least introspective levels in Scientology. Although I did get gains from looking into incidents in my past and querying my inner mind, the more outward looking processes did the most for me. And I believe they make for less of a mindfuck.
One thing that helped me a lot during my 25 years in Scientology was that I never had much expectations of what to gain from the various levels. I was curious and open to what they could bring. Not having expectations means not being prone to disappointments. Looking back, I believe this was my saving grace.
I have been pondering this for a while now and just had to get it off my mind. Having said that, I think most of you are waiting for a report from our US trip.
Yes, it will come. After I have collected the pictures and found the time to structure a report. As a teaser, I can tell you this; It was one hell of a ride. We got to meet with so many wonderful, exciting and hugable people and lots of amazing places. Like Chris and the Grand Canyon, making 10 videos at Karen De La Carriere’s (soon to be published), meeting a world class dj in NYC, doing a demo auditing session in front of 200 people in LA, and much more. I will leave you with a picture I took overlooking the Grand Canyon:
“Daddy – fear… is like an obstacle.
In fact, fear is Man’s greatest enemy.”(Jonatan Isene, 9)
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.
As the discussion on my previous blog post got rolling, Vinaire posted an excellent comment that I thought warranted a blog post on its own.
Reference links:
Godel’s incompleteness theorem applies only to axiomatic systems capable of doing arithmetic. I do not know if Godel’s argument can be extended to as complex a system as the universe.
de•ter•min•ism (noun)
1. the doctrine that all facts and events exemplify natural laws.
2. the doctrine that all events, including human choices and decisions, have sufficient causes.
axiomatic system
In mathematics, an axiomatic system is any set of axioms from which some or all axioms can be used in conjunction to logically derive theorems.
complete
A set of axioms is complete if, for any statement in the axioms’ language, either that statement or its negation is provable from the axioms.
consistent
A set of axioms is (simply) consistent if there is no statement such that both the statement and its negation are provable from the axioms.
e·nu·mer·ate verb (used with object)
1. to mention separately as if in counting; name one by one; specify, as in a list: Let me enumerate the many flaws in your hypothesis.
2. to ascertain the number of; count.
effectively generated
A formal theory is said to be effectively generated if there is a computer program that, in principle, could enumerate all the axioms of the theory without listing any statements that are not axioms. This is equivalent to the existence of a program that enumerates all the theorems of the theory without enumerating any statements that are not theorems.
Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory…
Gödel’s theorem shows that, in theories that include a small portion of number theory, a complete and consistent finite list of axioms can never be created, nor even an infinite list that can be enumerated by a computer program. Each time a new statement is added as an axiom, there are other true statements that still cannot be proved, even with the new axiom. If an axiom is ever added that makes the system complete, it does so at the cost of making the system inconsistent.
There are complete and consistent lists of axioms for arithmetic that cannot be enumerated by a computer program. For example, one might take all true statements about the natural numbers to be axioms (and no false statements), which gives the theory known as “true arithmetic”. The difficulty is that there is no mechanical way to decide, given a statement about the natural numbers, whether it is an axiom of this theory, and thus there is no effective way to verify a formal proof in this theory.
This may mean that if this universe (with both its physical and spiritual aspects) can be expressed through a consistent set of principles, then there is a truth about this universe that cannot be demonstrated using those set of principles. That truth may look at this universe (as a whole) exactly for what it is. Such a truth may not be derivable from the set of principles that supposedly describe the universe.
For any formal effectively generated theory T including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, if T includes a statement of its own consistency then T is inconsistent.
The second incompleteness theorem does not rule out consistency proofs altogether, only consistency proofs that could be formalized in the theory that is proved consistent. The second incompleteness theorem is similar to the Liar’s paradox, “This sentence is false,” which contains an inherent contradiction about its truth value.
This may mean that this universe cannot contain the ultimate truth about itself. The ultimate truth is unknowable from the reference point of this universe.
If we go by the definition of determinism that all facts and events exemplify natural laws, we cannot say for certain if that is true or not. In other words, not everything may be predictable ahead of its occurrence.
Manifestations may be related to each other in strict logical sequence meaning that any manifestation may be shown to follow from another manifestation. However, it may be impossible to determine how a manifestation may come to be on its own. This is another version of saying, “Absolutes are unattainable.”
So a system may be deterministic only in a relative sense. It can neither be absolutely deterministic, nor can it be absolutely non-deterministic.
Link to article on Vinaire’s blog: Gödel and Determinism
Was playing around with Xtranormal:
Peter: “Hello, I am a Scientologist. Have you heard about Scientology?”
Jane: “Oh! Isn’t that the weird science fiction cult created by that Blubbard guy?”
Peter: “No-no. Scientology is an applied religious philosophy which contains tools that anyone can use to improve their life. These are workable tools that have been proven to be uniformly successful if they are applied correctly. It provides a bridge to total freedom. It is complete and consistent. Complete and consistent.”
Jane: “Have you heard about the incompleteness theorems by… Gödel?”
Peter: “I missed that part of Scientology. Is it part of the class twelve course?”
Jane: “It’s part of the world outside the Scientology bubble.”
You can create a free account and submit a video if you like 🙂
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.
It is shit, and it is considered holy by the Church of Scientology.
As I touched upon, Ethics is one of three main parts of the subject of Scientology. The other two are Tech (training and counseling) and Admin (organizational policy).
After the last post on this subject, I did a bit more research and came across something that perplexed me. I cannot believe I read this while in the church without a blink.
Ethics comprises the subject of Justice. While Hubbard confused the two subjects in more places than I can count, he somewhere intended ethics to be a person thing. He equated it with reason, with personal discipline and being true to oneself, while justice is the action taken by a group toward a person that goes against the mores of a group.
A person’s transgressions against the group is classified into three categories:
There is an extensive list the three categories covered in the book, “Introduction to Scientology Ethics”. Wading through the list, we find a few interesting points:
Misdemeanors:
So far, so good. These are the minor transgressions committed by the unruly. How about the real, juicy stuff, the crimes? Hold onto your hat, because here’s where it gets weird.
Crimes:
Holy shit! “Seducing a minor” is on the same level of severity as “Not using a computer once it is installed”!
Note that not toeing the party line is a crime.
And what the hell is “Committing a problem”?
Keep that perplexity – here comes the worst of the worst of crimes:
High crimes/Suppressive acts
Excuse me? Withholding vital information from the Church is as bad as first degree murder? And worse than seducing a minor? Please pass me the barf bag.
And right here is the basis for the disconnection policy – failure to disconnect from someone who have publicly departed Scientology makes you just as guilty of a high crime. On par with arson or disintegration of a person.
And the use of Scientology policy while calling it something else is as bad as slaughtering a random person with a chain saw.
And people dare to call this a cult? Go figure.
Oh, and I can hear the justification crew come running down the door telling me this is taken out of context. That I am being too literal, that Hubbard didn’t really mean it that way, or, or, or. I am sure, with enough mental gymnastics, you can make any mental peg fit a square personality. I know, because I was just as guilty of leveling out my cognitive dissonance by the use of mental tricks. I cringe.
I should ease the harshness by mentioning that there are indeed good stuff that Hubbard wrote on the subject of ethics. But this, ladies and gentlemen, is just plain sick.
Geir Isene - uncut 