From what I know about est, it was far more admirable in it’s goals and operation than Scientology-- it really appeared to be trying to help people re-think their lives, without grafting on a lot of space mythology mumbo jumbo, and requiring members to pay for newly discovered levels of “clear” after they’ve completed their studies. Now, I never took an est course, so I could be way off, but originally it was just a 2-week seminar, no? I guess what I’m saying is est at least appeared admirable in it’s goals, as opposed to Scientology, which smells like a for-profit con game from the get-go.
As a gag, I used a friends name, email and phone number making several donations on their behalf too various religious groups. Not a week went by he was not solicited for more donations and it went on for years.
He eventually assumed I was behind his little problem. I couldn’t keep a straight face denying it.
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Soooo, what is with the cross symbol and the “Night Church”? Oh, and neat-o new tactic is targeted marketing with online ads, first time ever I saw an ad when visiting the Seattle PI (for the comics, duh) for Scientology. Not touching with a 1,000 light year ray.
From what I saw of the Forum, erstwhile est, yeah, it was less irrational than Scientology, but that’s a low hurdle to clear. The initial seminar was free, or relatively cheap, but they had a lot of more “advanced” courses, and from the one time I caught a glance at a catalog, the middle-tier courses had fees in the tens of thousands of dollars.
The Forumites were, among themselves, hierarchical and authoritarian, with authority based on how many courses someone had taken. The absolute end to any disagreement was, “I took a course on that and you haven’t, so you don’t understand”. Most disturbingly, in this hierarchy, in heterosexual couples, the men always outranked the women, and would chastise them for failing to adhere to Forum precepts – which is how I most often heard them talking about such things. One of their fundamental beliefs was that you should have a positive outlook at all times, no matter what, because that absolutely determined your circumstances; the women in the group were often obviously forcing themselves to smile. I haven’t seen such unambiguously patriarchal behavior among conservative evangelical Christians who literally advocated patriarchy.
So no, I don’t think they were benign.
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Yeah, maybe that was too harsh of me to say. “Proper religions” just sounded a little too much like No True Scotsman would do those things, if you see what I mean.
Re: teaching members to mistreat their family members, I believe the Amish formally call that “shunning” and some people in other religions behave the same way but less formally. I’ll give you that, the major religions don’t seem to have it as hard-coded as Scientology does. You’re not going to get excommunicated from most churches (or mosques or synagogues?) for hanging out with your backsliding kin.
Is not my student hat “ashof-fy” enough?
Funny that you make that comparison.
"Erhard and Scientology
In the late 1960s, Erhard studied Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard became a significant influence. Scientologists to this day accuse Erhard of having stolen his main ideas for est from Hubbard. We do know that when Erhard set up est he considered making it a non-profit, as Hubbard had done with dianetics and the Church of Scientology. But Erhard decided to incorporate as an educational firm for profit in a broad market.
Erhard and his supporters accuse Scientology of being behind various attempts to discredit Erhard, including hounding by the IRS and accusations of incest by his children. Erhard won a lawsuit against the IRS and the incest accusations were recanted. Erhard has claimed he has good evidence that Scientologists made a strong and concerted effort to destroy him.
est is not dianetics
est bears little resemblance to Dianetics or Scientology, however. est is a hodgepodge of philosophical bits and pieces seemingly culled from the carcasses of existential philosophy, motivational psychology, Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-cybernetics, Zen Buddhism, Alan Watts, Freud, Abraham Maslow, L. Ron Hubbard, Hinduism, Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, P. T. Barnum, and apparently anything else that Erhard’s intuition told him would work in the burgeoning human potential market. (I’m not saying that such eclecticism is a bad thing or that Erhard consciously constructed est out of just these sources. I employ bits and pieces from many of the same sources in my teaching. In fact, after a Socratic performance on the first day of an Introduction to Philosophy course, a student once blurted out: “This is just like est!”)
What did Erhard promise those who would shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for his programs? He promised he would “blow their minds”* and “empower” them “to produce effective action.” He would enable them “to produce new ways of working.” He would transform the basis of their communication. They would be able “to cause life instead of just living it.” “Werner Erhard held out the tantalizing promise of transformation, a word and a concept never precisely defined in the fuzzy syntax-twisted jargon of est” (Pressman 1993)."
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Not at all like Scientology, but the “It works because it does” attitudes and the associated cruft are all very cultish.
To be fair, lack of mass does make it hard to stay in your seat when you’re trying to study.
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It goes to show you how much money can do. If you had a million lying around, you could start a religion based on wickerwork and butter, complete with special truth chairs and a butter diet, a lexicon, idols, a dogma, and a scheme to get more money to perpetuate the thing. It’s nothing new. It’s been going on for centuries.
Imagine what their email inboxes look like these days. Mine is bad enough with all the Wine Chateau stuff. I’d run to the hills screaming if I got as much Scientology crap.
I’ve been to a couple 12 step meetings and saw none of those things.
Of course, I wasn’t a 20 year old desperate to stay in my parents house and treating it like a punishment, so maybe our viewpoints would be different.
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I guess the ‘hat’ is something like the opposite or reverse of a tin foil hat.
Scientology ist not a church, it is a highly profitable business that in some respects is not very unlike a drug cartel. You know, give 'em freebies, get 'em hooked, make 'em pay for the rest of theit lives. The ‘church’ bit is just a tax dodge.
What surprised me at the time is that it was well within the email era… like under ten years ago. I have no idea how much the church spammed their email accounts, but the level of dead-tree mail was astounding, especially for the 21st century. And though plenty of it looked fairly repetitive, there was still a wide range of topics. Just reading every piece of mail the church sent them would take half an hour or more out of every day. I was half afraid I’d mistake my car registration renewal notice for one of their mailings and accidentally send away for a used E-meter, C.O.D.
Is there such a thing as a used E-Meter?
I would have figured that old units would be returned to Scientology HQ and dissolved in a Hubbard-formulated mix of acids to destroy any lingering Thetans.
I’m imagining what a groupshave carwash looks like…
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The “wall of fire” is the famous/infamous OT III, the level where you learn about Xenu and the volcanos.
Apparently when you’re deemed ready for it (and have paid the $250,000 to get to that level, etc) you’re let into a room and a briefcase is taken out. Inside the briefcase are texts handwritten by L. Ron himself. I’ve read that the documents, or the briefcase, or something, are physically chained up so that they can’t be removed, in a bit of cultic security theater.
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They have tried to get it into schools. Occasionally it sneaks into one for a while until someone finds out.
A charter school in PInellas County, FL adopted “Study Tech”, and as a result had among the lowest test scores in the Tampa Bay area.
Not surprising, really, considering that it consists of constantly looking up words in dictionaries and modeling abstract concepts in clay. “Model a quadratic equation in clay”.
Will and Jada Smith set up a school that used this stuff, and their kids were “educated” with it. The school closed recently.
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Only if it’s done with mind-blowing clarity and being at purpose over the hairs. Preferably, near a yacht.
