Indonesia Relief Effort

The Volunteer Ministers are asking for our help in their efforts to help in Indonesia at the site of the quake in Yogyakarta. Abour 4300 people are known dead, with at least 120,000 homeless in the wake of the disaster. If you want to go and help them, contact vm@volunteerministers.org or ihelpwestus@ihelp.org. You can also make donations via paypal to the vm@volunteerministers.org site. They hope to field a team of hundreds of volunteer ministers. They do whatever is needed to help, whether that is digging through rubble for victims, passing out water and food, giving first aid to the injured, identifying and burying the dead, or giving "assists" to the survivors to help them cope with loss and injury. Scientology Volunteer Ministers are always "doing something about it". Help us.

NY Rescue Workers Detox Center

In 2002 Tom Cruise helped start the NY Rescue Workers Detox Center in Manhattan. Since then, 640 rescue workers have gone through the program. The detox program involves sauna and exercise (and vitamins) and I've seen photos of the "blue sweat" that comes out of their bodies in the sauna while on the program. More than 40 of the rescue workers from Ground Zero have died from the toxins to which they were exposed in their rescue and recovery efforts. Over 70% of the rescue workers have some form of health problem such as "WTC cough" as their bodies try to cope with the toxins they absorbed from the smoke and other chemicals in the air.

The program is free to those rescue workers who do it, although it costs about $5000 per person to deliver. Tom Cruise funded quite a bit of it initially, but of course they need more funds to continue operating. They're having a sponsored motorcycle ride on August 26th, led by Joe Higgins, a retired NYC firefighter and graduate of the program. To join the ride, contact hmdetox@aol.com (Jim Woodworth) or to organize a game to gather donations, contact Charlotte Anderson (charwah@msn.com). You can also make donations yourself.

For more info about the NY Detox center, visit www.nydetox.org/index.html.

May 10, 1950

Something important happened for humanity on May 10, 1950, and most people don't know it and couldn't associate that date with anything of significance to their lives. That was the date that the book "Dianetics, The Modern Science of Mental Health" was published by L. Ron Hubbard. It's a date of signifigance now mainly to Scientologists, who celebrate it annually as one of the beginning dates of that new religion. Back in the last 1940's, Hubbard was doing research into the mind, that no one else had done. He went with what worked, as therapy, and built the system of Dianetics to help people help each other using it. The book swept the country, Dianetics centers sprang up everywhere, and Hubbard created the Hubbard Dianetics Research Foundation to keep looking into the mind. When you look deeply enough into the mind (which he found was composed of mental image pictures), you eventually had to ask, "Who's looking at those pictures?" And he stumbled upon the human spirit quite by accident. By 1952 he'd pretty thoroughly researched the capabilities of the human spirit, which he recorded in a series of lectures in Phoenix and Philadelphia. Realizing that they were dealing with the human spirit directly, others then founded the Church of Scientology.

I attended my first celebration of the publication of this book on its 21st birthday, on a lark in 1971, at a hotel in Seattle, with a bunch of Scientologists I had only recently met. I was still in college then, and still doing street drugs. I wanted desperately to get off the drugs, but was pulled to them with a force that was hard to resist and that I didn't comprehend; it was hard to look at the various reasons why I was doing drugs.

The Scientologists rolled up their sleeves and helped me get off the drugs and get them out of my system completely, not just physically but spiritually as well. Dianetics, their old workhorse of mental technology, came to my personal rescue in the form of something called the "Drug Rundown". It helped break me out of the "woodenness" a word that perfectly describes my inability to reach out, to feel, or to communicate. Drugs lost their allure mentally and their hold physically -- and I became drug-proof for the last 30 odd years. I'm not a teatotaler, and I'm not an addict. I can have a drink with friends, and I can take a drug if I absolutely must for my health.

It would have been easier in today's world to get off the drugs I was on, with the tough and dedicated staff of Narconon available to help now -- back then Narconon was just getting going.

Actress Kirstie Alley has said that Narconon saved her life, twice. Once helping her break her addiction to cocaine, and once after she was poisoned. Narconon uses the techniques developed by Hubbard to help people get off drugs. It's not Scientology, but is workable de-addiction technology spun off of Hubbard's research into the mind. The recidivism rate of most drug rehab programs is around 80% meaning that the vast majority of those going through drug rehab slide back onto drugs. The recidivism rate of Narconon is extremely low, below 20%, last time I checked the stats. Ask any Narconon graduate. If you're interested in actual drug rehabiliation, Narconon is the way to go.

Narconon started in 1966 when Willie Benitez, an inmate, got hold of several Scientology books and started the first Narconon self-help group with other prisoners at Arizona State Prison. He could not have predicted it would become the tremendous force it is today in helping rehabilitate those on drugs and in prison.

Time off -- for work?

I've had several days to myself recently, with my fiancee gone on a business trip for a week. I enjoy the solitude and freedom: I can stay up til 2 AM on a whim now without anyone complaining! It feels like a vacation of sorts, even though I'm working away while she's gone, in silence and without all those annoying distractions. But I LIKE those distractions, and I like my fiancee, so it's a tossup whether this solo stint is better for my morale than just our normal dual life here. I find myself looking forward to our daily phone calls so we can catch up, even when there's not much to catch up on. "How are the cats?" "Fine. Crazy as ever."

Study Tech at work...

It's hard for us to imagine the difficulties that a college professor in Tanzania or Botswana or Mali faces compared to, say, a tenured professor in an American university. Yet they are trying, with very limited resources, to educate their students to be competent and able to excel in the modern world.

Applied Scholastics (developed by L. Ron Hubbard) is engaged in a broad program to teach African professors tools that they then use to more effectively educate their students. Here are two testimonials that express the hope and certainty that they achieve after completing only the first course in their program, called "Progressive Teaching Tools":

"I am excited to have completed my first course in the Applied Scholastics Master Training. I have attended several teacher-training programmes, but there is none that can compare with this one.

The instructors are wonderful people with amiable human reactions.

I can say without mincing words that I can now change my world, family, students and friends alike for the better.

God bless Mr. L. Ron Hubbard." ~ G.E. College Professor

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"I have been a teacher for 25 years and I have taught in all the levels of education from the primary through secondary to tertiary institutions in my country, but I have always thought something was wrong with our achievements - both as teachers and learners.

Why, for instance, would children who come to school looking bright, enthusiastic and ambitious suddenly become sullen and vindictive against society? Why again would a child want to withdraw from school when he knows all the advantages education gives to people? I could not imagine.

Now, I know why. We have been putting all the wrong things into our educational system. It is amazing that anyone successfully passed through the system at all!

Browbeating anyone into learning is no way to teach. Our kids must first know why they are learning (i.e. learning for life) and then want to learn so that the knowledge they acquire can be useful to them and to society. Learning must be achieved 100% - not 99%. In fact, it’s as if we insist on better quality from our industries than we do from our schools.

It is time to change, time to begin to put in place measures that would ensure hundred percent learning." ~ B.A., College Professor

Coastal Elk

One evening last week our chickens alerted us to the fact we had an animal wandering the yard. They make a great sustained racket of crowing and calling to each other when there is an animal, especially a predator, around their chicken run. When we checked it out, it was a fairly large coastal elk with nubby antlers just coming in. We've never seen them in our yard before -- our dogs usually scare off all the grazing animals, including stray cows, wandering horses, the timid deer, and the elk. This elk was as big as one of our horses.

When our dogs ran up to chase him off, he lowered his head and charged them. They quickly gave up and he ignored them after that. He came back the next day.

We are about ten miles from the Pacific ocean, which, as I understand it, is right at the eastern limit of the range of these coastal elk. We hope to see more....

Everything's blooming...

It's that time of year when everything seems to be blooming here on the timber ranch. The ceanothus (aka false lilac and tickweed) is flowering all over. That's not a good sign - ceanothus is considered a weed here. Wherever it grows is someplace that a fir tree isn't growing. We're always hacking it back. Here's some growing on a steep hill under some madrone:

We were surprised this year to see some trillium flowers blooming near our house. I had thought the flowers on trillium to always be white, but these have a pastel purple color to them that is wonderful. These only grow where it is cool and shady. The three big leaves make them easy to identify, even though the flower looks a lot like the wild irises that grow around here, which are also blooming now.

Eli Lilly funds "pre-emptive" drug study

More Eli Lilly drugs foisted on kids as this NY Times article today details, Eli Lilly and the NIMH have been funding a drug study since 1997, trying to determine if it is efficacious to drug kids who are "at risk" of schizophrenia with anti-psychotics. The biggest result? The kids gained an average of 20 pounds. This drug being tested, Zyprexa, causes those taking it to get fat. So let's see -- you take a girl who is borderline schizo, and now you make her 20 pounds heavier. That's certainly not going to make her any happier, now is it?

Of course, this "study" was flawed in many different ways. First they couldn't find that many people who fit the category of pre-schizophrenic. Only 60 kids were tested, which isn't statistically enough to get a valid result no matter WHAT the results. 10 of the kids stopped taking the drug, some of them moved away - so basically you can't read anything from the numbers. It's just more bogus pseudo-science from Eli Lilly.

You can see where they were headed with it, though -- "Don't be leff out! Brought to you by the makers of Prozac -- a drug for you kids who AREN'T crazy -- yet. You, too, can be forced to take your prescription on threat of being kicked out of school and reported for child abuse."

For more info on the insanity that is psychiatry, visit CCHR -- the only effective group doing anything to try to contain the pseudo-science of psychiatry.

Study Tech at work

I was a very glib student when I went to school (back before the last ice age). I could parrot back whatever the teachers had said, and had near perfect eidetic memory of the textbooks I read. So I did really well on tests, skipped a grade, etc. But when it came to actually applying what I'd learned, it was as if I never really absorbed any of what I was studying. It wasn't until my circumstances changed in my junior year in high school that I became aware of this flaw in my education.

At 15 years old I suddenly had to learn very quickly how to build a house. I was living with my older sister that year (1968). I spent the whole "Summer of Love" on a 2 acre lot in the desert outside El Paso, Texas, putting in a foundation, building framing, and putting up roof joists, putting on a roof, putting in plumbing and electrical and insullation, and putting up siding. I even learned to lay the proverbial bricks. I did most of the work with my brother-in-law directing and helping as he could (he had a bad back and was away most of the time). It was the first time I'd ever built anything or had to DO anything that mattered. About the only thing I was able to use from my prior life were my basic geometry skills -- how to measure out and lay out a right angle.

And that winter we lived in the house.

That qualification got my first "real" job - construction chief on a privately owned ship. All they cared about was: "Can you DO it." It didn't matter that I was "only" 18 years old.

The emphasis in Study Technology is on application, and it achieves results that cut through the psychobabble of modern education like scissors through playdough.

Here's a recent success from a parent after some tutoring using the study technology:

Let me begin by saying that what you do is AWESOME. I am a parent with a Masters Degree and numerous awards, but could not help my child understand in 3 years what you have helped him obtain in less than 3 weeks. I see a change in my son – not just academically but personally. There is an air of confidence he now holds. Life has opened up for him so much more. He could read before, but now he reads and understands.
We have been blessed beyond belief. – L.T.

Here's a success from a principal:

Applied Scholastics tutors have enabled our students to progress in reading, specifically. Students are equipped with the tools they need to help themselves. We are all enthusiastic about further progress. – S.N.

I wish study tech had been around when my sisters were young - it would have changed their lives and reduced the amount of struggle it took to get through school.

Psychiatry at work...

I recently saw someone trying to treat his child like a dog. He was at the mall, and the child was wearing a harness attached to a leash held by his father. I suppose if one believed (as the psychiatrists have been promoting for the last century) that we were all soulless animals, then it would make sense to treat a child like a dog, control him as you would a dog by guiding him at the end of a leash, stopping him from going where he wanted to go.

It reminded me of this quote from L. Ron Hubbard in the book "A New Slant on Life" which I used when helping my own children as they were growing up:

Children are not dogs. They can't be trained like dogs are trained. They are not controllable items. They are, and let's not overlook the point, men and women.

That's how I treated them. In that same book, he says

A child is not a special species of animal distinct from man. A child is a man or a woman who has not attained full growth.

When I negotiated with my children from this viewpoint, cooperation could be had. Whenever I negated this and tried to "lay down the law" or come up with some kind of punishment for bad behavior, I got only sullen resistance and looks that could kill. It took more time than simply cuffing them about (as my parents would have done to gain compliance) but my children are sane and effective adults now. Like the rest of Hubbard's advice, it works if you actually do it.

Freedom...

I often refer my friends who are hung up on one thing or another, waiting for some kind of clearance or approval, to this quote from L. Ron Hubbard:

The only possible way that you can get any freedom is to stop asking everybody's permission to be.

I first heard that when listening to the Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures given in the early 1950's by Hubbard. I've listened to them 4 times through over the last 20 years, and I gain something vital and new every time I Iisten to them, from every lecture. My understanding builds over time and with the number of times over the materials. Understanding of what? Of life. Of how to live my own life better.

Madrone

We have a lot of madrone trees here on the ranch. They look naked compared to the other trees, especially when the light is right. Here's a photo I took of the peeling bark of a madrone (bottom left of pic), and the smooth, almost sensual wood that has no bark left on it (upper right). The little tendril of plant growing across it is poison oak. The reddish marks on the madrone are scars of some kind, perhaps a buck trying to shed his antlers, or marks from when the branches of the tree next to it struck it when felled. The second picture is the same tree from further away.

This tree sits on the edge of a cliff; some of its roots are exposed. A big wind might blow it down. So I am documenting it now, in the prime of its life.

Volunteer Ministers in Australia

Australia recently had a category 5 hurricane (they call them cyclones down under) named Cyclone Larry hit northern Queensland. We've had Scientology Volunteer Ministers from Brisbane and Sydney on scene helping people since right after it hit. If you can spare anything from your Paypal account to help support these volunteers as they pass out food and water and minister to those in dire need, contact vm@volunteerministers.org and find out where to send it. Volunteer Ministers have the motto that "Something Can Be Done About It" and they make that motto a reality every time they show up in their yellow shirts.

Tom Cruise - Diane Sawyer

If you watched the Primetime show on ABC last night, you saw that Diane Sawyer interviewed Tom Cruise about a lot of the subjects that have been written up in the tabloids lately.

It's been at least a decade since I last saw Diane Sawyer on TV and I was surprised how old she looked. Tom looked great and I thought the interview went very well; he came across as credible and enthusiastic.

Regarding Scientology, he handled her question about silent birth by giving her the truth about it. Silent Birth makes sense when you come right down to it, so I think that his interview will dispel a lot of the attention that the curious have had on that. One of our religious beliefs in Scientology is that fetuses and neonates can hear anything said around them. Most of what is said they just ignore, and of course they don't understand it at the time, but if there is pain and unconsciousness involved and there are medicos joking around and saying things, then later in life, under the right circumstances those words that were said can start to act like hypnotic commands. Better to prevent it in the first place, hence "silent birth". From my own experiences, I can tell you that such words in those moments of pain and unconsciousness do act exactly like hypnotic commands and can make people act very strangely. I've felt the force of these myself, and using Dianetics have run through these enough times to spot them and to dispel their influence completely.

Tom also said that Katie would have use of any drugs (including an epidural) if she needed them, and could make all the noise she wants.

Tom's intense joy of living came through, as well as his love for Katie and his kids.

Tom warned Diane not to believe anything she read in the tabloids--that it was all made-up lies. And that people had been lying about him since his early childhood, when he moved around a lot and they made fun of him as the new kid.

All in all, it was a good interview. No new ground was broken, but it was good to hear Diane say that she'd read Dianetics twice. At least she had done her homework! Tom advised her to read "Fundamentals of Thought" next if she wanted to know what Scientology says about God.

When she tried to pin him down about Scientology's views about God, he was very politic. There's no dogma within our church telling us what to believe about God. We do pray when we get together during a Sunday service, for example -- we have several prayers asking God to secure human rights for all of us humans. Most Churches of Scientology have a Sunday service every week. But that's not the focus of what we do. Like Tom said, our focus is on helping people live a better life in their own estimation. And we have many tools that help us and help others to do that.

We have a huge Volunteer Minister corps that goes where needed around the globe, from Ground Zero in NY to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans to earthquakes in Pakistan and helping tsunami victims in India, Thailand and Sri Lanka. If you want to find out about Scientology, ask one of those guys in the yellow VM shirts who are filling sandbags, digging survivors out of the ruins, giving first aid, or handing out food and water. They'll be glad to tell you, especially if you pitch in.

Psychiatry - the smug bastards are on the run....

CNN almost gets it right in this video. Their reporter quotes Tom Cruise from a GQ magazine article. It would have been much more effective as a news piece if they'd gotten an interview with Tom, but they didn't bother. This piece feels kind of patched together with whatever footage was laying around. They did interview one psych, who runs the favorite PR line from the psychs about how black box labels scare people off the drugs. As if that's a bad thing. That's the whole point! To those of us who have been fighting psychiatry for decades, it is gratifying to see the smug bastards on the run.

Sites about Scientology worth reading.

As a person who has been a practicing Scientology minister for more than half his life (I was ordained thirty years ago in 1976 by the Church of Scientology of California) I have been very interested in all the news Tom Cruise has been making about Scientology over the last few months. Although we don't normally read them, we picked up four tabloids that all mentioned Tom and Katie at the newsstand last week. People Mag, Us, Star and some other I can't remember. The magazines were fascinating -- very little fact, mostly opinion disguised as fact. "According to sources close to Tom..." Photos were either staged or paparazzi shots. I was thinking "That's a hell of a way to be presented." What if someone did that to you? Snuck up when you were on your way to your car, before you'd had your coffee, and took a roll of pictures while you opened your car door, scowling at what jerks they were. They can make you look like an idiot, even if you are normally as perky as Katie Couric.

I was wondering what someone completely new to the subject of Scientology would find in the search engines. Poking around at Google, I found the following listings that make good reading -- they aren't the main Church of Scientology website, and they put the subject in an understandable and humane perspective:

• US Navy Chaplain presents basic information on the Church of Scientology including history and basic beliefs.


• Scientology (CESNUR) Documents and updates on the Church of Scientology from CESNUR (Center for Studies on New Religions)


• Scientology Volunteer Ministers - Scientology Solutions to a ...
  Suffering from worries, sorrow, grief or fear, whatever the problem, Scientology Volunteer Ministers can provide practical help.


• Scientology Effective Solutions - Informational brochure series in PDF format about the Scientology religion and its activities.


• Church of Scientology: The Bonafides of the Scientology Religion -
  A description of the Scientology religion: the theology and practice, Scientology members and their community activities, a history of religion and papers ...

What's True for You...

One of my favorite quotes from L. Ron Hubbard is this one: "What is true for you is what you have observed yourself. And when you lose that you have lost everything." (I'm quoting from a book called "Understanding, The Universal Solvent", and the quote originally came from an article about personal integrity.)

I read many philosophers in college, and none of them put it that well, or gave you any tools to dig yourself out after having lost your own viewpoint, as Hubbard does.

That quote explains the problem reporters have to contend with when writing a story about, say, Tom Cruise. What they SEE is a very enthusiastic movie star. But they have a hard time reconciling what they SEE with what their editors tell them. Rather than stick with the truth (what they SEE), they embellish facts, dig up rumor and innuendo, and get comments from the envious. What a scam such journalism is.

Aversive "Therapy" = Get Me Out Of Here....

Have you ever seen the movie "Alien IV", where they clone the aliens and keep them in cages? The scientists control the aliens by hitting a button that gives them a painful blast of cold gas when they do something they shouldn't.

And there you have it, the essense of "aversive therapy". You do something the psychiatrists don't like, and the psychs will shock you. Of course, the state is paying the psychs $214,000 per child for this program, because who would voluntarily pay for such a "service" for children? And these are not adults being shocked in the name of help -- these are kids.

I'm talking, of course, about the "Judge Rotenberg Educational Center" of Canton, Mass, where they are experimenting on children with electric shocks. True, it's not the spine cracking voltage they still use today in Electro Convulsive Therapy, but it's enough that one child, Antwone Nicholson, begged his adoptive mom, "Just get me out of here and get me in another place. I can be better in another place." (Quoted from People Magazine 4/17/06.)

David Miscavige

Since I first heard of him the early 80's I've admired David Miscavige's direct, no-nonsense approach and the results he gets. His work in getting IRS tax exemption for the Church of Scientology in 1993 effected great relief for the Church and its parisioners. I'd like to thank him publicly here: Thank you, David Miscavige!

Found an interesting article in Freedom Magazine about an event I attended in 1998. If you look closely, one of those heads in the audience is mine! David Miscavige was the emcee - he does a great job of delivering the good news accumulated during the year.

Never Forget...

Filmmaker Paul Greengrass (of "Bloody Sunday" and "The Bourne Supremacy") has a new film coming up for release, called "Flight 93" -- about the events of 9/11. The squeamish are already howling that the movie trailer should not be being shown, much less the film. That's it's too soon for such a film.

Personally I've been wondering what was taking Hollywood so long. It's been nearly five years, which is an eon in "Hollywood years".

Sure it's crass and commercial for Hollywood to profit from that horrific day. The same as it was for them to make a film about the battle of Midway as it happened, or about the events of December 7, 1941, only a year or so after it happened (that film won an Oscar, so I hear.)

I was listening to a recorded lecture of L. Ron Hubbard yesterday and heard one of the most cogent reasons ever expressed as to why people will do such horrific things. People are only willing to destroy others AFTER they have been convinced that they are no longer human: instead they are inhuman or subhuman "Japs", "Jerrys" and "Krauts", "Ruskies", "Ragheads" and "Sand Niggers", "unbelievers" and "infidels".

It takes a lot of propaganda and misinformation, and widespread inability to actually face and communicate with others, to make a whole people willing to destroy others. They won't do it if they can actually confront each other, if they are sure that each other exists.

The Japanese were told during WWII that Americans would actually eat them.

So real communication is the key. I beseech all of us to make the effort to communicate despite what may be believed about the "enemy". I believe that that which we are told that seeks to de-humanize someone else to us is meant to make us hate them, and it always contains lies.

Criminals commit crimes because there isn't anyone else but them, so none of their behavior, nothing they do has any consequence, because other people DO NOT EXIST for them. Not really. Show them that others exist, teach them to communicate with others, give them a basic moral code they can follow, and they reform. That's the basis of Criminon Program, operating in prisons around the world to reform and rehabilitate prisoners. It's the only effective rehabilitation program going. The penal system itself hasn't had any focus on rehabilitation for decades.

So this film has an opportunity to make human or to make inhuman the terrorists. I am dreadfully curious which road it will take.