I wrote that comment before I saw it. However, that update (“But please, don’t take Scientology classes. They are highly Dark Arts. You can learn things on your own without playing with cult fire”) is inaccurate. It seems to be saying that Scientology’s classes teach those who take them to be manipulative (that is, to use the dark arts), but that is not what the problem is. The real problem is the opposite: they manipulate those who take them. And it doesn’t stop at “manipulate”, it’s an escalating spiral that in some cases goes all the way up to “abduct and traffick”.
And, um, I can’t help but notice a disturbing connection—the document Gerard linked to says trainers should look for peoples’ buttons, focusing on sexual perversion for men, and you were assigned the exercise of staring at a 12-year old girl for 20 minutes. It’s eminently plausible that the instructor meant for that to happen and to be creepy. What was she even doing there, how were the pairings assigned, and did the instructor have the option of arranging the pairings in a non-creepy way?
Every time I went in to take a class it was always hard to find people to pair with, because of the odd hours I went to take classes. I would often wait 20 minutes for there to be somebody to do an exercise with. I think they paired me with the girl because nobody else was available until 20 minutes later when the adult became available to do the exercise with me.
Also, kids take these classes, too. They’re not adult-only classes. Her parents are Scientologists and they were training their kid in their religion.
I adjusted the wording of my update again to include ‘manipulative.’
Every time I went in to take a class it was always hard to find people to pair with, because of the odd hours I went to take classes.
That’s because Scientology has had the crap beaten out of it by the Internet and Scientology “orgs” are largely ghost towns at any hour of the day since the mid-1990s, not just when you went. Even in Los Angeles.
Also, kids take these classes, too. They’re not adult-only classes. Her parents are Scientologists and they were training their kid in their religion.
Uh, Luke. That would have been a Sea Org member’s kid. They brought her in especially for you. You don’t seem to want to accept the designed purpose the TRs were written for: to draw people further in.
I was at one point a 14 year old girl taking a Scientology Communications course, brought there by my father to train me in his religion. While I certainly can’t speak for all of the children in all Scientology classes, most of the other children there that I hung out with were also brought there by their parents to be trained in Scientology.
It seems plausible to me that if there happened to be a 12 year old girl in lukeprog’s class, they would have paired them together for that part of the class specifically because it would create an uncomfortable, “creepy” situation. Developing the ability to react unflinchingly to that sort of situation is pretty much the point of the exercise. (As an example, they paired me with a grandmotherly older woman for a different exercise: bullbaiting. She was certainly not the sort of person who I was comfortable trying to provoke a reaction from or had an easy time remaining stoic to.)
But it seems unlikely to me that the people at the Org I went to, at least, would have gone to the extent of enlisting their daughters in the class specifically to make one man feel uncomfortable, as you seem to be proposing.
I wrote that comment before I saw it. However, that update (“But please, don’t take Scientology classes. They are highly Dark Arts. You can learn things on your own without playing with cult fire”) is inaccurate. It seems to be saying that Scientology’s classes teach those who take them to be manipulative (that is, to use the dark arts), but that is not what the problem is. The real problem is the opposite: they manipulate those who take them. And it doesn’t stop at “manipulate”, it’s an escalating spiral that in some cases goes all the way up to “abduct and traffick”.
And, um, I can’t help but notice a disturbing connection—the document Gerard linked to says trainers should look for peoples’ buttons, focusing on sexual perversion for men, and you were assigned the exercise of staring at a 12-year old girl for 20 minutes. It’s eminently plausible that the instructor meant for that to happen and to be creepy. What was she even doing there, how were the pairings assigned, and did the instructor have the option of arranging the pairings in a non-creepy way?
Every time I went in to take a class it was always hard to find people to pair with, because of the odd hours I went to take classes. I would often wait 20 minutes for there to be somebody to do an exercise with. I think they paired me with the girl because nobody else was available until 20 minutes later when the adult became available to do the exercise with me.
Also, kids take these classes, too. They’re not adult-only classes. Her parents are Scientologists and they were training their kid in their religion.
I adjusted the wording of my update again to include ‘manipulative.’
That’s because Scientology has had the crap beaten out of it by the Internet and Scientology “orgs” are largely ghost towns at any hour of the day since the mid-1990s, not just when you went. Even in Los Angeles.
Uh, Luke. That would have been a Sea Org member’s kid. They brought her in especially for you. You don’t seem to want to accept the designed purpose the TRs were written for: to draw people further in.
I was at one point a 14 year old girl taking a Scientology Communications course, brought there by my father to train me in his religion. While I certainly can’t speak for all of the children in all Scientology classes, most of the other children there that I hung out with were also brought there by their parents to be trained in Scientology.
It seems plausible to me that if there happened to be a 12 year old girl in lukeprog’s class, they would have paired them together for that part of the class specifically because it would create an uncomfortable, “creepy” situation. Developing the ability to react unflinchingly to that sort of situation is pretty much the point of the exercise. (As an example, they paired me with a grandmotherly older woman for a different exercise: bullbaiting. She was certainly not the sort of person who I was comfortable trying to provoke a reaction from or had an easy time remaining stoic to.)
But it seems unlikely to me that the people at the Org I went to, at least, would have gone to the extent of enlisting their daughters in the class specifically to make one man feel uncomfortable, as you seem to be proposing.