Glenn observed:
“… It is that it is all complete and utter bullshit and none of it works. Of that I am absolutely certain.”

Congrats, Glenn. You can now attest to being “clear” …
.
.
.
of the cult.

VWD!

Richard said:
“.. Scientific materialism vs, belief in the paranormal and supernatural? Not a problem for me! Let’s converse.

(just being facetious)”

No need to joke. It’s just a matter of putting yourself “in others’ shoes” for a discussion. Sometimes I learn a bit about my “opponent” when I take their valence up deliberately. Usually I pity them afterwards.

I couldn’t find a definition of “solipstic”. Dictionary.com gives the adjective form as solipsistic or solipsismal. Here’s a definition of solipsism from wiki.

[Solipsism (/ˈsɒlɪpsɪzəm/ (About this soundlisten); from Latin solus ‘alone’, and ipse ‘self’)[1] is the philosophical idea that only one’s mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.]

It’s a philosophical position with variations. Years ago Jiddu Krisnamurti had a vaguely similar position, which is just my interpretation from listening to two or three of his talks and I may not be correct, that there is no I or Me, only a brain or mind receiving inputs of You and the environment. Something like that.

One might say that if an individual understands the concept of cognitive dissonance then the individual is senior to the concept. Personally I have no cognitive biases. Depending on with whom I am speaking I can be a Democrat, a Republican or an Independent. I know all the talking points. Likewise with atheists, agnostics and believers. Scientific materialism vs, belief in the paranormal and supernatural? Not a problem for me! Let’s converse.

(just being facetious)

Fortunately for the human race human females are very fertile. More dumb unknowing humans are being reproduced than are dying off.

William, yes, they are “verbal tech, but more, they’re false. certainty of false statements is self-destructive, particularly when the truth of the matter is available, such as: Hubbard was an AWFUL student. Any statements he made on the subject were counter-productive, and today seems to me to be made to make good students less satisfied that they understand what they are reading. After 40 years, I’m making inroads into banishing “study tech” from my life, so I can get back to enjoying what I read. The job’s not complete, as the “primary rundown” was an effective hypnotic that drilled deeply into my psyche.

Yeah, I twinned a few times on a fill in basis with one of the last PRD students we had in the Acad.

I’m not an adherent to any aspect of study teck. It’s all part of the mind-f*ck of the cult.

My love of language and people was there before hubbard pirated my life. Thanks.

🙂

A shocking change for me from the Scientology mindset is that there is in my opinion tremendously evidence that we are extremely biased and always subject to distortions in our perception, memory, and cognition (decision making).

We also unfortunately have no relationship between our certainty, our feeling that we are correct, and the degree of logic or evidence that supports our beliefs. They just have nothing to do with each other.

Lots of research has shown, for example, that we think we understand our own motivations and behavior and when put to the test we actually don’t behave as we predict.

We often, for example, believe we personally don’t hold sexist biases and would not let such things influence us, but when people are actually put in the position of promoting others we don’t promote women, often, and explain our actions by using explanations that contradict our alleged values in other ways. Subjects were asked if they valued experience or education more, for example, in one study and they gave their answers. Then when presented with female candidates for promotion they chose male candidates whether the men had more experience or education, no matter what their alleged values were.

The fact that high certainty is often our barometer for the truth or falsehood of something is recognized in logic as a flaw. The personal incredulity fallacy exists because of this.

The work that support these unpleasant conclusions is extensive. The Book The Knowledge Illusion digs deep into this with research and evidence that time and again supports this claim. The book Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow is superb and has a lot of evidence on this topic.

Our tendency to stick with information that supports our beliefs and avoid or deny contradictory evidence is probably best explored in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance by Leon Festinger. That book is also great regarding understanding cults.

Also worth reading are the Books Age of Propaganda and the book Influence by Robert Cialdini and the book Losing Reality by Robert Jay Lifton gives a description of solipstic reality. Doctor Lifton has explored the mindsets of gurus (cult leaders) and found that several have the belief that by believing or willing something to be it will to some degree exist, quite similar to Hubbard’s claims regarding postulates and his efforts to change himself via his infamous affirmations (self hypnosis commands he played to himself over and over for years).

RIP and Aqua – For general interest here is how the Primary Rundown was delivered when I took it.

There was a booklet for each tape with every new word listed in the upcoming tape in alphabetical order. Each new word was cleared before listening to the tape.

At a normal speaking pace a person speaks about 140 words per minute. So if the first tape was 60 minutes long then Elron spoke 60×140=8,400 words or probably less allowing for pauses in presentation. Probably 2/3 to 3/4 of the words were repeats like of, and, the and so on leaving maybe 2,000 additional words to clear. Most of those words were common words easily looked up and then move on.

Elron stuck to the subject of study on the tapes so there were few Tek words that needed to be cleared so it might have taken me 40 to 60 hours of study time to look up all the words before listening to the first tape, maybe longer allowing time for troublesome words.

After clearing all the words and then listening to the tape I was impressed with how clearly I understood what Elron was saying, call it a win, haha.

Succeeding tapes had fewer and fewer new words to clear and the last tape might have had about 150 or 200 new words to clear,

There are certainly other How to Study courses on the market but as I mention above the Primary Rundown and diving into all that word clearing was a worthwhile experience to me. As a bonus after completing the Primary Rundown you were declared “Super Literate” (haha) and escaped most future star rate checkouts.

P.S. RIP and Aqua. Both of you express yourselves so clearly in your comments. I wish I had your writing skills. Both of you are quite “Super Literate”. (smiles)

I would have LOVED to have done the Primary Rundown, Richard.
But by the time I wanted it and would have appreciated it this course wasn’t being delivered anymore. That said, I did KTL and it was very beneficial. In fact, as I recall now, it was AFTER I did KTL and LOC that I longed to do the Primary Rundown. Alas 🙂

I did the Student Hat on those tapes, and there were no transcripts.

You had to call the supervisor over to ask to decipher the garbled word. The Sups of course had them down instantly from repetition.

I planned to do PRD but it was pulled to be revised.. and then we got the KTL instead.

The PRD disappeared ..the way they have now disappeared the SHSBC and VIII course.

and the clams clap on and fork over.

Good riddance!