it's Ironic that your friend says thier material is poorly written considering that the founder of scientology was a science fiction writer (L. Ron Hubbard).

i went to one of thier thinggos once too. someone on the street gave me a flyer offering a free IQ & Personality test. i had a few hours to kill... so i went to check it out. Kate Cebrano's Mum was there to greet me.
i did the 30 minute IQ test first (i was curious to know where i ranked), but they wouldn't give me the results untill i'd done the personality test. the Personality thing was much bigger. countless pages of multiple choice questions. after 15 minutes or so i was sure that i was answering the same question (just reworded) over and over again... then i was interuppted by a very informal wedding and when i resumed the test again i just started ticking boxes at random as i'd quite had enough. i felt psychicly drained.

they wouldn't let me leave without trying to sell me books. they used thier personality test to decide which books i needed to buy. i was unemplyed at the time so $ was very scarce for me. i was rather offended that they told me that i was messed up and pointed to it on the graph that they'd synthisized from my results. i was even more offended by the fact that they kept demanding that i buy their books to fix my messed-upness.

i explained to they guy that i was flat broke & if it was honestly my welfare (and not profit) that he was interested in, and the book would actually benifit me then he should just give the book to me - even on a loan basis. he couldn't see the logic in it. the only way i could convince them to let me leave was by promising them i would come back and buy books on payday. which i never had any intentions of doing.

Also, while we are on the topic of strange self-help cults; whtever you do - steer clear of the LandMark Forum. i went to one of thier meetings and everyone had this stupidly happy look painted over thier faces. it was almost like mass brainwash. i walked in very determined not to sign up (under recomandation and escortation of my Mothers boyfriend; E.).

someone in the crowd asked the facilitator what exactly it was that we would get out of signing up. this eventually made her lose her temper and declare that she was a good communicator and the face in the crowd wasn't a very good listener. the guy in the crowd said something along the lines of it being her who had failed to answer the question properly and walked out.

when the seminar was over, somehow, i'd walked out with the understanding that i'd give E. guitar lessons for a year to pay him back for the $350 non-refundable deposit that he'd fork out for. i wasn't even sure about what it was that i was signing up for.


luckily my scepticism delayed my starting date. this seemed to provoke infuriation from the Facilitator lady. she'd quite often call me and demand that i attend their next meeting. it got to the point that i wouldn't answer the phone for the fear of her putting guilt trips on me.

there is a very strange twist to how all this turned out for me personally. i'll just say that i'm baffled at how people can be so kniving when they get themselves into an imagined position of power.

i broke the contract between myself and E when i found out that he was Shagging the Facilitator lady. She's still living with him and moved in within 3 months of their relationship. it's strange because he'd been seeing my mother for 5 years and always shy'd away from the C word - commitment. there was one xmas when my mum dropped in on E's parents only to find E and the dragon lady there. E's mum insisted on my mum staying for lunch, so reluctantly she did. The Dragon lady sat with her back to my mother the whole time and then forbid E to ever even talk to my mother again. talk about one hell of a communicator!?

i know my encounter of the landmark forum is a little tainted from my perspective, but i had a really bad gut feeling about the whole thing from the word go.

it's brainwash i tell you! brainwash!

indeed

yeah, it's pretty manipulative the way they go about it.

i witneseed a friends encounter with Scientologist once at a psychic/alternative therapies expo.

the old guy was demonstrationg his machine to my friend R. there were 2 metal rods that one holds in each hand and these are attatched to a meter of some sort by wires. aparently there is a small electrical current that passes thru the person and registers their respons to the questions on the meter. the guy asked R a series of questions and noted the position the needle hit. He eventually asked R to think of something that made him angry. the old guy was flabbergastered and had to fiddle with the settings to stop the thing from going into melt down. R has a lot of anger due to parental conflict early in his life. just for the record he is an aries (a true warrior) with a piscean moon (which makes him extremly sensative to his surroundings). The guy decided that this was his cue to do the book speil. R just put the rods down and casually explained that there was no amount of literature written that could fix all the things that are wrong in the world.

i bet if you had have told the scientologist lady that it was your hampster that was no longer with you, her response would have been just the same.

i don't discount their methods as being in-valid. it's just thier aplication of them that leaves a dirty great stain on thier credability.

there is an old saying about money never exchanging hands between student and teacher.

funny you say that coz on my aptitude test i ticked boxes at random, so thus i was also mis-diagnosed. if they had have paye dattention to my IQ test, they would have already known that i'm not stupid. but the poor fools had no way of knowing how lazy i am.