Mockingbird's Nest: (7) Scientology and NXIVM

Scientology and NXIVM - Parallels and Plagiarism

Influences on NXIVM beliefs and practices, sourced from Natalie et al (2019), rendered in the mode of W.S. Bainbridge, e.g. Bainbridge 1978. |NXIVM teachings drew upon diverse influences, including Ayn Rand ("parasites"), L. Ron Hubbard ("suppressives"), Milton Erickson's hypnosis, Isaac Asimov's science fiction, Rudolf Steiner, Tony Robbins, and neuro-linguistic programming. NXIVM incorporated elements of multi-level marketing and practices from judo, with colored cloth for rank and bowing.

This is the seventh post in a series that examines the book Scarred: The True Story Of How I Escaped The Cult That Bound My Life by Sarah Edmondson.

I recommend reading these posts in sequential order and have listed them in order to make reading them in order easy.

Unless noted otherwise, all quotes used in this series are from that book.

"None of us knew that his teachings, which promised to make us leaders, were actually making us followers-his followers. His disciples. He wanted us to worship him. None of us knew how Keith's machinations would come to impact our lives; that we weren't learning from him as much as we were being indoctrinated and deceived-brainwashed-by him." (Scarred page 24)

"A self-proclaimed science, literature, and history buff, Keith chose the name NXIVM when he created the company in 1998 as a reference to a debt bondage system in the time of Julius Caesar. We had been told that NXIVM meant "a place of learning," but after I got out and started doing some research, I learned that in ancient times, a" nexum" was a person pledging his or her services as collateral for the repayment of a debt, and the person owed the debt (the "master") was allowed to demand services indefinitely. This included sexual services. Keith loved masterminding terms like this, with a reference to something illicit that only he would understand." (Scarred page 25)

Okay, we have a lot to look at here.

Just as Keith Raniere intended to covertly mentally enslave his followers at NXIVM so too did Ronald Hubbard in Scientology.

He described his intentions several times in his affirmations. His affirmations were private self hypnosis commands intended to be used by him on himself and seen by no one else.

I have called them the Rosetta Stone of Scientology as they are essential to understanding the difference between what Hubbard claimed he was trying to do with Scientology and the things he was actually trying to do with Scientology!

Here's an excerpt from the blog post

Was LRH delusional? Did he believe that everything he was teaching was true, or was he just an evil, greedy, power hungry genius? Sunday November 6 2022

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I have them posted at Mockingbird's Nest as

A Psychiatric View With Comments On The Admissions By Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (1947)

I will put a few excerpts here to highlight Hubbard's intention regarding hypnosis and in general. To understand Scientology I absolutely recommend reading the post in full. These excerpts are just for this post on his intentions.

LRH is obviously L Ron Hubbard

LRH:Your psychology is good. You worked to darken your own children. This failure, with them, was only apparent. The evident lack of effectiveness was "ordered." The same psychology works perfectly on everyone else. You use it with great confidence.

LRH: Material things are yours for the asking. Men are your slaves. Elemental spirits are your slaves. You are power among powers, light in the darkness, beauty in all.

LRH : Your psychology is advanced and true and wonderful. It hypnotizes people. It predicts their emotions, for you are their ruler.

LRH: No matter what lies you may tell others they have no physical effect on you of any kind.

LRH: Lord help women when you begin to fondle them. You are master of their bodies, master of their souls as you may consciously wish. You have no karma to pay for these acts.

LRH: You can tell all the romantic tales you wish. You will remember them, you do remember them. But you know which ones were lies. You are so logical you will tell nothing which cannot be believed.

LRH: You use the minds of men. They do not use your mind or affect it in any way.

Ronald Hubbard, Scientology founder

So, Hubbard in his private affirmations clearly described his "psychology" as such that it "hypnotizes" people and that men are his slaves and regarding women that he was master of their bodies and souls. He described himself as being able to lie and be both believed and he was immune to physical effects from his lies. He described himself as the ruler of people who uses the minds of men but they do not use or affect his mind.

Imagine having these goals and using self-hypnosis commands repeatedly for years to bring these things into your mind.

From a tape on the Philadelphia Doctorate Course lectures in 1952 entitled Structure/Function we get this:

RON THE HYPNOTIST

Structure/Function: 11 December 1952 page 1
"All processes are based upon the original observation
that an individual could have implanted in him by hypnosis
and removed at will any obsession or aberration,
compulsion, desire, inhibition which you could think of – by hypnosis.“
"Hypnosis, then, was the wild variable;
sometimes it worked,
sometimes it didn’t work.
It worked on some people; it didn’t work on other people.
Any time you have a variable that is as wild as this, study it.
Well, I had a high certainty already –
I had survival. Got that in 1938 or before that. And uh…"Ron Hubbard

From the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course lectures we have a couple extremely relevant quotes. The tapes are listed by their number:

SHSBC-402

Of course, we go on a tradition "if you learn anything about man that will help him,

you help him with it." ...

"If you learn anything about man that you can manipulate him

You're going to manipulate men,

you've got to change their definitions

and change their goals

and enslave them and do this and do that.

SHSBC-447

Now, brainwashing simply is the trick of mixing up certainties.

All you have to do if you want to know and develop the entire field

of brainwashing as developed by Pavlov,

is simply to make somebody ..... into a confused or hypnotic state in which he can believe anything. Ron Hubbard

Complimenting this is a quote from Philadelphia Doctorate Course lecture tape numbered 39 from 1952 - known as the games maker tape or lecture

"Now here’s a process that has to do with the making of games, and all this process adds up to, is you just address to those factors which I just gave you, oh, run and change postulates and any creative process that you can think of and shift postulates around, you get a whole process." End quote

THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN CONTROL PEOPLE IS TO LIE TO THEM. You can write that down in your book in great big letters. The only way you can control anybody is to lie to them.

Lecture: "Off the Time Track" (June 1952) as quoted in Journal of Scientology issue 18-G, reprinted in Technical Volumes of Dianetics & Scientology Vol. 1, p. 418. Ron Hubbard

Conclusion:

Hubbard plainly defined "postulates" broadly as decisions, conclusions and this can be called beliefs. Changing postulates in a person is changing their beliefs.

So, he called brainwashing the trick of mixing up certainties. Putting a person into a confused state in which he would believe anything was how he phrased it. He said if you can manipulate men you WILL, not leaving any exceptions for himself ! And he said you will change their definitions and their goals which were their certainties and you will enslave them !

He said he started with hypnosis which could "implant or remove any inhibition, compulsion, aberration or desire you could think of BUT it has the wild variable that it works on the some people but not others and it works sometimes but not others." So, he was trying to see who it worked on and when and likely how to get it to work as often as possible on as many people as possible. He wanted people in Scientology to shift around the certainties, the postulates, the decisions and beliefs of people to change their definitions and goals, to definitions he wanted them to believe and goals that benefited Hubbard.This all aligns with the "game" he wanted. End quote

In both Scientology training called indoctrination Hubbard intended to enslave people (which I described in the third post in this series) and with Scientology auditing and really Scientology as a whole, which we have evidence regarding here.

The attitudes of both Hubbard and Raniere towards women as mere sex objects to own or enslave or use without any responsibility or consequences is an obvious similarity in their mental health states.

I am no doctor or psychologist but it's extremely unlikely this is a random coincidence, especially given all the other similarities between them regarding behavior.

Both Keith Raniere and Ronald Hubbard in my mind epitomize the negative stereotype of an NLP "guru" who uses ideas from hypnosis to try to covertly con people out of money and trick unsuspecting women into being seduced against their will (a kind of rape by confusion in which the women do not object or give in and stop objecting, though they are not giving consent and not eager or even willing participants in the sex acts performed upon them).

Several NLP books and ads boast about getting women to have sex with you, whether they want to or not! Which is clearly rape!

Hubbard studied hypnosis decades before the creation of NLP but was a perhaps a rapist ahead of his time?

An excerpt from a letter from Hubbard to his friend Forrest Ackerman dated January 13th 1949 is especially relevant:

"Wanted to tell you that Sara is beating out her wits on fiction and is having to do this DARK SWORD -cause and cure of nervous tension – properly – THE SCIENCE OF MIND, really EXCALIBUR – in fits, so far, however she has recovered easily from each fit. It will be considerably delayed because of this. Good as my word, however, I shall ship it along just as soon as decent. Then you can rape women without their knowing it, communicate suicide messages to your enemies as they sleep, sell the Arroyo Seco parkway to the mayor for cash, evolve the best way of protecting or destroying communism, and other handy house hold hints. If you go crazy, remember you were warned."

The manuscript Excalibur is a sort of legend within Dianetics and Scientology. It's the alleged basis of the idea behind which Dianetics and Scientology were created.

I never read Excalibur and very few people even claim to have seen it, which is extremely rare for Scientology references as Hubbard had many of them produced by the thousands or millions but Excalibur may have existed.

Ackerman was Hubbard's publisher so it's extremely likely Hubbard wanted Ackerman to publish something that fit his description of being able to make the result Hubbard alleged of "Then you can rape women without their knowing it, "!

This may have turned into Dianetics as Hubbard had that published in 1950.

The entire letter is available online free at The Underground Bunker blog in the article L. Ron Hubbard explains to a friend the real reason he wrote ‘Dianetics’

By Tony Ortega | October 23, 2014

I think we have well established between the work Sarah Edmondson did in Scarred and the excerpts of his own words I compiled from Hubbard that both Hubbard and Raniere are two super sleazy wannabe rapists and possibly very real rapists indeed.

Biographies and court records add far more than I could to the evidence against them. If there's a God I do not know about any mercy being shown to their souls, if indeed souls exist.

I think both of these men had a deep and abiding hatred of women for most of their lives. Raniere probably still does.

Another point of similarity brought up here is the idea of service owed and it being unlimited service for a debt, perhaps an inescapable debt that effectively enslaves one until death in both NXIVM and Scientology.

It's worth pointing out that Hubbard created a system in the Sea Org and to a lesser extent in the other Scientology organizations of people owing money for auditing, training and other Scientology services if they leave the organization before completing their contract. In the smaller organizations a different system is used regarding contract length and they are in years and vary due to a number of factors including how much training one gets.

But in the Sea Org? Contracts are a billion years. That's right. You promise a billion years of servitude to the Sea Org in exchange for the training you get and auditing and if you leave "early"?

You get labeled a "degraded being" and often officially or unofficially a "suppressive person" and have a "freeloader debt" for the services you got while in the Sea Org.

I did a line-up of basic courses while in the Sea Org for two months and owed several thousand dollars as a freeloader debt. I got "lucky" and there was some kind of discount program (very unusual) when I left the Sea Org and I was able to pay my freeloader debt off within about six months by working sixty hours a week at a normal job and giving fifty percent of my income to the Sea Org to pay off the debt. I was honestly happy to get it off my back at the time.

While in the Sea Org I was on course a few hours a day and had to work about eight or more hours every day except one day on the weekend in which I got a few hours to do my laundry.

In only two months of doing the most basic and inexpensive courses I racked up a debt of several thousand dollars.

Most Sea Org members want to remain in Scientology if they leave the Sea Org, so they are terrified of a freeloader debt.

I was friends with a former Sea Org member. I will call him Ollie. Ollie was a guy who was in the Sea Org I believe around fifteen years or perhaps longer. He intended to be a lifer but was kicked out.

He told me he did lots of training for his job as an executive while in the Sea Org and got auditing too.

I believe he told me his freeloader debt was somewhere in the hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand dollar range. He had a lot if very expensive courses as a top executive in Scientology and a lot of auditing.

Ollie got a job as an accountant and made about ten dollars an hour. This was obviously not enough to pay off his freeloader debt.

He ended up finding another job selling insurance and got a niche. His father lived in an upper class area and got Ollie an opportunity to meet with wealthy widows and plan their insurance. Ollie would meet a bunch of them at the local country club and for changing over the life and home and auto insurance for all of them he was doing pretty well. If I remember correctly he had several months in which he made several thousand dollars a week this way and he was paying off his freeloader debt.

But he had to constantly find new wealthy people who were willing to make big changes to their insurance and so he could struggle in months where no such deals were available.

It was feast or famine regarding his income and if he didn't have the freeloader debt he could coast on the lean months on savings but he gave so much to pay his freeloader debt he didn't really have savings, I believe.

There's a saying a former staff member in Scientology told me. He was considering leaving staff but also faced a several thousand dollar freeloader debt. He said "no matter how you slice it, it comes up Scientology!"

This means that once you get to a certain point, whether you are on staff or not, in the Sea Org or not you believe you MUST stay in Scientology!

So, if incurring an insurmountable freeloader debt is hanging over your head for leaving, you very often feel as though you can't leave or you will be damned for all eternity in a state of amnesia and trapped in suffering from which you can't escape!

Hubbard actually describes a state LOWER than the human being reincarnated called a "degraded being" and he was clear in saying that earth was a sort of end of the line for for a bunch of spirits that had been going down a dwindling spiral, in some cases for quadrillions of years and he remarked that a billion lifetimes of degradation is a lot.

He said that the beings on earth, meaning us as human beings living here now, are so degraded we have to either use Scientology to escape our decline or we will be too degraded to continue picking up bodies, meaning getting reincarnated and we will spend eternity in a state of pain, blindness, and deafness, with amnesia and disembodied as spirits that are too degraded to interact with ANYTHING or ANYONE!

Imagine just being a spirit with no body that can't see or hear anything that feels immense emotional and physical pain with no memories of anything that suffers for an endless time!

In Scientology this threat is drilled into you over and over again!

It's mentioned and elaborated on in Keeping Scientology Working which is read and studied hundreds of times in Scientology indoctrination.

“We’re not playing some minor game in Scientology. It isn’t cute or something to do for lack of something better.

The whole agonized future of the planet, every man, woman and child on it, and your own destiny for the next endless trillions of years depend on what you do here and now with and in Scientology.

This is a deadly serious activity. And if we miss getting out of the trap now, we may never again have another chance.

Remember, this is our first chance to do so in all the endless trillions of years of the past.”

(HCO PL 7 February 1965 Keeping Scientology Working Series 1, Ronald Hubbard)

Another reference elaborates on this as well:

"The threat to us if we don’t make it is eternity.

One could ask a staff member that refuses to get hatted how he would like to spend all of the coming eternity blind, in the dark and in pain. He would probably say he wouldn’t like that. But if we don’t make it, that’s what we’ve got and that’s what he’s condemning this planet to.

He doesn’t realize that he himself, next life, is for it if we don’t make it.

If staff in our orgs don’t get hatted, they’re condemning themselves and the planet to death a thousand times over.

So understand that no matter how mild the environment might appear to you, we are actually fighting a full-scale war against ignorance and enslavement. But we do have the tech to win.”

(HCO PL 2 July 1984 HATTING AND THE ENVIRONMENT, Ronald Hubbard)

Hatting in Scientology refers to training for a specific job. There are plenty of courses in Scientology to hat people, probably a couple hundred and most people are encouraged to take many of them.

Scientology has members who routinely have been indoctrinated to believe they are immortal spiritual beings who have existed for a near eternity, living perhaps a billion lives over hundreds of quadrillions of years and that they have lived in this universe and universes before it including as God in their own universe eons ago (this is an idea found in Gnostic beliefs) and through a long process of spiritual decline and degradation gone from God to god to mighty spirit to less mighty spirit to human to degraded being and the pattern is a few steps away from becoming so degraded that they won't be able to be reincarnated and will instead be eternally blind, without a body, deaf, with no memory of the past in endless emotional and physical agony that never ceases.

Scientology has members believe that the lone and unequaled messianic figure Ronald Hubbard found a way to stop the decline of spirits and reverse it to allow a spirit to regain their former power as a spirit and even as an invincible God of their own universe.

They believe that they have to do exactly as Hubbard said to follow his path and that any failure to get promised results, including Godhood and immortality, is their own fault and never the fault of Hubbard.

They believe Hubbard gave humanity a priceless gift of spiritual freedom and redemption. Redemption from eternal suffering is seen as his contribution and in return Scientologists see themselves as forever in Hubbard's debt. That's why they often pledge to serve in the Sea Org and work a hundred hours or more per week for pennies an hour or nothing and sign a billion year contract, intending to serve Hubbard lifetime after lifetime.

I see that both Hubbard and Raniere wanted to own others as slaves who felt indebted to them in a way that could never be repaid so they would be mentally enslaved and not willing to stop serving them, even if they were cruel and a means of escape was available.

This to my mind is the difference between authoritarian and totalitarian, described by Robert Jay Lifton as totalist

An authoritarian might have an army roll into a town and tell everyone to follow his orders or they will be killed, their family will be killed and their possessions taken. Might makes right. Do as I say or die. Pretty straightforward.

The authoritarian wants compliance. He doesn't care if you know this is ultimately unfair or you like him or don't like him. He just wants orders he gives followed. Period.

The totalitarian wants to not just influence behavior. He wants to control your thoughts and feelings as well.

He wants to get his hooks into your mind, take control and never let go.

We have our beliefs and thoughts as one part of us, we have our feelings and attitudes we associate with things as another part and we have our behavior and communication as another part.

(These are known as associations in psychology and this idea has been developed over thousands of years, Aristotle for example was said to have written about them as one of many, many examples. More modern psychologists have elaborated on this idea, in Scientology this is taken and repackaged as the ARC triangle. A is affinity or degree of liking which represents emotions, R is reality representing agreement or beliefs, and C is communication representing communication or behavior. Hubbard in my opinion discovered from psychology and earlier cults that if you can control the emotions (affinity), beliefs (reality), and behavior (communication) of a person you have control over that person.)

I only realized this after leaving Scientology when I started to study psychology and realized Hubbard took ideas from psychology and hypnosis, changed the terms as a rough way to "file off the serial numbers" of a practice, in other words disguise stolen ideas as original. Incidentally, I did not come up with "filing off the serial numbers" idea myself. I found it in a book on games and using characters from other sources.)

If you can control the thoughts, including beliefs of a person, and the emotions and attitudes associated with different things of a person and the behavior including the communication of a person then you have complete control of that person. And Ronald Hubbard and Keith Raniere BOTH strived for total control over other people.

Keith Raniere, NXIVM leader

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Scientology and NXIVM - Parallels and Plagiarism

Thursday, December 29, 2022

(7) Scientology and NXIVM - Parallels and Plagiarism

Was LRH delusional? Did he believe that everything he was teaching was true, or was he just an evil, greedy, power hungry genius? Sunday November 6 2022

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