"Zinj" <zinjifar@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:MPG.16b99e9391cbe508989919@news2.lightlink.com...

> In article <a2osqn$cii$1@helle.btinternet.com>,
> notearthlight2k@norhotmail.com says...
>
> <snip>
> > Not if you know what's occurring. Why subject yourself to such bullshit,
> > except to investigate, reveal, or enturbulate?
> That's *exactly* the point
> Human beings are investigative tools.
> A 'virgin' to Scientology may come away with realizations neither you nor
> I could.
> Being ignorant of OSA is a time worth savoring :)
I too can remember the bliss of ignorance, before moving to LA in 1984.

Being from the NYC area at the time, well, let's face it, there are a lot of jokes about the "fruits and nuts" etc. in California. I've always had a respect problem when it comes to unjustified piety at least, and, without knowing that I was working in a company owned and operated by $cientologists - well, they were more or less in a few of the high-paying management jobs (at least it was realized that some folks knew what needed to be done to run a software company, even if a bit badly), and otherwise attached to the rest of the company in dribs and drabs, with the rest of us doing the work. I didn't really think about any of this, never having worked at a company larger than 20 people before - and during a small gathering of us techs someone said something about $cientology, and, in sheer ignorance of whose company I was in (to say nothing of clams' lack of a sense of humor about such things!) I said, "It sounds like one of those wacko religions out of Ojai." In retrospect, it's not from Ojai, it's not a religion, but $cientology sure packs a lot of wackos.

Life became more stressful at the company from that point forward. I had never succumbed to work stress before, much less really addressed it - but was eventually in a position where I was performing a lot of tasks, more than my job spec required, and more than I should have been into. I thought I was diversifying - being a multi-talented person (music, programming, ui design, config mgt, cartooning/illustration, writing, etc.) this seemed just an outgrowth. I was growing a beard at one point, and even when I woke up one morning with tufts of the beard having been pulled out in my sleep (!) I just thought it was quite strange. Another thing I didn't pay attention to was that my friends - none of them clams - were quitting the company quietly and going elsewhere. The software biz was moving out of LA, North towards SF and other cities with real air. Eventually my then-fiance moved out to join me there, and, being an awfully disaffected Irish Catholic who rejected the RCC, in retrospect was a match made in hell for Co$. She started to change within 6 months of moving out there, becoming more critical in a infinitesimal kind of way, chipping away at friends and family, and calling my parents on occasion, once telling them that she thought I was on hard drugs!

Somewhere along that time I decided that I wanted to live by myself, and moved to my own place - the guy I'd been living with, from work, was more than a little strange, really REALLY tense, and refused to get cable tv, amongst other things (this last not making sense until I began reading a.r.s. and the concept of "chaos merchants") - and, as if to compensate for a lack of "coverage" of what I was doing on my own, my fiance started spending more than just weekends with me, but not letting up on the critical level. Over time at the job, I'd developed a way of contending with all the button-pushing I was being subjected to, that of not reacting (thus my comments on this). It drove some folks who tried "tech" on me just apoplectic on occasion! I didn't realize that files were being kept on me, obviously, else I'd have behaved a bit more sensible. In short, they played me like a violin. With respect to the fiance though, things came to a head one night when I was going to have some ex-workmate friends over, and she popped in despite already having stated her distaste for my little gatherings, and my friends, to finally demand that I be a "better person" to her. I didn't understand what the hell she was talking about, having not heard this one before - but in retrospect it was a forced confrontation. I refused to react emotionally, and told her that if that's the way she wanted it... and she stormed out. I didn't see her for another three months, at which point she popped into my life again, and actually seemed like she was less insane than before, like she had it together finally, comfortable enough with herself at last to be able to treat people around her with more kindness at least. In short, I was sucked in like an idiot when she told me how someone she'd been seeing was helping her understand more and more every day. She then told me how, one time after a "session", as she called them, she'd levitated a coffee cup across the room! I began to wonder, having already heard the bit about the ash tray, hm? I was about to have a salad she'd made, and something just wrenched up inside me for no reason. I couldn't eat a thing. I ended up taking this as a kind of signal, and proceeded to fast (only water, the occasional coffee, and a few saltines every day), as if some spiritual threat were approaching. I remember thinking of it as just that at the time.

A week later, the bleeding Harmonic Convergence happened, and we met just at sunrise for the occasion, though in retrospect it was all a bit silly. She then did something I couldn't have imagined, or understood at the time:

While sitting and having tea later in the morning (she no longer drank coffee, and had cut out lots of items from the diet, including red meat), she prompted me to think about something back in my childhood that had caused me a good amount of torment, though it wasn't an issue any longer.

But for some reason it touched me in a way I'd never experienced before as far as the memory was concerned: I cried like a baby, and later wondered what had happened. She explained that it was her special abilities as an empath that she'd been learning thanks to her new friend's help. I looked around and began to realize what had been going on sort of. While they'd not been around previously that week, that day there were post cards and photos everywhere in her apt. of her and some guy in his 50s, most taken up at Incline Village/Tahoe. I was reeling from all this, and just felt like I had to leave. Quickly, in the manner of the Amityville Horror's "Get out!"

While I'd been quite happy to be away from this girl for three months, and had denied her the satisfaction of me being upset at her departure, now she got what she wanted, and I was a mess emotionally about it all for the next three years. A week later, at a restaurant a lot of us used to go to, she popped up with this guy, and introduced us. I could sense an intensity from this fellow that I'd gotten from some folks at work. He said to me that she'd told him all about what had happened, and said that he was sorry, that she shouldn't have done that to me. All the time this jerk was smiling in an annoying way. I asked them both to leave, and while exiting the place, she said, "We've done what we needed to do anyway." In retrospect I wonder if she wasn't using auditing technique on me when she'd done her little trick...

It was at this time that the midnight calls began - hang-up calls at 12.30am, 12.33am, 12.35am, and 12.40 every night. Since I'm a night owl they didn't wake me up, but they went on like clockwork for months. When asked, PacBell stated that they didn't know what was happening, that it was probably a switch resetting itself in my area. Nonetheless it continued. I didn't think of calling to have the trace put on it or anything.

A little while later Oct 1, 1987 came along, and with it the Whittier quake at 7.30 in the morning. My dad was coming into town that day from a conference in AZ, and I was going to get off early to pick him up at LAX - and in any event I was there at 8 for a config mgt meeting. The day was otherwise uneventful, until I let the dept. manager - whose predecessor had hired me over his head - know about my early departure that day. He said, "Let's take care of this first." Exit interview. Ostensibly for being late that morning, though I arrived at 8, an hour earlier than usual. Noone who was in the meeting with me would own up to my being there, most didn't answer their voice mail. "Not for rehire" placed on my file. I was fortunate that my dad was there for me that day, and for the next 10 months I had absolutely nothing in the programming arena. Thankfully though I'd gone to three LAN certification courses before getting fired for the first time from anything; and I had written a number of artlcles about database and networking in the interim, which got some money. My unemployment benefits were denied, despite multiple hearings, each of which had this guy who'd fired me across the table, lying his ass off. I had to borrow money from my parents to stay where I was. Ultimately I got a job doing networks - a new area at the time, and one relatively unpopulated by $cienologists at the time, at least as far as the consulting biz was concerned.

Nonetheless I found people at work who were, to be succinct, too interested in me and details to not seem a bit weird. It was like I was being investigated by people I worked with. Remember I was still relatively new to all this, and still didn't understand the ops and so forth. I'd never even heard of Op Snow White. In any event the time for an assistant came at work, since I'd set up their first LAN and trained VPs as to what email was, as well as 50 employees who'd been using terminals before, and by nearly four years time, they were comfortable with PCs, and continuing to learn.

Every one of the guys they brought in for interviews was a dead-faced idiot, knew nothing about database much less networking, and I panned them, being in charge of the tech part of the HR area. While away for a week to visit back East, they hired someone whose father was a cop, and who was a pretty tight-assed pud himself. Good a button-pushing too. Once had me about to launch myself across the desk at him. He was really good at it, but I had some friends at work who tended to notice what he was doing, and mentioned it to my supervisors. Within a week he had left the company, to be replaced by another dead-eye dick type. I had finished my job anyway, and gave my notice, ostensibly to "pursue a career in cartooning", knowing the labor laws regarding privacy, as well as what can be legally said about ex-employees. Who could argue with that?

In the midst of a recession from the Defense Contractor Problem, I entered the consulting biz again, doing networks and rollouts. And on every single job I had until my departure from LA, there was someone placed with me, attempting to push my buttons, conveniently finding the right time to try to incite me into an argument in front of management, and further the entry on my file reading "hard to get along with others", that'd been stamped on me in 1987, however unjustifiedly. I survived thanks to cultivating a circle of reliable friends, some of whom were also at the company I'd been fired from, one of whose parents are probably still Co$, who petitioned for him to not have to be in the cult. With these peoples' help I began to realize what I'd been subjected to all this time, and by 1993 I'd learned how to "not react" again, and pepper my responses with comments about Xenu, freight trains on Venus, flying by the Van Allen Belts, and of course clams. Within two weeks of doing what I then called "pinging", to coin the network tool, these clammy fellows would be replaced by an equally-dead-eyed guy.

It was evident that there was a severe weakness in their attack methods:

They all relied upon a pre-programmed response in order to be effective. I simply refused to react as expected. I still laugh in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when Slartybartfast talks about the mouse that eats the wrong piece of cheese, or goes down the wrong end of the maze... :) It continues to be a source of pleasure to me, engaging in the process of fucking up Hubbard's Programmed People and his dysfunctional "plan for mankind".

(brief flashback) I'd known someone way back in the early 80s and had almost become romantically-involved except for her being 18 at the time, but always felt a bit bad about how it had all come off. After losing the ex-fiance and experiencing her brief strafing run, I tracked the girl down and talked on the phone, only to find she was moving on with her life.

Fast forward to 1997. Out of the blue, here comes this girl, all together, so energetic, and wanting to talk for hours at a time despite being at the edge of a marriage to a much older man that she couldn't say how she'd met somehow. Again, I performed the function of instrument to her fiddling, and she had me wound up like a spring in a matter of days. She said that she'd gotten into methamphetamine and "worse" (no description there!), and just about blamed me for it all, saying that my lifestyle at the time put forth the idea that there was nothing wrong with hard drugs. What? Despite working in the Atlanta area in the IT sector she said that she'd never heard of Earthlink, $cientology, or L.Ron somehow - but she DID talk about what a great drug rehab program she'd been through, involving saunas, jogging, and vitamin therapy. My antenna went up, and I started "pinging" her, popping questions or comments her way that had worked to enturbulate others in the past, seeing if she reacted in the same way. When she did so, I did my own version of disconnection on her instead. Some research via usenet found postings on newsgroups regarding the preparations for her wedding --- a year earlier than her reappearance! So much for that! Given what I knew by then, I was able to turn the switch internally that caused me to care in the slightest about it, since I now knew from whence this particular attack came from.

A week later, I was waiting for the bus in downtown LA, when a hispanic fellow approached me, and was looking at my shoes, and said, "Nice shoes, man..." Having peripheral vision is a good thing: out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement, and swivelled round to accidentally clock someone approaching from behind, my elbow to his chin. A bus - any bus! - arrived, and I pushed the other guy down and hopped on the bus.

A month or so after that, a $cientologist attempted to infiltrate my circle of friends via one of their work connections, at a weekly get-together we had at the time. Miserable failure, most of us knew what he was before the evening was out, and he left early, complaining that he had a bad headache.

He was also sweating quite a bit. One of us hoped that he'd not been carrying some kind of flu, but the rest of us pooh-poohed it as being just TOO paranoid. Within days three of us came down with the stomach-headache-fever flu of which this guy was exhibiting symptoms. We made jokes about clam-sauced germ warfare, and put it aside, having better things to do. The fellow who'd made his brief appearance in our circle not only never returned, but left the job he was connected to one of my friends through, within a few weeks.

My last contract in LA - as IT Director - was with a music company within blocks of Big Blue. I knew there were $cientologists there, not a lot given the relative penetration into the black community, but at least three, involved with the accounting section. They'd look at you with such dead eyes when you picked up your check, and were completely unresponsive when confronted with payroll errors they'd made. The company they dealt with was in Santa Monica, and the folks I met with there (when seeking to fix a payroll screwup) were - surprise! - 100% clam sauce.

I was married to a British girl in 2000, and moved to London as she has a 94-year-old mum. It was also a grand opportunity to leave the LA area, after 16 years... and I had a contract to be on retainer for an amount sufficient to support us both here. A month after coming to London, I received word that a check had not arrived at my US address; it took a month of repeated phone calls to discover that, not only was the contract snuffed out without any explanation, but that I was being accused of cashing a check that had been a duplicate, which I nor my bank had no record of being deposited nor cashed. In short, during a period of the year where you're lucky to get a job being a Mall Santa, I was again on the pavement looking for work. I've since been rebuilding the consulting business on the individual level, and producing work for a few US clients, having handed most of my former clients off to people I trust.

Sometimes I wonder about all of this, and why it was that I garnered such attention. Was it that I had simply made a joke about Co$ being a bunch of "wackos"? Or perhaps was it that I had not succumbed to the multiple prompts to self-destruction and discouragement that someone seemed to want me to end in, and I now knew how to defend myself on that level with clam after clam sent my way? I had indeed begun at one point to feel like I was a training ground for new $cientologists on the work front, and the QA level displayed by these people in their approach never altered, like a broken record. Same approach, every time. Combine this with an ability to write music, lyrics, poetry, and stories, as well as cartoon - and in a sense one might think I could, if I decided to dedicate myself to eliminating $cientology (loudly and with absolutely no sorrow whatsoever), I could indeed be a very dangerous person to the cult. But such ideas can lead to a sense of overbloated self-importance. Nonetheless, I am awake, and aware of what goes on. My parents don't discount what I've told them, especially after friends of theirs moved South to Florida - Clearwater to be precise - and moved out, despite having bought a house there, citing 'too many $cientology creeps'. It wasn't until I left the US, and changed ISPs etc.

that I felt safe about posting on a.r.s. Thus my appearance here a little over a year ago.

There was a bit of interesting business right before leaving LA, where I was having to go to the obligatory talks with a pastor in the Episcopal church - me wife is Church of England - and as it turned out, the good Father was one of those old ones, who'd had quite a lot of experience counselling people who'd either left $cientology, or been persecuted by them. To a 'T', he said, all of them came away from the experience feeling like it had all happened for a number of reasons, and perhaps one of these was that they needed to tell others about this pack of criminals and dupes. Perhaps it would help others not only avoid them, but assist in the destruction of $cientology some day.

So, yep, I occasionally wonder what life would have been like without having ever heard of $cientology. And the answer comes back, "blissful ignorance".

Rev. Norle Enturbulata "Church" of Cartoonism * Comedy Saves!

$cientology Enslaves!

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