William Burrows and Scientology
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Here's an interesting tidbit about William Burroughs, a man whose opinions and ideas I generally respect:
Along the way Burroughs experimented with yet another technique for going deeper into one's mental filters: Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard, creator of Scientology, was teaching that memories of events, or of words overheard while sleeping, and even of past life events were stored in a person's unconscious mental record. By bringing this information out into the open, the emotional charge on this baggage could be "cleared". What so impressed Burroughs was the effectiveness of the Scientology techniques. He once wrote that one could accomplish more with 10 hours of Scientology techniques than with 10 years of psychotherapy. He felt he accomplished a great deal of self healing through applying their methods, and for a time he was obsessed with "audits" and "E-meters".
But as he penetrated more deeply into the church he discovered that the visionary Hubbard was also an eccentric fascist and that his "church" used appallingly effective mind control techniques to assure a steady supply of loyalty, secrecy, and cash. Burroughs found it sickening and ironic that a tool effective for setting people free was being used to enslave them in other ways. He broke with Scientology and went on to blab all that he knew. (Note that a man with fewer guns might not have been so brave! Scientology had a strong policy of punishing those who broke the silence or pissed them off.)
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Originally Posted by HEROnlysIN
