Flag

Now that the summer rush is winding down, we're putting our plans together to go to Flag later this year. I'm really looking forward to seeing how the new Super Power building is coming along and checking out the area for possible longer stays in the future. I can't believe some of the low housing prices there.
The Flag tour comes to Denver tomorrow and should be a lot of fun!

Community

I started helping a volunteer group at my local church and found a great group of people. I wondered what kinds of activities they were working on and found out: fundraising for a new building, researching local history, helping translators, printing promotional material, organizing the filing area, grading extension courses, selling books, among other things. Nice people, fun group.

You

Seasons in Colorado

One thing good about Colorado is the weather. I don't know when I took this photo, but it could be any season of the year. We've been in the 60's the last few days with daffodils starting to pop up. Now I have no excuse to stop me from clearing out the winter mulch and cut back the remaining seed heads leftover from last fall.
This will be an interesting year for business. The economy blew apart right as we were entering our slow season of the year. This winter hasn't been much different from past years but we have been promoting like crazy. Feels like a good year is coming.

Media Psychiatrists

Grahame has posted what looks like the entire "Making a Killing" video on his blog. They say that the incredible is often invisible to people and this will go a long way toward helping people understand the problem.

The American Psychiatric Assn is revising their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and want to include:

•  "Apathy Disorder," 
• "Parental Alienation Syndrome,"
•  "Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder," 
• "Compulsive Buying Disorder," 
• "Internet Addiction" 
• "Relational Disorder" 
  

The way it works is, the psychiatrists vote on whether or not certain behaviors indicate mental illness.   Sort of Godlike, eh?   Then the Big Pharma manufactures the drugs to 'cure' the behavior.   

Yes, it's disturbing, especially when you start noticing psychiatrists shaping public opinion like Charles Krauthammer on Fox (who the Financial Times listed as the most influential commentator in America) and "The Infinite Mind" host on NPR , Frederick Goodwin, (who Slate Magazine noted is a paid lecturer for some of the drug companies).   Let's get them off out backs! 

Understanding Words

Doh! I can't believe it. I've just discovered a word that I have misunderstood for at least 30 years. I knew all the definitions but had used the wrong one all this time. Finally understanding it thoroughly by looking up the history of the word has left me elated!

Greta Van Susteran

I picked up on Greta again during the conventions and started checking Gretawire. She seems to be having a lot of fun with the election and is getting high ratings for cable shows. She's come a long way from covering OJ.

The Colorado Economy

Colorado has slowed down like the rest of the country but not to the levels of some other areas.

Real estate sales are down over the last year but our RE-related business is way up. Why? We didn't pay attention to the news about the economy. We decided to effect a boomlet for ourselves and started promoting like crazy. We gathered together work crews that wanted to make money with us and took off. We only turned down jobs that were way out of our abilities to handle them and took everything else. Even though the season flurry of activity has passed, our stats are doing well. Yours can do. Just don't listen to depressing people who tell you otherwise.

~Flourish and Prosper~

Mental Health Bailout

from politico.com

"...And tucked away in the tax provisions is a landmark health care provision demanding that insurance companies provide coverage for mental health treatment—such as hospitalization—on parity with physical illnesses.

Really a bill onto itself, the mental health parity measure has been a bipartisan priority for top lawmakers in both chambers but has stalled because of disagreements again over how to pay for its estimated $3.8 billion five-year cost. In the current climate, that seems to be no longer a stumbling block, and if the Treasury plan becomes law, it will also."

How urgent can this be if they are throwing all this other crap into the bailout?

Wouldn't you like to have had the opportunity to express your opinion about helping the rest of the country pay for "mental health" services? If the House passes this bailout with this addition, all our insurance costs will go up and you can look forward to more "mental health" screening.

High Summer

I love zinnias. An acre of zinnias wouldn't be too many.

Civic Duty

I have definitely entered the Civic Duty phase of my life. I had a feeling it would happen after the kids were up and out of the house. Yesterday was my first experience as an Election Judge in the Colorado Primary. It was like this for a good part of the day, thanks to mail-in ballots, but enough people came in to make it interesting. The November one should be a blast!

Inside Scientology Churches

Church Management recently release a video that shows what Scientologists actually do inside our churches. You can see it a the Scientology Video Channel on the Beliefs and Practices menu. We saw it last night at a summer gathering where we were joined by actor Michael Roberts. He was so funny! (in spite of the 100+º temps we had yesterday.) Anyway, if you're curious, take a peek at the video.

Rural Fire Department

The local Emergency Squad did a Jaws of Life demonstration at the rural fire department's open house.  Really impressive.  They popped the windshield just as I was walking up and had the 'victim' out within 10 minutes.  This crew was mostly in their 20's and 30's, all heros or heros in the making.  They have all my admiration.

Bringing Order

• I'm doing a CERT (Community Emergency Response Training) class to make myself more competent in case of emergencies and future disasters. Quite an education! (It's just make-up in the photo from a mock disaster). I've learned:
  

1.  Sympathy is more for the person giving it than for the victim - better to be effective.
   
2.  People will flock to points of order.  Any order is better than no order in some cases.
3.  Teamwork is imperative.  Don't leave your buddy.

I've learned a lot more but some of these lessons have to do with deep, personal response to the situation as well as hands on details.  I highly recommend the class. 

Mississippi

The other day I had to catch a train in Jackson, MS. We had some time to kill and so we dropped by the Mississippi Art Museum and saw a traveling exhibit of art inspired by Hurricane Katrina.

I spent some time paying respect to the experience of the people portrayed in the photos. They were mostly character studies of people surrounded by their local devastation with a little text explaining the circumstances. I read story after story, then lo and behold, I saw mention of volunteers with "Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Scientologists and Jews being the largest groups that came to help". Wow - what an unexpected acknowledgment! I know I was there along with hundreds more Scientologists but there is never a mention of it in the mainstream press. This person who put together the display knew we were there.

Funny thing, I told my brother that I went, but he never had any interest in my experience or any questions about it. After he read that little text, he finally asked me about it. Seeing something in print written by somebody he has never met gave the experience validity.

Earth Day Colorado 08

"Safeguard and Improve Your Environment" is one of the precepts from The Way to Happiness and while I'm great at safeguarding my yard, it needed some improvement in the area of upkeep. A winter windstorm blew down some of the fence latticework that we replaced but it was too cold to paint. I just got around to it this week and once I get started painting I keep going. It was a beautiful day in the 70's, clear blue skies and I had lots of avian company. After a while in the sun, the shade of the lilacs provided some nice relief.

Yesterday we went to the city's free mulch yard and picked up a couple of barrelfulls. I also got some soaker hoses for the newly dug garden area along the fence and some extra hose for the new cistern. Things are coming along.

Colorado Depression Solutions

Get some exercise! Finally, the weather is warming up and the days are getting longer. Take a walk every day and look around.

Breathe in and breathe out.

Get some sunshine on your face everyday. (don't forget the sunscreen)

Eat well and take B1.

Actively seek inspiration. Track down whatever inspires you.

Experts

I've been thinking about Experts lately since I recently went to 2 different workshops put on by Experts. The workshops were basically: the Expert reads the text of the overhead message shining on the wall.
I can read faster than they can talk and point the laser light, so tedium set in.

But on the subject of Experts, I've noticed that people seem to use Experts as a substitute or via for actually contact with a subject. In the past, a lot of knowledge was passed person to person, coming from friends and family. People now need help with raising children so they make an appointment with a psychologist. They need to get the weeds out of the yard so they hire a gardener to come once a week.
Don't have time to spend with the dog - hire a dog walker. Can't figure out that too much food and too little exercise = fat? Hire a personal trainer.

Hire someone else to do it or get advice from an Expert about how to react to it. What I see missing is a direct contact with Life.

Really Using Scientology

When I was younger I was stranded in Iran with no way to get back.   Thanks to a serendipitous encounter at a phone center,  my friend and I found ourselves on a truck convoy driving back to Europe through the Turkish mountains.

   

A fellow traveller was an Italian returning from a year in India with his Guru. He was very calm and peaceful, a shining example of a happy spirit.  That is, until a couple of days into the trip after spending time in a truck cab with a driver who was going through a psychotic break and would not stop talking.   The guy staggered out of the truck looking for a cigarette, pleading for one of us to swap trucks with him.  He had totally lost the serenity that he achieved during his year long quiet-time after getting smacked down by the physical universe.

I went through a slightly similar experience myself recently.  When I returned from a several month long Scientology retreat, I landed myself a huge pile o' bitter choleric hateful antagonism from an unexpected source.  At the time, I was also reading "Science of Survival" which goes into detail about the entanglement of life force with the physical universe.  Reading that book  gave me the understanding I needed to weather this situation and move on.

The thing about Scientology is that with auditing, you can get a bunch of spiritual improvement and feel great.  The training, though, is the life raft that will keep you afloat so you don't have to stagger around looking for someone to bail you out of bad situations.  

Internet Attacks on People with Epilepsy

A group of hackers are trying to make Scientologists fear them.  

They are also trying to cause people with epilepsy to have seizures.  They hack into websites of interest to that population and install links to pages with visual images that induce seizures.

This is entertainment for these people.  Go figure.

Season's Greetings!

I had a great time this weekend with our Women's Auxiliary helping with an Easter Egg candy free-for-all. Last night we went to the annual LRH birthday event and I was delighted with all the expansion going on with Scientology around the world. I also got to see some footage of my buddies in the Translation Unit at the Advanced Organization in Australia.

Whatever you are celebrating this week: Easter, Ostara, Purim, Naw Ruz, The Arrival of Spring, or the various Rabbit Gods , I hope you have a Happy Holiday today.

More from the Factors

I've been thinking more about the Factors in Scientology (see Feb 25th post) so here are a few more:

7 And from the viewpoint to the dimension points there are connection and interchange. Thus new dimension points are made. Thus there is communication.

8 And thus there is light.

9 And thus there is energy.

10 And thus there is life.

Recent events in my life have been reminding me how important communication is since it leads to more life.  Here's the link again for all of the Factors.

Disaster Relief Training

I went to a day-long 'Be Ready' training put on by the local Office of Emergency Management. I've been drawn to this kind of training since I went with some other
Scientologists to help with the Katrina disaster relief effort. Even working in a well organized group, I realized that I was really unprepared for the reality of a disaster area. Things like being in sweltering heat all day and night with no relief, sharing portable showers with a thousand other volunteers, long traffic lines, and the general disarray that is part of the situation.

The training was fascinating and I'm looking forward to the 32-hour CERT training that follows later this year.

Some people seem to be concerned about Scientology 'beliefs'. Well, Scientology is not a faith-based religion. When my sons asked me about God, etc, I would ask them, what do you think? I personally think that any being is capable of coming up with his own conclusions.

So when I read "What is true for you is what you have observed yourself.
And when you lose that you have lost everything." in Personal Integrity I totally agreed.

People who are looking for more can read The Factors :

1.Before the beginning was a Cause and the entire purpose of the Cause was the creation of effect.

2 In the beginning and forever is the decision and the decision is TO BE.

3 The first action of beingness is to assume a viewpoint.

4 The second action of beingness is to extend from the viewpoint, points to view, which are dimension points.

5 Thus there is space created, for the definition of space is: viewpoint of dimension. And the purpose of a dimension point is space and a point of view.

click on the link for the rest.


"Not In My Body, Not In My Town!"

While our city council wrestles with citizen requests for them to call for the president to be impeached, citizens in Santa Cruz are calling to declare their town a Psychotropic Drug Free Zone. What a great idea! Great slogan and cute little mascot, too.

School Shooters

From Natural News:

NaturalNews) It comes as no surprise to anyone who's been following school shootings all the way back to the Colombine High massacre in Colorado: Every young, male shooter that has gone on a killing spree in the United States also has a history of treatment with psychotropic drugs -- typically SSRI antidepressants. These shootings have three things in common: 1) The shooters are young males. 2) The shooters exhibit a mind-numbed disconnect with reality. 3) The shooters have a history of taking psychiatric medications.
...
Psychiatric medications, of course, are well known to cause extremely violent thoughts and behavior in young males. This is actually acknowledged by the FDA and is found in the black-box warnings printed on the packaging for such drugs. In Europe, the prescribing of many such drugs to children and teens is actually illegal. But in the United States, where psychiatric medications have become the "new medicine" for American youth, nobody seems to pay attention to the simple fact that every school shooting we've seen in the last decade has been committed by a young male with a history of treatment with psychiatric medications....

I read a letter to the editor in Variety magazine defending our rights to religious freedom. The writer brought up other religious beliefs including:

• Eve came from Adam's rib
• Red Sea parted for the children of Israel
• God spoke to Moses from a burning bush
• Jonah lived in a whale
• Christ rose from the dead & walked on water
• Eating Christ's flesh and blood is a good thing
  
• Angel Moroni descended into upstate New York to show Joseph Smith the buried golden tables
• 
  
• and then there is the one about all the virgins in heaven
• and sitting for long hours brings enlightenment
• and coming back in the next life as a different life form
• and not being able to open an umbrella on the Sabbath
• and poking totems with sharp objects creates effects in the real world
• and the well known man-is-only-a-body theory from the psychiatrist's sacred tomes
  

Personally I think the world would be a better place if everyone spent time on spiritual matters. What a rich and full experience to have a conversation based on beliefs and ideas. And that would be a very high toned conversation.

Take a look at this Chart of Human Evaluation checking Column 10 Speech: Talks-Speech: Listens. You can see what kind of communication you can expect from different types of people.

In Science of Survival, LRH writes about the methods that people use to handle others:

enhancement

punishment

nullification

If you take a look at this, you can sort the people in your life into these different categories. It's obvious that people who are focused on the latter two are really unhappy to start with. What a waste of a life!

I tend to forget about posting here, being a busy Scientologist and all. There's been a lot of noise about Scientology lately. I wonder if these people have lives of their own? I mean happy, thriving, prosperous lives full of love and friendship. I think that someone with a full personal life wouldn't have the time or attention to try to stop others from living their lives as they choose.

Here's a quote from L Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology:
"Beware the person or group who fights Scientology, for that person fights truth - not the truth of natural laws, but truth about himself. It's well worth knowing, we assure you."

Hmpf...

I ran out of things to say for a few days there.

I've been hanging out with some friends, organizing paperwork to prepare for doing our taxes, & getting back to reading Science of Survival. What a great read.

I'm also doing some volunteering for our local Office of Special Affairs. Winter's moving right along. This is a friend who likes to sit on my lap.