Ahh... Scientology HAS Discovered NLP!

In spades, it would appear... nicked this one from the Ex-Scientologist Message Board... this is interesting... there's now a movement of Ex-Scientologists who are bailing out of Scientology and starting their own thing... which looks to have absorbed a goodly dose of NLP into the mix.....

Without further ado..... I give you one thetaCannon:

"(Please, this thread is only for people who recognise the positive aspects of processing and want to understand it in a mainstream scientific context. If you still think in terms of reactive minds, havingness and mental mass, this is not for you.)

I once worked for a puzzle company. While I was there I noticed a striking similarity between the effects people would get from puzzle books that they would from "cognition therapy", otherwise known as auditing. In both cases, the person is presented with a series of novel mental challenges to which they have no automatic response. After a period of increased stress and concentrated exposure, a collapse happens and thinking about the challenge suddenly becomes a lot easier (also freeing up a lot of attention that had been progressively diverted to the task and taken away from everyday matters).

It can be seen on a meter that solving a puzzle or playing a puzzle video game, of the correct level of difficulty, has the same kind of effects that an auditing rundown has. It is the same exact pattern of TA action, rise and rise followed by blowdown that constitutes "negative case gain" in Scientology.

This leads me to believe that a generalised auditing framework is possible, if we can only objectively study the structure of auditing processes and pay close attention to the types of words and phrases used and how they're run.

For instance: homonyms play an important part in auditing commands. In conversational hypnosis, homonyms are used to scatter a subject's attention by invoking "transderivational search", which is the process of figuring out what the speaker means. Sly speakers use homonyms to mask words they don't necessarily want the listeners to register, because they're momentarily occupied with establishing the meaning of the previous sentence.

So as an example "give me something you wouldn't mind remembering". Here we have the repetitious usage of several homonyms chained together. The question is broad enough that when the mind forms an automaticity to answer it, especially after one or more attention spans had been dedicated to the activity, a significant blowdown would be (and is) observed.

Meter reads are closely correlated to changes in vigilance, and the more homonyms you have to process and formulate a sensible response to, the more vigilant you would tend to become. I believe this is why auditing commands become progressively more nonsensical and abstract as you graduate levels.

Another factor is opposites. This is like the game where you have to alternate between humming the theme tunes to Star Wars and Superman (both composed by John Williams in close succession). Stacked on top of homonyms, you now have opposites.

Hubbard was very interested in scales, and finding words to qualitatively describe degrees of various subjective concepts.

Of course there is also the concept of "buttons" in auditing, whereby emotionally loaded words are thrown into the mix to challenge a subject's mental agility.

Auditing commands come in pairs, often when using opposites, and lists when using degrees or permutations. There's also the concept of flows, which gets the faculties of spatial reasoning and self/other identification involved.

Then we also have the perceptics, which challenge one's visualisation ability.

What I'm interested in is establishing an open-source, generalised version of these Hubbard's trademark "diary puzzles" and turn it into something less than a costly cult trap. Puzzle research says that feel-good chemicals are released when solving crosswords, and that the mental exercise has positive health benefits. I believe that auditing is a more personalised example of a crossword, and one that really ought to be popularised for what it is."