Podcasts about Dianetics

Guest:Craig Brockie – Best Selling Author & Founder Ultimate Health Solutions BioCraig Brockie is a best-selling author and founder of the Ultimate Health movement. After losing his health as a young man, he spent the next three decades and 7 figures researching advanced health and performance-enhancing technologies.Links to Resources Mentioned:Follow Craig on X: http://x.com/craigbrockieProbiotic Yogurt Maker:  https://amazon.com/ultimate Dr. Berg's "Fix Your Gut with One Microbe" video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nZV1oYv5DdoFREE first chapter of "Ultimate Health" book: https://CraigBrockie.com/free FREE Ultimate Peptide Cheat Sheet: https://CraigBrockie.com/cheatsheet Mental Health Supplements: https://TrueHope.com "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health": https://Dianetics.org Sauna Detox Program: https://ClearBodyClearMind.com FREE course to regain self-respect: https://scientologycourses.org/tools-for-life/integrity/progress.html

Send us a textScientology infiltrates government by creating seemingly benign front groups and securing official proclamations that hide their connection to the controversial organization.• Operation Snow White was Scientology's 1970s program to infiltrate government offices and remove damaging information about the organization• 12 Scientology officials, including L. Ron Hubbard's wife, were imprisoned following FBI raids that uncovered their illegal activities• After arrests, Scientology simply rebranded the Guardian's Office as the Office of Special Affairs without changing personnel or practices• Modern Scientology uses front groups like The Way to Happiness, Narconon, and Dianetics to approach government officials without mentioning Scientology• Brighton, Colorado mayor rescinded a Dianetics Day proclamation after learning it was connected to Scientology• Scientology uses government proclamations both for external legitimacy and internal propaganda, showing them at events to convince members the organization is expanding• Email campaigns to government officials deliberately avoid mentioning Scientology, focusing instead on mental health or community improvement• Former Scientologists are developing resource kits for local officials to recognize and avoid unwitting endorsement of Scientology front groups• Mother's Day is particularly difficult for former Scientologists whose families have disconnected from them under organization pressureIf you're facing disconnection or know someone trapped in Scientology, the Michael J. Rinder Aftermath Foundation has resources to help, including a dedicated law enforcement crisis line.Support the showBFG Store - http://blownforgood-shop.fourthwall.com/Blown For Good on Audible - https://www.amazon.com/Blown-for-Good-Marc-Headley-audiobook/dp/B07GC6ZKGQ/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=Blown For Good Website: http://blownforgood.com/PODCAST INFO:Podcast website: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2131160 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/blown-for-good-behind-the-iron-curtain-of-scientology/id1671284503 RSS: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/2131160.rss YOUTUBE PLAYLISTS: Spy Files Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWtJfniWLwq4cA-e...

Jeff Hawkins was in Scientology for 40 years. In the 1980s, he created the project that put Modern Science of Mental Health back on the bestseller list. He abandoned all of Hubbard's ideas about marketing to do this. Jeff gives many insights into the true nature of Scientology management. He worked directly for David Miscavige and, like many others, was physically assaulted by him. Jeff runs a recovery group in Portland, Oregon.Links:survey of public perception of ScientologyJon's paper, Possible Origins for Dianetics and Scientology

In the wake of updates to Child Safety Standards emerging from Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Mirriam Francis wrote to Victoria's Commission for Children and Young People outlining the ways in which she sees Scientology teachings and practices to be violating these standards. While concepts of religious freedom and choice can muddy the waters of certain discussions around coercive organisations, Mirriam sees the regulations and laws to protect children as a key lens through which such practices need to be viewed and pursued. She speaks from personal experience that spans three countries.Links:Child Safe Standards — Commission for Children and Young People Victoria (you can raise a concern here); Queensland Family & Child Commission (you can raise a concern here)Child Safe Scheme — NSW Office of the Children's Guardian (you can raise a concern here)Australian Child Safe Standards – A State By State Guide 2024 — Safe Space LegalRage Against the Dark Arts — Mirriam Francis' SubstackThetans in Young Bodies — Season 2, Episode 1 of Leah Remini's Scientology and the Aftermath in which Mirriam Francis featuresReport of the Board of Enquiry into Scientology — by Kevin Victor Anderson, Q.C., the State of Victoria, Australia, 1965The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma — by Bessel van der Kolk, Penguin, 2015Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice — by Judith Lewis Herman, Basic Books, 2023Dianetics excerpt re: 7-year-old child responding to kiss from adult maleA Children of God message to members mentioning their "friends in Scientology"Introduction to Scientology Ethics High CrimesYou can support us on Patreon. Sarah's book Do As I Say is available on audiobook. Subscribe and support the production of this independent podcast, and you can access early + ad-free episodes at https://plus.acast.com/s/lets-talk-about-sects. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anne ran Landmark approved seminars for many years. She witnessed the return of Werner Erhard and often worked with him. Her fascinating book Is This a Cult? details the first phase of her own recovery. est and Landmark contain much that is familiar to Scientologists and survivors of Mind Dynamics, Subud, Silva Mind Control from which Erhard appropriated ideas. A deep dive into the twists and turns of est, the Forum, Landmark and large group awareness training with many surprises along the way.links:Buy Anne's bookAnne's Instagramfor more on Steven Hassan's Influence Continuumex-Scientology KidsSeek Safely Jon's paper, Possible Origins of Dianetics and Scientologydownload your own Predator Poster heremore on the work of Ira Chaleffmore about the Bear-Fedio index

Dr. Adam Francisco, author, “One Word, Many Writings” One Word, Many Writings The post The Bible and Other Religious Writings: The Gospel of Thomas and Dianetics – Dr. Adam Francisco, 2/12/25 (0433) first appeared on Issues, Etc..

In this episode of Other Worlds, we explore the notion of Inner Worlds by looking closely at the idea of inner space vs. outer space - the power and problems of our own minds. Exploring these ideas with Sue Berman is Other Worlds exhibition curator Andrew Henry. We discuss a range of texts including 'Return to Tomorrow' and 'Dianetics' by L. Ron Hubbard, 'The World of Null-A' by A.E. Van Vogt, and 'The Dreaming Jewels' by Theodore Sturgeon as well as the well-known Robert Louis Stevenson's classic 'Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde'. Visit the onsite exhibition and join us in a series of events and activations: www.aucklandlibraries.govt.nz/Other-Worlds-exhibition For recommended reads visit: www.aucklandlibraries.govt.nz/Other-Worlds-reads Books mentioned in the podcast: L. Ron Hubbard, Return to tomorrow. London: Hamilton, 1957. L. Ron Hubbard. Dianetics: the evolution of a science. London: Hubbard Association of Scientologists International Limited, 1958. A.E. Van Vogt, The world of Null-A. New York: Ace Books, 1964. Theodore Sturgeon, The dreaming jewels. London: Corgi Books, 1975. Alfred Bester. The demolished man. London: Hamilton, 1959. Robert Louis Stevenson, The strange case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1930. New worlds science fiction, vol. 30, no. 89. London: Nova, December 1959. New worlds science fiction, vol. 40, no. 118. London: Nova, May 1962. Analog science fiction, science fact, vol. 90, no. 4. New York: Condé Nast, December 1972. Music credit: https://www.melodyloops.com/tracks/space-harmony/ Image from Robert Louis Stevenson, The strange case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1930. Produced by Sue Berman and JL.

Jon has a few things on his mind about the connection between Scientology, the Nazis, and the occult. Was L. Ron Hubbard Jr. right when he said that his father “was given the magic by the same person who gave it to Hitler"? Just what is the link between the Nazis and Scientology? Read Jon's paper, Possible Origins of Dianetics and Scientology or watch the videos: part one part two And read Jon's paper, Hubbard and the Occult or watch the video And find out about why medieval knights fought snails in the margins of manuscripts #scientologycult #occult #theosophy

Rockville, Rockville, U-S-A! This week we're combing through what is now the largest rock and metal fest in the United States - Welcome to Rockville in Daytona, Florida. They've got it all! Hardcore, radio rock, legacy metal, insane clowns, butt rock, and so much more. Join us as we rapid-fire judge about a million and a half bands. Also, Linkin Park is back, and you can read all about it in Dianetics. We're talking about their world tour, new album, and all the opening bands that shredded their credibility for the opportunity. Folks, it's a good one. Want more Toilet Radio? Get hundreds of hours of exclusive content and access to the TovH Discord over at the Toilet ov Hell Patreon. Music featured on this ‘sode: Gutless – Beyond the Catacombs This program is available on Spotify. It is also available on iTunes or whatever they call it now, where you can rate, review, and subscribe. Give us money on Patreon to get exclusive bonus episodes and other cool shit.

The boys drink and review Sierra Nevada's Cold IPA, then discuss Scientology. If you had your choice, would you rather your child be woke or a scientologist? It's a hard choice. Pigweed starts the discussion with a bio of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder / creator of both Dianetics and its later manifestation, Scientology. He was one of the most prolific authors in history, with as many as 1,000 titles. The distinguishing factors of Scientology include ... * The reactive vs. the analytical mind. The reactive mind stores painful traumatic memories called “engrams.” You find these through “auditing.” Once you get rid of the reactive mind you're “clear.” * Auditing is done with the E-meter, which is essentially a galvanometer. * Opposition to Psychiatry and Psychology are flawed because they focus on symptoms rather than addressing the underlying problem of engrams. * Focus on self-empowerment and personal responsibility * Bridge to total freedom * Thetans and spiritual identity. * Survival as a core drive But there's another side -- the mythology, including the goofy story about Xenu throwing people into volcanoes 75 million years ago. Remember to connect with us at https://www.pigweedandcrowhill.com/, or write to the show at pigweedshow@gmail.com.

Send us a textWhat if a belief system you thought was just eccentric turned out to be fundamentally abusive? Apostate Alex returns to the podcast to unravel the complex activism efforts against Scientology in the UK, working with Members of Parliament to challenge the organization's behavior. From halting local Dianetics book sales to advocating for a parliamentary debate, we discuss the crucial shift in public perception needed to understand Scientology as an abusive organization, with a focus on educating law enforcement about the unique challenges faced by Sea Organization members.Moving into the realm of education, we share personal stories from Greenfields, a Scientology-affiliated school, where promises of an advanced education meet the harsh reality of financial barriers. With insights into how non-Scientologist students inadvertently encounter Scientology principles, we shine a light on prominent figures like Peter Hodkin and the influence they wield. Ongoing protests and legal challenges are explored, underscoring the broad implications of Scientology's reach and the efforts to counteract their maneuvers.We also confront the harrowing experiences within Scientology's Cadet Org, where restrictive policies and neglect paint a grim picture of childhood in the Sea Org. From systemic failures in child protection to the emotional toll on those who grew up within the organization, the discussion emphasizes the urgent need for safeguarding measures. Personal stories of isolation, neglect, and the intricate relationships within second-generation Scientology families highlight the moral responsibility to report abuses and ensure accountability. Join us as we raise awareness and provide support for those affected by the Church of Scientology.Support the showBFG Store - http://blownforgood-shop.fourthwall.com/Blown For Good on Audible - https://www.amazon.com/Blown-for-Good-Marc-Headley-audiobook/dp/B07GC6ZKGQ/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=Blown For Good Website: http://blownforgood.com/PODCAST INFO:Podcast website: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2131160/shareApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/blown-for-good-behind-the-iron-curtain-of-scientology/id1671284503 Spotify: ...

A deep dive into the mental health crisis among veterans and an alternative therapeutic approach using Dianetics with Chris Owens, Executive Director of the Restored Valor Project.00:00 Introduction and Welcome01:03 Chris Owens' Background and Journey into Dianetics01:43 Explaining Dianetics05:57 Dianetics Techniques and Their Unique Aspects28:16 Addressing the Reactive Mind and Engrams36:24 Physical and Emotional Pain in DianeticsLinks & ResourcesVeteran Suicide & Crisis Line: Dial 988, then press 1 Website: https://restoredvalor.org Follow Christopher Owens on Twitter/X: https://x.com/happywarriorz Other websites mentioned in the episode: https://cchr.org | https://HappyMind.WatchTranscriptView the transcript for this episode.

In this episode of Healthy Mind, Healthy Life, host Avik dives into the transformative power of Dianetics therapy with Christopher owens, a seasoned Dianetics counselor with over 30 years of experience. Christopher, who is also the founder of Happy Water Counseling and the Restored Veil Project, explains how Dianetics can help individuals release the pain of past traumas and discover their true selves. The discussion explores how Dianetics differs from traditional mental health therapies by focusing on the mind's reactive responses to painful experiences rather than chemical imbalances. This episode offers a fresh perspective on mental and emotional well-being, challenging common misconceptions and offering hope for those seeking true healing.

Join me today as we discuss Jacqueline's Graduation, Why I guess I'm supposed to hold my dogs heads up, how Dean has somehow attracted all the hot Jehovah's Witnesses and how we were one book away from Scientology with "Dianetics"

Jon is joined by Spike for this discussion about how we can tell if we're truly free from the clutches of our former high-control group - it's far more involved than just leaving; often it takes a concerted effort lasting years to unwind oneself from deep psychological indoctrination and fully heal the damage done. Here's all the links: the crimes of Josef Fritzl Steven Hassan's TedX talk "How do you know if you're brainwashed?" Possible Origins for Dianetics and Scientology: the paper The videos: Part one Part two More on Semmelweis The Report of the India Hemp Drugs Commission The episode of Big Question where Jon was on the panel Never Believe a Hypnotist the paper the video All about the Bear Fedio Index Download your own copy of our Human Predator poster

Shawn is fascinated that Jon's positive attitude is not based in religious belief. Jon talks about the wide range of influences that have led him to lose any concern for personal immortality. links: Jon's current website Jon's defunct website with the art Jon's writings on the Underground Bunker Never believe a hypnotist - the paper the video Possible Origins of Scientology and Dianetics - the paper the video part one the video part two Jon's translation of the Tao Te Ching Spike's gospel song for all faiths, "Precious Child":

Frances spent the first 44 years of her life as a Jehovah's Witness. Since leaving, she has dedicated herself to counselling former members. As Frances says, authoritarian cults give members overwhelming and impossible responsibilities. They can also diminish the real responsibilities we should accept. After leaving a cult, it is important to reassess beliefs and responsibilities. Read Jon's paper, Possible Origins of Dianetics and Scientology, here or check out the videos: Part one Part two For more on Ira Chaleff's work on Intelligent Disobedience and Courageous Followership

One of the most publicized authoritarian cults is Scientology and the world's leading authority is Jon Atack. Jon and I have been friends and colleagues He is the author of Let's Sell These People A Piece of Blue Sky, considered the definitive book on Scientology, Dianetics, and L. Ron Hubbard. During our podcast, we discussed the new audiobook versions of Scientology: The Cult of Greed and Opening Our Minds: Avoiding Abusive Relationships and Authoritarian Groups. A significant portion of our discussion focused on the struggle former cult members face in processing the mind control they endured. We consider ourselves “elders” in the work helping people to understand and recover. Yet we both are frustrated that former members fail to see “the big picture” and continue to operate out of a cult mindset of “us vs. them”- even when it comes to fellow ex Scientologists. There is a lot of interesting things we unpack, including the fact that the founder of the cult was a hypnotist. Our conversation delved deeply into the complexities of mind control, the importance of processing and healing from cult experiences, and the challenges former members face in reclaiming their lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Mark Bunker is a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and a Scientology history expert. He is a massive critic of the Church of Scientology, having previously worked for the Lisa McPherson Trust –– and is the founder of Xenu TV, a website featuring videos and commentary critical of Scientology. - BUY Guest's Books & Films IN MY AMAZON STORE: https://amzn.to/3RPu952  EPISODE LINKS: - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://juliandorey.myshopify.com/  - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/Ajqn5sN6  Scientology Videos from Episode: - Tom Cruise “KSW” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFBZ_uAbxS0  - Tom Cruise Scientology Award Speech - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ8ciJZvjyk&t=107s  JULIAN YT CHANNELS: - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips  - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily  - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - How Mark exposed the Tom Cruise Scientology Videos 10:46 - Scientology Founder, L Ron Hubbard background 21:47 - L Ron HUbbard's multiple wives; Dianetics, Escaping US government 33:37 - Scientology belief in the afterlife; Xenu & Volcano of Souls 42:31 - Scientology hiding beliefs from public; Tom Cruise; Scientology brainwashing 55:42 - Internet shaming of Scientology; Clearwater HQ 1:12:37 - Ponzi Scheme success; Sea Org kicked out of England; Hubbard's India Trip 1:26:31 - Mike Rinder; Hubbard on run from FBI; E Meter; Leah Remini Casting director escape 1:42:27 - David Miscavige takes over scientology; Miscavige's wife Shelly goes missing 1:56:03 - Clearwater Politics & Scientology; LA Scientology building; Fake history 2:12:27 - Lisa McPherson Tragic story; Scientology attacks Mark Bunker 2:29:07 - Mark's involvement in Scientology take down; L Ron Hubbard turns on Scientology 2:39:07 - Mark moves to Clearwater; Police paid off by Scientology; Mark stories getting people out of cult 2:54:34 - Smart people brainwashed by cult; Mike Rinder pulled out of hole 3:05:28 - Lisa McPherson Trust & Scientology fair play tactics 3:13:28 - Political plan to eradicate Scientology in Clearwater 3:19:51 - Scientology's history with the IRS 2:23:45 - Mark soldiering on CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edited by Alessi Allaman ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 203 - Mark Bunker

Eminent psychiatrist Steven Moffic discusses the original 'Book One' method of Dianetics with Jon. Hubbard canceled the method in 1951, explaining that it is hypnotic. It was re-introduced in the late '70s and is still used as a recruiting tool. They also discuss music, art, and compassion. links: Moffic's eclipse piece Spike's eclipse piece Freud lectures in Worcester, Mass 1911 Moffic's piece in Psychiatry Today on Vijay Vincenzo Di Nicola's writings

Happy birthday L. Ron Hubbard! Who is your favorite sci-fi writer? As we Celebrate March, we now turn our attention to pulp fiction writer and creator of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard and his work "Dianectics." How does someone go from sci-fi writer to leader of a new religion? What is the science in Scientology? What is the aim of Scientology and Dianetics? In this episode, we cover all of that and I give some of my thoughts on pseudo-psychology within Christianity. Website: https://myseminarylife983333216.wordpress.com/?preview_id=3&preview_nonce=2d22b29479Shop: https://my-seminary-life-store.creator-spring.com/Buy Me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/mslpodFacebook & Instagram: @myseminarylifepodYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MySeminaryLifeContact: emailseminarylife@gmail.com

Alec's Astounding is a brilliant account of the 'golden age' of science-fiction when John Campbell, jnr, brought together the writers who would thrust s-f into the public arena - Heinlein, Asimov, Van Vogt and, of course, Ron Hubbard. There is much to be learned from Hubbard's stint at Astounding. Without Campbell, Dianetics might never have seen the light of day. Find how those around Hubbard lost faith in his ideas. Check out Alec's website here.

Rachel Bernstein LMFT, MSEd discusses what it's like working with survivors from high-control groups. This episode is for survivors looking for a mental health professional or for mental health professionals looking to work with the demographic of survivors of cults, high-control groups, and spiritual abuse. University of SalfordTranscript (Transcript is unedited for typos and misspellings)Katherine: Hello. How are you doing today?Rachel: I am doing really good. How are you doing today? Katherine: I am good. I am a little tired. I went to a midnight book release. On Monday nights, and I don't ever stay up that late, and I'm still sleeping.That was a new thing for me. I was like, this is what teenagers do. These are not what people who are almost 40 do. But it was fun. It was a fun experience. I'm glad. Very excited to talk to you today. I know you have indoctrination podcast, and you do a lot of different work with a lot of different clients, but the particular demographic that I would [00:01:00] love to talk to you about is the demographic of folks who've And cults or high control experiences.And I would love to hear from you, what prompted you to work with this demographic and what was the story that led you to working with this type Rachel: of client? Nice. Okay. So there's so much to this story. I'll try not to make it overly long, but Okay, great. No, go for it. Tell, tell, tell whatever. It's slightly long, longer than it needs to be, not overly.Right. Huh. Right. So, When I was growing up, my, one of my siblings who was eight years older got. Kind of a new friend through a friend, and they started hanging out a lot. Next thing we know, she's not really spending time at home. She has taken the money out of her [00:02:00] account and it's gone.Which she had really worked hard for. In my family, we were supposed to work from when we were young. If we needed cash for anything, even to go to the movies, well, you need to earn it. You know, it was like that. So it, you know, we didn't take spending lots of money all at once lightly. Cause we know how much we had worked to make it and suddenly liquidated gone.And she was speaking differently. She was acting in a very kind of in your face way. And we're like, what is going on? So then she said that she has this friend of a friend who's introduced her to this place. It's called Scientology. Got it. And and it's a church, but we're a Jewish family, but it's not a church church.That would, that became a line in our family forever. It's not a church church. Like what? I'm sorry. It's not a church church, but it's not. So. Because there really wasn't the idea of a word cult that was known at the time, and this was in the 70s. So there [00:03:00] was no one to call. There were no resources that, you know, the books out there at the time before the interwebs, the, the books were written by cult leaders.Like there were L. Ron Hubbard novels out there about Dianetics and his science fiction books, but nothing about what is Scientology and that it is a cult. And the, the cult books that were out there too, were more about like working with POWs who had been indoctrinated and watching the Manchurian candidate and are like, yeah, fit, but not.So the turning point was. And I learned a lot about this. My, my parents responded different ways to stressful events. My mom was more of a kind of in your face, you have to stop this right now, finger pointing. I mean, that, that does sometimes come in handy, right? And my father instead was the, let me link arms with this person, see what they like about it, see what's interesting to them.But also I want to ask my questions about what I'm concerned about. So, They had tension and [00:04:00] she had tension with my parents and she said this group is going to teach me how to get along better with, with all of you. And And my friend said she's gotten along better with her parents since she's gotten involved.And so my father, in a very nice way, said could we call her parents and find out? Like, if this really has helped, then I'll say, okay. And she got the number of this person and their parents and the parents said, in this kind of panic tone, where did you see our daughter? Whoa. Right? That was a whoa.And my dad goes, what do you mean? We haven't, we don't know where she is. She left home six months ago and she said for the last six months she's been getting along better with her parents. She hasn't seen them. So this is the way the group defined getting along better, right? No contact. Katherine: No contact. Rachel: Cut them off.Oh my. That actually startled my sister. She didn't know. She didn't know [00:05:00] that's what that meant. I'm sorry. And she tried to get her money back. That was impossible, but. That you could see the personality change right away, and you could see that being in your face and she was having problems with her friends at school for the first time, too, because she was learning other ways of communicating the Scientology way of communicating, which is very in your face.So that became dinner table conversation. How can this happen that people can just take over someone's mind and convince them that something is true. That's really not true. That's totally the opposite of what is true. And then. Because I then was raised hearing about this and that there are many groups that do their recruiting also on college campuses, and they use front names, I then went to college, and I saw it.I saw these groups with their front names that I had learned, and they're at the student union, you know, passing out their pamphlets having people join, taking them on weekends, the bus picked up in front of my dorm, and I remember, because I was now cult educated, [00:06:00] I said to these people, Where are you going?And they said, Oh, we're going on a church weekend. What church is it? We don't know. Really? You don't know. And where are you going? Well, we're going to the mountains. I go, you know, that's not a place like mountains are these geographical structures and geological entities. That's not a place. Do you know where you're going?Is there going to be a phone there? Like, how are you going to leave? And they just thought I was being a drag. And I remember the leaders coming on the bus and asking me who I was and why I was harassing the people who were going. But I thought some of them are going to be dropping out of school after this and needing to show their devotion to this group and not school because that's what would happen.Suddenly these people were gone. Yeah. And then. So there are just two more parts of this story, and it really is, this is a shorter version. When I then went on to grad school to become, to, to become a therapist, to learn [00:07:00] counseling, there was a, a group therapy course where you learn to do group therapy that turned out to be run like a cult.The leader of it, who was the teacher, used, utilized almost every technique of influence and manipulation. And that was just her personality and I did a social experiment in that class, which was interesting because I noticed. This was the year before my dad passed away the year before I broke up with my boyfriend the year before my favorite dog passed away like I was just on the cusp of going through lots of trauma.Yeah, but until then life had been okay, but we were supposed to share our traumas. And if we didn't have trauma to share like if we hadn't gone through abuse or something, we were withholding, we were being resistant to the process. And then I could see people folding like I could see them making stories up just to be liked.And then they would be hugged by the people in the group. Thank you for [00:08:00] trusting us with your trauma and with your, with your past. So people were just crafting stories to please the teacher. I thought, wow, this is happening in a therapy class. I remember talking to my Dean about that. He was actually a little alarmed and I did one of my, I did my dissertation on what happened in that class for that school.That was controversial. But then I, I thought, you know, I want to do this work because there were so few resources for people and. I, yes, I want to do general counseling. I still do some general counseling, but about 80 percent of the counts counseling I do is former cult stuff. And then I start that they were looking for a clinician at a place called the cult clinic in Los Angeles, which was effectively shut down by Scientology.But that was my first taste of harassment, Scientology harassment, which did scare me. I mean, they had. discredited LAPD officers that they hired to harass people to follow people. They were scary, [00:09:00] scary mofos, if I can say. Leaning on my car when I'd come out of the office following me home sending people into poses clients.And I get this note saying, just to let you know, we're watching and listening and thought, what the hell is this? And so I remember staying home for about a week, my father had passed about a year before this, and suddenly I heard his words, which were, you can't let the bullies win. That was his way of looking at the world like you cannot let the bullies win.And I thought, Okay, but I need a week. I just have a week. I'm like talking to him wherever he is. He's already passed. And I had to get myself together and See what my rights were. Yes, we're not. Take a little break, right? Yes, we're not letting them win, but I do need a break. I need a break, because they're outside my house, and I need to know if I'll be protected.I need to contact the police. And then I went back to work, and I thought, what I'm dealing with in terms of harassment is only slightly what former Scientologists deal [00:10:00] with. And other people from other groups. They're pretty intense. Yeah. Scientologists are very intense. Really intense. Katherine: Stopping them is intense, right?Mm hmm. Rachel: Yeah, yeah. They've complained to my board many times to try to have my license taken away. They, they're no nonsense, but it's what happens to me and to a couple of my, you know, colleagues. And, and I think to me, especially because where I started doing my work, my counseling was very close to the Scientology buildings in Hollywood.So I started working with a lot of Scientologists and have continued working with them. So they don't like me, but okay. So that's, that's sort of how I got started in this. So yeah. And then how many years would you say Katherine: that this has been like the folks? Is it kind of been from the Rachel: beginning? Yeah, it's been since I've been doing counseling.It's been 32 years and it's morphed over time in that before it really was. It was, I thought this was fascinating. [00:11:00] This was a human rights issue to me, especially the way in a lot of these groups that women were treated and children were treated or mistreated, neglected and, and then over time it morphed to include now people who have been in relationships with narcissists because I would do a talk on cults or something and someone would call me and say, that sounds like my husband.Oh, what do you mean? And I kind of learned from people responding to my words about cult saying, no, that was my family that or that was my relationship. So I realized to now with. You know, with political landscape and so many people having polarized views of things and group think that I think is very scary.That's happening right now in the world to that I care about this on a micro level and also macro that. As the descendant of Holocaust survivors, I'm, I care a lot about group think and how people can be, kind of, how you get to Katherine: that place. It Rachel: doesn't Right. Caught up into a ffr, the [00:12:00] torch and pitchfork way of Right.And then also still on the micro person by person listening to what they've been through and trying to help them individually. Katherine: Mm-Hmm. Two, two observations. First of all. I noticed that when you were talking to those people who were getting on this bus to go to the quote unquote mountains, and that your father's approach to your sister, a lot of questions, there was like a lot of asking questions and I sure I'm sure we'll get into that.In just a minute, but I, I noticed that and then also I do appreciate that you address the fact that like a narcissistic relationship can have that similarity because I feel like I know like in the world that I work in, we have a much better, a broader. view of like what a cult can be, what a high control relationship can be, and what a high control religion can be.But most folks [00:13:00] still think of a cult as like something happening in a bunker somewhere, or out in the desert, and Expanding what that can be and what that high control relationship can be. And there are so many people who experienced that, but then have that very, just invalidating experience of like, nobody knows what this is like.It feels like a cult, but I can't call it a cult because it doesn't look like this. And, and so I appreciate that. You made that connection between that narcissist and that cold, cold experience. The impact can be very, very similar. Rachel: The impact is very similar.I think because not every cult is run by a narcissist. Some really are. You know, they have their delusional disorder and they get people into this diagnosis that is called fully I do, which is shared psychosis. Like they invite people who are maybe vulnerable to that way of thinking into their psychosis, but by [00:14:00] and large, I'd say a good 90 percent of cult leaders have a narcissistic bent.And so then. Whether it's your partner, your parent, even your child, there's some people who contact me because their children are narcissistic and run their life. Because that it's the same disorder that's prompting it, you're going to have similar techniques. Like they've read the same manual. It's kind of amazing.And, and then when you have similar techniques of, of manipulation, gaslighting, all of it, you're going to have similar outcomes. So it could be a one on one situation or it could be hundreds of thousands of people. Katherine: Yeah, and that can be helpful for someone who is recovering from that type of relationship, like even looking for someone who has the high control experience when they are looking for a mental health professional.Right. That would be maybe not necessarily just a narcissistic relationship, but someone who has that experience might be able to relate with that a little more. One of the things that's unique about your story is you didn't get into [00:15:00] this demographic because you had a personal experience being in a cult.So I think that's really unique. I feel like everyone that I know who gets into this demographic also had an experience. In it makes your story very unique to me, but then also, what are some things that you have learned over the years from your clients about what they need for Rachel: recovery? Right. It's a great question.So yes. And it, it is unique that I haven't. Been in one myself, and I think that's why I work almost equally with the families and friends of people who are in situations like this or in relational situations like this and have a webinar for them too, because I was. One of those, like being on the outside, needing to figure out how to have these conversations, how to manage the anxiety that comes up when you see your loved one getting slowly stolen away from you.And you don't [00:16:00] know what this forces that's on them and how to. See if you can get them back and if it's even possible and learning about the ways to communicate that are in a kind of counterintuitive way that are specific for this has been something I noticed from my own family, but also now for further doing this work and learning about that.So, right. I mean, what. People need. It's interesting when you talk about doing this kind of counseling for the people specifically who were in situations like this, whether it is a cult or a relationship that took over their life, multi level marketing, abusive teen treatment place, whatever it was, or is, or having been with a therapist who was dangerous, which I talk about a lot.I, well, it's unconscionable to me. To use that power in that way makes me mad. And so there are, [00:17:00] there are some things that. Are really important. I think for specifically when people are coming out of this, they need to know that they're believed because so often they're made to feel that they're exaggerating the story or they didn't get it right.That's part of the gaslighting that they can't trust the evidence of their senses and how they are deciphering what happened. And they also will often underplay it. And really downgrade how much they've been traumatized because it wasn't supposed to be seen that way in the group like you're supposed to just deal with being abused, or you're, it's for your benefit.You're supposed to be appreciative of being treated that way, being selected for something that turned out to be abusive. So. Abuse, neglect get underreported a lot of the time by people who leave. And what helps is defining for them what they've been through. Like, Oh, [00:18:00] that actually is abuse. That's why you're having nightmares.That's why you break into a cold sweat when you hear someone who has similar voice to the person who did that to you. I want you to understand yourself and your reactions, and you'll only understand it if you know what happened to you. And also that it wasn't your fault. That you didn't bring it in, that it wasn't because of you.Because, you know, within a cultic system, as you know, anything that's good that happens to you is because of the leadership. Anything that's bad is because of you. Katherine: And because you didn't Rachel: follow the leadership. Right, because you didn't follow the leadership. You, or you weren't feeling it in your heart or whatever, whatever it is, it's always back on you.So to be able to have a clear sense of who the culprit is, and you can take it off of you is also a really important thing. It's also good for people to understand that they have strengths, that they have capabilities. That they can live in the world and be successful at it, even [00:19:00] though they have been told that they don't have these strengths and these capabilities and to have them understand why they were convinced of that and how that fed the.Need of the leader to have you be dependent on them and to never want to leave because you don't feel equipped to be in the world. I think helping people understand why they were taught what they were taught and how it wasn't for them. It was right. It was for the control that the leader or the group needed to have over them.That's really helpful just to understand the source and the reasoning for the things they were taught as truths about them. And I think it's really helpful to connect people with other people. That's why I run a support group. So people don't feel isolated and alone. And I will often talk to people about how they They are having trouble relaxing and resting because when you're in a cult, you're going, going, going, you're doing, doing, doing, you learn that you matter the [00:20:00] least and you don't have to sleep.And it's fine if you're not eating and you're, you're supposed to somehow be devoted to the cause. And I try to shift that in my counseling work. So people know they are also the cause that it's important for them to take care of them. And that that's not selfish and it's not being lazy and it's not having pride.It's not all the other things that it's called when you care about you. And that you have to be a good steward of the self in order to then do work that you might want to do that's in service of others, but it needs to happen in that order. And there's nothing wrong with you for doing it in that order.And I also, I guess I want people to know that the world outside is actually not going to be as scary and not going to be as critical and not going to be as gossipy, like they'll have more privacy. There, there aren't people who are going to give them a hard time about everything. I have Clients who [00:21:00] panic if they're running even 30 seconds late for a session, or they come on to a zoom call a little bit late, or they come to the group a little bit late.I'll sometimes see them in the waiting area on zoom and then they're gone. They're missing. And I realized they're panicking because they're sure. That I'm going to give them a hard time and I'm going to berate them for not showing their allegiance to this group and not showing that it matters enough for them to be there on time, all the things that they went through in their cultic group.And they're also They've expressed to me they're worried about not showing up for the group because when they didn't go to things, that's when they were talked about in their absence and waited and given a hard time. So they were afraid of walking back into what suddenly felt like an unsafe. Situation.So I let people know we do not talk about you. And if someone does want to talk about you while you're not here, if it's something positive, like, oh, it's so [00:22:00] nice to meet that woman last time. And I hope she comes back. That's fine. And I'll be happy to tell you about that. But, you know, someone who just wants to.Berate. Not allowed, not allowed. So it always needs to feel safe. You just, if they're doing this work and learning from people and what makes them so anxious and you just see how much they've been mistreated and how much they've been under a microscope that has been so unfair to them and has made them so tense and so worried needlessly.Katherine: Absolutely. So I heard you say. Believe them. Let them know that you believe their story. I heard you say, give them like language to name what happened and then validate even that it was like a big deal, like naming it as abuse or naming it as as gaslighting. I heard you say, help them access.Like the internal [00:23:00] resources that they have and access their own, you didn't say the word power, but their own, their own resources, their own internal resources reframe things. So learning that like outside world is not scary and, and just having that, like a lot of like compassion for. The trauma that results in anxiety or fear or mistrust or anything like that.All like super, super, super important things. And I just think about like your support groups and like the courage that it takes for someone to show up to something like that when they have, a lot of times it is a group. Right. That happened in the first place. And that can be very scary, yet such a huge part of the recovery process to be able to engage with a group again.And yeah. Oh yeah. Again, Rachel: very, very important. Yeah. There are people also who. [00:24:00] Have been in support groups that have really, really been unhealthy. And also ones where they dealt with being in a treatment center that were kind of patterned. Well, they took off from Synanon, which started this this horrible practice.It was a cult in California started a whole horrible practice of something called the game where. You are supposed to berate people in a group. You're supposed to shout at them, call them things. They would sometimes need to grovel, like walk around on, on their hands and knees to show that they were they knew they were less than or they needed to wear a sign around them, around their neck that would say something.It could say whore, could say anything and whatever they may have been labeled that day. I mean, it was, so it was attack. Therapy. I don't even want to call it therapy. And so people coming out of that have interesting reactions when I do counseling with them. [00:25:00] And, and what is one of the reactions that's kind of sad is that some of them think that I don't care about them because I'm not shouting at them.Translation. I get that Katherine: though. I, I totally get that. Yeah. Rachel: Yeah. Right. That was the justification for someone being cruel. Like, no, this is for your benefit. And so I remember one person saying, I don't know if this is going to work because you've never raised your voice, but it's like someone raised by an abusive parent, you know, like this is how I show you that I care.It's, oh, it's such a perversion of how it should be. Katherine: No, absolutely. No. And I, I mean that I'm remembering how like I migrated to someone who was like a known abusive pastor in the evangelical world is Mark Driscoll. And I remember migrating to him as a leader because he yelled from the pulpit and because he was so angry from the pulpit.And I had without realizing it been conditioned to see [00:26:00] that a strong, trustworthy leadership in it. I was like very just Very disorienting when I realized that that happens and that I like read into that anger as good leadership. It totally, totally, really. Rachel: Okay. Yeah, it's really terrible. And people get that they, they then wind up sometimes in relationships with people who are really mistreating them because.That was translated as love. That's another thing to define. Like, what is love? And what can that look like in a relationship? And what are rights? I mean, I remember one time, I, I was flown to Texas to help with the, the raid, which had already taken place on the FLDS compound. And I, I don't like raids, even though I've worked with a lot of people who did feel traumatized by [00:27:00] them, but also relieved knowing that there were people out there who cared about what was happening behind closed doors.Like it's very mixed thing. So I wasn't involved in all planning it, but they asked me to come in to, to help to train the social workers who were working with the people who had been taken off the camp compound even temporarily. And they were talking to these women or young, well, they're really still girls who are these sister wives about rights, that they had rights.And they were looking blankly and and they said, they, they don't seem to believe us that they have rights. I said, They don't know what rights are. We have to go back. We have to teach them that there are these things that are called rights. That, that there is things called boundaries, that you have the right to say no or to control your body.But that's not true in their group. So they're not gonna believe you that they have these rights. They probably don't even know that there's this thing called a constitution. Mm-Hmm. . [00:28:00] That says that they have rights that are legally protected. And they don't even Katherine: have a Rachel: concept for it. Right. And that if they were to impose those rights, they would be abused or they would be kicked out.And so it's not safe for them to have them. So we can't jump in assuming that they've had the same life and same education and same exposure. Like we have to educate them about the fact that these things exist. And that maybe that will help them leave at some point, knowing that these things exist, but only outside the compound.Katherine: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I know that. You and I probably come from the same position of just because someone has a credential doesn't make them someone as as you as you discovered with these social workers doesn't make them equipped to work with this demographic. But if someone were to be interested in working with this demographic and wanted to.Equip themselves and get the resources to be able to work with this demographic. [00:29:00] What would you point them to and what would you direct them to? And what are some recommendations for things that they could pursue to become equipped? Rachel: Okay. I think it's a great thing. And yes, just because someone has, has initials after their name doesn't make them healthy people.And I have seen that and I've seen it for people who have dealt with abuse at the hands of psychiatrists who have an MD and You know have these very advanced degrees, but they have a disorder that makes them totally misbehave. So, and, and there are people who don't have credentials who I think have been great.So it's still buyer beware, unfortunately, even it's, it's important just to be a smart spiritual consumer and a smart therapeutic. consumer. I think what people also need to know is that now there are a lot of people who are running what they're calling support groups, and they're not necessarily credentialed people.And some run a lovely group, but they're not quite sure what to [00:30:00] do when there is an issue. And they'll sometimes call me like this happened and then someone felt ganged up on and we started talking about someone. Thinking it would be helpful, but then they felt traumatized and like, it can go down kind of a rabbit hole if there isn't someone who's had training in how to run a support group.So you want to go to someone who's had training and also there are people who have left cults who will sometimes run them as cults. That's how they manage, right? That's what they know. Yeah. And then there's a group of favorites and that, you know, and they feel, they know it and other ones are feeling ostracized.It's very culty and they're feeling judged. So see how you feel. Know that if you get involved in a group, that's not your only option. You can go shopping around, don't owe them anything. You don't have to keep coming back if it doesn't feel safe. There is, this needs to be part of. The curriculum for social work schools.Katherine: Oh, my gosh. Yes, right. It does because it's [00:31:00] so common. Rachel: It's it's so common. I'm sure you've had the experience. And if you talk about this issue, invariably, when I'm out somewhere and someone asked me what I do, there's at least one other person who's going to say, Oh, yeah. I was in something or my family member was like, it happens so frequently now that I think it should be curriculum and for people who are learning to to become therapists of any sort.It's just really not, and it's still not seen as something really as important as it should be. I've, I've taught a class at. USC about how to run support groups for people who have been abused in groups. But it's just, they'll invite you with just that Katherine: extra awareness of like, they're coming into this and they're instantly going to feel anxious because and just that extra layer of awareness that someone who has never had that experience would have no idea that someone would come in to that Rachel: environment.No, right. It's it is. It's a niche. And and I'm [00:32:00] just I'm asked when I'm asked, but most of the time not because they have other things that they think are more important to teach them and maybe they are. But still, this happens. And so the there is a program out of England run by Colleagues of mine who are lovely and wonderful have had a lot of experience.It's through the University of Salford and I think you can take courses online. It's a master's in coerce coercion and coercive control. And It teaches you about what that is. I don't know to what degree it teaches you to do the counseling piece, but it is a master's in it. So you have a good framework for understanding it.And it's new few years old, and I there need to be more programs like it. But I think If people want to go to conferences, or if they want to attend like the International Cultic Studies Association conference online, where there is a section that is [00:33:00] for professionals, how you do this work, I do some lectures on it, how you also do interventions how they're different than regular interventions and, Yeah, just understanding the nuanced differences in this work is important and to understand why those things are important.So I think attending conferences, if you want to learn reading some books, I'm in the process of writing one that is going to be about my counseling work. So hopefully that will be out soon. I hope. And, and. It will be a little bit more of like a how to this is what happened to this person. And this is how I thought to help them.And because that's missing out there. So, yeah, so I think this program in England and also attending workshops at This at the International Cultic Studies Association Conference, which is yearly, is a good place to start. And and then reading books, you know, from people who are professionals who are talking about how they do this [00:34:00] work.I, because again, there were so few resources I really have learned most of what I've learned. From my clients really taking notes, like, okay, that worked better than this. And why understanding it. And, you know, we've been a learner of the Katherine: people that you're working with. And that sounds like that's part of your story is you learned from the actual people that you were working with.And, and that can be, I think, really empowering to, I think, for someone on the client side of. This person maybe doesn't understand, but they are, they want to understand and Rachel: they want it. I mean, now I can come in feeling that I have an expertise, which is great, but I also come in with enough humility to know I don't know everything, which is a really important thing for someone who's been involved in the cult to see that someone coming in, who seems to have this position of authority is saying.I'm open to you teaching me. Katherine: [00:35:00] Absolutely. Absolutely. Rachel: And I'm open to being wrong. I'm not an actor on you. Right. Exactly. I can know about cults, but I don't know you. And I don't know what's going to work for you. Some of this is going to be trial and error. I'm not going to punish you or, you know, I'm not going to stop treating you because something I provided for you turned out to not be the best thing for you.And you let me know that I'll be happy that you let me know that so we can fine tune it for you. But yeah, that dialogue does not happen. Katherine: In the cold, like, yeah, like you have something to offer here that I don't have and like having that kind of relationship when you don't know and when it isn't your expertise, but it is something that you're interested in for something for someone who is.And I, I mean, I encounter this so often just with like [00:36:00] my clients and it typically comes up even just in their first initial consultation of trying therapy and admitted and immediately realizing it's not helping and it's not the person doesn't get them and doesn't understand and then. to have to go through the process of finding someone, you know, when you're, when you're traumatized and when you're exhausted and we're just trying to figure things out, what are some guidelines that you can give to someone who is looking for a mental health professional to help them that they can maybe look for just immediately when they.Look on someone's website and questions that they can ask during the consultation to kind of help them narrow down someone who might be able to Rachel: help. Right. So first, you know, I think you and I are going to be equally reactive to going onto people's websites who seemed who, [00:37:00] who are trying to come across.Like they have the answer. They are the one. And they need to be talking all about their credentials and how they can provide something that no one else can. That is a huge red flag because they're never also typically going to be able to admit that they were wrong because they know it all. So if it feels collaborative, collaborative.Like we will work together to help you get to where you want to go that kind of language. Like, I'm going to hold your hand while we kind of muddle through this together. I can offer what I know, but this is something that, you know, I'm not going to be coming in and I'm going to be the expert and you have to listen to everything I say.And so, yes, if it has that kind of we're working together language. And that I'm open to hearing, and I want to understand you so that I can help you. That is, it's nice that you get to be, as the former member or the person who's been through this, you get to be the expert in [00:38:00] that space too, because you know your story.And you know what you feel, you intuit that you need, and you want a therapist to be open to that. It's also important for people to notice when they first start going to a therapist, if they get the sense that they have to make a commitment for a certain amount of time. That is something I think people should not necessarily agree to cause then you're locked in and then if you decide that it really isn't working for you, you might feel like you have to keep coming back because you're of that mindset of you made a commitment and you have to stick with your commitments, but it only matters if it's helping you.And so you want it to be open ended. you want to be careful to, to not work with a therapist who keeps changing the subject. Like if you really want to talk about your cult experience or the manipulation that you went through or something that's specific to your experience and the therapist just isn't trained [00:39:00] in that.And instead of saying, you know what, you have a book that would be good, or maybe I'll do some research or cause I have. Katherine: Right. Rachel: And I've had therapists contact me and say, listen, I'm not telling you, I want you to meet with my client. We have a good relationship, but I don't know about this. Can you guide me on this?And can you give me some resources? I really value that. I think that's really wonderful. So if the therapist is open to learning so that they don't keep just kind of ignoring when you bring it up, cause it's not their expertise and saying, well, now let's just talk about your mother. Or whatever, like the usual suspect.No. And you want a therapist who honors your boundaries. And if you have a therapist who asks you questions and you don't know if you want to share so much information about yourself, even though in the cult you've been trained to share everything with anyone at all times, because you have to If a therapist says, actually, that's, I'm, I'm kind of glad that you're saying [00:40:00] no, because you don't really know me yet and you don't feel comfortable talking and you don't know how I'm going to respond to your information.That's good, then that's safe. And so what can I do, I'll ask my clients is what can I do to provide a feeling of safety here for you to let you know that I'm going to handle what you tell me. In a healthy way and something that would feel safe for you. There are therapists and I've told people this. If you have a therapist who tells you, who uses either of these two words, which are like nails going down a chalkboard for me, resistance and withholding.Katherine: If they tell you that Rachel: you are resisting or you're being resistant to this process or you're withholding information from them. Right. Just because you're saying, yeah, I don't know if I feel like force. Yes. Yes. Katherine: And it also indicates that they're almost taking offense. that the client doesn't trust them.And someone who is aware of this experience will know it is going [00:41:00] to take a lot for this client to trust me. So I'm not going to force them and I'm not going to push them. I'm going to let them lead. And how much they want to share and even just say that, Ooh, I felt my internal haunches. Yes. Wow. Rachel: Right. And you, and that somehow the client also was told they need to make a commitment to this work. That this work is the thing that's going to change them. But that is just filled with too much ego and too much stress. And just let the person be and let them breathe and let them bring snacks.Just let them relax. Right. Katherine: . Maybe don't sip a glass of wine, but having a cup of tea is fine. Exactly. Yeah. I remember one one thing that I think my therapist said that felt me helps me feel really safe was I had mentioned sexual abuse pretty early on in our, our therapeutic relationship together.[00:42:00] And it was probably a good year before I was like talking about something else. And she was like a while back, you mentioned the sexual abuse. There's a chance that that has some you know, impact on what's happening here. Like, would you mind sharing about that a little more? And so I did. And then at the end of the session, she said, Do you want to bring this up again, like if it feels important to you or do you want me to ask you about it?Like, would you prefer to bring it up or would you prefer for me to ask you about it? And that just felt, I just felt very empowered with that. And just like, she was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave this in your hands. If you want to bring it up again and you want to talk about it, we will. If you. Want me to ask you about it?I can do that as well. And it just felt, you know, just very, it felt very empowering and it, and it definitely created a sense of safety for me. And I've [00:43:00] definitely like implemented that in, in with my own clients too. Just like, is this, is this something that you want to talk about more or do you want to just wait and bring it up?Later when you're ready and you just giving, yeah, just empowering the client and when they have been so disempowered and teaching them little ways that you're allowed to take this back, you're allowed to take this voice back. That's great. That is great. I, yeah. Is there anything else that you want to share about what a client might need or what a mental health first step?Professional might need in. Rachel: In this process, so starting with mental health professionals, there are going to be times like I've, I've gotten to a certain degree desensitized to hearing some pretty horrific stories. I was not at the beginning, of course, but it is good if you find that. You know, you want to be open to this [00:44:00] population.Sometimes they've been through really horrendous, horrendous things. And so it's good. It's important for you to take care of you. And if this really is too much for you, or if it's too triggering, cause you went through something similar, get more support for yourself. So that you can be able, right. Or you can choose if there are certain parts of this population you don't want to work with, that wouldn't be healthy for you.And it's okay to say that. It's okay to know that. And then it's good for you to have a resource list, because I never liked saying no to a client when I didn't have someone else to offer them, you know, like, how about try this person. And so then if you know that you're starting out and you're still very much affected by the things that you're being told.It is good to have at least three or four other names to refer people to for those cases and really, you know, again, you know, really make sure that you feel protected along the way until you get [00:45:00] maybe a little more able or desensitized. For clients. I think it's really good to know that, at least the way I talk about it that.They're the ones having the power in that space, and they might not know it, but I will let people know that like I make sure it's where it might. I'm not at all I don't have OCD traits sometimes I wish I had more of them in my house would be cleaner. But Right. But, I measure the furniture in my office, which is a weird thing. That might sound weird, but I make sure that my therapy chair isn't higher than the other chairs or the couch. Like I want us literally to be seeing eye to eye that we are equals here. And not lording over them just because I'm in my chair, you know, I don't have power.I will tell clients that I'm going to provide for them. My 31, 32 years of experience, but that they're hiring me, they're in charge. If I'm not giving them what they want, [00:46:00] they don't have to stay. It's like if you take your car to a mechanic and they don't fix the problem, go somewhere else. Or say, this is actually not what I'm needing.I'm needing more of this. Like, guide me to know what you would like, and then maybe I can provide that with more clarity, and we can work on defining what might be helpful here. But really, you can call the shots. And you can, you know, you can cancel your next appointment and that's okay, if you have stuff to do you can, I think it's also important when someone has been involved in a cult, sometimes they get very attached to the next person who is guiding them and leading them and they can get dependent.And it is my job, I think, to be a transitional object. And it's fine if people want to be dependent on me for a time, but I will say at some point, even though I know you're calling me to ask me what decision you should make about something, I would love it [00:47:00] if you, if we could work together where you will feel confident being the one where you can ask yourself that question and feel good about the answer you give yourself and trust it.So I can be that person for a while. But part of the goal here will be to hand the baton back to you, you know, I think it's an important message. Katherine: Absolutely. Yeah. And not just. I think that that for someone looking for a mental health professional that they can work with to, as you mentioned that collaboration and that mutuality and, and, and someone not showing up in that space and like I am the expert I know.This is what you need, et cetera, et cetera. That that's a good distinction to make. And, and you can typically sense that a little bit in that first meeting and that first consultation. Not always, but I feel like that's [00:48:00] something that that will come up. And. Yeah, and I also feel like it's, it's totally fine to ask a mental health professional in that initial consultation what are some books that you have read about this?What is, what is training that you have had on this? When you say that you're trauma informed. What does that mean exactly? Have you had training in that or is it just, you know what trauma is, you know, like, like having that you can ask those questions right out of the gate and and that's okay.And a good mental health professional is not going to get defensive. Rachel: Right. Even if people want to take a break, like I'll say sure. I mean, of course I don't even have to give them permission. They can take a break whenever they want, but if they want to see if they are able to take what they got from therapy and kind of just Use it on their own and, [00:49:00] and feel like they're able to call the shots in their life and see what they can do by themselves.I think it's really important to have people have that time. And then there's no shame in calling me and saying, well, something came up. And I realized I'm not equipped for that thing that just came up yet. So can I come back for a while? And yeah, I mean, you know where to reach me, you know, you have my number if you need to come back, great.But, and then when you're done with that, feel free to, you know, I also, I don't mind collaborating with other professionals. So if someone does EMDR, and I think that would be really good for. Client, then I'll, I will refer them or say, sure, they can go see someone else. The only time that becomes an issue is if someone else is seeing someone who I think is fraudulent in some way, like they're consulting with their psychic, you know, who's telling them that they don't need counseling.They just need to pay the psychic 10, 000 and they will free them of their negative energy. Okay. Then we're going to have a discussion [00:50:00] about that. But if it's someone healthy. Who is an adjunct. I think part of the wisdom that we have in this world is knowing who our resources are and utilizing them.And so I'm, I never feel in competition, but I will warn someone if I think they're getting advice from someone who is taking advantage of them. Katherine: Absolutely. Well, this has been amazing. And I know that. Both mental health professionals and folks looking for one are going to find this episode very, very helpful.If folks want to know more about you and the work that you do, where is the best place to find you? Rachel: Right. So you can listen to my podcast. It comes out each week. It's called indoctrination. It's on every platform, as far as I can tell, which is lovely. And I can be reached. All my information is on my website, Rachel Bernstein therapy.com. I'm Los Angeles based, but I work with people all over the world. And I have this support group. That's every other Wednesday [00:51:00] night on zoom. And I work with families with people who are trying to reach out to loved ones. Trying to plan a way to intervene if they feel they need to do that and doing just general counseling day to day in my office in Los Angeles but mostly still on Zoom.And so, yeah, there are a lot of places to reach me and I'm excited to have people reach out if they think it would be helpful. Is Katherine: your support group just kind of anyone can join at any time or do you have like Is it for like a certain amount of time and you Rachel: just right. Yeah, that's a great question.So it's open ended. But I just need to vet the person before because we have had issues with people just jumping on who were from a particular group and they were. spying basically on the group to see if former members of that group were coming to this and wanting to get their information. So I, as a safeguard talk to everyone [00:52:00] first to vet them before I give them the zoom link.And and then I do have right of refusal, like if someone was pretending to be someone turns out that they're not and they really are there to wreak havoc, they're no longer invited back, it needs to remain a safe place. And it really has, except for Scientology at the beginning. And that's why I have that.I have to have that interview process now because of them. But it's been great and it's been safe and it's a really nice feeling, nice kind of supportive, collaborative feeling in that group. But yeah, so people can join at any time. And it, people come when they come. It's very open ended and which I think people.Value that there isn't the expectation and I'm not going to contact them. Like what was wrong? How come you didn't Katherine: come? Yeah, that's great. And then one final thing you mentioned a [00:53:00] university that has a master's degree about coercive control I'd love to Drop that in the show notes as well. What was Rachel: the university?University of Salford. It's in England. And It's S A L F O R D. They have a program in coercive control. Katherine: Alright, I will look that up and I will make sure that makes it in the show notes. Thank you so much for Rachel: being here. Yes, thank you. Thanks for interviewing me. It was lovely to talk to you.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson speaks with former-Scientologist and podcaster Aaron Levin-Smith. They explore his upbringing within the “church,” how Scientology entices new members, the basis for Dianetics in Freudian psychology, the religiously inspired twist only found behind multiple paywalls, the higher being known as Xenu, what broke Aaron's belief, and his now ongoing fight against the manipulation of this still relevant, international cult. Aaron Smith-Levin is a former Scientologist and host of the “Growing Up In Scientology” YouTube channel. He was also a main interviewee on the docu-series “Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath.” Since leaving the cult, he has devoted himself and his career to unmasking the harmful practices and beliefs held by the international religion. This episode was recorded on December 23, 2023  - Links - 2024 tour details can be found here - https://jordanbpeterson.com/events   Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com/ For Aaron Levin-Smith: “Growing Up in Scientology” YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/@GrowingUpInScientology/videos 

Today Carl and Bryan welcome Tim Cridland to explore the latest close encounter of an alien being by a family in Las Vegas.They examine reports of a UFO crashing in the backyard of a family who say there were eight to ten feet tall beings with huge eyes trying to hide from them. Covering a long history of sightings in Las Vegas , once know as the UFO capitol, many efforts were made to create dis- information for damage control. From Aliester Crowley, the self described BEAST, to Jack Parsons who some call the father of Rocketry, to L.Ron Hubbard the founder of Dianetics and Scientology who performed a ritual over AREA 51 called The Babylon working, this conversation covers many who have been confronted by ‘Alien beings ‘. The long sighting history of alien craft over Las Vegas which is situated close to the infamous AREA 51, continues to attract many UFO centric organizations. You will need a level of discernment to separate the truth from the misdirection of those in the government who want to control the narrative. Covering old TV shows like UFO COVER UP LIVE and publications of books and articles, there has been an attempt to control the peoples perception of said events. From the underground bases of Dulce, New Mexico, to secret installations at Indian Springs, years of research are revealed in this amazing conversation. Coming full circle back to the latest sighting by the family which went viral, join us for this eye opening discussion of real close encounters!

Effy would like to talk to you about Dianetics. Peter is puppy wrangling. Get early episodes, bonus minisodes, merch discounts, Effy video blogs, puppy content and astrology readings in the Pleasure Zone: patreon.com/weekendateffys Sponsor the podcast: weekendateffys@gmail.com SEND EFFY 650 Ponce De Leon Ave Ste. 300 #2936 Atlanta, GA 30308 Book EFFY: effylives.com Wear EFFY: wrestlingis.gay Live your mid 2000's fantasy: http://tiny.cc/effytumblr - Peter and the aliens: @lowskydance etsy.com/shop/LOWSKYDANCE Get early episodes, bonus minisodes, merch discounts, Effy video blogs, puppy content and astrology readings in the Pleasure Zone: patreon.com/weekendateffys Sponsor the podcast: weekendateffys@gmail.com SEND EFFY 650 Ponce De Leon Ave Ste. 300 #2936 Atlanta, GA 30308 Book EFFY: effylives.com Wear EFFY: wrestlingis.gay Live your mid 2000's fantasy: http://tiny.cc/effytumblr - Peter and the aliens: @lowskydance etsy.com/shop/LOWSKYDANCE --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/effylives/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/effylives/support

*Content Warning : In this episode we discuss excommunication, death and suicide. Please use discretion when listening.* Liz Gale was born a 3rd Generation Scientologist. In fact, her family was into Scientology, before it was ever called Scientology. From the moment Liz's grandmother picked up that copy of Dianetics, it set her family on a tragic trajectory until Liz herself decided to break the generational trauma that L. Ron Hubbard created. In our chat we discuss what excommunication looks like inside the church and the worst possible outcomes for those who feel like they have nowhere else to run. Show Notes Connect with Liz : TikTok | YouTube | Blog | Instagram Confessions of an Ex-Scientologist Pothead Philip Gale South Park - S9 E12 Trapped in the Closet Aftermath Foundation What is SPTV? IGotOut.org Out of MLM The BITE Model LAMLM Book Club MLM Dupes How can you help? MLM Change Report Fraud Truth in Advertising Report to your state Attorney General's office! Not in the U.S.? No Problem! Support the Podcast! Website | Patreon | Buy Me a Taco | TikTok | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Discord | Merch! Life After MLM is produced by Roberta Blevins. Audio editing is done by the lovely Kayla Craven, video editing by the indescribable RK Gold, and Michelle Carpenter is our Triple Emerald Princess of Robots. Life After MLM is owned by Roberta Blevins 2023. Music : The Limits of the Cosmos by Geoff Harvey *Some links may be affiliate links. When you purchase things from these links, I get a small commission that I use to buy us tacos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before creating Scientology, Ron Hubbard performed a ritual to incarnate the Wh*re of Babylon. Is Scientology itself perhaps an elaborate magic ritual? Hubbard also admitted to addiction to barbiturates in a Scientology lecture. At twelve, Janis was one of the original 'Commodore's Messengers' and spent time with Hubbard almost every day for eleven years both on ship and ashore. She talks about he Kali Ritual aboard ship and is confident that Hubbard was not using street drugs. Jon's paper, Possible origins of Dianetics and Scientology the video, part one part two

Continuing our in-between episodes, we will be discussing Dianetics, L. Ron Hubbard's first book that would lead him to founding scientology. Catherine and her guest Sarah discuss L. Ron Hubbard's history and the start of scientology. We also consider the danger of cults, the language that leads people into such organizations, and how many groups in the modern world use cult-ish words.

Imagine walking in the shoes of a child born and bred in the cloistered world of Scientology. This is the fascinating journey we explore with our friend, Dylan Gill, who spent seven years in the Church's Sea Organization and encountered the enigmatic figure, Shelly Miscavige. Dylan's early life was marked by rigorous Scientology courses, door-to-door selling of Dianetics books, and an environment that bred fear and paranoia. The tales he shares with us are a remarkable insight into a world few of us can truly comprehend.As we delve deeper, Dylan recounts the solemn atmosphere surrounding LRH's death and the emotional repression that ensued. He gives us a behind-the-scenes look into the intricate dynamics of the Church, the systems it employed to identify effective members and the subsequent transformation it underwent after LRH's demise. Shifting locale from Florida to Los Angeles, Dylan elucidates his time working for the Church of Spiritual Technology's (CST) LRH Archives project, a monumental endeavor to collect every piece of handwritten correspondence, tape recording, and original document from LRH.The narrative's intensity amplifies as Dylan and his wife Bronwyn are dispatched to Happy Valley for hard labor and security checks, leading them into a life of seclusion and segregation. Dylan's candor is on full display as he relays his distressing experiences at the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF), where he was treated more like a guilty prisoner than an active member of the Church. Despite engulfing fear and terror, Dylan found the courage to escape and start anew, his story serving as an inspiration to all. Come join us on this insightful journey into the heart of a fiercely debated religion, through the eyes of one who lived to tell the tale.Support the showBFG Store - http://blownforgood-shop.fourthwall.com/Blown For Good on Audible - https://www.amazon.com/Blown-for-Good-Marc-Headley-audiobook/dp/B07GC6ZKGQ/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=Blown For Good Website: http://blownforgood.com/PODCAST INFO:Podcast website: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2131160/shareApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/blown-for-good-behind-the-iron-curtain-of-scientology/id1671284503 Spotify: ...

My journey from 17 years old college wrestler through drug addiction and PhD science researcher, musician and yogi. Finally coming to self-help and social dynamics as a subject of interest and passion. When I came across AZD I realized the world class qualities I could make the most use out of in this lifetime. Early when learning from AZD he would mention L Ron Hubbard LRH and Scientology so I began to read what he recommended. Years later it began to make sense to me. And now living with AZD in IMC Base One and running IMC Nation I see how vital the writings of LRH are to living the kind of urban monk player's lifestyle that makes IMC Nation known to the world. WE ACTUALLY HAVE THE SOLUTIONS TO THE MIND and we're using the MOST underrated and undereducated subject on Earth today - male female social dynamics and mating a.k.a. dating and relationships. Now I would recommend to any ardent student of IMC Nation to read Ethics and Dianetics from LRH. It took me four years to finish. Good luck.   AZD'S DAILY MENTORSHIP PROGRAM https://www.arashzepar.com/a/2147519866/FNtLA37h ADVANCED AZD TRAINING https://www.imcbaseone.com FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA! https://geni.us/LfLAcqE

What is Dianetics? How is Dianetics related to Scientology? Who was L. Ron Hubbard?

Mark Laxer - Rama Trauma TrumpMark Laxer has been on a journey. A man who was sucked into the seductive world of a cult, eventually leaving it and finding, in time, the thinking of the cult had become one of the pillars of opinion in mainstream society.He tells Ed Opperman about what he learned from the cult, what he had noticed since he left, and how society is the poorer for the lack of compassion and critical thinking.Rama Trauma Trump is the true story of a seventeen-year-old who joins a spiritual group that starts out cool but gradually, over years, turns abusive. The young man leaves the group, tries to come to terms with the past, and years later is surprised to find that the larger culture looks an awful lot like the cult he had left. Ultimately, Rama Trauma Trump is the story of friendship and loyalty which transcends the mind-bending power of charismatic leaders.Rama Trauma Trump is a collaboration between two Vermonters, artist Marcie Vallette and Mark Laxer. They are sharing Rama Trauma Trump as a free digital download because they believe bad things happen when good people do nothing. They feel the nation is in danger. “Please download and share the book,” they ask. “And above all, please vote.”Review from website“Rama Trauma Trump is a remarkable and unique view of the inner world of an authoritarian group that reflects upon the similarities between a narcissistic pseudo-religious leader and President Trump. The information is vital, the wit is sharp and the illustrations are simply brilliant. I'm far too busy to read anything, but I picked it up immediately and couldn't put it down. Brilliant, beautiful and unique.” –Jon Atack, author of Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology and Opening Minds: The Secret World of Manipulation, Undue Influence and Brainwashing.Books (FREE) : Rama Trauma Trump Movie : Mark Laxer Website : Mark Laxer Twitter : Mark Laxer Instagram : Mark Laxer Facebook : Mark LaxerThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/1198501/advertisement

This week, it's answers about staff actually living in Scientology churches, whether the Amish are a destructive cult, the whole deal with “silent birth” in Dianetics and a lot more. Enjoy! (1) Why don't the orgs let staff live on property? It would solve the rent problem since they don't get paid, although as a… Read More »Critical Q&A #420

Justin Wells joins the pod to talk recruiting and more. Is sluggish Longhorn recruiting in East Texas something to be concerned about or a one year anomaly? Why is Texas taking a judicious approach with the last 7-8 scholarships in the class? How much portal room should Texas leave each year? Then, this week's team is Texas Tech. Paul and Justin predict every game on their schedule and discuss why the Raiders need to be taught a lesson in Austin come November. The time is now for your new mortgage or refi with Gabe Winslow at 832-557-1095 or MortgagesbyGabe. Then get your financial life in order with advisor David McClellan with a free consult: dmcclellan@forumfin.com. Read his personal finance series at Kiplinger! Need a great CenTex realtor? Contact Laura Baker at 512-784-0505 or laura@andyallenteam.com. Go buy the 11th annual Thinking Texas Football. It's better than Dianetics and The Illiad.

#scientology #lronhubbard #thelema Did Aleister Crowley influence Scientology? Did L. Ron Hubbard borrow from Thelema? Relationship between Scientologist thought, Thetan, Dianetics, and Thelema. CONNECT & SUPPORT

News On The Flipside voice artist actor,Jim Meskimen The Goodwin's well be Joining us later in the program JIM MESKIMEN Actor, Improviser & Voice Artist – Biography Jim Meskimen is an accomplished actor, improviser and voice artist whose work has been seen and heard on television, in movies and on stage for many years. He is a veteran of hundreds of TV and radio commercials, for AT&T, IBM, Subaru, Tic-Tacs, Quality Inns Hotels, and many others. From 1987 through 1992 he was the spokesman for Skaggs Alpha Beta grocery stores for which he improvised commercials that garnered a collection of prestigious advertising awards. He acted as spokesman in commercials for TGI Friday's Restaurants, Belz Factory Outlet World, Ivory Liquid Soap. Tristate Megabucks, and CVS Drugstores. Currently he can be seen in improvised commercials for Kash 'n Karry stores in Florida, Schnuck's grocery stores in St. Louis, Ames department stores in New Hampshire and Luby's Cafeterias. He has appeared on series television in Whose Line is it, Anyway?, a British comedy-improv show now seen on Comedy Central, and in a recurring role on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Other television credits include Seinfeld, Third Rock from the Sun, Grace Under Fire, Ned and Stacey, Seven Days, Family Matters and To Have and To Hold. Jim's feature film debut was in Ron Howard's The Paper (1993), starring Michael Keaton and Glenn Close. He was featured as a mission controller in the hit Universal movie, Apollo 13 starring Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon. He recently was seen in the Touchstone pictures comedy The Other Sister directed by Garry Marshall, and in Ed TV directed by Ron Howard. He also completed a featured role in Inherit The Wind for MGM, starring George C. Scott and Jack Lemmon that aired on Showtime and NBC. Jim played officer Who-Lihan in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" for Director Ron Howard. Jim is represented theatrically by William Bartoli at BBA Talent. Jim Meskimen studied theater and art all his early life and graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a Bachelor's Degree in fine art after working extensively in oil painting, drawing and lithography, while also working in the theater. During his years as an art student, he traveledd several times to Galicia, Spain to study realist oil painting with the world renowned artist Miguel Arguello, with whom he apprenticed. Returning to the States he worked in the field of animation as a character designer for Rankin/Bass Productions while pursuing his career as an actor, designing for the TV shows Thundercats and Silverhawks. Meskimen credits L. Ron Hubbard and his best-selling book, Dianetics for his success. "In 1982 I read Dianetics and started to apply the information I learned in the book to every aspect of my life which I was dissatisfied with," says Meskimen, "The result has been a steady growth of personal, artistic and financial success which never would have happened had I not applied what I had learned from Mr. Hubbard. Dianetics put me back in control of my life... permanently." He has gone on to record and direct several of L. Ron Hubbard's fiction works on cassette tapes for Bridge Publications. Jim Meskimen grew up in a theatrical family; his sister Ellen is an improvisational actress and singer who for two seasons wrote for NBC's Veronica's Closet and now writes for Friends, his late father, Freeman, was an actor and director, and his mother is Golden Globe and Emmy nominated actress Marion Ross of TV's Happy Days and the critically acclaimed Brooklyn Bridge. Jim performed improvisational theater with the award-winning ensemble Interplay, under the artistic direction of Tamara Wilcox-Smith for 13 years. He and his wife Tamra Meskimen have been fixtures in the improvisation theater community in New York and Los Angeles and currently perform with The Really Spontaneous Theatre Company. They live in Los Angeles. Find out more at: www.AppliedSilliness.com https://www.appliedsilliness.com/about/jim/resume.html

This week we hit Dianetics (no, it's not the text book or Bible of Scientology like Ash, and maybe you, though) up through OT (Operating Thetan) Level II. I know... what the hell did I just say, right?!But that means that TOMORROW you'll finally learn what happens at OT III and trust me y'all... this is what you have been waiting for. You can't gloss over this episode though because there is still some real juicy stuff to go over here!Find Alex on his YouTube channel to hear soooo much more about Scientology and to see all of the amazing guests he's had on! And as always, don't forget to subscribe to his channel, and like and comment on his videos! And if you haven't yet... please go rate and review us on Apple (you can update old reviews so they come to the top again), or just give us 5 stars on Spotify! IT'S SO VALUABLE AND APPRECIATED FRIENDS!-Join us for as little as $5 a month on Patreon!-We have some dope ass merch, go take a look!-We'd love to see you in our Discord, seriously it's the best community on the interwebs!-Follow us on Instagram and TikTok!-Audio editing by Apostate Alex and Malissa Coulson.-Research and storytelling by Apostate Alex.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4523794/advertisement

Mark Laxer - Rama Trauma TrumpMark Laxer has been on a journey. A man who was sucked into the seductive world of a cult, eventually leaving it and finding, in time, the thinking of the cult had become one of the pillars of opinion in mainstream society.He tells Ed Opperman about what he learned from the cult, what he had noticed since he left, and how society is the poorer for the lack of compassion and critical thinking.Rama Trauma Trump is the true story of a seventeen-year-old who joins a spiritual group that starts out cool but gradually, over years, turns abusive. The young man leaves the group, tries to come to terms with the past, and years later is surprised to find that the larger culture looks an awful lot like the cult he had left. Ultimately, Rama Trauma Trump is the story of friendship and loyalty which transcends the mind-bending power of charismatic leaders.Rama Trauma Trump is a collaboration between two Vermonters, artist Marcie Vallette and Mark Laxer. They are sharing Rama Trauma Trump as a free digital download because they believe bad things happen when good people do nothing. They feel the nation is in danger. “Please download and share the book,” they ask. “And above all, please vote.”Review from website“Rama Trauma Trump is a remarkable and unique view of the inner world of an authoritarian group that reflects upon the similarities between a narcissistic pseudo-religious leader and President Trump. The information is vital, the wit is sharp and the illustrations are simply brilliant. I'm far too busy to read anything, but I picked it up immediately and couldn't put it down. Brilliant, beautiful and unique.” –Jon Atack, author of Let's Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky: Hubbard, Dianetics and Scientology and Opening Minds: The Secret World of Manipulation, Undue Influence and Brainwashing.Books (FREE) : Rama Trauma Trump Movie : Mark Laxer Website : Mark Laxer Twitter : Mark Laxer Instagram : Mark Laxer Facebook : Mark LaxerThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/1198501/advertisement

Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Stat” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Codine" by the Charlatans. Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry, a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal, Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself, which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation, and The Writer's Crusade, a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human. For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding. 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology, and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road, which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school and around there. That was one of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybody sang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn't know anybody that played. I mean, I didn't know anybody that played the guitar. Nobody. They weren't around. There were no guitar teachers. You couldn't take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know? When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and it was like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I was late" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn't have is the harmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That's what it's missing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said “I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown' on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie's word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can't walk and arms can't think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don't think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site... We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, 'cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even [fuckin'] know it. I couldn't hear that low, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instant arrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn't matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said “Jerry, listen, it's seven-thirty on New Year's Eve, and I don't think you're going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D'Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn't have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I'm gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn't believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of th

This week, I discuss remembering Xenu in Scientology auditing, give a rundown on why History of Man is important, what Dianetics 55! signifies and lot more. Enjoy! (1) When people are being audited, do any remember back to the Xenu days?  I would think as the Xenu story is (more or less) public knowledge, someone… Read More »Critical Q&A #410

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Bad Cadet is an excellent addition to the welter of biographies by former members. Katherine Spallino was born into the Sea Org in Los Angeles and gives a vivid description of her childhood and coming of age. I had intended to skim the book before talking with Katherine, but found the material so compelling that I read from cover to cover. Katherine reads a few passages and tells us about life after Scientology. Links: For more about Katherine's book Katherine's Twitter: @BadCadet Tony Ortega's Underground Bunker Ex-Scientology Kids Never Believe a Hypnotist the paper the video Possible Origins of Dianetics and Scientology: the paper the video part one the video part two

TENE pod continues their look into fashy ruling class woowoo following JB Rhine's ESP lab at Duke into the first steps on the path to Project Stargate alongside the Golden Age science fiction fandom created by John W. Campbell and Astounding Science Fiction. Praise Mighty Jorth! Cool sci-fi sounds from freesound.org Subscribe to patreon.org/tenepod and twitter.com/tenepod.

In this episode we look at Scientology beginning with the best selling book: Dianetics. We dive into the teachings of the group, where there money comes from and where it goes. You be the judges. Do they practice in reality what they preach to the public? Are they out to better mankind or is there a bigger picture here? Are they a legit religion or a cult? email us at: downtherh@protonmail.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/nwczradios-dtrh/message

This week, Jon Atack and I do a follow-up discussion to our last podcast about L. Ron Hubbard and the occult origins of Dianetics and Scientology. This information sometimes makes ex-Scientologists uncomfortable because it's basically so diabolical, no one wants to think they were part of something that bad. But Jon and I had a... The post Sensibly Speaking Podcast #370: Hubbard, Scientology and Mysticism appeared first on The Sensibly Speaking Podcast.

NY goes after Twitch, Musk's real plan, Apple's DeepMind defection Elon Musk says Twitter deal can't happen until bot account dispute is resolved.  Twitter asks shareholders to support Musk's purchase.  NY Launches Ridiculous, Blatantly Unconstitutional 'Investigations' Into Twitch, Discord; Deflecting Blame From NY's Own Failings.  @kendraschaefer: My goodness. China's cyberspace watchdog, the CAC, just published a long (and unprecedented) set of draft regulations for recommendation algorithms.  Why is the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial so visible on social media?  The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt.  Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell.  Dianetics and scientology technical dictionary by L. Ron Hubbard.  Losing Ian Goodfellow to DeepMind is the dumbest thing Apple's ever done.  The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology by Amy Webb, Andrew Hessel.  Apple Shows Headset to Board in Sign It's Reached Advanced Stage.  VeeCon: Exclusive Conference Around Web 3 and Culture.  Fears grow for smaller nations after ransomware attack on Costa Rica escalates.  Ransomware gang Conti 'shuts down' in midst of Costa Rica attack.  Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.  Bobiverse by Dennis Taylor.  The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman.  Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand. Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science by Harry R. Lewis.  Pinball Map Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Amy Webb and David Spark Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: www.stamps.com - promo code: TWIT expressvpn.com/twit noom.com/twit Indochino.com promo code TWIT

Leah and Mike are joined by Jeff Hawkins, an extremely talented, thoughtful and articulate former Sea Org member to recount his experiences with David Miscavige, his role in making Dianetics a bestseller again the 80's and his journey into and out of scientology.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com