![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Training Routine Zero
Scientology is a rather difficult area to study, because they are very aggressive about maintaining a positive public image. As such, the information that you’ll find from Scientology-approved resources and ones which are not authorized by them tends to be rather different. Their official information online though is actually extremely difficult to navigate. Perhaps this is intentionally done to bring the curious in for a one-on-one session. Or else maybe it’s just a poor choice of information architecture.
In any event, I’ve become interested in the “Training Routines” of Scientology, called “TR” for short. The only thing I can find on the Scientology website about it is on a drug rehab page, and says:
It consists of drills, called TRs, whose purpose is to increase and improve an individual’s ability to confront (to face without flinching or avoiding) and be there in the present.
Nowhere on that site can I find any information about what a TR consists of. However, many other sites seem to have reasonably consistent information about what goes on in the various TR’s. Since they aren’t “approved” by the organization, you’ll have to take them with a grain of salt I suppose, but I recommend reading them nonetheless. Start with an article called TRs the Hard Way — ‘Flunk for Blinking! Start!’
One of the more interesting Training Routines is TR-0:
In the first training routine, called “TR-0″ for Training Routine Zero, two students sit in chairs facing each other, knees almost touching, and they look into each other’s eyes without blinking for a prolonged period of time. If either student blinks, moves, twitches, or has tearing of the eyes, etc., he or she will be flunked and told to restart the drill.
During TR-0, a student may hallucinate, and will almost certainly experience some sort of dissociation; however, the drill is continued until the student can effortlessly maintain an unblinking stare with his partner.
The second stage of this routine incorporates something called “bullbaiting” where you intentionally try to provoke a response from the partner, using a variety of verbally abusive techniques, and you keep going “until each student can confront anything the partner says or does without reacting”. Based on what I’ve read of Scientology, this training ritual seeks to diminish the strength of what Hubbard called the “reactive mind”. In his system, the reactive mind stores negative life patterns, and sort of forces you to relive them over and over. So it seems like this tries to break the chain of automatic reaction. However, I’m sure it does a lot beyond that as well.
Detractors of Scientology, however, are not quite so generous with their assessments:
It is a mind-control technique that opens up the mind for programming. TR 0 induces an eyes-open alpha state, building on OT-TR0. I vividly remember one of the instructions I received while learning TR0: “don’t evaluate, just accept the data.” Yeah, right. In other words, suspend disbelief and get programmed.
The long hours of staring at a fixed object caused hallucinations in me. I didn’t realize at the time that this was a sign of hypnosis. The sensory deprivation is incredible. You’re working hard on not FLUNK!ing, and having to start over. The Scientology staff coach does a good job of FLUNK!ing you for no apparent reason (at least in your own normally socialized mind), creating all sorts of uncertainty and confusion.
Come to think of it, this is actually quite similar to one of the classical symptoms of schizophrenia. They call it “flattening of affect” and it means you’re lacking proper emotional response. (Although this seems to be a rather subjective criteria. Who decides what’s appropriate? A diagnosis of schizophrenia of course consists of many other characteristics, but the similarity is still worth noting.)
Another interesting correlation for all you Philip K. Dick fans: in his novel A Scanner Darkly, the main character is admitted to a drug rehab facility, run by a group called Synanon. Synanon was a real organization that was repeatedly accused of cultish behavior. I don’t know a ton about them, but here’s some introductory info. In any event, Synanon used a technique called “the Game.” It seems to have been a form of group therapy designed to break down a personsality so it could be rebuilt. That article has some info about the Game:
The Synanon game required participants to gather chairs in a circle. A theme was introduced–ranging from worldly philosophical questions to mundane housekeeping matters–and the attacks would begin.
The verbal assaults–physical violence was forbidden–didn’t necessarily have to be based on reality. One person could launch a tirade on another with no foundation. Others in the group generally supported the attacker with comments of their own.
The goal was to dump emotional hangups during the game so people would be happy outside the game. That was the upside. The downside was that it distorted reality and inflicted emotional injury.
(Sounds a little like Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate) Here’s an excerpt from Scanner to give you a taste of what it’s like:
He sat in the Game and they screamed at him. Faces, all over, screaming; he gazed down.
“Y’know what he is? A kissy-facy!” One shriller voice made him peer up. Among the awful screaming distortions one Chinese girl, howling. “You’re a kissy-facy, that’s what you are!”
“Can you fuck yourself? Can you fuck yourself?” the others chanted at him, curled up in a circle on the floor.
[…]
“You turd prick,” the Executive Director said. “You weakling. You puke. You suck-off. You snatch.”
He heard nothing now. And forgot the meaning of the words, and, finally, the words themselves.
Only, he sensed Mike watching him, watching and listening, hearing nothing; he did not know, he did not recall, he felt little, he felt bad, he wanted to leave.
The Vacuum in him grew. And he was actually a little glad.
To be fair though, bizarre practices seem to be found in many traditional schools of meditation. I’m having trouble tracking down info on it, but I’ve heard that in certain forms of Zen practice, the master will walk around and basically smack a student for no reason. I don’t have any personal experience in this sort of thing though, so I can’t say. It all seems to very closely walk the line of what’s acceptable (to me). It’s one thing to be made aware of the inner workings of your own mind, but it’s very much another to be subtly or overtly abused or coerced according to someone else’s agenda.
The potential for abuse in such a situation also seem enormous. Take a look at another account of TR-0:
Some participants say they “exteriorize” while in TR-0. When a person exteriorizes, his spirit leaves his body temporarily, perhaps hovering a short distance from his head. The concept is akin to “astral projection.” [Hubbard] suggests that the ideal relationship between the spirit and its body is one of moderate exteriorization. The spirit should be outside the body, but near it, operating the body at arm’s length, so to speak. In psychiatric terms, this seems to be a state of general dissociation. When deep in TR-0, I noticed that my physical sensations were greatly attenuated. A feather lightly brushing across my face did not tickle. An itch did not matter. I was only dimly aware of the existence of my legs. It seemed as if my personal boundary had contracted. When my hand was touched to my face, I sensed the contact in my cheek, but not in my fingers!
It reminds me of an article on ritual abuse by Beth Goobie called the Network of Stolen Consciousness. In it she talks about how the purpose of the ritual abuse she experienced was intended to trigger dissociation as a means of programming her mind:
Dissociation is commonly experienced during trauma. Rape and traffic accident survivors describe out-of-body experiences during which they float above their bodies and watch terrifying activities transpire below. This experience occurs naturally, whether the actual trauma is a fluke occurrence or a calculated torture session.
(I discuss these techniques in more detail in my article about Trauma-Based Mind Control.)
After Traing Routine Zero, there are a series of other alleged training techniques that are described here and here. I would definitely advise that you go and read about them so that you can evaluate the information for yourself. (PS. This is the best overview of the Scientology recruitment/induction process that I’ve seen so far, and I’ve been researching this for several weeks.)
Does anybody have any experiences similar to these within a mystical or religious tradition - or even within Scientology itself? As I said, I recognize these ideas cropping up in places wholly unrelated to Scientology. It seems worth exploring whether or not there are any potential merits for adapting such ideas for your own personal use, or if they can be used positively within the right situations. I remain skeptical, but I’m open to discussion.
June 27th, 2005 at 1:09 am
This is how I think the “zen smack” is supposed to work. First it’s not random at all, but only for the student who wil actually be helped by it. Say a student has been studying for years with a teacher who has always treated them with patience and compassion. The teacher realizes that they are on the verge of enlightenment and that the only thing still holding them back is a sense of attachment to the teacher’s approval. The smack provides just the shock that is needed to breakthrough to a nondualistic state of mind. Of course not all zen masters are as enlightened as they are claimed to be, sometimes “crazy wisdom” is the perfect excuse for abuse. But if you accept that enlightenment exists, and that there are what Buddhists call “skillful means” for pointing it out, then the paradox of a compassionate smack upside the head (in the right situation) would seem to be effective.
June 27th, 2005 at 1:51 am
Holy crap, man, nice timing! I just now happened to be reading a research study about “The Forum”, which I personally attended almost 15 years ago as a teenager (with the consent and encouragement of my parents, who had previously enrolled in the program themselves). Reading about it totally brought back a lot of the parts I had forgotten.
Some of the training techniques they use are definitely designed to break down people’s emotional defense mechanisms. Long days with virtually all waking time spent within the program, and a leader who will totally berate and rip into anyone who shows signs of “resisting” or not “getting” something, and a lot of other more subtle stuff (which I didn’t consciously notice when I was there, but the article points out) like the chairs and furniture in the room being arranged to be perfectly symmetrical down to the inch.
At the same time, a lot of the concepts they teach about reality and the way we perceive it are both interesting philosophically and useful in a practical sense. (For example, even now, I still use the term “racket” — described in the part 3 of that link — when thinking about certain patterns in myself and what drives them, and find it helpful to clarify what’s going on inside me.)
What the article says about people coming out of it after three days with a sense of total “euphoria” is also very accuate. As a group, there’s this huge sense of accomplishment which is fed by the personal stories from participants about the exciting things that are happening in their lives thanks to the program. (In addition to the 16 hours spent each day in sessions, people are given homework assignments to do stuff like get back in contact with a relative they may shut out of their lives, or, to use the language of the Forum, are “withholding” from, so you’ll hear a lot of people talking about how they got back in touch with a parent they hadn’t spoken to in 10 years and breaking down in tears and stuff like that.)
One of the exercises from their “Advanced Course” (which I also attended before I became wary of the whole thing) is somewhat similar to the TR-0 training you describe, although there are some key differences. They have people form two rows facing each other, and then for several solid minutes, you’re supposed to make constant eye contact with the person directly across from you, without looking anywhere else or saying anything. (But there is no “failing” it like the Scientology thing.) The people on one side are told to mentally “support” the ones on the other side.
During this, the Forum leader walks around and observes everybody (especially those who are supposed to be doing the “supporting”), and if he thinks that your mind might be wandering, he firmly tells you to “stay with her”, “keep being present”, “don’t go off into space, stay here because this person needs you”. Some of the people would spontaniously start crying. By the time it’s over, you really feel like you have a deep bond with the other person, even though you didn’t know them at all outside the program.
So I think there definitely can be positive results from forms of training that use “harsh” or extreme measures to bend or break people. If life has somehow fucked a part of us up — some part of ourselves that we’re not able to reach or fix on our own — it makes sense to turn to someone who can get in there and rewire our minds, so to speak. It might even take on the form of “brainwashing” if things need to be tinkered with really seriously. But this requires a great deal of trust, and there’s the risk that an unscrupulous trainer might wield that power to enslave us, or take all our money for themselves.
It’s like the Pop Tarot cards. There’s a side that helps us, and a sinister side, and often they’re intertwined so much that it’s impossible to draw a line between “good” and “bad”.
June 27th, 2005 at 1:51 am
i think that frequent shocks to the system were a key component of gurdjieff’s, er, ‘teachings’.
personally i don’t care if that kind of shit really can lead to real spiritual progress, it’s still pretty fucked-up. i guess getting smacked is just not the path for me.
June 27th, 2005 at 6:32 am
Life itself is pretty good at delivering random shocks and smackdowns.
June 27th, 2005 at 7:28 am
i used to have a little old hardcover book written by ouspensky. he followed gurdjieff across europe during the war,living in abandoned villas etc. p.d.`s descriptions of the games going on with gurdjieff`s group were a lot like some of the scientology stuff. if you read tex watson`s court transcripts from the manson trial, he talks about some of charlie`s methods. similar depersonalisation rituals,plus the dmt,jimson weed,lsd,beer,etc.
gurjdieff went so far as to neglect his wife`s failing health during thier ordeals and she died.
and,yes life does enough to us all on it`s merry own. if this research and exploration does anything,hopefully it will enure us to falling into some malicious rabbit hole where we are pawns for some messianic crackpot. that`s always been the reason for my interest.
June 27th, 2005 at 9:30 am
check this out:
http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2005/06/27/cruise/index.html
June 27th, 2005 at 9:31 am
i like the super creepy picture that i thought was fake but aparently isn’t.
June 27th, 2005 at 11:28 am
here is a breakdown of ot vii. http://www.xs4all.nl/~kspaink/fishman/ot7.html.
June 27th, 2005 at 11:45 am
the spacing wasn`t intentional,it occured as i pasted the link.
regarding the validity of ot7, i use some of the techniques indicated within the fishman article.they are known processes from nlp(neuro-linguistic programming). the majority of the work i do with these techniques is to show people how they store feelings internally, in precise ways. by showing people how to exert control over the images and sounds(memories) they can change thier responses, if they want to.
there have to be some moral and ethical values in place before this work can begin. the ability to manipulate is immense and in the wrong hands highly destructive.
if my memory serves, i believe germany ran scientology out 15 years ago.
June 27th, 2005 at 12:24 pm
in zen schools, it’s not even necesarily the teacher who does the whacking. most of the time it’s other acolytes who walk around delivering the random whack with a bamboo stick.
one big difference in the ‘zen smack’ tradition is that if you find it too much of a hindrance, you can ask the techer to knock it off (in most modern schools, anyhow). or, the teacher will tell the acolytes to tap people more lightly. it’s by no means integral to the tradition, or necessary for everyo practitioner.
in my understanding, the pain isn’t the point– it serves many purposes, one of which is to remind the person meditating not to get attached even to the meditation. it also serves to spark the enlightenment experience in an indescribable way.
June 27th, 2005 at 2:01 pm
Syanon actually has scientological roots if you dig deep enough.
I find it more than a touch odd that they use techniques like this yet so harshly criticize the use of traditional hallucingenic methods.hink I’d rahter trust the Amanita fairy than the fallability of the “technologist.”
June 27th, 2005 at 2:17 pm
I suspected they had Scientological roots (because of Narconon, which definitely does), but I didn’t want to say so before I had something to back it up with. You don’t happen to know a good resource for splinter groups and offshoots of Scientology, do you? It seems like there are just so many once you start looking.
June 27th, 2005 at 2:49 pm
Synanon was a Scientology-run business that made millions from state drug-rehab contracts mandated instead of jail time. Werner Erhard, founder of est and The Forum was a former Scientologist.
June 27th, 2005 at 2:50 pm
“I’m having trouble tracking down info on it, but I’ve heard that in certain forms of Zen practice, the master will walk around and basically smack a student for no reason.”
The wake-up stick (kyosaku in Japanese) is used in some modern Zen schools to help people wake up, in various senses, especially during long retreats. The usual method in use today is that the monitor will walk around the zendo holding the stick; when he gets to you, if you want a whack, you bow from your cushion. You generally get a couple of good whacks on the shoulders, and sometimes the upper back. If the stick-wielder is skilled, as my teacher was, it’s like getting a 30-minute chair massage compressed into a few seconds.
The random-whack business fits into the older Oriental Zen and martial arts culture, in which the student was in it for life or the teacher wouldn’t bother. Those students took vows to learn Zen, or kendo or whatever, or die trying.
June 27th, 2005 at 3:58 pm
Haven’t heard anyone yet mention Carlos Castaneda with respect to cults and mind-fucking. I got some good stuff from reading a few of his books, but from what I hear, he and his followers really got into some pretty cultlike behavior at the end.
In Castaneda’s books he talks about the concept of the “petty tyrant,” which according to his teacher don Juan consisted of using extremely humiliating situations, such as those that conquered Natives would endure under the rule of the Spanish, to break down the ego. Fascinating stuff, but from websites like Sustained Action and books like Amy Wallace’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda, it’s clear that he turned into an ego junkie himself and abused his followers using the very techniques and concepts that were supposed to help them.
… Yeah, fine line between abuse and assistance. I’ve recently been reading some case studies of the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, who was a master of reading and adjusting people’s behavior. In one instance he had an unwilling patient, a very uptight Prussian gentleman, a stroke victim who was completely paralyzed and so unable to resist when his wife dragged him in. Erickson, having worked with Prussians before and knowing what buttons to push, spent an hour insulting the man until, his pride so damaged, the man rose in anger and lurched out of the room and into the car. After that Erickson was able to work with him to regain better physical movement.
Thing is, that kind of power has to come with a lot of wisdom, wisdom that it seems that Erickson had in spades — by his keen observation of people and by his strong desire to help others. But knowledge and power without wisdom, well that turns into some pretty dangerous stuff. It’s not always clear who has what though.
June 27th, 2005 at 4:49 pm
my training is in ericksonian hypnosis. richard bandler, in the developement of nlp with john grinder, modelled milton.it became the milton model.(funny how that works.) the milton/bandler interaction is hilarious. i have played richard bandler`s audio material for friends and they have consistantly mistaken it for george carlin. it is a part of the human growth movement that i can say with some pride comes from a place of compassion and wisdom. it is a powerful tool for helping people to learn flexibility over thier situations. i look forward to seeing clients, knowing that we are going to find new ways of doing things, together.
a large part of nlp training is learning how people do thier stuff to themselves, trying it on yourself briefly, on occasion, and then using thier internal ecology(map) to build new behaviours. i can see similarities in what scientology does, especially the ot7. my concern is who is administering the treatments and why. does the average person know that they are being reprogrammed when they go to scientology? do the people who are administering the treatments? many clergy are unaware that they are hypnotists.
June 27th, 2005 at 5:02 pm
Hey alistair, that’s interesting, what audio stuff are you talking about? is it commercially available? or as a transcript anywhere?
June 27th, 2005 at 6:18 pm
david,if you google “nlp” you will find organisations and practitioner websites. the course materials are expensive and the training in nlp is all live seminars with master level instructors. there is peer-to-peer (kazaa) of course………..
i am a trained hypnotherapist. i am certified through the robert shields college in england and have studied ericksonian hypnotherapy as part of my ongoing professional development.
i have a collection of audio and video bandler material that has been invaluable in my development as a therapist, not only for my clients, but for my own path. i highly recommend the content. it is about as non-proselytising as any of this material can be, in that it deals in manipulation. for some, they can never get past that. it`s all about your own ethics.
June 27th, 2005 at 7:24 pm
Yeah, I’m acquainted with NLP. I was just curious what material, specifically, you were referring to in your previous comment. Erickson and NLP is fascinating stuff … and I can see it being co-opted to serve the needs of conspiracy, quite easily!
June 28th, 2005 at 12:22 am
richard bandler`s designing human engineering series on audio disk and the book frog into princes.they are great place to start. i have been studying and practicing nlp and hypnotherapy for nearly 10 years and so much information has passed through the grey matter that i have lost track. i have a series of talks that bandler did in india which is aboslutely wild but the recording quality is horrible. it is probably the best of his stuff. i can`t remember where i ordered it from though.
what i find is that the basic skill set of nlp/hypnosis is launch platform for intuitive work that i do and i suprise myself regularly with the insight and direction thing head in in session.
in summary i guess the best way to start in reading/listening is with the two things i mentioned, apply them to your own neurology and those you trust and go from there.
July 7th, 2005 at 12:14 pm
[…] laims it has only one goal: to make the prisoner believe he is insane. If you recall, the Scientology Training Routines make use of a lot of very similar mental re-pat […]
July 8th, 2005 at 7:42 pm
[…] ion sessions, debilitating work routines”. Certainly we’ve seen that many such rituals are designed to re-pattern the thinking and behaviors of an individua […]
July 26th, 2005 at 1:30 pm
[…] ly doing. It seems like the meat of the religion is in their practices, particularly their training routines. Their practices are designed to re-train and re-engineer t […]
January 21st, 2007 at 11:54 pm
[…] Long ago they had much shorter phone numbers. Last night I discovered one for a man named Reed Wright and his machines. The number was 3-1234. I want to call it but I’m scared of what I might find. Flunk for blinking start! However, two things appear to be — but are not — recorded in the standard banks: painful emotion and physical pain. In moments of intense pain, the action of the analytical mind is suspended and the second part of the mind, the reactive mind, takes over. […]