What's the ugliest pa-art of your body?
What's the ugliest pa-art of your body?
Some say your nose,
Some say your toes
But I think it's your mind....

Frank Zappa

Hot fudge AND pure maple syrup???!! Yech!

(Some techno and trance dance, too. Good fun.)

Merlin, now WHY are you trying to trick me? I'm just an old naive granny minding my own business, and you're trying to bait me. Shame on you.

I have an AWFUL time equating "genius" with what Don Carlo quotes. This Frank Zappa guy thinks he's a rock, and then he writes a song about hating someone's mind. You gotta try harder than that to convince me. (Hint: I never liked Elvis or any who followed him, even when I was a teenager. I like those "oldies" - you know, the ones that are about 400 years old.)

"Scientology and all the other cults
are one-dimensional, and we live in a
three-dimensional world. Cults are as
dangerous as drugs. They commit the
highest crime: the rape of the soul."
-L. Ron Hubbard, Jr.

This officer(L.Ron Hubbard) is not satisfactory for independent duty assignment. He is garrulous and tries to give impressions of his importance. He also seems to think he has unusual ability in most lines.

-US naval attachè to Australia, February 14, 1942

Great quote, Haarek.

Freeborn, Frank Zappa was always an advocate of free speech, and in fact testified in Congress for it. To me, the song, "What's the Ugliest Part of your Body," is saying that prudish censors are the ones with ugly minds.

Frank Zappa had a intelligent twist to his outrageous remarks that makes today's bad boys like Eminem seem immature and annoying.

You may be right. I just never liked to stand around being bombarded with bonky noise, regardless of whatever the message was. If that makes me culturally deprived, so be it.

I suspect, however, that most of the "musicians" of the past 50 years will be consigned to the ash heap of history, long before Mozart, Handel, and Beethoven fade out of favor. (I do like a little Bluegrass banjo/fiddling and Celtic music, too, so I'm not totally ancient.)

While perusing the net for Crowleyanity and Thelema websites, I came upon the following from a man formerly involved in the CoS:

"My opinion, straight out, is that Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was a well-read genius who had a very weak grasp on reality and a dismal sense of integrity. He absorbed ideas from everywhere and incorporated them into his own works without the least bit of acknowledgement. To be sure, there are some things that he did on his own -- and some of these are, in my opinion, brilliant. In places, his writing (most of which was not actually written but transcribed from taped lectures) could be described as inspired. But he laced it with fluff from his own embellished view of his life experiences to the extent that one has to be a real detective to sort through it all."

More at http://www2.gol.com/users/larabell/xenu.html

"Either directly or obliquely, it is probable that no other methodology has had more profound an influence on New Age thought than Hubbard's."

from the magazine Gnosis, Summer 1989.

Let me get this straight: LRH stole stuff from "everywhere," including the distant past, so why is that so NEW Age-y?

New Age people tend to throw the Hindu scriptures, parts of the Bible, Buddhist meditation, Freudian psychoanalysis and a handful of crystals into a blender and puree it. LRH did this as well.

Also, many people who passed through Scientology went on to participate in the New Age movement throughout the seventies and eighties. Or they were influenced by EST or Knowledgism or Avatar or Transactional Analysis, which were all Scio spinoffs.

One of my favorite New Age speakers, for instance, frequently uses the phrases "confront" and "withhold," and I didn't understand the reason she used those particular words in that particular way until I studied Scientology in more depth.

Also, to answer Freeborn's question about what makes repackaging so NEW, it's possible that the "newness" of the New Age consists only in the idea that there are no more ideas to be discovered -- only old ideas to be recycled. Hopefully with acknowledgement!

Not only that, but the term "New Age" has been around for at least 30 years - I recall reading about it in Mother Earth News way back then in the olden days. Well, I guess the argument could be made that it's "new" compared with Judaism and other stuff thousands of years old.

However, I never noticed anything by Beethoven or Bach in the "New Age" music!!

Transactional Analysis is recycled Freud, not recycled Hubbard.
Transactional Analysis has Parent, Adult and Child parts of the human mind. Freud had Superego, Ego, and Id.