Vinaire's Story

[Vinaire]

I first wrote this story on Beliefnet from November 2002 till August 2003 with long breaks in between. This time those breaks won't be there until I get to the point where I ended it last time. I may continue after that depending on the inspiration I get.

Here is the beliefnet post that started my story:

11/21/02 11:26 PM

Well, you guys sure seem to be getting upset with me. I really do not know what has made you guys so bitter. I could count many reasons to be bitter too, but knowledge has always grabbed my attention leaving little attention for bitterness.

I would not hesitate to say that I have probably suffered more hardships than many of you combined. Probably the Hindu ascetic streak within me helped me pull through some very tough times. The inner assurance throughout has been some vague perceptions of truth since my early Hindu upbringing, which suddenly blossomed into my awareness when I ran into Scientology in the United States.

It was February 1969 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was a poor student just arrived from India with only $10 in my pocket. Fortunately, I had a full scholarship provided by M.I.T. for its Master’s program in Nuclear Engineering. It was enough to meet my needs.

I still remember those days quite vividly. I was from a very conservative background suddenly thrown into the middle of a full-blown Hippie movement. I was wide-eyed and innocent. I remember being perplexed when somebody exclaimed “far out,” and I looked around and far into the distance to see what he was referring to.

Those were not really very happy days for me because all my hopes for a cure were dashed. I had expected to find a cure in America for the extreme pain I used to suffer from. Soon after I arrived I went to the Mass General Hospital to get examined completely. Only I was told after a few days that I was suffering from Ankylosing Spondilitis and the sedimentation rate was quite high. All I could do was to take ten aspirins a day to keep the pain down. I could look forward to two more years before I was completely bed ridden. This condition usually led to the doubling of the spine with a collapse of the rib cage and the lungs. Chances of survival were minimal.

I continued for a few days with aspirins to suppress the attack of pain, but depression overtook me. Life didn’t seem to be much fun at all. I contemplated the worst when I had the best of the opportunities in this material world. I felt very alone. My family was in India. I couldn’t communicate any of this to them. They could do nothing about it anyway. Why give them worry! I sought help from the student counselor. The counselor directed me to see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist gave me some pills.

I took the aspirins and those pills for a few days. I felt spaced out. It was simply horrible. Then something strange happened.

I was walking down with a friend of mine toward the Central Square. I was trying to amuse myself looking at all the hippies with long hair and colorful, ragged clothes. Suddenly, a frizzy haired girl appeared in front of me and thrust something into my hands. It was about 1” by 4” sized ticket of a yellow color. It said DIANETICS on the top with a fatherly looking smiling face in the center. It said something about PSYCHOSOMATIC ILLNESSES and how Dianetics could handle such illneses easily and swiftly. It invited one to a lecture. The address given on that ticket was close by.

My friend had gotten a ticket too. We looked at those tickets with amusement. It seemed like somebody was out to con people by selling something like snake oil. We decided to amuse ourselves by going to the lecture. We simply expected to see some long haired, drug-happy hippies there.

[To be continued…]

P.S. I hope you guys don’t mind me telling this story and if it takes some time to unfold fully. You may continue with your other discussions in the meantime. I will refer to the number of this post in the next installment to keep some continuity. Here I just wanted to paint the picture of my condition which prompted me to look into Dianetics and Scientology. If I were not so desperate I wouldn’t have given another thought to Dianetics.

 

[Alanzo]

You had a very different viewpoint back then, as I remember, with regard to the Church.

You would have never said something like, "the events are boring and mechanical", for instance.

I hope you update your story with your new viewpoints, and with your re-newed allegiance to the path of knowledge, and the renewed courage it takes to truly travel it.

Far out, Vinaire!

 

[Alan]

It was February 1969 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was a poor student just arrived from India with only $10 in my pocket. Fortunately, I had a full scholarship provided by M.I.T. for its Master?s program in Nuclear Engineering. It was enough to meet my needs.

1969 - That was back in the days when I owned the Boston and Cambridge Centers, which later became the Boston Org.

Alan

 

[OHTEEATE]

Couriers

I had a lot of contact with Bess and Don Currier, and Bill Foster, who had track at Boston Org. Were they there in your time, Alan? Don passed away from cancer or a brain tumor some years back, around 2000 or so.

 

[Alan]

I had a lot of contact with Bess and Don Currier, and Bill Foster, who had track at Boston Org. Were they there in your time, Alan? Don passed away from cancer or a brain tumor some years back, around 2000 or so.

I knew Don Currier, and Bill Foster quite well - though more from later years. We had some fun times.

 

[Zinjifar]

Those were not really very happy days for me because all my hopes for a cure were dashed. I had expected to find a cure in America for the extreme pain I used to suffer from. Soon after I arrived I went to the Mass General Hospital to get examined completely. Only I was told after a few days that I was suffering from Ankylosing Spondilitis and the sedimentation rate was quite high. All I could do was to take ten aspirins a day to keep the pain down. I could look forward to two more years before I was completely bed ridden. This condition usually led to the doubling of the spine with a collapse of the rib cage and the lungs. Chances of survival were minimal.

Interesting. In '69 I'd dropped out of college (for the first time) and, by '72 I was stalled out in Germany, on my way to India, because I was playing music and suddenly had a girlfriend.

Then I didn't have the girlfriend, but did have a job as a printer (as a 'guest-worker) and was refinancing the trip when I was, over the course of a couple of weeks, laid low with something that caused intense pain and caused random joints in my fingers and feet to swell up to amazing size, which made walking or touching anything almost impossible.

It's a good thing I was in Germany, because the medical coverage was great, but, they couldn't diagnose it and I ended up in various hospitals for the next year, where they experimented on me with everything from injected gold to oil and anything else they could think of. Since it was a university hospital I was in finally, they enjoyed showing me off to various students and running tests, for what they thought was some kind of poli-arthritis, but didn't show up in blood tests. Finally, one of their scattered shots hit home (indometacin) and I started recovering (somewhat). (I had been self-treating with aspirin since the beginning, which had most of the doctors amused. 'These Americans! haha'

Anyway, the indometacin was like a miracle and, while I had recurrent attacks every few weeks, it allowed me to keep it under control.

Anyway, what made this interesting is that, finally, around '80, somebody thought to run the HLA-B27 test and do some more spine x-rays and I finally had a diagnosis of ankylosing spondilitis (which they charmingly called 'morbus bechterev' locally)

Anyway, the indometacin worked wonders for keeping it in its place and, for the most part it's gone into remission, with fewer attacks, which I manage to keep under control with massive Motrin, as long as I catch them in time.

Zinj

 

[Romuva]

1969 - That was back in the days when I owned the Boston and Cambridge Centers, which later became the Boston Org.

Alan

Probably before the Boston Org became a lunatic asylum like Mcleans Hosptial or Met State
That's funny Alan,I never knew that.It's great History for me.

All my fathers family grew up in Cambridge.Near Youville Hospital and
Inmans Square.Central Square used to be pretty seedy.My great-uncle
used to manage the Lithuanian club up near Main Street so he used to
get all the drunks from Central Square.

Man,you must of had fun running that mission! lol Wasn't it on Green
Street?

 

[Vinaire]

You had a very different viewpoint back then, as I remember, with regard to the Church.

You would have never said something like, "the events are boring and mechanical", for instance.

I hope you update your story with your new viewpoints, and with your re-newed allegiance to the path of knowledge, and the renewed courage it takes to truly travel it.

Far out, Vinaire!

My basic viewpoint has always been to tell it like it is without bias, and that has not changed. I just don't go all out focusing on outpoints only, or on pluspoints only.

So, what I am looking at may have changed, but my viewpoint remains the same.

And please don't think that you can influence my viewpoint.

.

 

[Vinaire]

1969 - That was back in the days when I owned the Boston and Cambridge Centers, which later became the Boston Org.

Alan

Then I owe you many thanks!

Vinaire

.

 

[Vinaire]

I knew Don Currier, and Bill Foster quite well - though more from later years. We had some fun times.

I knew them both too. My first auditor was a girl named Kristen Pucket, who later married Don Currier and then they divorced.

I wish I could contact Kristen again and thank her. I think she was just as amazed with the sessions between us as I was.

Vinaire

.

 

[Vinaire]

Anyway, the indometacin worked wonders for keeping it in its place and, for the most part it's gone into remission, with fewer attacks, which I manage to keep under control with massive Motrin, as long as I catch them in time.

Zinj

Did you ever get auditing?

.

 

[Vinaire]

[Previously posted on Beliefnet]
[11/22/02 10:38 AM]

The last post was simply to paint the picture of the environment I was confronted with when, all of a sudden, I ran into DIANETICS. I was in a cultural shock being from India. I was attending a tough Master’s program at M.I.T. I had duties as a Teaching Assistant. I was suffering from incredible bouts of pain. I was given not much hope for continued survival. I was acutely depressed.

But I was blessed with a very sane upbringing in Hinduism. I had a warm family back in India who cared for me. I had a bright future ahead of me if I could only make it. I was young and did not mind taking challenges. I was also free of any drugs in my system except for a small amount of medical drugs. There are certainly some advantages coming from a relatively “not-so-advanced” society.

We are talking about the summer of 1969. It was a day at the Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

My friend and I walked into this medium sized room on the ground floor of a small building. There were three rows of chairs, about 8 chairs in a row. There was a passage in the middle, and a rostrum in front. The lecture was about to begin. There were about ten people sitting in the chairs, all longhaired and scraggly as we had expected, an amusing collection indeed.

We found our place among the chairs, sat and waited. Soon the lecture began. The topic was BODY, MIND, and SPIRIT. The lecturer was a very presentable young man very unlike his audience. He talked with confidence and enthusiasm. I never expected to find this kind of a scenario, especially what he was talking about. What he said made perfect sense. The data had ring of familiarity from what I knew from Hinduism, only it was dressed up in precise modern vocabulary. It was fascinating.

After the lecture was over, we didn’t stick around. We returned to our dorm in the campus. We didn’t talk about that lecture.

My friend never visited that place again. But I did, this time alone, with some trepidation in my heart. Could there be something that could help me?

[To be continued...]

.

 

[Zinjifar]

Did you ever get auditing?

.

No.

Neither the promises nor the theory behind it has any attraction for me.

Zinj

 

[Vinaire]

[Previoussly posted on 11/23/02 10:38 PM]

In the last post I described my first visit to the Cambridge Dianetic Center located at the Central Square in an unassuming little building. What I found there was totally unexpected. To hear about the ancient Vedic truths in modern scientific vocabulary was fascinating. On my second visit to this center I hoped against all hopes that Dianetics could help me, without knowing what it was.

When I went there I was given an OCA (Oxford Capacity Analysis) psychometric test. They interpreted my scores on that test and told me that it could be improved. I didn’t care about that test or its interpretation. I just wanted to know if my psychosomatic condition could be handled.

Then I found out about Dianetic auditing. It was $40 an hour and I had to buy at least 25 hours of it to get started. I rapidly calculated the cost in my mind and choked. From where will I get these $1000? It was a lot of money. I was just barely surviving as a student and teaching assistant. So, I bought the book, DIANETICS: The Modern Science of Mental Health (DMSMH) and returned to my dorm.

For next several days, I rarely got my nose out of that book. That data was incredible. I had taken quite a few courses on Psychology during my undergraduate years. I knew how mind was treated in Hinduism based on its function. The approach in Western psychology was very different. It was very structured and systematic but also very complex. It was full of different theories that sometimes appeared contradictory and confusing.

But Dianetics was very different. I liked the analogy of the mind with a computer. Having a background in computers I could directly relate to what was described in the book. When it described the Reactive Mind, and presented it as the single source of all aberrations, I literally felt a thrill. I felt like a volcano ready to explode just as the one painted on the cover of that book. All the confusion about my condition seemed to have evaporated. My hope surged. I kept reading. I finished reading the book from cover to cover within a week. I read portions of it again and again. I knew I had to get that auditing at any cost. I knew that if I could only get at that birth engram I would be out of the jam that I was in. Suddenly it all seemed possible.

.

 

[Voltaire's Child]

Slightly diverging here but I really want to say this-- Vinaire is a really nice guy. I've enjoyed reading his posts for years. He's a smart, decent, "pan determined" guy. I'm so glad to see him on ESMB. ESMB already had oodles of cool people on it, but always nice to see another one!

 

[Alanzo]

Slightly diverging here but I really want to say this-- Vinaire is a really nice guy. I've enjoyed reading his posts for years. He's a smart, decent, "pan determined" guy. I'm so glad to see him on ESMB. ESMB already had oodles of cool people on it, but always nice to see another one!

He looks kinda like Charles Kurault.

 

[Vinaire]

Slightly diverging here but I really want to say this-- Vinaire is a really nice guy. I've enjoyed reading his posts for years. He's a smart, decent, "pan determined" guy. I'm so glad to see him on ESMB. ESMB already had oodles of cool people on it, but always nice to see another one!

Thanks for your vote, Fluffy.

.

 

[Vinaire]

He looks kinda like Charles Kurault.

I had to look him up.

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/K/htmlK/kuraltcharl/kuraltcharl.htm

.

 

[Vinaire]

[Previously posted on Beliefnet 11/24/02 9:01 AM]

I considered getting $1000 on loan. But I still didn’t know how to go about it. In any case, I wanted to know if I had that money then could I get started on Dianetic auditing right away.

So I went back to the Dianetic Center. I had an interview about my condition. I told them that I was suffering from pain and I was told that there was no medical cure for it. I was taking a lot of aspirins for my condition. I wondered if this pain had psychosomatic origin, and if I could get rid of it.

I expected to get some sympathy for my condition. But I didn’t get any. I was told in a pleasant way that I needed to be free of any current intake of medication for at least 30 days before I could be audited. I looked at the prospects of going without my medication for 30 days. Would I be able to handle my pain through sheer determination!

I was then advised that if I took the HAS course (a course that taught the basics of human communication) then it would help me in my present condition. It cost only $40 and I could be on that course as long as I needed to complete it. It sounded a great deal. I could afford that course right away. I signed up for it.

I worked out a schedule and started on the HAS Course in the evenings and on weekends. It was like nothing that I had ever done. On my first day on the course I was handed a Course Pack of some mimeo’d sheets bound in a manila folder. It consisted of drills called TRs 0 to 4 (Training Routines), and additional material explaining them. I was supposed to do these drills by pairing with other students.

The first drill (TR 0) had to do with confronting. I was encouraged to use a dictionary to look up any words that I didn't understand clearly. The word CONFRONT was explained as “to face without flinching and avoiding.” I read the drill. My understanding of that drill was checked out by a supervisor. I was assigned a “twin” (another student) to work with. My twin and I sat facing each other with our knees almost touching. We were supposed to just sit and look at each others face and do nothing else for the rest of the evening.

I had observed other students in the course room doing subsequent drills. The next drill called "TR0 Bullbait" appeared to be a lot of fun. I wanted to get to that stage. So I thought I shall just bear with this drill of sitting and doing nothing for a while.

But the first drill TR0 didn’t prove to be that simple. It was not easy to just sit and be looked at by another person. I was very shy by nature. My condition had made me just keep to myself. I was not very outgoing. I could be categorized as a bookworm. From my childhood, I was encouraged to be good in academics. I had met those expectations of my parents and more. The society I grew up in segregated opposite sexes. The opposite sex was a big button for me. It was unthinkable for me to be looked at not just by another person but also by a girl. I was mortified.

.

 

[Kilia]

You're story sounds absolutely fascinating, Vinaire .....do continue on.