Electra: The Cognition Tax, continued

THE COGNITION TAX, continued

EXM - 2 ca. 1991

You see the problem was that people began entering the Church in droves, they KNEW that the Technology worked, but this did not change the fact that it took a long time to complete it. People wanted to be saved, they didn't want anything to do with looking at the monsters in their closets. There was however no salvation until they did.

And the one point that must never be forgotten is that the primary attack of this disease on the spirit was in the spiritual and ETHICAL centers of the mind, leaving a person open to every whiff of corruption, temptation and seduction that came his way.

In the beginning when someone entered the Church, they did so knowing full well what they were getting into, it was a small band of highly advanced people. New people were immediately trained in the Tech and received the Tech themselves, to rid themselves of the Divine Plague. Thus everyone in the Church was clean or nearly so.

But when the Church started to catch on, so many people came into it and took on positions of responsibility, that there were just was not enough trained people to debug all the new people. Probably this was due to the increase in administrative posts, people who did not deliver the Tech, thus they were slow at receiving the Tech or responding to it. It was easier to stay on post and screw up than go into session and own up.

Those who wanted to be Techies on the other hand quickly moved up the stair case to higher states of Divine Clarity because they spent all day learning the Tech and delivering it to others.

In the end there were probably 10 to 20 administrative posts to every Techie post, thus the Church was swamped with very ill beings, who did not get their own cases cleaned up as fast as was needed. Yet they formed the power base and made all the decisions. This corruption was all very slow and subtle and still has the historians scratching their heads. It was just too incredible.

The Church began to look like a bastion of the Fourth Reich.

Near the end of the Good Doctor's life, he had managed to lose control of his Church and was no longer running it, and was no longer legally responsible for it. It was in the hands of who ever had managed to take over control.

There was Tech still taking place, but more often than not, those with the most money, HOWEVER OBTAINED, where the first to receive the Tech while the more worthy people, the more spiritually advanced, waited in the sidelines.

Often people would declare having attained a particular level of Divine Clarity and they would place their big certificates on the walls mainly because of the social status that went with it, and the amount of money they could boast they had paid for it. Yet a deeper look would have shown that not one confession had been given up, and nothing of the central trauma had ever been touched in session.

Men who could have been saved, weren't. People who claimed to have been saved, hadn't been. This gave salvation a very bad name to the public at large who were a bit edgy on the subject of salvation in the first place. They came to feel betrayed, because they were made to doubt the existence of salvation altogether. It put them back in their nightmare without hope. This they did not forgive.

The Tech was all going to waste and it was all for show. At about this time various celebrities became involved in the Church pushing its various causes, raising enormous amounts of money for its advertising campaigns and declaring the wonders of the Tech. But the Tech was nowhere to be found. It was all hype and glitz and smiling faces. And very slick promo.

Now you might ask what ever happened to the Techies during all this? Surely they would have put up a stink at the use and abuse that the proper application of the Tech was undergoing. And you would be right, a stink they made indeed.

Remember some people where violently opposed to the Tech because they did not understand it through their illness, or because they were afraid it would uncage the beast within them. These people had always been trouble to the Church and every once in a while one of them would actually get on post and start to do screwy things to bring the Church into disrepute. Or they would get on Tech lines and give Tech orders that were totally wrong and upset everyone, and so of course people's cases would just get mucked up and everyone would start grumbling about the Good Doctor, the Church and the Tech, about how bad it all was.

These people were called Bad Guys. They were declared as such when they were discovered among the ranks, and they were expelled from the Church until they saw fit to confess and do amends for the harm they had caused.

Near the end people were being declared Bad Guys at an alarming rate and little mustard yellow slips were handed out to everyone on post declaring that so and so was a Bad Guy and no one should talk to him and everyone should report anything they saw him do especially if it were bad.

Usually Bad Guys were kicked out of the Church FOREVER, but that was just a dramatization of the hate and evil of the very disease the Church was trying to cure. And actually if you read the policies of the Good Doctor, it said clearly in 'Ethics Gradients' that the door was always open a little, even if just a crack, to let anyone back in who changed his mind and didn't want to be a Bad Guy any more.

However the Ethics Gradients Policy letter was repealed soon after the Good Doctor died. This locked the Church into this universe forever as they were buried under all the beings they refused to make friends with.

The Good Doctor knew that no one would be saved unless everyone COULD be saved. But that seemed to be a new thought on the planet. One that went right over the head and souls of the management that took over the Church after the Good Doctor's death.

Anyhow this precedence had been set, permission had been granted to kick someone out of the Church if it could be proven that he was a Bad Guy. So they would call Committees of Evidence together and they would Com Ev the hell out of the guy, and then they kicked him out and sent his case folder to the DEAD FILE, which meant that no one was allowed to give a hoot about him until he repented. And any letters he sent to the Church or the Good Doctor were sent to the dead file without being read.

This was actually very mild treatment for some very nasty people, people whose intentions were really evil, and whom the Church could easily have done without.

But what happened is that the Techies, the TRUE TECHIES, the ones who had been in it from the beginning, the best ones around, the ones who had devoted their whole lives to becoming expert in the subject, the ones who had had the most Tech applied to themselves, and so were the highest beings on the planet, the ones who had applied the most Tech to others, actually the only ones who knew anything at all about the Tech, the only ones who could apply it correctly and had the courage and honor to do so, started complaining about the false attests and the people buying their way up to higher states with out actually attaining them, and THEY WERE DECLARED BAD GUYS AND KICKED OUT OF THE CHURCH.

The records show that this all came to a head one dark day, when all the best Techies of the Church from all over the planet, all the mission holders, all the highest and most devoted people that the Church had, were all called together for a large meeting which they thought was going to be to discuss the future of the Church.

Well they were all fired, and while they were sitting there in shock in this huge meeting hall, back home their missions were stormed, their materials were taken from them, all their Tech references and tools, and all their case folders, and all those private confessional folders of their parishioners. Their staff members were absorbed back into the Church and those that wouldn't go were declared Bad Guys too and were hounded and harassed until little was left of their lives.

In the agony of this day was born the Free Zone.

The Free Zone is where all the Techies went, to practice the Tech independently on their own. There was no Tech left in the Church, just mouthings and pretenses. Shams and shambles. Facades and smiling faces, with knives behind their backs.

Just like the Good Doctor had said in one of his little charts.

A few years later the Good Doctor died as befalls all men no matter how Immortal, and although history records that he swore to come back and take over his Church again to do it right, it is unclear if this ever happened. Personally I think maybe he washed his hands of the whole thing and came to Earth to start anew. I sure hope so.

In the years after his death, his Church became very rich and powerful, but it also grew more hated by the population at large especially by its own members. Not the vapid Churchies who repeated the mouthings of the Doctor at the beck and call of installed Puppet Masters, I mean the Free Zoners who still had all the Tech intact and had been working day and night to improve the Tech, to add on to the foundation laid down by the Good Doctor and to make sure that his work would never be in vain.

To make matters worse, the various governments of the world knew that the Tech worked, but they all had a strong vested interest in the Tech NOT working so they could keep their war games going. They made a lot of money with war games. Thus a secret coalition was eventually formed between the Church and various governments of the world.

On the surface it looked like the Churchies and the Politicians were always at war with one another, but in truth the last leaders of the Church were installed by and were in the payroll of various governmental leaders who used the Church for their own ends, one of which was to make sure the Tech was never applied properly. Further they siphoned off millions of dollars from Church funds to help them in their wars and covert operations including the trafficking in drugs.

The Church was virulently opposed to the legalization of drugs, including the harmless plant euphoriants, because along with the government they wanted to sell them and the harder drugs under the table for the inflated prices that criminalization produced. Thus thousands of people were condemned to a life in jail with all of their possessions confiscated by the government just for worshipping one of the prettier 11 leaved plants of the time. Plants that often broke through the Zombie Shock of one's mortal life, and gave a direct if fleeting glimpse of the Divine Glory that was the destiny of all beings.

Inside the Church, the Tech became terribly expensive. Only the very rich could afford to attain Divine Clarity. The joke is that they never did. Their attitude was that the Tech was only for the 'able,' to help them become more able. The rest could go eat cake.

Since only huge amounts of money could buy you an audience with the remaining Church 'Techies', being 'able' obviously came to mean being rich, no matter how you got your money. It became a crime to be poor, and confession consisted mainly of explaining why you didn't have enough money to pay your voluntary donation to complete your confession.

You see it was just the original disease gone wild, everyone in the Church was sick, there was no one left clear enough of the Divine Plague to keep things going. Eventually the sick 'helped' the sick by KEEPING them sick and charging them an arm and a leg to do it.

There is humor in this somewhere, although I doubt the Good Doctor would see it that way.

Anyhow the end came when the Church put out the decree that everyone practicing the Tech outside of the Church was a Bad Guy, that the only correct way to receive spiritual counseling was at the hands of a Church Standard Technician charging the (VERY HIGH) Church Standard Fees.

Correctness had taken precedence over workability.

The green and gold of money took precedence over the green and gold of the books the Good Doctor had written.

Further the only processes that were allowed to be run on anyone during their confession were those determined by their Case Supervisor, even if he was the dumbest creature alive, and by this time there were none dumber. They also declared that the highest high crime of all was to practice any of the Tech on yourself in your own free time, or to experiment with the Tech in any way to try to come up with something new or different or faster or cheaper to deliver.

Or SAFER. Or more WORKABLE.

This goal 'To find a better route' was the prime postulate of many of the brighter souls who entered the Church, and when they were forbidden to follow their true heart, they declared the Church an enemy for the rest of time and left, never looking back. Thus the Church lost is most valuable asset, an asset that was never recognized by the Church and never would be.

And the only thing worse than practicing Tech alone on yourself, was to practice any sort of Tech of any kind on anyone else, without explicit orders to do so by the Church and only after that person paid for it.

Thus was born the Salvation Police, who along with the Finance Police, made sure that no one got away with salvation for free. Those who were poor, deserved to stay in their own personal Hells forever, even if they were bright enough to solve it alone.

The Salvation Police saw to it that they were forbidden to try. They used direct threats of physical violence against the bodies of the persons involved and their loved ones, not to mention disinformation campaigns designed to ruin the person's reputation, and career.

Not to mention murder in the night.

If you weren't willing or able to pay for salvation, then the Church was going to see to it that you didn't get it.

And THAT became their total goal.

To charge for salvation and to maximize profits.

The following because HIGH CRIMES:

     1.) Receiving Tech out side of the Church,
     2.) Running Tech not specified by your Case Supervisor,
     3.) Running Tech on yourself,
     4.) Correcting, Improving or Inventing new Tech,
     5.) Running Tech on anyone else except as directed by the Church,
     6.) daring to have a cognition or new realization about yourself,
         your life or your past, out side of a standard Church session,
     or
     7.) daring to confess anything to anyone out side of a standard
         Church session,

By engaging in any of these activities, you were directly undermining the survival of the Church by taking needed income away from it and endangering your own life and other's lives by playing around in dangerous waters that you had no business playing in, your own soul.

You see getting better was mainly a matter of confront, confession and cognition. Basically the person had to cognite, step by step, his way out of the personal prison of forgetfulness and inability he had built for himself in his ignorance.

Thus by forbidding a person to have or create or indulge in any activity that would produce a cognition or a new realization about life except during an authorized Church session, they made it impossible for any of its followers to improve their own condition at their own bidding. Thus spiritual well being, its promise and its attainment, were totally controlled by the Church and were handed out as reward only to make people obey and serve them.

If you washed walls well, you might get some counseling.

To make matters worse, since most of spiritual counseling involved GETTING THE CONFESSION, and since detailed written records were kept of each session so that the Case Supervisor could keep track of how the parishioner was doing and cram the hell out of the therapist when he screwed up, the Church had amassed thousands upon thousands of folders of people's confessions and withholds.

You know, things from sticking cherries where they don't belong to murder in the night.

It was ALL THERE. Every word of it. People didn't attain Divine Clarity with out it. The confession that is. I don't see why it had to all be written down. But it was.

It had been a sworn promise above and beyond Honor that these confessional records would never be used against anyone in the Church, even if they turned against the Church in their own personal insanity. You see the Church was supposed to be a safe space.

But near the end, the Church wrote a directive stating that all parishioner's folders should be culled for all of their withholds and transgressions and confessions and that these should be publicly disclosed should anyone decide to leave the Church or complain about the Church or disagree with the Church.

In other words, to hell with the SACRED client/therapist relationship.

So much for the Code of the Sacred Promise and the Foundation of Honor.

Well that probably took the cake.

With broken promises, sworn in all good faith, do we seal the graves of our own fate.

The days of the final treason had come to pass. War was openly declared by the Free Zoners on the Churchies, and any hope of reconciliation was forever lost.

Now if money had never entered into the game, all this probably would never have happened, because in a sick world, the people most able to make money are not always those who are the most ready for Divine Clarity. They are not always the most able to be helped and the most able to help others.

Nor are the rich the most worthy of help. They are merely the most able to make money usually by ripping off or exploiting others. If they confessed and repented they would be poor again, so there was a small conflict of interest here.

Many thousands of years later someone was to say that a rich man was as likely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as walk a camel through the eye of the needle. This is probably because most wealth came from corruption. This is not always true of course, but it is worth noting, and it sure applied to this bygone age.

The Good Doctor himself said many times that a person is as worthy of help as he is able to be helped and is able himself to help others afterwards. There was no mention of bank balances.

But people do have to eat, and have a good home, and raise a few kids, hopefully sane ones, and I would never have begrudged a good Techie his 5 to 50 dollars an hour working on me. I can turn my own stomach just thinking about the things I have done that I CAN confront, surely someone should be paid well for helping me slog through all the things I have done that I can NOT confront.

There is always beauty and laugher at the bottom of the manure pile, but the pile of manure goes mighty high. And there's god damn THINGS living in it!

It's always wise to take a friend along before you go digging.

Have you ever looked in a mirror during a lucid dream, a dream where you know you are dreaming? What did you see? Well I know what I saw, and I went screaming out of the room yelling for my life at the top of my lungs. Now who you gonna call?

That's why I need help. Anyhow that's just the way I have it figured.

Anyhow back then the Techies that did a good job on their parishioners couldn't keep the money from flowing in their doors, that was just the way gratitude worked.

Further once people had thrown off their shackles of shame blame and regret, and what few demons they kept impacted to their faces, their ability to make money soared through the roof because they had recovered their Prime Postulates, their Basic Goals, and so valuable production in their own personal lives went up again especially in the field of Art. It turned out, down deep, everyone was an Artist.

Perhaps it was this fact that money came easy to those who had a clean slate that led the Church to raise its prices, figuring that those that had money were higher beings. The fallacy was that below poverty is criminality, and THOSE people have tons of money, which is why everyone else is poor. So judging a person by his bank account is a tricky business, and during the age of this story it was a very bad bet as there were just no high beings around at all. Thus the Church with its high prices became a cesspool for the criminal and the morally filthy beyond belief.

They were all promoted and became Church administrators and Case Supervisors.

In the Good Doctor's opinion, it really only took a few hours in good hands to crack a case, and there after the person could do it alone and do it to others, and so in his opinion the money was not only necessary but worthwhile.

But he was an expert in the Tech, and he routinely overestimated people and their abilities, and few had attained the level of accomplishment that he had when it came to cracking hard cases. People had spent the past million years after all totally bent on saving them selves by not knowing what they had done, so it was no small matter that he could 'crack cases' in a few hours.

But he also had another very reasonable idea, one that the Church never listened to.

Those who had the money could pay more, and those that didn't could pay less. A person's worth was not measured by his bank account, but by his ability to be helped, and by his ability to apply the Tech to others after he had attained the state of Divine Clarity himself.

The Church tried to implement this idea by offering training and free services to those who would come and work for them for 5 years. If you had no money, they would train you in what ever was needed, and you would get your entire allotment of Tech during your stay and you would leave with your case fully cleaned up.

But it never happened that way, staff people were the most ignored and deprived people on the face of the planet when it came to spiritual progress. Basically the Church saw them as human fodder to be used, abused and thrown away. Divine Clarity was only for its PAYING customers like the local hoods or the movie stars.

Stars would come in with some drug problem or another, they would pay thousands of dollars for a few hours of Tech, suffer a miraculous cure, and go out and live happily ever afterwards making commercials for beer.

So the Church finally decided that everyone must pay the same amount for services and if you didn't have it, then you didn't get it.

But charging rates of 300 dollars an hour for confession, with a prospect of needing hundreds of hours of work is insane and should have been recognized as such. And actually it was, the people who charged those rates never had any intention of the Tech working, they just wanted to give people hope so that they would keep coming back forever at 300 dollars an hour for the rest of their damn Eternity.

The Church also came up with the idea of ONE SOURCE. In other words after the Good Doctor died, the Church claimed that no one else could ever do research on the Tech, or improve on the Tech, or Lord save us, correct the Tech. They claimed that every failure of the Tech to help anyone was really a failure of correct application of the Tech and not a failure of the Tech itself. In other words the TECH was right, but the people delivering the Tech were wrong. What I want to know, is how could they know?

Eventually they started blaming not the delivery of the tech, but the receiver of the tech, the parishioner himself! If the Tech didn't work, it was the fault of the person looking for help.

Millions of people had left the Church in disgust having lost all their financial resources with nothing in the way of case gain to show for it. The Tech had evolved upwards from a clumsy hard to use confusion to a sleeker and better fit system for curing people of the Plague. Each day of the Good Doctor's life research went on and discoveries were made.

He was ALWAYS seeking to crack the cases that kept walking in his door to the very end. He cracked more and more of them but I am sure the Good Doctor would be the last to claim that he had solved the last troublesome case on the last day of his life. In fact he knew he was damn well far from it.

So for the Church to claim that all the Tech that was needed had already been discovered, and that any failure of the Church to deliver satisfaction to its customers was the fault of the CUSTOMER or the Org's staff, was arrogance, conceit and vanity all wrapped up into one. They just couldn't be wrong about ANYTHING.

But to then decree that no further work could be done on the Tech, no improvements, no corrections, no new discoveries, no experimentation where it was obviously needed, showed that in the end the Church Management was more interested in a financial monopoly rather than in the final salvation of its planet.

The petrification that resulted from this was hard to look upon.

At one time it had all been such a beautiful dream.

Imagine some doctor spends his whole life researching AIDS, and makes many discoveries. Then when he dies, his organization claims that no one else can do independent research on AIDS, and no one else can deliver the medicines that cure AIDS, and if anyone does they are an enemy of the good doctor. Imagine they claim that anyone who dares to start his own experiments or research on AIDS is denying who is SOURCE on the subject of AIDS, and isn't admitting that all the work that will ever need to be done is already done. Further that by competing with the doctor you were taking funds away from the doctor's sanctioned organization and thus you were doing a great disservice to the doctor, the one who started it all in the first place.

What would you think of that?

This is neither a science nor a religion. Its a cult of the dead.

So when the Church finally decreed that no one should be permitted to have a cognition or make any case gain except during a paid session at standard rates with a Church designated Case Supervisor and Church designated Techie, using only Church designated Tech, and that anyone who dared to go into session with himself or others with out permission was a Bad Guy, an enemy of truth, the Good Doctor and the Church, and was therefore subject to the FAIR GAME policy of personal and physical violence and harassment, they cut their own throats.

For no one in their right mind would put up with such a thing.

The Free Zone was not the Zombie Zone.

The difference was this thing that came to be called the COG TAX.

Having to pay someone else for the right to cognite about yourself.

Further since the Church by its own decree was not allowed to work to improve the Tech, since only the Good Doctor could do that and he was dead, the Free Zone soon advanced way ahead of the Church in the Tech department. The superior Tech and their propensity to use it eventually resulted in the Free Zone prospering and flourishing, and the Church went down the tubes in self installed petrification. A classic case of those with the Divine Plague doing themselves in to protect others from themselves. Even the Churchies were basically good. You had to dig awfully deep though to find any of it.

The original Tech still resided in the Church however, if you opened any door to any closet the volumes of wisdom would fall on your head or be lying in a corner at your feet, dusty, unadorned and forlorn. Those beautiful books, the color of green and gold. What irony. For it was the desire for money and gold that brought them down.

I mean imagine having the Tech to free the soul, and dangling it in front of people's noses so that they would give you anything in the world to get out of hell, and then giving them just enough to keep them hoping and buying more, all the while making very sure they never got what they really needed. And then when they were destitute and broke, kicking them out of the Church and forbidding them to make any efforts to do it alone.

Imagine watering down the Tech, or applying it wrongly on purpose so that it never quite worked, but always gave promise. What a way to make a buck.

Its bad enough when the truth you are selling is garbage anyway, its a High Crime when you have the real thing.

One last comment. Over the years after the Good Doctor's death the Church declared two General Amnesties towards its disaffected staff members, its parishioners and the general public. Thousands of people had left the Church in disgust and the purpose of the Amnesties was to bring these people back into the fold. The way an Amnesty worked was the person was supposed to write up all of his or her withholds and transgressions committed since they were last in the Church and send them into the central headquarters. These acts and transgressions would then be forgiven and the person would be allowed once again to receive training or services from the Church and become a member in good standing.

The Church could never say 'We were wrong, we want you all back.' Instead they tried to save face by saying if you admit to all the bad things you have been doing to us we will forgive you and take you back in.

It is interesting to note that withhold write ups were always demanded of the lower level members by the upper level members of the Church. Never did the upper level members write up their overts and publicly disseminate them to the lower members. Thus the upper level management never had their overts or withholds cleaned up and never was a there confession gleaned.

The first amnesty was a very big success. Many many people wrote up their withholds and came back into the Church. But nothing had changed. The second amnesty was a dismal failure. Once bitten, twice shy. This was the beginning of the end.

The Church was rejected not only by society at large, but by its own members, members who continued on up the stair case to Divine Clarity without the Church and formed a formidable opponent to the Church's dishonesty and money grubbing ways.

The above is a true story, the names have been changed to protect the innocent. It did not happen on Earth, it happened on my home planet, Alletrelix, a beautiful planet I lived on many life times ago, and one that will be beautiful again one day if the fires ever die down.

It is presently acting as a crematorium for those who were so foolish as to worship money over truth and salvation.

Idols of Stone over Eternal Home.

The Techies from the Free Zone eventually all came to Earth and are here now. The Churchies are still back on my home planet. Breathing fumes hopefully.

Someday we will go back for them.

When we're ready and when they're ready.

In the meantime, the price of Divine Clarity has come WAY down. There is a Free Market in the Free Zone.

Electra