Control

When I lived in California, my husband and two of his friends, Doug and Joe decided to start a business. They leased an AVIS franchise. Joe had a filling station where the business was going to be set up. So along with all of the other things that he had to do, Joe also rented cars for this business.

After doing this for a while, Joe felt that he was doing all the work and the other partners weren't doing their share. At the time, Doug was going to school and his wife was working full time. My husband was working in real estate and I was the only other person that wasn't working outside the house. I agreed to help the business. The first thing that the AVIS Representive suggested was that Joe and I go to a training session in San Francisco.

Off we went. The main office for Western AVIS was near the San Francisco Airport. All the AVIS students stayed in a hotel nearby. Every morning a van would pick up a group of us and take us to the office where we would spend the day learning how to manage a franchise. There were people from all over. All in all, I think that there were about 10 to 15 people in this class from various places. I remember one lady came all the way from Phoenix.

Most of the instructions were math related with percentages for this or that. I didn't think it was very hard but some people did.

After we got back to the hotel at night, we went to dinner and then a few of us went to the bar for drinks. They even had dancing in the bar, so we got to unwind.

The week before I went on this training, I had been taking classes in Fresno at the Scientology Center. One of the classes was about control,learning the anatomy of control and how to use it in our lives. I decided to use this week away from everything to control my Pepsi habit. I was going to find all the other things that I could drink and put a stop to this habit.

About the third night after classes, a group of us were in the bar, I decided that I was going to leave and go to bed. The other girls kept trying to get me to stay but I told them that I really wanted to turn in. As I was leaving, Joe decided to leave too. We had rooms on the same floor so we went up together. We chatted in the elevator about the group that we had just left. I didn't expect him to leave this early because he had been flirting with some of the girls in the group.

I told him that I would see him at breakfast and went into my room as he walked down the hallway.

I turned on the TV and thought about his flirting in the bar with the other girls and then how he just left when I did. It seemed strange for him? So I decided to see if I could get him to come to my room.

"OK, now how do I do this? Let's see?" I started talking to myself. "Picture his room in your head. It is the reverse layout of yours. He is there sitting on the edge of the bed in front of the TV. Get that picture very clearly in your head. See the whole room.

He wants to come and knock on your door. Think about him wanting to come and knock on your door. Get inside of his head and think this. OK, he is thinking about this.

Hey, he needs a reason to do this. Let's see, what reason could he have. He just can't come down and knock on your door. We have to think of a reason.

I've got it. He wants me to explain some of the formulas that we went over today. OK. That’s good. He will come down and ask you if you will go over the formulas with him in your room.

Good. You have given him a reason. Now see him cognite on that reason and go to the door.

See him turn the door knob.

Hey, I really don't need this," and with that I flipped off lights, the TV and went to bed.

The next morning I took my shower, got dressed and headed down to breakfast. I had gotten my order when Joe came into the restaurant. He slid into the bench across from me like he did every morning before classes. The waitress came as soon as she saw him. He ordered and then he told me, "I almost came down to your room last night. I got as far as your door but then didn't want to disturb you so I went back down to the bar. I was going to have to help me with one of the formulas."

Don't move a muscle! Don't smile or laugh or react in any way! Just keep eating and nod like you heard him.

This stuff works.

So if I can do this, what does that mean? It means that it is possible to control other people but if you do, you are completely responsible for everything in their lives. When you shift people from self determination to being controlled, you change everything that they would have done. You are responsible for all the things that they do from that point on, all of their relationships, all of the rest of their life because you have shifted their reality. This is not a good game to play.

I have never done this again but I do understand control a lot better than I did. We are living on a planet of free choice. We need to keep this in mind even when we make our own decisions.

It did show me just how easily it is for an outside force to influence the decisions that we make. If your Mother told you something and you put that into your head as fact, you will make decisions based on that for the rest of your life or until you discover that it isn't true. Let's say that she mentioned more than once that "those people" are not nice. Think about all the decisions one makes and how many of them are influenced by what is stored in our memories as facts.

This is why the TV and the News is so hurtful. We buy into all of this as fact and base our decisions on what we have heard.

At our house we always said, "Cancel, Cancel" when we do not want to be programmed by false information. There is a lot of that out there.

Make some good decisions for yourself today.