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rodomontade part 2

4. THE ROLE OF THE ETHICS COUNCIL & ACCUSATIONS OF SEXUAL PREDATION BY OSCAR ICHAZO. (EDITOR'S NOTE: A NUMBER OF ALLEGATIONS OF A SEXUAL NATURE, ALTHOUGH DENIED, WERE EFFECTIVELY PROVEN BUT HAVE BEEN REMOVED FROM THE METATON SITE in MAY 2019 TO AVOID FURTHER HURT TO THE VICTIMS OF CULT ARICA-ICHAZO)


5. "THE REALITY GAP"


Part One "…Oscar moved to New York City where he taught this theory and practice to over a hundred thousand participants at the Arica Institute from 1971 to 1981." The Arica, Autumn 1996 P17.


"Currently we have a total of 614 members versus 672 members by the end of our last fiscal year." Arica Day of Unity (ADU) Report, December 13 1998.


AH's Comment - So the 100,000 people Oscar Ichazo taught from 1971 to 1981 plus the people taught thereafter yield 614 members. Ignoring, the people taught after 1981, 100,000 students yielding 614 members is a conversion rate of 0.614%. The "Violet Door Meditation" Step 34 (The Arican, Winter 1990 P69) mentions "millions upon millions of Aricans". Well with a conversion rate of 0.614%, to produce one million Aricans, over 161 million people would need to take Arica trainings. Does this seem likely to you any time soon?


Part Two

The same December 1998 ADU also notes that "income from product sales is expected to be down $35,000, a reduction of approximately 35% from last year". Also "Income from sponsor royalties is also expected to decline steeply this year…. a reduction of 46%". Nowhere in the 15 page ADU Report is there any discussion of why the income has gone down, or why membership is dropping. This is simply incredible when it is considered that this "Report" includes the Board report and the Treasurer's report at the AGM. However, the Report does contain a statement from the Board describing the new Protoanalytical trainings as being "brilliant and concise". This is what has been described as the "reality gap". If the trainings really were "brilliant and precise", the membership would not be going down and revenues would not be collapsing. I ask the reader to ask him or herself why no one at the meeting felt able to make this simple observation?


6. PSYCHOMACHIA : THE EIGHTH LEVEL IS COPIED OUT OF BOOKS


Recently while reviewing Arica materials for this note, I came across an Arican dated Fall 1986 in which a "Members' Newsletter" appeared. This rediscovery surprised me as this Letter (which contains much interesting historical material) is not included in the book called Letters to the School (Arica Press, 1988) which contains all Oscar Ichazo's significant letters of this time. Then it dawned on me why. The letter starts "I have received letters from members of the School in reference to the current book by Macklin Smith about Prudentius' work Psychomachia." After reading this I checked the two Arica manuals which contain parts one and two of "The Golden Eye Ritual", which contain the Arica psychomachia work. In the lengthy introductions to the two parts of the training, the reader would not know the word psychomachia had ever been used before. There are no references to the classical works of psychomachia. Furthermore, in The Golden Eye Ritual Initiation Manual, the word "Psychomachia" is even listed as a service mark of the Arica Institute!


I suspect that the discovery by his students of the classical author Prudentius came as an unwelcome surprise to Oscar Ichazo. Oscar Ichazo's letter contains a protestation that "The psychomachia I propose is a totally different type of work…". Clearly Oscar Ichazo was happy for this incident to be forgotten. Although the fall 1986 letter does contain interesting historical information about various historical examples of psychomachia, this work (almost uniquely) was not chosen for inclusion in the book and so was excluded from the permanent record. My guess is that there is very little original at all in Oscar Ichazo's presentation of psychomachia. All he did was take the classical concept and mold it into the usual ninefold Arica classification. If the fall 1986 letter had been included in the book "Letters to the School", it would have appeared between the letters of April 1986 and November 1986. Both these letters are long complaints about the plagiarism of Oscar Ichazo's fixation work. Given the derivative nature of Oscar Ichazo's psychomachia and the lack of acknowledgment in the original training manual, this would have been a very awkward juxtaposition. Finally, it has been pointed out to me, that the rest of the eighth level work (MS1 and Divine Nature) is very similar to Tibetan Bhuddism. This is a subject of which I know little and so will abstain from further comment except to say this might be an interesting angle for someone else to research.

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