Irene Mumford, passed away at 1.00 PM. on Thursday the 24th. January ((1991)), leaving the stewardship of Dianasis in the hands of her son, Gregory Mitchell. The following is an edited version of a tape Gregory Mitchell made about his mother, Irene.
My mother was born as Irene Hudson, on 27th. 0ct 1926 Her father was an inventor, not terribly succesfull in terms of money but several common objects came from his mind, which include the propelling pencil. The family was unusual in the sense that it is one of these families that went down in the world. A sort of nouveau genteel poor. My mother passed a scholarship and she went to Westcliff high school and then on to Clarks College were she started secretarial practice.
Towards the end of the war she was working for a newspaper called the Acton Gazette, (Acton is in West London, and was a fairly affluent suburb. Ed.) and due to a shortage of staff, because many people had been called up as a result of the D-day landings, for a short period she was the acting editor of that paper. At some point in 1946 she married my father, Kingsley Mitchell, who was a photographer, and this was unfortunately only a short marriage. However it bought her in contact with the Mitchell family which included a certain George Medhurst who is my uncle, deceased now, who was at various times involved in the Society for Psychic Research, and a number of activities that went on in London at that time in the late forties and early fifties, and a Science Fiction buff, a friend of A.E. van Vogt. It was through this uncle of mine she had the first contact with Scientology, or Dianetics to be precise, because at that time he ran a small group doing things with Dianetics.
Some years were to go by before Irene entered Scientology, and she had had a number of interests in related activities at that time, which included Subud. (Quite a well know philosophy cum practice in London at that time, perhaps as well known as TM is now. Ed.) However in the early 50's Ron Hubbard came over to England setting up his first centre, I believe in Holland Park. In 1956 my mother became a member and had auditing services from the Academy and learned how to use an E-meter and all sorts of things like that and her association continued from 1956 until 1982, with a brief break at some point in the early 70's.
While she was a member of the Academy of Scientology she did her HPA, (The professional auditors course of that time - before grades. Many different things were taught on the HPA course at different times, in that they taught the latest rundown, and checksheets would change in the middle of a students course and he would have to start again, a practice later forbidden by policy. From Irenes account, her course was almost soley concerned with GPMs, many different processes were tried out and discarded, and after 13 months full time on course Irene graduated, without a single GPM techniques which she was allowed to use. Ed.) I believe that would be 1963, and at that time became interested in certain GPM technologies that Hubbard was working on, and this idea remained in her mind for perhaps 20 years. She felt that in some ways the O.T. materials were not where it was at, nor was the way in which Hubbard addressed the GPM situation and failed.
In 1982 she was declared a suppressive and ejected from Scientology and she spent some time in the independent movement, particularly in relationship to Steve Bisbey who was C/S at that time, (At the Advanced Ability Centre, East Grinstead, one of the main English independent centres. Ed.) and became the first AA7 (which is the independent scientology equivelent of OT7) in Great Britain, sometime in 1983. She found this interesting but was not entirely satisfied with what she found and she put into action ideas that she had been working on for some time with relation to GPMs and in 1984 launched Dianasis as an alternative upper bridge. From 1984 until her death has created 6 franchises in this, 80 students of her own and a number in excess of 200 world wide when we include the students who have been registered by the different Franchises which are in Australia, Italy, Switzerland and Scotland.
I myself have been working with her since 1987 in various capacities but we will come back to that later. In addition to her work in Scientology and transperonal psychology Irene Mumford has been an artist of a certain measure of success. (Irene had no training beyond ordinary school in art and was mediocre up to the age of forty. She then had auditing from her husband, Peter Mumford, and after that flourished as an artist. I was very impressed byt the thirty or forty pictures I saw when I visited her house recently. Ed.) I say this in as much that very few women artists are recognised at all and she has had the odd portrait hung in galleries which puts her in the realm of professional artist. Furthermore she has run a photographic company during the 1950's which employed up to 40 people at one time and has been the proprieter of several shops in the areas of antiques and books, and has written various articles of various types in many areas apart from psychology which have been published in different magazines and journals.
Dianasis Data Network
Irene Mumford, as she is now known passed away on the 24th. January, leaving the stewardship of Dianasis in the hands of her son, Gregory Mitchell.
The Dianasis data network may be described as an organization which is the commonwealth of its students but it is held in trust by its manager or managers. Now as a result of Irene Mumfords death, this stewardship is passed into the hands of Gregory Mitchell, her son, who is a therapist of some standing and has been in practice since about 1970. He has worked with Irene Mumford unofficially for several years and has been part of a think tank in the exchange of ideas in the management of Dianasis, and he has worked with her in a formal sense since 1987 when he became the treasurer of Dianasis and has gradually assumed more roles within that company. In 1989 he became a full director and was being prepared by Irene as her apprentice student so Irene could set herself free for the purposes of research, her intention being to do this some time in 1992. However the axe was to fall much earlier than anticipated and this control has passed to Gregory Mitchell. She has chosen him because he runs another organization called Mental Development Ltd which has the means to produce the neccessary set up with people so that they can start Dianasis and has all the branches of an organisation such as publishing and production of meters. So thus Dianasis could completely cut the umbilical cord that binds it to scientology, hence would be no longer liable to predatory reaction in the courts which has often been the lot of organisations within the independent movement.
Currently four levels of Dianasis are published and are avaible to people who have the appropriate qualifications to start them and a further four levels of Dianasis exist in Manuscript. The work on these four levels has been completed and Gregory Mitchell and his assistants will be editing this and producing it in publishable format so it can be issued when students become ready for those level. Not only will Dianasis continue as it has been before - we trust it be even better than before by being more accessable than it was in the early days with materials in a more ordered form. (Some of the extant 'pirate' Dianasis material represent early primitive versions. Ed.)
Mental Development
Mental Development and Dianasis have agreed to keep their seperate identities, and this was agreed in a series of board meetings some months before Renes illness, such that they would trade at arms length, but obviously has some preferential arrangements between them, and in this way the security of both organizations could more easily be guaranteed. For example any financial difficulties in the one of them would not impinge on the other and it would make for a much greater flexability in that we are recognising a plurality of approaches to upper level, that Dianasis is like the cherry on the cake - that there may be several ways in which a person could reach stable case state neccessary for starting Dianasis. Mental Development is one of them and obviously as a propriator I am selling it. I can't say much more than that or I would be accused of blowing my own trumpet.
To the usual services that have been available Mental Development is now in the position to do a number of review actions on people who are having various difficulties with the Dianasis rundown, as may occur where a student had not been seen by us and we take it on trust that he has met the minimun requiremments to do it, and he may be in Bulgaria or Finland or whereever - we do now have by means of certain technologies that have been developed in Mental Development to unbug the person and getting him running again. (It is perhaps of interest that Gregory Mitchell is an expert in 'rescueing' people who have 'messed themselves up', with one or more of the many mental practices going (perhaps by doing one while their rudiments were out, overruning. running over bypassed charge, etc. - subjects relatively unknown outside of Scientology and its offspring). He is a member of a sort of network, where he can obtain data on the contents and methodology of maybe rare mental subjects that a prospective client has become 'messed up' in. Ed).
Gregory Mitchell, the proprietor of Mental Development, has done some research in the area of GPMs in the 1970s when he lived in Spain. However did not persist as this was really only a luxury interest, the majority of time being concerned with lower bridge issues in his company, and on hearing that his mother was developing technology in this area decided to put down his sword and let her continue as perhaps being a better person to find that solution. However there is a spin off from this earlier research of the 70s which has a synergistic value with regard to Dianasis. Devices such as the bilateral meter which allow us to look at certain mental structures to do with the matters of GPMs in another kind of way, and procedures so we can check what has happened if a person has gone up a bad alley or made silly mistakes with the rundown, to unbug it.
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