I believe the way we are going to effectuate the most effective genuine change is by de-ptsing ourselves. Several mechanisms are wielded by Miscavology to keep the sheep in the pen and to keep the more adventurous ones in fear of straying too far. The most common weapon is the disconnect card. It is used to keep people in a state of terror of losing their family, friends and livelihoods. Many on-line, or at least in good standing, public and former staff have reached out for advice on how to keep pursuing the truth without losing one or more of what they consider integral parts of their communities. As more appear and more are made aware of fellow independent minded folk in their vicinities little communities are forming. The effects of the support independent Scientologists give to one another are remarkable personally, on the family dynamic, and in terms of business networking.
While watching these successes begin to unfold, it occurred to me that if the process of forming communities were aided and a form of coordination amongst neighboring and even distant similar communities began – however informally – the de-ptsing could expand exponentially with little effort. The ripple effects of independent thinking Scientologists connecting are immeasurable.
Some inquiring minds have also been asking, but what of my Bridge? Well, for starters I have found the case gain being attained by independent Scientologists simply connecting up with one another and validating one another’s gains that were were suppressed under Miscavology are spectacular. Escaping from the suppression and Reverse Scientology practiced in Miscavology tends to rehab every ability you once thought you had attained but were convinced by reges, recruiters, E/Os acting for reges, execs acting as reges, etc were canceled due to your “out ethics” for failing to mortgage your home or drain your retirement account to fill DM’s coffers.
If you want to continue with formal auditing, I know there are some fine independent auditors whose dance cards are not full. I bet there are many more because I haven’t even really explored the free zone much.
But more fundamentally, the communities that independent minded Scientologists are so fearful of being expelled from are deviating more and more from the Aims of Scientology as promulgated by LRH. Those communities are becoming increasingly tolerant of and thus encouraging of insanity and criminality (particularly financial criminality). They are being leaned on hard to continue to contribute to the “wars” that Miscavige is so fond of declaring. Honest beings in those communities have long since been stripped of any rights. The able are increasingly being made to suffer rather than prosper, and when one manages to somehow reach greater heights, he or she is pressured to become a pimping cog in the financial irregularity machine.
So, let’s examine what we mean by community. What is a community? What kind of community do real Scientologists want? What are the benefits of sharing an ethical, sane community?
Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers begins with a chapter about a small town in Pennsylvania named Roseto. It was named after the village its Italian-American inhabitants’ ancestors had emigrated from during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sometime in the 1950’s a guest speaker at a local medical conference, Dr. Stewart Wolf, happened to notice that there was an extremely low incidence of heart failure in Roseto. Wolf investigated for years to determine how this small burg could apparently beat what was then a nationwide epidemic.
Using every medical and scientific investigative means Wolf – with the aid of other doctors and a sociologist (John Bruhn) – failed to find a single physical common denominator that explained Rosetans’ longevity. They seemed to drink, smoke and eat fatty foods just as often as most other Americans.
Then:
“What Wolf began to realize was that the secret of Roseto wasn’t diet or exercise or genes or location. It had to be Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they figured out why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under two thousand people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.”
Wolf and Bruhn went on to discuss their findings at medical conferences across the country, “about the mysterious and magical benefits of people stopping to talk to one another on the street, and of having three generations under one roof. Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were – that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made – on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking in terms of community.”
Communication, great social activity, love and respect for family, attending a church that has a “unifying and calming effect”? Imagine that. Kind of sounds like a firm foundation for “A civilization without insanity, without criminals, and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where Man is free to rise to greater heights…”
Maybe we should stop being so confounded worried about being expelled from immoral, rapidly declining communities and start getting busy building ones in which we can be happy and of which we can be proud.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 