Over the past few days I have told a several people that the then current post on this blog, The Scientology Sandbox, would very likely be my last post on the subject. However, this morning as I was leaving Los Angeles after taking care of some business there the ambush partially captured on the video below occurred.
The cast is as follows:
1. Bald guy – Marc Yager. Highest ecclesiastical officer of scientology’s ‘mother church’ (church of scientology international). Watchdog Committee Chairman.
2. Fellow with video camera. Dave Bloomberg. Long-time Scientology Executive Strata member – the alleged highest management body in church of scientology international.
3. The woman is Jenny Linson Devocht. She is a close personal aide to David Miscavige – the self-proclaimed pope of scientology. She is also an intimate friend of Miscavige.
Because of scientology’s bunker down response to public exposure of Miscavige’s creation of a culture of violence at the highest levels of scientology, including maintenance of concentration and torture prisons, people have been in mystery as to what scientology management has been up to for the past several years.
This video gives a partial answer. It is remarkable in that Miscavige has spent millions of dollars to create a wall of perjury before Texas courts claiming that he, and the highest levels of scientology management, have no knowledge – and have not authorized – these same type of ambush, in-your-face tactics against me and my family that have been carried out for years now.
There are those who dismiss L. Ron Hubbard as the consummate con man. They insist that with conscious aforethought he created and operated dianetics and scientology as a fraudulent bait and switch operation fooling and fleecing tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of relatively intelligent adults. So cunning was Hubbard according to some anti-scientologists that if you were to take their words for granted you would have to rank Hubbard as one of the more able and intelligent minds of the twentieth century. The complexity, the breadth, and the duration of Hubbard’s alleged fraudulent scheme would be a virtual impossibility for any mere mortal to accomplish.
At the opposite extreme pole hard core scientologists truly believe that L. Ron Hubbard was ‘Source’, a sort of God from which nothing but ultimate truth was issued. They have trained their own minds to reject any information even tangentially relating to mind or spirit that does not come from Hubbard’s mouth or pen.
The anti-scientologist with his name-calling, absolutist statements and lampooning serves to reinforce the scientologist believer’s conviction that Hubbard and scientology deserve undaunting and vigilant defense. Likewise, the Ron-quoting scientologist’s aggressive certitude serves to reinforce the anti-scientologists’ views that Hubbard’s work is good for nothing more than creating unthinking, conformist zealots.
Members of either side of the scientology extremes demonstrate as severe a case of denialism as the other. As with any hotly contested, complex issue denialists cling hard to simple answers that make them comfortable with putting difficult questions out of sight and out of mind. It seems that in the scientology world L. Ron Hubbard is either God or Satan. One won’t find much truth on either side of a passionate debate between denialists, whether the subject is politics, science, philosophy or scientology. But, if one listens without embracing one side or the other the minute it seems to agree with one’s prejudices and intelligently looks for oneself, one will generally find that the truth lies somewhere between the polar extremes.
We will explore the reasons why those affected by scientology in the long-term continue to act out scientology’s patented us vs. them drama behavior and why that holds true even for those who become virulent critics of the subject.
It is quite easy to understand why someone gets involved in scientology in the first place. Scientology includes features that play well to those going through the adolescent stage of human development. That stage was well summed up by James W. Fowler in his book Stages of Faith:
New expectations, qualitatively different disciplines and a host of difficult decisions are the requirements with which societies greet the now more womanly or manly adolescent. In trying to meet and fulfill these requisites youth will call on the available and personally resonant ideological resources of their environments, particularly those that are embodied in charismatic and convincing leaders. They will seek sponsoring groups and figures and will appoint otherwise well-meaning persons as temporary enemies over against whom their identities may be clarified. They may band together in tight cliques, overemphasizing some relatively trivial commonality as a symbol of shared identity. In this cliquishness they can be quite cruel as they exclude those who do not share this common element.
What is so unique about scientology is not that it at first capitalizes on this adolescent growth stage and its needs. Instead, it is that scientology manages to implant within the scientologist’s sub conscious that this stage is as far as development goes. By continually communicating constructs as reality with a convincing combination of charisma and certainty, Hubbard manages to make scientologists buy into a universe view that is completely encompassed within Fowler’s adolescent development perspective.
That scientologists receive what they consider adequate solutions to their immediate needs from those constructs and related practices reinforces the indoctrinated universe view. The closed culture of scientology makes stage growth stunting inevitable. That culture convinces the individual to assign any and every personal development along the Fowler schema — or by any other standard — to the brilliance of Hubbard and scientology. Likewise, it includes sophisticated and complex analyses for blaming any regression or depression on perceived enemies of scientology, directly or indirectly. All of these dichotomy creating mis-assignment of causation devices serve to reinforce the adolescent, denialist universe view taught in scientology.
The adolescent stage of faith universe view is so thoroughly ingrained in the sub conscious of the scientologist that even when an individual manages to disconnect from the scientology organization he or she often continues to act with the adopted us vs. them, misassignment of cause, and blame mentality. The former cult member can gravitate toward groups of independent, former, and even anti-scientologists who act in the same cliquish and cruel manner that they did while actively participating in scientology.
In the scientology milieu – organizational, independent, former, and anti – reason holds little currency. It is replaced by the adolescent, denialist language of absolutism and condemnation. It is a culture of facile appointment of enemies and easy bandwagon riding with those perceived to share trivial commonalities.
Getting out of the scientology sandbox begins with one simple, liberating step. But, for the reasons outlined thus far, it is a step those involved in scientology culture find difficult to navigate.
That phrase keeps coming to mind when I see the TNT ad “we know drama”. TNT, you have nothing on scientology. Seems sort of oxymoronic, doesn’t it? Scientology’s entire mission purports to be to remove dramatization from the psyches of adherents, and ultimately from all of humankind’s psyches. Yet, by observation there are no more drama obsessed people than scientologists.
I was not going to post this essay for the foreseeable future. However, I came across this item from FOX 411 recently, Lewis on Cruise. Most of this essay was drafted prior to me seeing this latest scientology, well, drama. When you get to the end of the post you will understand why this news prompted me to push the ‘post’ button.
One of the favorite sayings of scientologists to express disdain towards someone is ‘he is just dramatizing.’ It is used to label any behavior that is not upbeat, Stepford or Truman Show like, positivity. It has its source in the mind ‘technology’ presented by L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard teaches that we are all the unknowing effect of previous moments of pain and unconsciousness, called ‘engrams.’ To a scientologist, the poor, unknowing non-scientologist doesn’t even realize that a great percentage of his behavior, his choices, and his actions are really to greater or lesser degree ‘dramatizations’ of the emotions and post-hypnotic commands buried in engrams.
After a scientologist spends hundreds of thousands of dollars and several years conquering his engrams, he is said to be ‘Clear.’ He no longer has the supposed repository of engrams called the ‘reactive mind.’ Thus, theoretically he no longer dramatizes. Right? Wrong.
The Clear is indoctrinated into a dramatic universe view that is so surreal millions of dollars are spent annually to keep the scripts under lock and key and out of the hands of the public at large. The drama is so intense that Hubbard claims that if the unprepared are exposed to it, they will drop dead on the spot. The secrets teach that there is no original thought on planet earth, but that of Hubbard. All technology advances are simply dramatizations of the 75 million year-old incident that converted Earth into a prison. All social sciences are mere dramatizations of ideas that were implanted into beings’ heads 75 million years ago. Now, realize the drama so far revealed in this paragraph is cold, hard reality to the clear scientologist. In their minds, clear scientologists are sub rosa agents on an enemy controlled prison planet giving it their all to clear humanity from the effects of their universe view indoctrination. And like any good drama, the scientology one includes its nemeses.
All who would state the patently obvious as I have done here are labeled as suppressive persons. A suppressive person is an agent, knowing or unknowing, of the intergalactic forces who converted earth into a prison planet 75 million years ago. They are programmed to destroy, wittingly or not, humankind’s only hope for furlough, scientology. Some classes of people do not even have to demonstrate that they have even heard the word ‘scientology’ to be considered suppressive people by scientologists. ‘Psychs’ is such a class. Psychs is a scientology term describing anyone involved in the mental health, mind science, or psychotherapy fields. That includes all psychologists, psychotherapists and psychiatrists. And, by extension the manufacturers of psychotropic medications: pharmaceutical companies. Psychs are overtly targeted for ‘annihilation’, ‘obliteration’ and ‘extinction’ by scientology.
This drama becomes so dramatic for the scientologist that he or she can ‘freewheel’. That is, go into a paranoid-schizophrenic like spin where they act out the drama that the enemy is everywhere. In such a state they can become wild-eyed and, well, dramatic about matters that would seem to have little significance to anyone but them.
That is rather apparent from the very public dramatization that is the subject of Lewis’ lament:
A couple years later Tom Cruise invited Brooke Shields and her husband to his scientology wedding to Katie Holmes in Italy so that she could see first-hand those who really know about the mind. Brooke graciously accepted and flew to Europe with her husband to attend. Tom’s hand-picked high-level scientology officiating minister was Commander Norman F. Starkey. Starkey was given a furlough from a scientology concentration and torture camp at which he was serving time in order to conduct the wedding. Starkey promptly got drunk, and overtly hit on Brooke Shields. She and her husband were so offended, they complained to Cruise’s best man, scientology supreme leader David Miscavige.
Cruise was later exposed for having attempted to use his resources to cover up his bff David Miscavige’s operation of cult prison camps where torture was regularly meted out:
Rather than take any iota of responsibility like a man, Cruise went mute and as we can divine from Juliette Lewis’ rants took solace in the fact his conduct really did not happen because in fact the forces of evil want him silenced. Perhaps he shut up in order to dutifully comply with those terrifying forces?
Poor Juliette Lewis – with apparent conviction and sincerity lamenting that Tom’s public relations problem is that big pharma wants him silenced. If Big pharma really cares about hurting scientology, I am pretty sure they want Tom out there front and center continuing these antics. Does all this seem just too thick to believe? It would not if you had had much experience with scientologists. Scientologists know and teach drama like nobody else.
The highest level of the bridge (the one-path-covers-all series of specific steps one must follow in order to arrive to native state) Hubbard left behind, OT (Operating Thetan) VIII, is a foray into the deep past for the purpose of identifying and validating one’s fundamental whole track identity. Thus, along with the deep past, identity – or ego – is made an obsession with scientology. The original client-centered therapy that scientology copied and scientology itself – up to the level of Clear – aim for stripping those ‘false’ identities one tends to collect and adopt so as to reach a state of self-actualization where a person finds his own self. However, in scientology one is not permitted to take that self-actualization so as to transcend self and explore new horizons. Instead, scientology teaches that knowing oneself is not good enough; one must become someone else: the superhuman, ubermensch, operating thetan. And to get there the scientologists starts anew on an endless journey stripping what he is indoctrinated to believe are thousands upon thousands of foreign personalities he is continuing to play out unconsciously. In fact, unwilling to admit the failure of scientology to erase the subconscious, Hubbard came up with a new explanation for the continuing subconscious dramas Clears continue to play out. That is a science fiction mythology that anthropomorphizes every sub-conscious thought the Clear has.
More fundamentally, scientology’s tenet of the everlasting individuality makes Clear self-actualizing a minor way station. The further an individual progresses along the bridge the more he is convinced that he possesses a continuing core identity which one can never fully realize absent thousands of hours of more auditing. That is a self that has been a separate, identifiable individual basic personality for what varies between adherents from quadrillions to an infinity of years. The longer one participates the more firmly one believes in his individuated separateness from all other beings and the entire universe. And so after spending perhaps years to attain the state of Clear the false identity stripping starts anew and this time continues until the scientologist dies.
To believe that scientology has secrets in store that will release the self from this obsession with time and identity would be irrational. For the past twenty-eight years scientology’s leaders have been attempting to read Hubbard’s solo (self-administered meditations) sessions after his own passage through his highest published level. Because of the non-sequitur nature of the scrawl he left behind, they have unsuccessfully attempted to divine what levels Ron may have ventured into beyond OT VIII. The only thing they do purport to know for certain is this: those ventures were even further into the deeper past than even quadrillions of years.
That is indisputable fact if Ron’s last two most trusted aides can be trusted as they were by Ron. Both of them made public presentations of a handwritten sheet of paper purported to be a worksheet from one of Hubbard’s late-life sessions. Pat Broeker did so at the L. Ron Hubbard funeral event in Hollywood in January 1986. Years later David Miscavige – who later deposed Broeker -pulled the same stunt in a special “OT Summit” briefing aboard scientology’s ship the Freewinds. They presented the same full 14 ½” sheet of paper covered in numbers in L. Ron Hubbard’s handwriting. Scientology’s elite of the elite claimed that was a date Hubbard was addressing in his post-OT VIII self auditing. They promised to divine what OT IX, X, ‘and so on’ were from study of those worksheets. To date they have apparently failed to create those revelations. So, the only thing the world knows about scientology’s as yet uncodified levels is that they direct attention to dates in the past that are so ancient the numbers alone can fill a foolscap sheet of paper.
Lest people mistake that worship of the past is something David Miscavige and Pat Broeker misinterpreted from Hubbard’s final days, realize it is much the same in scientology circles outside of the official organization. While Miscavige and Broeker promised OT levels IX, X, and ‘so on’, the leading independent scientology organization offers fifty-five (55) such levels beyond Clear – or four and one half times the invitations to regress yet further into the past.
And so, behind the face of the scientologist trying his darnedest to project the image of the upbeat maverick fully in the present lies a hidden obsession to ultimately return to native state, quadrillions of years or more into the past. That this cognitive dissonant state (present vs. past) would appear to be the pressure-packed counterposing of the perfect, polar dichotomy is not so by accident. A dispassionate and informed study of Hubbard’s research and discovery path reveals it to be an inevitability.
Once sold on the reactive mind construct as fact, the next most fundamental belief instilled through the scientology catechism is that we have all fallen from grace and must strive to re-attain it. We came from a state of perfection that was infinite in terms of potential and capability. Each of us once was divine ‘cause’. A scientologist’s mission is to return to that ‘native state.’ In order to do so one must confront that which created his descent into the human condition. Thus, the central practice of scientology is a form of abreaction therapy that returns one to and addresses each step one took down the ladder from his native condition.
Unlike more conventional psychotherapies, scientology’s abreaction practice is intended to be, and is in practice, interminable. That is due to scientology also teaching that each of us is a positive, separate identity that has been intact for quadrillions of years and beyond. It preaches that the unraveling of all the quadrillions of years of falling from perfection is the only road to spiritual freedom, even the only means to fully wake up from insanity.
The cathartic byproduct of witnessing events in the past serves as the glue that fixes the scientologist’s attention there forever. The belief in the holy grail lying in the deep past is firmly and cumulatively reinforced by every session one participates in that results in relief or release – or some other form of heightened emotion or consciousness – by witnessing an incident from one’s past.
Consequently, the second important prong of the scientology indoctrination is the belief that the answers to the mysteries of the universe all lay deep in the past. As much as scientology promises to create freedom from the past – and irrespective of how personally liberating one finds certain instances of regressing back to face it might be – scientology never releases the adherent from it. To the contrary, scientology continues to offer indoctrination at its highest levels that enforces a fixation yet deeper into the past. Scientologists will vehemently argue with a great deal of righteous indignation that this notion is blasphemous and defamatory. Yet, the words of scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard – which scientologists swear to understand and abide – demonstrate this to be the case. Hubbard’s thousands of recorded lectures are strewn with references to the good old space opera days. He liberally dropped dates like millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions, and quadrillions to the infinite power years ago when reminiscing about his exploits and by positive suggestion those of his adherents. In virtually all of Hubbard’s sci fi narratives beings possessed capabilities far exceeding anything known to humankind.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 