Author Archives: Mark C. Rathbun

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 19^th and early 20^th 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.

I am confident that my friends who saw me evolve over the past couple years will attest that what I posted in February on my little web page was true. Particularly, the following description outlining my intentions and objectives:

“A lot of folks seem to be suffering from the inculcated idea that once they depart or cease to slavishly follow every arbitrary dictate they automatically forfeit any spiritual gains they may have attained along the road. Natively conscientious as most beings are, such an evaluation can begin a pernicious dwindlng spiral of self-invalidation and unhappiness. I understand this phenomenon and the internal dichotomies extant within the organization that bring it about. In the process of reversing the decline in myself and in others certain lessons were learned that might be of some assistance to those who have experienced the same.

“I offer a simple program of rehabilitation of previously recognized abilities and education on universal truths and principles of spiritual growth. I do not offer a substitute for Scientology nor am in competition with the Church. I am only offering to share all the skills I have learned – from a wide variety of sources – to help those in need who once formally participated in Scientology but who now hold no hope nor intention of ever seeking help from the Church.”

I was on no mission to replace the Church or even the Church leadership. It was purely an offer to help those who had made the determination that they would never again seek help from the Church of Scientology; for whatever reason.

Within days of that posting I caught wind of Miscavige efforts to pull the plug on that offer of help. Church informants reported on some of those who initially reached out to me. Those people were intercepted and offered large incentives to turn on me, turn over all communications with me, and to return under the control of the Church. When I did not attempt to compete for those souls, adhering to my word that I wasn’t interested in those even harboring a desire to remain under the control of Miscavige’s outfit, Miscavige had OSA send informants to try to infiltrate my home and life.

What I had posted was not a threat in any way, shape or form to Miscavige’s fiefdom. It was never intended to be competion. I meant what I explicitly stated about the category of people I was reaching out to. People that the Miscavige regime had zero interest in, other than apparently, in keeping in a dormant, sleeping, effect state.

His reaction confirmed what I believed to be true about Miscavige: the very concept of anyone helping someone – particularly for no motive other than purely the desire to help one’s fellows – was so abhorrent to him it caused irrational impulses to stop and destroy. “Helping others is an activity which drives the antisocial personality nearly berserk.” – LRH

Since that time a lot of water has passed under the Bridge. That includes a lot of Miscavige generated toxic waste. That also includes a lot of pure, clean and beautiful outpouring of theta from folks who fit the exact description set forth in the italicized text above.

Several people have challenged me to demonstrate that I am able to take over Miscavige’s position or to create an organization mirroring his. I do not have any desire to do either. Some people have criticized me of irresponsibility for exposing the truth about Miscavige’s church without offering all the bells and whistles of Church membership they find comforting or necessary. People who are in it for the bells and whistles probably ought to stay parked right where they are. Ultimately, they will be served nothing but bells and whistles.

I have learned quite a lot since February. First, there are far more people who consider themselves Scientologists, or at least use what they learned from Scientology in their every day lives, who fit the description of having no intention of ever again being affiliated with the Church than I initially thought was possible. Second, many of those people fear retribution if they publicly discuss their feelings on the subject. Third, many of those people lead unhappy lives because they miss the ability to share community with others of similar philosophic disposition; a subset of that group, may have also suffered financially by having to cut ties with business networks they nurtured for many years. Fourth, some portion of that public are ill physically and spiritually because they have dwindled down to apathy and below and found refuge with the only ex-Church member forums that have existed – ones that make anonymity and hiding a virtue, and make criticism an end, rather than a means to achieve any improved state of affairs.

When I started blogging more and more people contacted me about helping them to reverse the spiral they found themselves on. In order to cope with such an overwhelming number of individuals, I began simply connecting former Church members up with similar thinking ones in proximity to one another. Lo and behold, such people began to report to me truly phenomenal phenomena. Here is a list of the types of things they have reported more than once:

1. A rehabilitation of states attained in Scientology by simply having someone acknowledge with reality what he or she has been through.

2. An enhancement in states attained through Scientology by now receiving regular acknowledgment of theta phenomena that up to that point they had no one to share with who could truly understand and appreciate it. Sadly, many folks have reported being invalidated by Scientology public and staff for such origins when they were affiliated with the Church.

3. Feeling de-pts’d by virtue of feeling some strength in numbers – even if the increase went from one to two – and all that comes with that.

4. Physical disabilities healing. Not a bit surprising to me. In the Church’s “Freedom” magazine in response to the St Pete Times Truth Rundown series, my former wife attributed a long list of physical problems I had the year I left the SO. It was one of the few relatively accurate statements of that scandal sheet. All of those ailments rapidly resolved upon my cutting all connection to the SP.

5. Great artistic, career, and or business opportunities suddenly appearing, attributed by people reporting them to beginning to socially network again with newly discovered friends sharing their philosophy.

6. The increase in frequency of OT perceptics and abilities.

I don’t have ultimate answers to questions of how to set up widespread, uniform delivery of the tech, nor how to administer whatever form that might some day take. I don’t even purport to have the background, training or experience to answer such questions.

I do know that I have been working on an Ethics paradigm – sometimes referred to as Ethics Program Number One. I do know that I have seen many people rise from apathy and below to 4.0 and above on the Tone Scale as they become de-PTSed from Miscavige’s Church. Most of those people never received a formal session nor even had the opportunity (yet) to meet in person. The several I have met in person tend to confirm my estimate that most folks reporting incredible gains by handling the suppression in their lives are not exaggerating.

I am of the view that those phenomena listed as 1-6 above have been suppressed in Miscavige’s Church. I do not have the slightest hesitation in continuing to facilitate more free, independent Scientologists experiencing what appears to be the miracles attainable with the subject when studied in the fashion Hubbard originally advised it be done. That is with a keen, critical, and independent mind. That increases the ability to as-is. Isn’t that what the entire aim of the subject is, to increase people’s ability to as-is?

Having operated with this viewpoint, I have been pleasantly surprised to learn of another natural, positive byproduct of as-ising lies with truth and making it safe for the well intentioned to congregate and share ideas. I have learned that there are a number of very capable folks who are approaching the subjects of tech and admin in the same fashion I have tried to approach Ethics. They are not motivated by money. They are not motivated by fame. They are motivated purely by making it possible for others to experience gains similar to their own.

I believe that the behavioralism, twisted moralism, materialism and induced fear of disclosure of confidences practiced as standard operating procedure in Miscavige’s church are the reverse of Scientology. Those practices increase mental mass, and convince a person he needs to become a slave in order to become free. All too often, rather than increase one’s ability to as-is, it results in people who specialize in creating mental mass for others (guilt, fears, self-invalidation, and for those who have been to Int for any substantial period, actual text book engrams).

People who have simply exercised their abilities to be there and comfortably confront when faced with Church intimidation tactics – and not allowed themselves to be drawn into flash fights and the resultant creation of ridges – have as-is’d the invaders. That has happened most frequently when the person being targeted by the Church has the comfort of knowing he has people who are behind him or her with unconditional love. It is quite remarkable.

I am fairly certain that if a decent percentage of independent Scientologists stand up, identify themselves, and freely associate with like-minded friends in the light of day at least three things will happen:

a. Many individual lives will regain meaning. Many more lives still will reap the gains from each of us who independently and freely use Scientology with no other motivation than to help others reach higher states of beingness.

b. Scientology (the subject and community) will experience a renaissance within society at large.

c. Miscavige’s church will be forced to either radically reform by reversing its suppressive operating basis or face its inevitable demise (note the intransitive is used; it is not because of anything that you or I will do to it that will cause it other than being their comfortably – it will be a self-inflicted fate).

At this point, at this Ethics stage,  I am advocating  that independent thinking Scientologists think hard about being proud of exercising their independence. That they make themselves known and use the title “Scientologist” without shame or embarrassment. That they create community with other independent Scientologists and make it that much safer for those people to get their strength up and flourish. To the extent we tip toe around imaginary egg shells, we are PTS. We cripple our own ability to as-is. If we walk tall, we rehabilitate one another’s abilities to as-is. The Lord knows that this world could use some more of that.