Tag Archives: Dianetics

Scientology Beliefs (revised)

Posted on February 3, 2015 by | 1,016 comments

In plain English, here are scientology’s core religious beliefs.

  1. Scientology’s sophisticated mix of pop psychology and hypnotism are firmly believed to be the only workable ‘technology’ for curing mental issues, neurosis, psychosis, physical disease, increasing awareness and intelligence, and for creating OT’s (operating thetans, L. Ron Hubbard’s version of Nietzsche’s superman or Aleister Crowley’s magician).Note:  Scientology is at first presented in secular, scientific terms promising and then false reporting 100% workability.  In fact scientology never achieved even the scientifically recognized 20 to 30 percent placebo effect in terms of long-term satisfaction.  In order to explain away that discrepancy the less-than-placebo percentage who stick with it are led to adopt the remaining listed beliefs.  The ‘technology’ evolved being carefully designed and administered so as to lead scientologists to wholeheartedly accept and live according to these beliefs.

2.  Planet Earth is a prison. The vast majority of human beings – and billions of             invisible other beings – are its inmates.

3.  Xenu is the name of scientology’s Satan who established Earth as                                  a prison and transported billions of beings to serve as its inmates.

4.  Our continued imprisonment is assured by ‘psychs.’ ‘Psychs’ are                                    defined as psychiatrists, psychologists, psycho-therapists, priests,                                ministers, and anyone else practicing in the field of the mind and                                  spirit.  Psychs were sent here from a planet called ‘Farsec.’  They are a                        special breed of being created and invested with the sole purpose of                            keeping humankind mentally imprisoned.

5.  Ron Hubbard is the first to discover the above ‘truths’, and the only                             one to have devised a means of escaping the prison planet.

6.  Navigation through the only hole in the wall consists of closely                                        emulating Hubbard and behaving as he did when he lived.

7.  Enemies, including psychs as well as anyone expressing any doubt or                           reservation about these beliefs, must be destroyed by any means                                  necessary by scientologists. Such means include lying, suing, cheating,                        harassing, intimidating, blackmailing, smearing and by physical                                      violence.

8. When a scientologist has expended all of his best efforts in the vain                             pursuit of these beliefs he is expected to ‘discard’ his body so that he                           may continue to pursue them without such a physical ‘impediment’.

Whether the ultimate belief, number 8 above, constitutes suicide is a wholly subjective question of religious belief.

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The Scientology Sandbox

Posted on October 14, 2014 by | 559 comments

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.

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Scientology: Past and Present

Posted on October 3, 2014 by | 336 comments

Continued, from last post Scientology’s Worship of the Past:

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.

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Scientology’s Worship Of The Past

Posted on October 1, 2014 by | 314 comments

Another excerpt from Deconstructing Scientology:

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.

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Scientology Thought Control

Posted on September 26, 2014 by | 271 comments

The following is a chapter passage that immediately follows another one that was posted earlier, Deconstructing Scientology.  A quick reminder perusal of the first passage will make reading the following easier.

Part II:

Such a psychotherapy has been shown to have the power to convert conscientious, caring, emotionally disturbed, and relatively intelligent people into cheery, focused followers who yet accept implicitly, and act according to, subconscious commands on the order of:

A. One should never fear to hurt another person in a just cause (most particularly when that cause is the cause of the creator of the mental therapy he engages in).

B. One should never withdraw his allegiance to any group to which he has pledged it, irrespective of how criminal and destructive he discovers that group might be (most particularly when that group is the one endowed with a monopoly on the mental therapy he is engaged in).

C. One should never show compassion to the weak for to do so will worsen the weak and the strong attempting to lend a hand. Only the ‘able’ ought be supported and assisted. Like in social Darwinist thought it is justified by the arbitrary datum that only further empowerment of the elite will raise anyone else’s boat.

D. That now considering oneself one of the elite, every time you engage in self-absorbed, introspective processes to make yourself feel better you are improving humankind’s lot. A sort of imbued megalomaniac narcissism is effectuated re-enforcing a-c above.

E. Personalities inclined to not go along with the mental therapy program and instead find fault with it ought to be disposed of permanently and with no slightest dent in one’s conscience for having done so.

The thinking becomes so inverted that the mental health therapy acolyte becomes fiercely contentious and combative about arguing the rationality of the a-e thought pattern and behaviors above.  In fact, this is the ingrained mindset and behavior pattern of a scientologist; and he or she will defend it as ferociously and instinctively as a she-gator protects her young.  Being utterly oblivious to any sub conscious (associative) mind system in himself the scientologist may even purport not to hold these views and yet continue to argue vehemently for their rationale.  Even when scientologists leave and disavow the organizations and the subject itself, they can be observed continuing to act out these patterns.  Little compassion and much arrogant, vicious fault-finding and attempts to undermine espousers of opposing views often marks the interchange between them.

That people can have their characters and long term behavior patterns so apparently permanently molded and that they can continue to argue the virtues of their programming ought not come as a surprise.  Many scientifically grounded studies over the past several decades in fact have demonstrated that that is precisely how sub conscious (associative) and analytical thought works hand in glove.  The subconscious (associative) mind system automatically rationalizes the content of its adopted narratives perpetuating the human proclivity toward creating, adopting and bolstering stories to make sense of the world.  Those rationalizations become somewhat permanent associative mind narratives.  The narratives’ matrices of associated ‘facts’ become the filter through which new information and perceptions are sensed and organized. The auto-associating mind system prompts the individual to use his analytical faculties to further explain and justify its conclusions.  The comfortable, if lazy, analytical function usually complies or simply abides and articulates the sub-conscious-associative faculty’s conclusions.  It most certainly does so when the individual is not on guard against misinformation, mis-association and irrationality common to associative mind processes.  And when the person is convinced that there are no such processes present – as the ‘cleared’ scientologist is – his analytical system can become mighty reactionary itself.

Many of these facts about how the mind works are understood and plied by those who mold educational, political and social thought.  This knowledge is used and affects us daily in advertising, business, law, politics, media, you name it.  Arts and sciences driven by it are increasing exponentially with the advent of the Age of Information.  Fantastic sums of money are invested into utilizing this knowledge to maintain the status quo and make populations more materialist-consumerist oriented to increase the dollars flowing toward the top of the wealth pyramid. Like it or not, we live in a culture driven, fueled, and maintained by consultation to and application of the advices of the greatest minds in human psychology.

The knowledge utilized to keep the masses slaves to the current economic system demonstrates how an understanding of these mechanisms could make a hypnotic ‘therapy’ as discussed herein possible.  They are the very mechanisms used to make scientologists slaves to their leadership.  The scientologist is kept oblivious to this.  Scientology keeps its followers ignorant by clever application of a-e above.  It teaches them that those who know anything about psychology are the enemy and that understanding what the enemy knows could poison the follower.  The enemy and his knowledge must be attacked and destroyed by any means necessary in order for a-e culture to function.  And so scientology ultimately becomes an insulated cult playing out an exaggerated form of that which it is taught to condemn.

In practice this is how scientology culture operates.  Its form of governance is closed-system, thought-controlling totalitarianism.  It closely resembles George Orwell’s 1984.  That holds parallel right down to omnipresent electronic recording, thought police, thought crimes, and Newspeak.   If a scientologist begins to cultivate thought patterns that question authority (or even explore the very mechanisms we discuss here) they are soon ferreted out by liberal use of one component of a lie detector (the electropsychometer or e-meter).  The discovered offending mind is put through rigorous reformation techniques.  That reform can include years-long confinement in re-educating concentration camps. It more often entails the loss – or threatened loss – of communication and communion with one’s family and closest friends and even business associates.

It should be noted that the psychological mechanisms at work in commerce, marketing, media and politics are not held secret.  The only reason for their continued negative effectiveness is people’s lack of energy or curiosity in learning of them.  And therein lies the most troubling aspect of scientology’s enforced information bubble.

It would seem that the road to recovery for a scientologist should include education in the very psychological mechanisms that were employed on him so effectively that they often continue to affect him long after he has left the cult.

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Deconstructing Scientology

Posted on September 13, 2014 by | 622 comments

This is an excerpt from an upcoming book with the working title ‘Deconstructing Scientology.’  It is directed toward those who are considering the possibility of dipping a toe into dianetics or scientology study or participation.  My failures over the past three years in attempting to help former members graduate from the subject informed a whole new line of research into some of the darker arts that L. Ron Hubbard mastered to make people so apparently incapable/unwilling to learn.  

Hypnosis

The most diabolically effective form of hypnotism would probably thoroughly convince the subject that it was impossible to hypnotize him.  It seems that only in that case could the idea be implanted that no awakening and de-hypnotism would ever be desirable or even possible. It would inculcate the opposite of the old adage applicable to any reform, or even education, activity that the first step to recovery or learning is the recognition that there is something to recover from or to learn.  If you were thoroughly convinced that you were more awake than virtually all of humanity, there is no chance that anyone could convince you to possibly take a look at waking up.

Imagine this scenario for a moment.  You take up a course of therapy and study that convinces you that if you dedicatedly address a particular category of subconscious incidents (those anchored in unconsciousness and pain) you will have erased your subconscious mind and all of its automatic associative responses.  The practice promises to render you virtually immune to sub conscious suggestion because you are permanently erasing that mind system or mechanism – in this case related as a tangible, factual entity – that makes you susceptible to such.  The practice of concentrated attention toward past experiences produces some feeling of catharsis, just as countless forms of psychotherapy, meditative and contemplative practice inevitably do.  Thus heartened, you assiduously follow instructions and devote a substantial amount of time and treasure to the endeavor.  The required sacrifice alone conditions you to fight to justify the experience so as to account for the years and resources devoted to it.

Each session of therapy leaves you that much more certain that you are that much less prone to sub conscious persuasions.  While following this course, you also take in a tremendous volume of opinions, prejudices, life-directing philosophy and mythologies from the source of the methodology that is making ‘erasure’ of your sub-conscious a reality.  You are fed a comprehensive, romantic and imaginative new universe view.  It is reinforced every time you encounter evidence against its plausibility. That is because your new universe view characterizes any information conflicting with your new universe view as evidence of the validity of the new universe view under attack by ‘flat-earther’ holders of traditional universe views.

You implicitly trust virtually all of your indoctrination because you find the therapy cathartic on some level and you are so grateful for being given the opportunity to forever be free of hidden persuasions directing your life.  Your experience is being validated and reinforced by sophisticated, organized positive encouragement all along the way.  That – combined with ample mythology adoption – elevates your cathartic experiences to levels of exhilaration.  You are led to believe that these feelings of exhilaration are super human states making you sort of an elite, special being.  You are literally told you are among the upper tenth of the upper ten percent of humanity, simply because of your participation.

The indoctrination becomes part of you because, consistent with the principles of conversational (or covert) hypnosis, you are given to believe you are assimilating it of your own volition.  You are repeatedly told that nothing you are being told is true unless you yourself accept it, so that analytically you are certain data cannot be being imposed upon you, but instead you are self-determinatedly evaluating its truth or falsity and use.

All the while all the data input is being poured into a sub-conscious that could not be opened wider for unfiltered receipt of information and suggestion.  That is because you are convinced that you have no sub-conscious, auto-associative mind.  As noted already you are given to believe you have ‘erased’ that hidden persuader.  Of course in reality you have as strong a sub-conscious as anyone else.  It is probably even far more hair-trigger given all the counseling you engaged in to take the edge off your incidents anchored in pain and unconsciousness. That you have a sub-conscious, auto-associative faculty is patent.  Otherwise, you would not be able to draw a breath.  You would not be able to direct a spoonful of corn flakes into your mouth in the morning.  You would last about five minutes on a busy city street before you walked in front of a bus or speeding car.  You would not be able to perform any of the myriad intuitive tasks human beings routinely carry out daily.

Just as you have come to believe that you are making trillions of analytical, conscious calculations every day in order to function, you consider all that you have been taught during your mental therapy devotion is analytically evaluated and understood wisdom.  Yet, by objective observation of people not wed to the same therapy your behavior is in many ways far more reactive than before you engaged in the therapy.  If such observations are shared with you, you will reactively, automatically associate such with sociopathic characteristics of the type who oppose the magic of erasure of the sub conscious, associative mind system.  That is part of your indoctrination.  Just as certain as you become that you are a member of the top one percent of humankind, you truly believe that such negative people are part of the sociopathic bottom 2 ½ percent of humanity. You will move away from such people and replace those bonds with people who have received and abide by your therapy and its indoctrinations.   Again, indications of the possibility of your having entered an elaborate trap are converted into reinforcements for the walls of that trap.

By now, you might recognize that what is being described here could be characterized as an extreme, exaggerated case of the mechanisms of fanaticism.   You might have noted some more subtle forms of the mechanics outlined so far as being present in the far-out fringes of political or religious isms.  Such indications are not difficult to recognize when there is some distance between you and the object of your observation.  By entering those mechanics into such a super personal, ultra subjective activity as psychotherapy that works with the deep recesses of your psyche, those mechanics are far more difficult, if not impossible, to detect.

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Congruence

Posted on September 6, 2014 by | 172 comments

Excerpt from upcoming book Clear and Beyond:

The fundamental two-way communication process that all scientology methodology derives its workability from existed before L. Ron Hubbard ever wrote a word on the subject of the mind.  All of its components were developed, far beyond the degree of sophistication that scientology ever treated them, while Hubbard was still engaged in black magik rituals in Pasadena.  They were perhaps best explained and demonstrated in Rogerian client-centered therapy.  It would behoove scientologists to study of it.  The best place to start would be On Becoming a Person by Carl R. Rogers (Houghton Mifflin, 1961).

What made Hubbard popular initially with publication of Dianetics was his simplifying and codifying critical principles of client-centered therapy thus potentially opening the process of self-actualization to far more people.   Hubbard himself has acknowledged that Dianetics’ fad-like initial appeal rested largely on the promise of taking therapy out of the hands of professionals and putting it into the living rooms of lay people.  Much of that particular appeal was lost as dianetics and its progeny scientology became more mass-production oriented, expensive, exclusive, and cult-like.  Not surprisingly, those negative developments can be traced to dianetics’ and scientology’s attempts to short-cut vital client-centered therapy principles in the first place.

The more failure in producing a confident, independent-minded, self-determined client, the more Hubbard introduced personality control mechanisms.  That is probably the most cardinal of sins imaginable in actual client-centered philosophy.  With pressure to deliver on dianetics’ original promises of immediate and permanent results, the training of practitioners became an assembly-line like activity.  On the one hand that helped to thoroughly crash train some workable skills, while on the other hand it omitted a more contemplative, intellectual appreciation for the agencies at work that actually create a desired effect and the responsibilities that go with such practice.

For example, for all the effectiveness of the training regimens instituted to teach the skills of counselor communication in scientology, perhaps the most important client-centered counseling ability was not only omitted but the opposite was trained in.  That is congruence.  Congruence is the term Rogers uses to describe the counselor’s natural ability to fully and comfortably be himself without imposing himself upon the client.  Congruence is being oneself as a person and not attempting to conceal it by creation of a façade, even a null one as trained in by scientology.  By establishing congruence the client has the security of the sense of knowing exactly where the counselor stands at any given moment.  Without congruence he does not.  That is critical in establishing the conditions necessary for self-actualization.

In contrast, scientology drills congruence out of a counselor to the point he can become a blank personality or a synthetic one.  Scientologists are even shown films depicting how they should ‘act’ (the ‘beingness’ they are expected to assume) as an auditor.   That is in keeping with its teaching that the way to achieve something is as simple as be, do, have.  That is, figure out the personality traits of someone who has what you want, then act them out as you do as he or she does, and before you know it you will have the fruits you sought.  Sincerity and genuineness (read congruence) are not included in the equation.   Certainly there have been mavericks within scientology who have had the courage or sense to be themselves as counselors.  And their results reflected that.  But, every single one of them was eventually caught up with and either expelled from the ranks or converted into a play-acting automaton by scientology’s policing arms.  This presages later chapters where we analyze in more depth the manifold ways in which scientology creates conforming, compliant minds.

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Standard Scientology

Posted on August 17, 2014 by | 1,102 comments

Those who obsess on the motivator (object of victimhood attachment) about how David Miscavige is scientology’s problem because he keeps revising scientology are like dogs barking up the wrong tree.  There is a plain fact they are not coming to grips with.  Scientology will forever be altered, revised, re-revised, repackaged, re-organized, and re-compiled.  People on the outside have been at it as hard as scientology organization folk are on the inside.  It is inevitable.  That is not because misunderstood words, the reactive mind or body thetans will forever keep people confused and incapable of applying one-hundred percent scientology standard technology.   Nor will it be because of the unstated (except in confidential upper level secrets), but actually held, scientology belief that humankind can’t get it because humankind is inherently incapable of understanding.  Instead, scientology will continuously be revised because there is no such thing as standard scientology technology.  Like the substance of scientology itself, what constitutes the standard is wholly a subjective matter.

That fact is obvious if one can unlock himself from identifying with L. Ron Hubbard and his work and read the latter dispassionately.  That of course is impossible for those who vow from the outset of their studies – and stick with it all the way through – to the notion that Hubbard is infallible and examination of any comparative data is potentially lethal.  When one who can objectively study scientology does so – particularly when he has tested its methods through extensive practice – something becomes patently clear. That is by conservative estimate more than ninety (90) percent of everything Hubbard wrote and uttered on scientology and dianetics was about how wrong all those who attempted to apply it were.  It is mostly a running stream of consciousness  (albeit held together by a hard core, two-valued logic and persuasively conveyed by a convincing speaker and writer) record of assigning reasons why the promises in the book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health were never realized and how they might yet be.   Highlighting that statement is Dianetics’ promise of full memory restoration in 1950 and Hubbard’s last ‘breakthrough’ (OT VIII) – as his 1986 dying declaration – promising to address the reason folk are apparently inherently amnesiacs.

Exacerbating the confusion is that many of the methods Ron educates his followers on as the mechanics intentionally used to control and damage the mind are simultaneously employed by him to do precisely that to his followers.  It is diabolical in that the follower having been educated by Ron on those mental entrapment techniques would then never guess they would be used on the follower.  You wind up with the curious phenomenon of apparently sincere people devoting their lives to vehemently defending their own entrapment.

There is another reason why the obvious is nearly impossible for a scientologist to see.  If there is one skill Hubbard had that perhaps outstripped all others it was his ability to always convincingly sound right while making others wrong.  That skill was exercised as consistently and as uncannily as a falling cat’s ability to land on its feet.  From before the publication of Dianetics, Ron Hubbard proved as immovable as a mountain on being criticized, corrected, or accepting even the most rational of input and advice. Just as consistently, he rained hell on anyone with the temerity to suggest holding his theories up to objective standards.   When he said or wrote something it was communicated convincingly and in an authoritative fashion.  For the next thirty-six years he evolved his subjects by trial and error.  But, the running track of that development was memorialized in a unique voice.  While the track altered and changed everything over and over because of unworkability found with that which was at first communicated as unalterable, absolute fact, the voice of those continuous alterations could admit of no error.  The matter is exacerbated by the fact that it is a ‘research and development’ record based exclusively on subjective standards.   With no objective scrutiny allowed and no accurate, honest assignation of error possible, all manner of erroneous yet authoritative data are driven home just as forcefully as correct ones.

The continuous backfilling that constitutes the bulk of scientology writing and lecturing is apparent in scientology training packs.  The student is not instructed simply on what he should do and why.  Instead, he reads bulletin after bulletin and listens to lecture after lecture of Hubbard talking about how people have misapplied or might misapply what he discovered.   The materials are a patchwork of Hubbard writings and lectures cherry-picked from different periods of time.  They make for a mix chock-full of contradictions.  Without having one’s intellectual honesty compromised by agreeing from the outset that Hubbard is infallible and all of his words are literal Gospel (that which is required in scientology training – along with the requirement to attribute every success to Ron and every failure to pesky humans and their inherent fallibility), all of this would be as obvious as the nose on your face.

Since all scientology courses begin with a warning that if anyone states that anything Hubbard wrote is ‘historical’, ‘background’, or ‘no longer used’ he will be promptly convicted of the crime TREASON, how does one cope with the miasma of contradictions?   Scientology instructors employ a ‘technology’ that has the student convince himself there are no contradictions.  It is so effective that scientology students do not graduate a course until they attest with certitude that everything makes consistent, perfect sense.  The firmness of that idea of certainty is verified by one component of a modern lie detector (the stress testing electropsychometer).  Highlighting this culture of hypocrisy, the cognitive dissonance creating course rooms – which eliminate any questioning, thinking or doubts – are called ‘Academies’ taken from the ancient Greek sites where liberal, critical philosophical thinking was once nurtured.

The net result of all this is that scientology is destined to always incite debate and internecine strife – no matter how enlightened and wise its leadership may be.  There can never be universal consensus on what constitutes ‘standard technology’ given the voice (noted above) scientology is written in and given its inalterable injunctions that that voice may not ever be questioned, interpreted, or clarified.   In a strict organizational setting, the debate goes on inside each individual’s head (until settled by an instilled, arrogant brand of cognitive dissonance) while attempting to keep up, lock-step of course, with management’s latest pronunciamentos on what constitutes ‘standard.’   In an independent setting it is a self-righteous war of words in which nobody can establish a clearly reasoned high ground.  To gain any traction in the debate requires one to progressively retreat further toward adopting Ron’s certain, swaggering and authoritative personality.

That is why bands of scientologists, whether in or out of the official organizations, will always rally around certain, swaggering, authoritative types of personalities – and promptly disperse when that catalyst is removed.   Sadly, but just as certainly, about the closest thing scientologists are going to find to that original L. Ron Hubbard package is David Miscavige.

About the only common denominator all brands of scientology share as something resembling a standard in practice is this: does the guy stay on board and continue paying?  If you have been led to believe that any viable brand of scientology is applying some more enlightened standard you have simply been led to believe yet another lie.  Why do you think that the only allegedly ‘expanding’ independent scientology outfits feature the addition of 47 advanced levels of auditing?  It is like Miscavige inventing the existence of OT Levels IX through XV and beyond, only seven times over.   What you get is power of choice in picking the duration of your addiction.

Those who make a living by trying to convince folks otherwise are profiting by playing on misplaced hopes.  It is a different harmonic of the same game that was played on people within.

There is a silver lining in all this.  In addition to whatever any individual may feel he might have picked up of use along the way in scientology,  there are a couple of assets that probably all scientologists can recognize they possess.  First, they can realize that they were well meaning and trusting to begin with; scientology doesn’t take very well on people without those virtues. Second, they can recognize that they have had the opportunity to hone the latter virtue (trust) by surviving the most intense graduate school of psychological hard knocks.

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Posted in David Miscavige, Deconstructing Scientology, Graduating from Scientology, healing, independents, l. ron hubbard, philosophy, tech, Uncategorized

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Scientology: Hypnotism or Persuasion

Posted on October 17, 2013 by | 156 comments

Jefferson Hawkins began an insightful deconstruction of Scientology ethics in an interview with Tony Ortega at his Scientology Underground Bunker page.   I believe the techniques Jeff exposed had (have) broader application in the process that Scientology employs in implanting its constructs as hard-bound reality.  It is not limited to the indoctrination on ethics. I had noted this myself while spending several months of each day listening to a Hubbard lecture from the fifties and sixties.

In an early chapter of The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra gives an accurate and concise history of the evolution of logic and thought in the West and the East.  In doing so, he necessarily mentions virtually every significant philosopher who lived and wrote over the past couple millennia. I read that after the stint of listening to dozens of Hubbard lectures given over a two decade period.   Here is my contemporaneous margin note at the end of the chapter on evolution of thought in The Tao of Physics:

‘By this point (20th Century) in history, Hubbard has invalidated and laid to waste every great thinker who made possible and contributed to his way of thinking.’

One might recognize that Hubbard’s techniques of persuasion are used far and wide in today’s society.  In politics, in business, in advertising, in self-help, in religion, you name it.  Whether one wants to label it ‘hypnotism’ or ‘how to influence people’ or ‘persuasion’, it cannot be gainsaid that the  technique of indoctrination Jeff breaks down for us was employed throughout the history of Dianetics and Scientology.  And L. Ron Hubbard was a master of it application.

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Posted in acknowledgments, black dianetics, ethics, healing, Integral Theory, l. ron hubbard, philosophy, policy, propaganda, tech, the Reformation, training, Uncategorized

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Scientology In A Nutshell

Posted on October 7, 2013 by | 223 comments

L. Ron Hubbard devised methods using Aristotelian and Newtonian two-value logic constructs that can and do sometimes create peak experiences of a non-dual, infinity-logic consciousness nature.   However, Hubbard also constructed a philosophy that is simultaneously inculcated into adherents that anchors them into two-valued logic thinking and living.  The philosophy includes as a senior element, an utilitarian ethics system.   The ethics system is made senior and precedent to the peak experience therapy techniques that otherwise could give glimpses of intuitive non-duality.  The utilitarianism of the ethics system is only apparent.  Its representation that it is based upon infinity-logic is false in practice.  It is corrupted by creating a central ‘utilitarian’ equation that always has what is good for the group (the Scientologists) weighing senior to all other considerations and thus is always considered what is best for all.  That fact makes the system, in fact and in practice, a two-value logic system.  What redounds to the benefit of the group is good; what does not benefit the group is evil.

The net result of Hubbard’s system was that he could create adherents who were given a taste of infinity-logic, non-dual reality, but were prohibited by his group ‘philosophy’ and ‘ethics’ from exercising or sustaining such reality.  The former serves as the glue that holds adherents to the latter.  The adherents could appreciate the possibility of intuition.  However, in practice only Ron Hubbard could exercise it consistently.  Against those constrictions of the Scientologists’ adopted philosophy and ethics, an inescapable result manifested.  To adherents Ron Hubbard was considered a special being from a higher universe as only he could naturally and consistently demonstrate intuitive powers. Scientologist were reduced to aspiring to be like Ron.  Ultimately that was an unattainable goal, when adherents were anchored to an ethics and philosophical system of thought predicated upon two-valued logic.

In effect, Scientologists who rise to the highest levels or otherwise adopt Scientology’s dictate that it is the only path to salvation, not only for the adherent but for all others, are trapped in a rather debilitating cognitive dissonance (the persistent attempt to hold two conflicting ideas in harmony).  On the one hand, they are thoroughly convinced that they are following a scientifically proven, utilitarian path that leads to transcendent consciousness.  On the other hand, in practice, they are prohibited from exercising transcendent, intuitive consciousness by their philosophy and ethics which are firmly grounded in two-valued logic.

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Posted in ethics, healing, independents, Integral Theory, l. ron hubbard, philosophy, policy, Scientology, tech, What Is Wrong With Scientology?

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