I just read the following on Tony “Backpages” Ortega’s blog in a story about alleged coercion with a secret dossier:
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Seymour: Scientology enforcer Marty Rathbun was known in the organization for his brutal and unforgiving manner. Rathbun was their bad lieutenant, charged with carrying out the orders of leader David Miscavige.
Rinder: Marty told me that he did. I didn’t know that at the time, but Marty told me subsequently that he had gone to see Pat. And like, had brought more of the, ‘this is what you are going to do’ approach.
Seymour: He’s a pretty intimidating guy, isn’t he? He can be pretty forceful.
Rinder: Well, he’s intense. He assumes that he is in the position of authority and you are just going to listen, shut up, and do what I tell you. And he’s very good at that.
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Mike Rinder was right about one thing – I was the only person who spoke with Pat Kingsley about Tom Cruise talking about Scientology. The rest is utter fiction.
First, there was no ‘dirt’ file on Pat Kingsley. Complete invention.
Second, my only conversation with Ms. Kingsley was civil and friendly.
Third, there was no agenda. There couldn’t have been, because the meeting was by complete happenstance – I happened to be randomly seated by her on an airplane flight.
Fourth, she was the one who originated Scientology to me.
She explained to me that she had somehow picked up the vibe from someone in Tom’s entourage (perhaps “secret source X?’) that she was anti-Scientology. She explained at some length her personal feelings on the subject which were not antagonistic at all.
The only report I ever made on the subject of the conversation to anyone was an accurate description of the above, and the observation that Pat seemed sincere and it was my view that a) she was not an antagonist, and b) her advice concerning the handling of Scientology questions had some merit.
End of story. I never heard of or from her again.
As to Rinder’s set up by slavishly agreeing (his only trick) with the ‘bad lieutenant’ description of me is a 180 degrees reversal of tomes of material he has written about me over the past ten years (since he ‘escaped’ from Scientology), as well as the testimony of other such ASC Bunker luminaries as Karen De La Carriere, Mark Headley, Jefferson Hawkins, et al… before they were authoritatively informed by Remini, Rinder, and Ortega that I was an enemy of their CULT.
In the most recent edition of its ‘Freedom’ magazine, Scientology may demonstrate why the people of France and their institutions constitute one of the few remaining bastions of resistance against abuses of the cult. Freedom’s article entitled ‘Get Religion?’ is at first blush a level-headed plea for ‘freedom of religion.’ Clearly it is scientology’s latest effort to hide behind the cloak of religion in response to unprecedented media coverage of its abuses. In that regard, Freedom espouses a number of ‘religious freedom’ arguments that are the epitome of hypocrisy. They rail against censorship and alleged attacks upon conscience while carrying on operations as perhaps the most censorious and violent usurper of expressions of religion and conscience. Its aims to dominate and silence opposition are so strong that even within its best efforts to convince the world it is reasonable, scientology cannot restrain nor well-disguise its overriding intentions. Scientology’s stripes appear loud and clear to the attentive reader in the following Freedom passage on the recent, highly publicized terror attack on and murder of French journalists and artists:
“The editors at Charlie Hebdo appeared to go to great lengths to antagonize extremists and some might even say provoke the deadly terrorist response with its publishing of sacrilegious depictions of the Prophet Muhammad they knew to be deeply offensive to Muslims. Is the freedom to publish also the freedom not to publish?”
‘Some might even say’ is textbook scientology code for ‘everybody knows’; a generalization technique deftly developed by its founder L. Ron Hubbard to mean ‘we say, but the hell if we are going to take responsibility for saying it.’
Scientology is notorious for its take-no-prisoners retribution apparatus. The stories and testimonials about its vicious attacks on whistleblowing former members and the media who interview and publish their testimony are legion. Perhaps then it should be no surprise that they would be in the vanguard of defending fundamentalist terrorism and murder particularly when it is ‘justified’ by media coverage that some might even say would provoke as much.
Scientology’s final word on the Charlie Hebdo murders is this:
“The fury aimed at the Muslim community speaks to a disturbing level of bigotry and outright discrimination.”
Interesting. Bigotry and outright discrimination against the ‘scientology community’ is precisely what Scientology accuses French law enforcement officials and media of when it comes to scientologists. Yet, there are no scientology ghettos in France. There are no scientologists arrested for crimes committed by others because of the way the scientologist looks or even acts. There is freedom of economic opportunity for scientologists in France. The millions Scientology continually rakes in and funnels overseas is testimony to that. Scientology has even giddily published evidence that it has unbridled access to the highest levels of French government (photo of Tom Cruise schmoozing with former President Sarkozy).
Scientology has no respect or affinity for the Muslim community in France or anywhere else. At the same time Scientology espouses a mighty fury aimed at France. Could that be because France apparently is one of the few republics remaining that has not been cowed and censored by Scientology?
In plain English, here are scientology’s core religious beliefs.
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.
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.
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 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.
Welcome to all the folks from Australia who have apparently been visiting this blog (visit counter just went off the charts) in the minutes since the 60 Minutes piece ran there. If you are interested in learning more about Scientology you may want to visit the right hand column of the home page of this blog. There are links to a number of books, sites, and other informative media pieces that have run in the past couple years. There is also a search feature where you can explore the more than 1,100 articles published on this site. For those not in Australia, I am informed that the show will appear at this link momentarily, 60 Minutes Australia. Contrary to scientology’s published response to this show, like virtually all other media that have interviewed us Sixty Minutes approached us to ask for the interviews.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 