Transcend

 

The following is the third piece of advice I shared with Scientologists in What Is Wrong With Scientology?    I would love to hear what Independent Scientologists have to say about this.

Transcend or Descend

At the January, 1986 L. Ron Hubbard funeral event we touched on in Chapter 12, Pat Broeker announced that OT 9 and OT 10 were fully written up by Hubbard and ready for release.  That was a blatant lie.

Twenty years later, David Miscavige told a collection of elite Scientology contributors that L. Ron Hubbard had written up OT 9, OT 10, OT 11, OT 12, OT 13, OT 14 and OT 15.  That was a whopping lie.  The last OT level L. Ron Hubbard ever wrote up was OT 8.  Then he died.

Pat Broeker used the threat of never turning over the alleged OT 9 and OT 10 in an effort to get Miscavige to allow him to exercise control in Scientology Inc. I was a part of three separate forcible search-and-seizures Miscavige directed in order to get at the alleged OT 9 and 10 at Broeker hideouts.  Each time we came up empty-handed, and finally concluded there were no such things.  This was validated by the senior technical officer of Scientology since L Ron Hubbard’s death, one Ray Mithoff. Mithoff audited Hubbard during his final week of life. Mithoff acknowledged in my presence that Hubbard had nothing intelligible to say about any levels that might exist above OT 8, let alone gave any indication that anything had been written up about them.

These horrendous big lies, growing in magnitude as years rolled by, are the continuing creation of the religious con played out through the ages, so well described in Paine’s Age of Reason.

For those who have honestly accomplished OT 8, it makes perfect sense.  After all, at OT 8 Hubbard seeks to guide an individual toward a state or condition of no longer having the slightest attention devoted to past identities, any aspect of the past, introversion or regression.  At that level, there wouldn’t be even a remote desire for or inclination toward introspective processes or practices of any kind.

A number of people who had completed OT 8 have come to me, hoping that I could give some inside scoop on where Hubbard said it went from there.  My response is usually along the lines of: “Please do not invalidate yourself and Hubbard so.  Do you think he was cruel enough to build the Bridge to a place where, when you’ve reached the apex, you are so ill-equipped to move on that you must cling to the guard rail , waiting for some priest to prescribe your every step?  Do you feel so vulnerable and weak that you cannot step out on your own and begin to walk your own walk toward higher plateaus?”

I sometimes share the following account of a Zen Buddhist practitioner’s colloquy with Zen master Xuedou:

Someone asked Xuedou, “As it is said, ‘the road beyond is not transmitted by any of the sages.’ Where did you get it?” Xuedou said, “I thought you were a Zen practitioner.”

Some express disbelief that Hubbard would not have published something that explicitly let the world know that OT 8 was the end.  First, this is not surprising to me.  Hubbard was perpetually exploring and prolifically publishing the results of his findings, throughout his life.  I would have expected him to be exploring to the end, and if he died before he found anything worthy of publication during his elderly ventures, then the last thing he published would be the last thing he found worthy of publication.  Second, if one thinks that OT 8 is the end simply because it is the ultimate attainment on the Scientology Bridge, then from the very beginning one wasn’t pursuing the same ends Hubbard was.

To feel or act as if one needed to be the recipient of more knowledge or more effect, then one would have fallen into the trap Hubbard himself warned that formal education had created to sabotage the entire field of philosophy:

I hope no man ever falls into that trap because it blocked human thought and human progress. Philosophy became completely abandoned as a subject…and even at this moment they still give a Doctor of Philosophy degree in universities which demands only this of the student: that he know what philosophers have said. Now, that is incredible. If you had a Doctor of Philosophy, you would expect that Doctor of Philosophy to be able to philosophize. The professors of those courses would just be shocked beyond shock if you dared come in and infer that the end and goal of their students should be the production of philosophy. No sir, that’s how you keep a society static.

I have seen subjectively and objectively that this is precisely the product produced by corporate Scientology.  They create people who have devoted their entire adult lives to studying and auditing to achieve the ability of ‘knowing how to know’ (the very definition of Scientology), only to wind up feeling lost, abandoned, and powerless to do anything except to slavishly kowtow to a fascist regime, in hopes it will dispense the next carrot of wisdom.

And so the corporate Scientologist never learns to walk the walk. Instead, he learns to stand compliantly in leg shackles and talk the Scientology Inc. talk.

One who has reached the top in Scientology has two choices: transcend or descend.  One can descend down into the mire that corporate Scientology has become.  That entails adopting the sickly ‘victim’ jacket, since the hallmark of a corporate Scientologist is the certainty that until certain people, ideas and even fields of study are exterminated, Scientology can never achieve its aims.  It means covertly being a victim while asserting with great energy that you are quite the opposite, the totally-certain superhero who is part of the elite group with the only answer, and thus possess carte blanche with which to forward that group by any means necessary.  It includes behaving in a compliant, other-determined fashion, so as to avoid getting into trouble and tarnishing one’s image and status.  Because in Miscavige’s world, image and status have become everything.

Or one can choose to transcend.  Transcend with your developed insight and ability to observe and think for yourself.  Maybe even use what you know to help others ascend and transcend.  For me, that has included using Scientology to help others remove those jackets that keep them weighted to serious, painful lives.  Each auditing session I deliver – at whatever level of the Bridge – not only results in cognitions (enlightenments) for the preclear, it also results in cognitions on my part. I continue to study and find and use many other writings, from various sources, that might work more directly to move a particular individual on up a little higher from where he or she might stand.  That study also brings about a greater appreciation of what is right and workable and recognition of what is wrong and unworkable about Scientology.   But I am not saying that is your calling, purpose, or path to greater heights.  Only you can determine what that is.