Fear

L. Ron Hubbard once designated the entry level of Scientology as Scientology Zero.  Scientology Zero consisted initially of demonstrating to a person that the environment was not as dangerous as he had been led to believe. It educated a person on the existence of merchants of chaos who traffic in painting a picture of danger so that they can profit by protecting one from that danger.  It is the old organized crime protection racket.

As we have seen over the years Scientology has become that which Scientology Zero warned of.  The church continually plies its public with end-of-world scenarios that can only be handled by contributing more greenbacks to the church.  Some folks on the outside engage in a similar game of designating the church as the enemy that will consume humanity if not combatted continually.

One purpose of this blog from the outset was to demonstrate that the church of Scientology was not something to be feared; that it in fact had simply perfected the protection racket game, giving folk the illusion that it was something to continually fear.

I came across a little something by Bruce Lipton from The Biology of Belief (Hay House, Inc. 2005) that explains why obsessing with fear inhibits growth:

In a response similar to that displayed by cells, humans unavoidably restrict their growth behaviors when they shift into a protective mode.  If you’re running from a mountain lion, it’s not a good idea to expend energy on growth.  In order to survive – that is, escape the lion – you summon all your energy for your fight or flight response.  Redistributing energy reserves to fuel the protection response inevitably results in curtailment of growth…

…Inhibiting growth processes is also debilitating in that growth is a process that not only expends energy but is also required to produce energy. Consequently, a sustained protection response inhibits the creation of life-sustaining energy. The longer you stay in protection, the more you consume your energy reserves, which in turn, compromises your growth.  In fact, you can shut down growth processes so completely that it becomes a truism that you can be ‘scared to death.’ 

Maybe that is a scientific explanation for Lao Tzu’s having wrote the following in the Tao Te Ching:

There is no greater illusion than fear, no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself, no greater misfortune than having an enemy.  Whoever can see through all fear will always be safe.

Bad To The Bone

Excerpt from Chapter One of The Enemy Formula:

Chapter One

 

The Zen of Basketball

Zen:  A total state of focus that incorporates a total togetherness of body and mind. Zen is a way of being. It also is a state of mind. Zen involves dropping illusion and seeing things without distortion created by your own thoughts. – The Urban Dictionary

 

     Caveat emptor (buyer, beware). I may be crazy – and this book of my recollections therefore may just be laced with delusion.

It all depends on whether you buy into the genetic theory of mental health. That is the school of thought that maintains we are simply organisms, unthinkingly carrying on the genetic, cellular commands we are born with. That is the very theory that L. Ron Hubbard eschewed in developing Scientology. Scientology is predicated upon the idea that the spirit (called thetan in Scientology) and its considerations are senior to the mind and the body, and that ultimately every one of us is capable of sanity and of becoming the captain of his own destiny – irrespective of genetic or biological make-up.

The church of Scientology has apparently done away with such core Hubbard principles.  Corporate Scientology leader David Miscavige sent my former wife to Clearwater Florida to visit reporters Tom Tobin and Joe Childs of the St. Petersburg Times (now Tampa Bay Times) in mid 2009. She came with a script to read to the reporters, one no doubt carefully crafted by Miscavige himself. It would be Corporate Scientology’s answer to an interview I had given, exposing a culture of violence created by Miscavige at the highest levels of his church.

In embarrassed, halting phrases my former wife told the reporters that I had a family history of insanity and the “church” was concerned that I had picked up the insanity gene. When the reporters attempted to make some sense of the relevance of those claims, my former wife, on cue, stood, turned and walked from the room, noting with finality, “This is not a deposition; I’m not here to answer questions.” When official Scientology spokesperson Tommy Davis was confronted with the claims I’d made about violence in the church, he shouted, with veins popping from his neck, “Marty Rathbun is a fucking lunatic. He’s psychotic!”

Miscavige came up with this brilliant public relations move based on an analysis of my church counseling folders. Those folders note, in meticulous detail, every significant event of my life, and of many prior lives as well. It is a policy of the corporate Scientologists to find bits of embarrassing confession from a former member’s past, and then allude to one of these bits publicly.  The hope is that the target will quail, for fear of any more particulars being revealed.

In order to erase any influence such attempted blackmail might otherwise have, let’s get right to the heart of Miscavige’s allusion to the matter he seems to believe is my Achilles’ heel.

Insanity runs deep in my family. My mother received multiple electro-convulsive shock therapy treatments while pregnant with me.  I found that out through Scientology counseling which probes into pre-natal, and even previous lifetime, incidents of the being.  I told my Scientology counselor that I recalled my mother being taken off to a private psychiatric facility while I resided in her womb.  When she was hit with electro-convulsive shock I, the spirit, was hurtled out of the body and witnessed the rest of the ‘treatment’ from above looking down at the psychiatrist and his assistants and my mother’s body strapped to the table.  When the violence was over, I contemplated leaving and finding another mother and another fetus to occupy.  But, my conscience struck me and I decided I would weather the storm, stick around and help the mother I had initially chosen.  When I was in my early thirties I told my aunt about these recollections and her jaw dropped.  My descriptions of the facility and the surrounds and the event were accurate in all details.  And that, in essence, is Scientology Inc.’s blackmail on me: I am a lunatic by virtue of carrying my mother’s genes, complicated and compounded by my fetal electro-shock experience…

The Quest: Quixotian or Gandhian?

On his ‘Dean of Technology’ course titled Class VIII, L. Ron Hubbard advises that the ultimate state of consciousness attainable in Scientology (dubbed OT, for Operating Thetan) is simple.  The state is attained when the individual no longer carries any lies with him.  An individual is as OT as he doesn’t walk about with lies.

So it is with Scientology itself.  As a subject it contains a wonderful body of technology for helping to strip a person of the lies through which he filters the universe around him.  The biggest problem with broad dissemination and application of that technology is its self-imposed prohibition on differentiating that technology from the broader body of Scientology work that is chock-full of lies.

Because of the religious cloak with which L. Ron Hubbard chose to enwrap Scientology, the discernment of truth from lies within Scientology is not an easy task.  L. Ron Hubbard wrote a large body of doctrine satanizing anyone who attempts to look at his body of work in a critical fashion.  In fact, the very term ‘criticism’ – at least when directed toward Hubbard or Scientology – has been solidly re-defined in Scientology to be the activity of only sociopaths and criminals.

Thus in 1967 Hubbard published an article in a Scientology journal for all Scientologists to heed and adhere to.  Entitled Critics of Scientology it pronounced the following:

Now, get this as a technical fact, not a hopeful idea.  Every time we have investigated the background of a critic of Scientology, we have found crimes for which that person could be imprisoned under existing law. We do not find critics of Scientology who do not have criminal pasts…

…If you, the criticized, are savage enough and insistent in your demand for the crime, you’ll get the text, meter or no meter.  Never discuss Scientology with the critic.  Just discuss his or her crimes, known and unknown.  And act completely confident that those crimes exist.  Because they do.

Hubbard issued dozens of pages of directives to his church to investigate  - with the aim of destruction of – critics of Scientology.  When the ‘technical fact’ he preached above proved to be utterly false (as determined by the intelligence agency he created to prove it – called the Guardian’s Office), Hubbard advised the agency to skip the investigations, create and plant and then ‘discover’ and expose the evidence of crime.  He was particularly vicious and ruthless in his directives to destroy those who attempted to clarify, refine, or simplify Scientology technology so as to reach more people effectively.

In a 1955 Professional Auditor’s Bulletin Hubbard directed Scientologists on how to deal with Scientologists not toeing the line with the religious cult of Scientology as follows:

Personally, if I were an auditor and found my area being muddied up to that extent, I would have a definite feeling, if I permitted it to go on, that I was not doing all I could do to spread Scientology in my area.  I would have taken such a screwball out of the running so fast he would have thought he had been hit by a Mack truck, and I don’t mean thought-wise.  But then the difference between me and an apathetic auditor is that I fight, and I get things done.

Hubbard advised that such screwballs be sued in the following manner:

The purpose of the suit is to harass and discourage rather than to win. The law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause his professional decease. If possible, of course, ruin him utterly.

Hubbard dealt with what he called ‘squirrels’ (defined as those who alter Scientology) in such wise to the very end of his life.  In fact, the last person who served as his own auditor in the late seventies and who was the Hubbard-appointed senior-most Scientology technical  supervisor in the world, one David Mayo, was the final target of such Hubbard scorn.  When Mayo started practicing Scientology outside of the control of the cult in the early nineteen-eighties Hubbard directed that the church ‘squash him like a bug.’  Notwithstanding that Mayo’s essential ‘clarification’ concerning Scientology was that the violent, combative aspects were not true L. Ron Hubbard technology.

It is because of the above that the Office of Special Affairs continues to attempt to destroy my wife and me – and anyone else who does stand for truth when it comes to Scientology.  It is not because David Miscavige tells them to.  It is because they are religiously bound to attempt to destroy us by any means necessary.

The violent, reactive attitude toward ‘squirrels’ is so deeply implanted in Scientologists that even the latest ‘independent Scientology’ movement – which the church of Scientology dubs ‘squirrel’ – facily accuses people attempting to differentiate workable Scientology technology from its ample supply of lies as being ‘gestapo’, ‘war criminals’, and ‘Nazis.’

Ironically, this firmly implanted, combative attitude is one-hundred and eighty degrees, diametrically opposed to the attitudes, states of mind, and states of consciousness that sane, understanding application of Scientology processes are capable of bringing about.

My views and aims have not much changed in the past four years.  In sum, to the extent that that which works in Scientology can be differentiated from that which disables, by – among other things – radicalization, L. Ron Hubbard’s ideas have a future.  To the degree that differentiation process is killed, Hubbard’s ideas die.

I am letting it be known that in spite of the ample back stabbing, cur dog yapping, and undermining and severing of all of our sources of support that we’ve encountered in the past four years, we continue to pursue our course.  Whether the quest turns out to be more Quixotian or more Gandhian will likely be apparent by the end of this year in my estimation.

“Too much sanity may be madness.  And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”  - Dale Wasserman, playwright, attributed to Don Quixote author Miguel Cervantes in the play, The Man From La Mancha

“A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Becoming Clear

The communication training routines in Scientology are very much downplayed in my opinion.  Supervised with the requisite attention and emphasis, in and of themselves they are a tremendous advance toward the state of Clear.  Ron Hubbard at one time made that point rather plain.

From L. Ron Hubbard’s lecture Scientology and Effective Knowledge (15 July 1957):

I woke up eventually to discover that these training drills (communication training routines) all by themself, practiced with sufficient rigor and coached well enough and instructed well enough, were steps on the road to Clear, all by themselves, without any further processing…

…And where training and processing processes are successful, they lead toward a straighter communication.  And therefore, the road out is marked by simplicity and direct observation….

…The whole subject opens up at its inception with just this: that the simplicity of observation, the simplicity of communication itself and only itself, is functional and will take Man from the bottom to the top.  And the only thing I am trying to teach you is look.

Provided one approached the training routines with the above in mind, and not as a bait and switch toward dependence on years and years of costly and complex psychotherapy or membership in some true-believer group, one might avoid the pitfalls Ron warned of in the same lecture:

Now, that’s the first thing we must know about Scientology is that by the attainment of a simplicity we accomplish a benefit. By the attainment of a simplicity, we accomplish a benefit.  By the invitation of or involvement in a complexity, we accomplish the unfathomable and create a mystery.  We sink Man into a priesthood, we sink him into a cult.

It is interesting to note that Taoists had a similar philosophical view about becoming clear more than two millenia ago.   From Lieh-Tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living (translations of ancient Taoist texts) by Eva Wong:

Those who are involved are muddled; those who watch are clear.

There was a man who was so intent on avenging his father’s death that he could think of nothing else.  He was so engrossed in making plans for his revenge that he forgot he was holding his walking stick upside down.  He leaned on his staff and the sharp point punctured his cheek.  One of his friends said, ‘He is so deep in his own thoughts that everything around him is a blur.’

There was another man who was obsessed with getting rich.  One day he went into the bank and tried to walk off with several bags of gold.  The guards caught him immediately.  A passerby said, ‘only a fool would think of robbing a bank in the presence of armed guards.’  The man said, ‘my mind was so set on the gold I didn’t see the guards.’

You often see people stumbling into walls or stepping into holes because they are so occupied by their thoughts that they don’t see what’s in front of them.  When we are too involved in a situation, we can’t see straight, and things that are obvious and clear to bystanders are a blur to us.  This is very dangerous.

The training routines that Ron devised, well supervised by those not caught in the rapture/delusion of complex scripture, go a long way in attaining that ability to be clear.  A handy stable datum to help steer one clear of the ‘priesthood’ and ‘cult’ aspects of Scientology is to question anything you encounter that doesn’t seem to contribute to this:  And the only thing I am trying to teach you is look.

The Psychopath Test

References:

Judgment

Sitting In Judgment

I am adding The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson to my recommended reading list.   This short excerpt from What Is Wrong With Scientology explains why:

Ironically, perhaps the best way to understand the most fundamental flaw in the Scientology system of dealing with the influence of sociopaths is to read a book that touches on corporate Scientology’s vehement, costly protests against the alleged failure of the field of psychiatry to do the same.  In The Psychopath Test, Ronson chronicles a member of corporate Scientology’s Citizens Commission on Human Rights (a group established to “clean up the field of mental healing”) and his quest to free an allegedly falsely labeled psychopath from a United Kingdom mental institution.

Ronson becomes fascinated with the apparent terrible injustice of “Tony’s” (pseudonym) incarceration.  As Ronson researches the matter in greater depth, he comes to find the Bob Hare psychopath test, or checklist, rather rational and workable.  The more time Ronson spends with Tony, the more he begins to doubt the fellow’s sanity against the psychopath test.  Out of curiosity, Ronson puts the test to use on a businessman who is unrelated to the matter of Tony.  When he completes the analysis, Ronson shares his condemning findings with a fellow journalist.  His colleague points out that Ronson only spent a couple hours with the target, and perhaps his journalistic “skill” of catching a target out on lurid admissions, and his preconceived notions of guilt, played a part in his finding.  Ronson, in his honest and entertaining style, rides the rollercoaster of enthusiastic certainty to self-deprecating doubt in his own and others’ use of the psychopath test.

Ultimately, Ronson causes the reader to consider that while there is a tremendous, accurate compilation of information that helps us detect sociopathy, can any one of us be trusted with the power to judge and sentence anyone else against that information?  Are any of us worthy of the God-like power to condemn another to a life of quarantine and isolation?  Do we, in wielding such a powerful tool of knowledge, tend to take on the characteristics of the sociopath when we sit in judgment?

Ronson seems to wind up in much the same place L. Ron Hubbard did when he published this statement: “I have come to find that man cannot be trusted with justice.”  While Hubbard persevered and constructed an elaborate system of justice intended to overcome that fatal flaw of humankind, for whatever reason, his lack of trust was proved justified by his own creation.

Ultimately, though, L. Ron Hubbard said that the only guarantee that one would not wind up on the receiving end of a sociopath’s club was to understand how to identify one in the first place.  And that conclusion was echoed by Martha Stout.  The founder of Scientology and his long-time nemeses in the field of mental health ended up agreeing on one unifying principle: When it comes to the havoc others can wreak upon one’s life, the best protection is the truth – know it, and it shall set you free.

And so my recommended remedy in dealing with the very real problem of sociopathy, or the suppressive person, is as follows:

• Learn for oneself how to evaluate the worthiness and value of one’s fellows.
• Never forfeit your judgment to some authority, no matter how apparently wise and judicious, when it comes to judging the merits of others.
• Strive to be worthy of the trust of those you care about.

 

Elephant In The Room

If folks want to know why there was so much noise in the independent field about my scary, heretical views all the sudden recently, it would behoove you to do as Ron advises in auditing technology and look a little bit earlier.

‘Elephant in the room:  An English metaphorical idiom for an obvious truth that is either being ignored or going unaddressed. The idiomatic expression also applies to an obvious problem or risk no one wants to discuss.’- Wikipedia

The book What Is Wrong With Scientology? Healing Through Understanding  marched a veritable herd of elephants into the independent Scientology house.  I am going to identify one of those elephants today.

That is Chapter Thirteen Reversal.  A copy of the entire chapter is appended below for easy reference, refreshing of recollections, or for the convenience of those who have not read the book.  In that chapter I spelled out where and how a critical reversal is entered into the Scientology line up that enables it to be converted from a technology to free the mind and spirit to one that incarcerates beings into a cult mindset.

In the near year since the publication of the book, not a single independent Scientologist practitioner has originated a single word to me about the rather far-reaching implications of what is covered in this chapter.  Some have disconnected from me, some have assigned me lower ethics conditions – including ‘Treason’ for having stated facts that allegedly conflict with L. Ron Hubbard opinions.  To me, such actions speak to the truth of what is contained in the chapter below.  The reversal is apparently effective inside and outside the corporate church.  I am more convinced than ever that the way out is not through compliance, conformity, zealotry, and self-induced blindness.  Such self-imposed ignorance will relegate ‘Independent Scientology’ to the role it has played for thirty years, a mere parasite appended to the church of Scientology.  It will continue to walk lock step (with a shallow, self-serving protested distinction between it and the corporation) toward the demise of the subject when the corporate disaffecteds it sustains itself on run dry.  No integration, so no appeal to new students.  No evolution, so continued inevitable conflicts over who is ‘more standard’ in a subject that lends itself to infinite arguments on that score.  No transcendence, and so no ultimate moving on up a little higher.  Dianetics and Scientology would never have been developed at all had L. Ron Hubbard been such a conformist.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

REVERSAL

Miscavige’s elevation of L. Ron Hubbard to God-like status, and himself to demigod status, has provided Miscavige with carte-blanche to reverse the entire vector of Scientology’s aims and activities.

He began by perpetrating a fraud upon the highest-level Scientologists, Clears and OTs, with his promise of upper OT Levels allegedly in his possession.  While the seed was planted at the January 1986 funeral event, it has been a cleverly-played mind game on Scientologists ever since.  Miscavige has devoted most of his attention to keeping these highest-level Scientologists on the farm for a reason.  He knows that they are the opinion leaders among the general membership.  With the opinion leaders doing his bidding, he is able to keep the majority of his followers in the dark.  At this he has done a masterful job.  But to ascribe any great virtue or power to him for having done so would be a mistake.  Without L. Ron Hubbard, David Miscavige would be little more than a clever, overly-aggressive con man.  To pretend that Miscavige perfected his consolidation of power without the help of Hubbard’s own decisions and policy would be naïve and untrue.  In fact, to so pretend would require quite an invalidation of Hubbard’s abilities, and the power of the technology he discovered.

Without the backing of Hubbard-authored Scientology policy, David Miscavige could never have created the Black Dianetics monopoly Hubbard had warned against many years before.  How could such a contradiction be possible?  That is a complicated story. For purposes of our discussion here, I will provide a brief summation of what will be more fully treated in a later volume.

In short, human beings are full of contradictions, and L. Ron Hubbard was not immune from that imperfection.  For better or for worse, during the ’60s, when Hubbard and Scientology were continually facing attacks intended to bring about their demise, Hubbard issued quite a bit of policy in response which changed the character of the movement.  This “wartime” left an indelible imprint on Scientology.  It was a dark ages of sorts for the movement.  It was a time when the group, as a matter of survival, needed to circle the wagons and know who was with it and who was against it.  This was the era when security checks became routine.  This was the period when ‘disconnection’ from suppressive persons was dictated and enforced by the organizations.  This was when policy called for the overt and covert destruction of alleged forces of evil.  This was the period when Hubbard created a monster to achieve that end – an ogre that would later play an important role in his own demise.  That was the Guardian’s Office – a legal and public relations organization with its own intelligence network.

The Guardian’s Office’s intelligence system was once described by a government official in the know as rivaling that of Israel’s state intelligence service (the storied Mossad).  Hubbard wrote volumes of material for the Guardian’s Office on how to smash and obliterate the “enemy.”  David Miscavige seized on this material during the early ’80s, when the collective crimes of a decade and a half of unfettered Guardian’s Office operations had come back to haunt Hubbard. Miscavige would rise, live and die by that wartime policy.

Miscavige became sort of a reactive mind of the Scientology machine.  Just as the reactive mind drives all of the past into the present to haunt and torture the individual, Miscavige drove all of Hubbard’s “war” era policy to the present, to haunt and torture Scientologists – and Scientology’s detractors – from the ’80s forward.

The way in which Miscavige corralled Clears and OTs, however, begins with a seemingly benign policy.  That is a Hubbard policy letter of 1967, entitled An Open Letter to All Clears. It is the first thing a newly-arrived Clear is required to read.

Hubbard represented consistently and repeatedly, from 1950 to the mid-’60s, that the quest for Clear is the pursuit of personal freedom and personal confidence, to the point of self-trust and being worthy of trust by one’s peers.  In the face of that continual statement of purpose and goal, the Open Letter begins hedging on those representations.  It begins indoctrinating the Clear into the idea that whatever sacrifices the individual might have made to achieve the state of Clear, the ledger of responsibility is not balanced.  The Clear has obligations to Hubbard and Scientology, and is expected to comply with group directives in order to pay off the debt, particularly if one should wish to rise to greater heights than Clear.  The Clear is told, in Open Letter:

An ethical code already exists for OTs so at the state of Clear one should not assume that one has a license to do just whatever one will…

…So, the policies of Scientology which have enabled you to reach the state of Clear still apply to all Clears. In fact, they apply more because you have the reality of their value and the necessity of seeing that they are followed…

…As a result, bigger responsibilities will be given and expected of you so you must be prepared to responsibly educate yourself where necessary so that you can do whatever is assigned to you in a proper manner, in keeping with the main goals and aims of Scientology.…

…It is a crime to invalidate the state of Clear – see to it that you don’t do this in your conduct as a Clear, particularly as regards yourself.…

…You have now become more than ever a part of a team. Obsessive individualism and a failure to organize were responsible for our getting into the state we got into.…

…As soon as you have gone the rest of the way this will become abundantly plain.…

…I expect and need your help to carry out the broad mission of decontaminating this area of the universe.…

And so, the promise of a Golden Age of reason among free-thinking, un-policed Clears was replaced with the news that the organizations would be enforcing your duty to follow an “ethical code” and the “policies of Scientology.”  It announces that you will comply with “whatever is assigned to you” by the organization.  Should any Clear bristle at this news, it is quickly pointed out that he is simply dramatizing the “obsessive individualism” that was “responsible for our getting into the state we got into.”  For my part, the most empowering cognition I came to in my own travels along the Bridge was that I no longer had to agree with anyone.  I no longer felt compelled to go along with group-think.  This was the key to breaking the controlling, conforming conditioning that society tends to coerce us into accepting, including all the group thought patterns that justify greed, cheating, conflict and war.  Upon indoctrination to An Open Letter to All Clears, I had to begin rationalizing, and thus invalidating, that new-found ability to chart my own course in life.

Thus, with Open Letter, and the volumes of policy it mandates now must be followed even more vigilantly, the vector became reversed.  The door was opened to the evolution of an obsessive group devotion that graduated into the Big Brother corporation which went on to ruin the lives of thousands, and to lose whatever magic Dianetics and Scientology were capable of producing in the first place.  It was bolstered by encyclopedic volumes of Scientology organizational policy.  Most of that policy is very heady and workable material.  It cannot be denied, however, that it is liberally spiked with a number of policies grooving in the idea that the group, the Scientology organization, is all important, and that its hierarchical structure must be respected and complied to, irrespective of who runs it.

Here is where the perversion we covered in Chapter 8, Ethics, receives its most potent authority.  The over-weighted third dynamic (group) would forever after skew the contemplation of the ‘greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics’ formula.

To gainsay this reality would be an exercise in denialism.  For example, any Scientologist reading this book is automatically guilty of a variety of Scientology crimes and high crimes, by the mere act of reading.  Per long-standing and currently-extant Hubbard Scientology policy, anyone who has read this far ought to be declared a suppressive person (a sociopath that both Hubbard and mental health authorities agree should be quarantined from society, without civil or constitutional rights).  This is how Scientology organizational policy protects and perpetuates the vicious cult Miscavige has created.

Exacerbating matters is the fact that the first thing a Scientology Inc. Clear will encounter upon reaching that state is unrelenting pressure to get onto the Operating Thetan, or OT, levels.  If a Clear wants to get on with life, exercise his new-found abilities and awareness so as to “practice to increase general reality” (as it was earlier noted that Hubbard had recommended) and resists compliance, Scientology Inc. resorts to scare tactics.  An Open Letter to All Clears is the first weapon in the organization’s arsenal on that score.  That is then compounded with the ultimate weapon, Hubbard’s pronouncement that a Clear is at grave risk as a being if he or she does not get through the OT Levels as soon as possible.  Ironically, that warning perhaps serves as the greatest invalidation of the state of Clear, which the Open Letter policy announces shall be considered a crime in itself.

As shall be made clear in the next chapter on the OT Levels, I am a huge proponent of the idea that the OT Levels are indeed capable of taking people to spiritual heights they never imagined possible.  However, to ignore the shift of focus and the reversal-of-motivation tactic employed – even by Hubbard himself – would be to check my logic and personal integrity at the door.  Just why Hubbard deviated from a 15-year devotion to creating a path that would only work where the practitioner’s motivations were solely the pursuit of truth toward the empowerment of each individual addressed, into scare tactics aimed at having each individual surrender his or her self-determinism to the will of the group, is a complex matter.  Warranted or not, much of what Hubbard and Scientology were facing in terms of opposition by vested interests by the mid-’60s wove its way into Hubbard’s outlook, his thinking, and his overriding, strong intention that Scientology survive and be made available to humanity.

At bottom, it was Hubbard’s reaction to what I consider ill-motivated, unethical, and vicious efforts by certain vested interests to keep him from achieving what he aimed for.  Whether the response was an over-reaction or was necessary at that time is a question requiring a more in-depth history.  For our purposes here – outlining what is wrong with Scientology – it is only necessary to highlight the contradictions that are obvious.  Recognition of those contradictions makes patent the simple fact that to take every word Hubbard wrote literally, and treat it as commandment, puts one on a slippery, untenable slope.  To do so would be just as irrational as criticizing and rejecting all of Hubbard’s work and discoveries just because it is recognized he was not infallible.  Exercising either extreme would be to employ the type of associative-reactive thought patterns his discoveries help people to overcome.

The problem with Hubbard’s reaction to the attacks, and the ultimate product of that reaction, is that it puts an individual or group right back into that which they had sought to transcend through Scientology in the first place.  Technically, it is a violation of one of his own fundamental maxims, “that which you resist, you become.”  It is perhaps best explained in Hubbard’s own words, in the very lecture series, the 1958 Clearing Congress, where he finally settled on the parameters and qualities of Clear:

We get this sort of a situation where everybody’s idea of everybody else becomes himself. Well, let’s look at that. Here’s Mr. A. Mr. A is certain that everybody around him is very evil and that they are “gonna get him” one way or the other. Now, Mr. A. has no choice – if he is also saddled with super-agreements, obsessive agreement, making equality a necessity – but to be this way himself.

Now, we ask this question: Does this evil character actually exist? And that’s one of the first things we have to ask in clearing. Does this evil character exist?

It seems like we have a synthetic personality in existence which isn’t really anybody, but is simply everybody’s idea of how bad the other fellow is. This is pretty complicated, see. See, he’s got the idea that this other fellow is so bad that he cannot help but criticize him violently. But because he is equal to this fellow over here, then, of course, he himself has to assume these characteristics of superlative evil. You see that? We get generals, admirals, politicians, all sorts of people, who have an idea that the enemy is so bad, or that the fellow man is so bad, or something else is so bad, they can’t possibly live with it, and have therefore got to cut it to pieces. It’s a very tricky thing. This has a vast bearing on clearing.

They’ve got to cut this evil being to pieces. Yes, but at the same time, they have an equality complex. By communicating with him, they therefore go into agreement with his evil characteristics, and the only thing they have left is an evil, synthetic personality which they themselves have to wear to be like everybody else and to be normal. This is one of the simplest and easiest tricks that is played in a culture.

So, what are you trying to do when you’re clearing people? You’ve got to find the fellow himself and you also, as you go up the line – not an attribute of Clear, but an attribute of OT – have to give him a certainty on the other fellow.

Therein Hubbard echoed the ancient book of wisdom he once noted that much of Scientology had grown out of, Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu:

There is no greater misfortune than underestimating your enemy. Underestimating your enemy means thinking that he is evil. Thus you destroy your three treasures (simplicity, patience, compassion) and become an enemy yourself.

In the same 1958 lecture, Hubbard continued by warning against the temptation to create policing agencies:

…Well, all you’d have to do is have a police force and a society would start caving in. Why? The police force constitutes a constant reminder that men are evil, which is a constant reminder that we must agree with these evil men. Do you see how this would work? Neat little trick.

Now, that doesn’t say that we are so starry-eyed as to believe that at this time we could dispense with all police. Or could we?

Now, you have to make up your mind which way you’re going to go with a society, if you’re thinking about a new society of one kind or another. And if you say, “Well, this society would be totally unregulated,” then we would be proposing an anarchy. And all the anarchists tell us that the only way a society would work as a total freedom without government would be if everyone in it were perfect.

Well, I don’t know whether we propose – when we talk about a cleared society – whether we propose or not to have an anarchy. That’s beside the point. That’s up to the people who get cleared. But I don’t think you’d wind up with an anarchy. I think you’d wind up with a much finer level of agreement and cooperation, because I think you’d then be able to realize the rest of the dynamics.

Again, Hubbard was in perfect alignment with the Tao:

Throw away morality and justice, and people will do the right thing… The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous the people will be… I let go of the law, and people become honest.

However, with the advent of tomes of policy, creating layers of hierarchical restriction upon the group and aggressive policing of its individuals’ morals, the promise of the sanity and happiness of a cleared group and society was replaced.  The new doctrinal paradigm held, in essence, that the only way to achieve a ‘cleared society’ was through a tightly-controlled, disciplined group whose survival trumped all other possible considerations.  While volumes were written on how to run a Scientology organization in keeping with the goals of Clearing and the promise of OT, no matter how one dressed it up, Scientology policy created and required a force that one would have to be in utter denial to characterize as anything other than the police enforcing prohibitions, so as to protect good people from other people presumably dedicated to evil.

I am quite aware that these views will be condemned by many Scientologists, corporate and independent alike.  But I believe that if one dispassionately examines the facts of how Clears and OTs have come to be treated, how they have docilely accepted such treatment, and how they have come to behave within Scientology Inc., to ignore or deny Hubbard’s empowerment of such treatment and behavior is tantamount to condemning Scientologists to repeating a history they are systemically required to remain ignorant of and yet perpetuate.

I am not contending that Hubbard was wrong to react to opposition in the way he did.  Nor am I contending that he should not have memorialized his reaction under the heading of ‘policy.’  I do contend that to take Hubbard’s policy literally, out of the time and the context in which it was born, is to become an extremist.  With extremism comes the loss of the potential benefits that would otherwise accrue from application of the discoveries Hubbard made.  In my opinion, nowhere is literalism and extremism more destructive than at the highest reaches of the Bridge, the OT levels.

The Secret

This is addressed those who have read the book (by Rhonda Byrne) or seen the film The Secret and failed to have its magic work for them.

The secret revealed in The Secret was the ‘law of attraction.’  In short, that which one thinks one gets.  That upon which one focuses one’s attention will be attracted into that person’s life.  As the book points out the secret is nothing new.  More than 2500 years ago the Buddha was said to have said ‘you are what you think.’ What is new about The Secret is the marvelous job of it does of communicating the simplicity of the truth from religious, spiritual, self-help, and even scientific perspectives. The crux of The Secret’s authority is that great human beings throughout history have all apparently uttered the ‘law of attraction’ in their own ways as being a ‘secret’ to their successes.

However, mastering the law of attraction is not quite as easy as the book and movie make it out to be. If the secret was so simple to realize and apply, no doubt in the seven years since the book was introduced, and remained a bestseller, the world would have by now been transformed into something resembling the garden of Eden.  So, what went wrong?

Two things in my view.

First, and this is fatal to the realization of its message,  The Secret omits a most important step of realizing one’s intentions.  That step is doing something in furtherance of that realization.  One can think all the most pleasant thoughts in the world, and absent doing anything to realize those thoughts will result in a person thinking a lot of thoughts.  Every single historical figure that The Secret used for its authority for the ‘law of attraction’ was a prodigious doer.  They did not merely think about what they wanted, they pursued what they envisioned with every fiber of their beings.  Yes, even the Buddhist’s noble eight-fold path begins with ‘right view’ and ‘right intention’.  But, it is followed by ‘right action’, ‘right livelihood’, and ‘right effort.’

Second, The Secret appeals almost exclusively to people’s material interests.  While some of the historical figures used as authority for the book accumulated unimaginable riches I am pretty sure they did not do so by aiming exclusively to attain those riches.  They had bigger, broader dreams and if attainment of those more worthy intentions did not involvement attainment riches, they likely would not have been any more wealthy than you or me.

In keeping with the law of attraction, when a person focuses exclusively toward the attainment of matter, they will get matter.  The problem is, that matter might not glitter with gold.  It more than likely will be the dull, painful matter that is most closely associated with thought.  That is mental mass and energy.  And so many a poor soul put all their mental power into conjuring fancy cars and yachts and wound up instead with splitting headaches.  Why?

The answer lies with another historical figure who understood the secret but who was not mentioned in the book.  L. Ron Hubbard built an extensive philosophy, psychotherapy, and religion predicated on the magic of the law of attraction.   He stated it in 1954 in this wise:

Considerations take rank over the mechanics of space, energy and time.  By this is meant that an idea or opinion, fundamentally, is superior to space, energy and time or organizations of form, since it is conceived that space, energy and time are themselves broadly agreed-upon considerations.  That so many minds agree brings about reality in the form of space, energy, and time.  These mechanics, then, of space, energy and time, are the product of agreed-upon considerations mutually held by life…

…The freedom of an individual depends on that individual’s freedom to alter his considerations of space, energy, time and forms of life, and his roles in it.  If he cannot change his mind about these, he is then fixed and enslaved by barriers of his own creation.  Man thus is seen to be enslaved by barriers of his own creation.  He creates these barriers himself or by agreeing with things which hold these barriers to be actual.

Hubbard realized that stating these facts – such as was so artfully done in The Secret – alone did little to liberate people from their self-imposed mental enslavement.  Over the next couple decades Hubbard developed a mental and spiritual technology for relieving the mental mass and energy an individual accumulates since birth while under the mistaken idea that the mechanics of matter, energy, space and time take precedence over the considerations of the individual.  He called the subject Scientology.

There are two Scientology routes to achieving a strong realization of the law of attraction and the ability to use it to one’s advantage. The first, is what Hubbard called the Training Routines.  It is a two to three week course in communication toward the ability of realizing and executing intention.  For some people that course alone will free them to clearly see and apply the law of attraction in their lives.  For those it does not deliver that end phenomenon to, it will not have been a waste of time.  At worst, one will walk away with improved communication skills and the ability to more comfortably be, do and have as one wishes.

The second route is called auditing (from the Latin root, audire which means to listen).  It can be pursued if the first route gave you something desirable, but not all that you sought toward mastering the law of attraction. An auditor does one on one counseling with a person which directly addresses one’s ability to recognize his or her spiritual self, the creator of the considerations that dictate the mechanics in one’s life.  There are six levels of counseling that follow one from another in a gradient approach.  Any one of those levels could result in a person feeling perfectly comfortable and competent in living with and by the law of attraction. There are a number of other skills and abilities attainable with each one of them.

There is an important word of warning in choosing to apply the L. Ron Hubbard approach.  As so often happens with the empowering ideas of a philosopher, institutionalization and monopolization of those ideas for power and profit can pervert them beyond recognition.  By no means should a person go anywhere near a church of Scientology nor any Scientology practitioner who does not practice Hubbard’s ideas in an integral fashion.  Such folk are religionists whose intention to help you is overshadowed by their intentions to convert people to become Scientologists.  That encompasses a world view and philosophy that in many ways is one hundred and eighty degrees diametrically opposed to the simple methodologies of helping people master the law of attraction.

An integral practitioner understands and continues to educate himself on philosophy and science outside of Scientology so as to increase his own worth and ability to apply his skills.  An integral practitioner would understand The Secret and how Scientology methods can be used to realize it and would use them in that spirit.   A true believer Scientologist religionist does not understand that The Secret is simply another way of describing the very thing Scientology was created to achieve.  Thus, a true-believer Scientologist can practice Scientology for a lifetime and never realize The Secret.   Rather than assist you to realize it, he would attempt to discredit it and to dissuade you from even pursuing it.  An integral practitioner serves with the purpose of empowering you.  A true-believer Scientologist attempts to own you so as to ‘save you.’

If you wish to pursue this route, be sure you establish that you are pursuing it with an integral practitioner.

The Road I Must Travel

L. Ron Hubbard was a great observer and describer of phenomena.  He once noted that the universe abhors a vacuum.   He also noted that when confronted with a vacuum of data, people tend to invent data to fill it.

I have intentionally not shared a lot of personal information over the past several months; and I don’t intend to start regularly doing so in the near future.  However, I have observed that Ron’s description of the information vacuum has apparently created a field day for those intent on reading tea leaves and those who harbor intentions inimical to my own.   And that has apparently upset some folks.  So, I am going to attempt to fill in the vacuum in the hopes it might set some people at ease.

Monique and I worked hard throughout 2011 to create some time for me to write some books that I believe will help Scientologists and former Scientologists heal and move on up a little higher with their lives.   Things did not go as planned.  2012 presented some issues that I thought, right or wrong, deserved my attention.

We wound up spending the bulk of the year assisting with battles (Battle of San Antonio, mop up of Headley affair,  expose of the Pat Broeker affair, etc.).   We with forethought entered them and exited them without a single penny in compensation; not even for the not insubstantial personal costs involved.   Fundraising for them diverted much of our income for the year.  This was the case much to the frustration of Debbie, Wayne, Marc, Claire, and others who demanded I be compensated.   We did not do so because the road I feel I must travel requires absolute independence of thought and obligation.  The pursuit of truth can, and has through history – including with Scientology- , been compromised by financial considerations.

We decided to move at the end of the year and Monique decided to go back to work in the health care field for two reasons.  First, it was necessary in order to obtain the type of premises that would afford us our life back from an intelligence apparatus the likes of which have been unknown to the world since the infamous East German STASI.  Second, it was necessary to afford me the time and space to get done the books I am in progress on.  Monique knows what I have to say – and what I have been trying to find the time to complete in the full context I have always asserted it deserves in books form.   She felt it so important to be said that she gave up – temporarily – the joy and fulfillment of auditing in order to make it happen.  We also forfeited our only assets, $35,000 in equity from a lease/purchase option, in order to effectuate this change.

Thanks to great research and planning on our part, we are moving forward on our plans while also rebuilding our lives from the intrusion.  It is not that the STASI (OSA, Scientology Inc.’s Office of Special Affairs) has gone away.  It is that they are buffered.   Thanks to the good people in our community, and the rather ethical and uncorrupted law enforcement agencies in our vicinity, we know more about their rather extensive and expensive surveillance operation than it can divine about us.   Their absurd black PR campaign being run directly at virtually everyone we have known or met (including everyone who has visited us and all of Monique’s family) is indication of the level of frustration of not having 24/7 access to our every movement.  It also doesn’t hurt having Sugar Ray Jeffrey as a neighbor and friend – the only man in history who has kicked Scientology Inc.’s ass two times in one year and who is fully motivated and prepared to do so again if they get too adventrous.

As far as what I have to say in my books, I am previewing some of it on the blog of late – but those are simply snippets.   I will say the following.   I believe I will demonstrate that perhaps the most powerfully destructive fault with Scientology is its promise and authoritative insistence that only it, to the explicit and must-be-agreed-upon exclusion of examination of any other data or technology, with scientific precision delivers ultimate truth.   Understanding that, in my view, opens one to potential heights that Scientologists wind up insisting they have achieved, but in reality are not even aware of.

Where ultimately does that go?   I don’t purport to know.  I do believe, though, that the moment one is certain he has arrived, he in fact has died spiritually.

To borrow a line from Tom Morello, ‘the road I must travel, its end I cannot see.’

Sitting In Judgment

 

In December 2012 I posted an essay on this blog suggesting that  judgmentalism is a negative  trait that Scientologists ought take care to curb.  This blog is frequented in the main by former members of the church of Scientology who still consider themselves Scientologists.  These are people that have been out of the organization for years and who profess that Scientology ought not be used to control and dominate the lives of others.  Nonetheless, a popular counter-position posted in response to my essay was that ‘labeling, and judgmentalism, is just fine in and of itself – the only problem with such practice is inaccuracy of the labeling.’   Even years after their participation in the organization, many Scientologists considered a judgmental attitude a positive virtue provided it is done in keeping with their own standards of accuracy.  The most zealous proponents of that idea resorted to ad hominem attacks on me for raising such issues, and ultimately disconnected from me.

I do not contend that the labels Scientology promotes usage of are inaccurate or harmful provided they are used in a professional manner as initially intended upon creation.   Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard created numerous constructs against which the mind, spirit and human condition could be understood and improved.   He observed and recorded gradient scales ranging from horrendous, painful conditions all the way up to beautiful, joyous conditions.   The scales are invaluable when used by professionally trained Scientologists to help move people up those conditions.  But, just like any other field of the mind and spirit – including psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and other religions and systems of spirituality – the moment one takes the diagnosis and treatment or practice scheme out of the hands of trained, responsible practitioners and applies it casually and inexpertly in the field of day to day human relations, disaster is close to inevitable.

Imagine a friend telling you that you are an obsessive compulsive disorder case – in all seriousness – , and thereafter treating you as leprous until you conformed with that friend’s standard of acceptable behavior.  How long would you tolerate that friend in your proximity?  Not for long I suspect.   Scientologists – regardless of levels of training – are encouraged to apply their own, equally judgmental, labels to others and apply them in life.

Scientology has a substantial lexicon of judgmental labels that rivals the scope and complexity of the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).   Its organizations promote their facile use in day to day life.  Despite that, Scientology organizations spend millions of dollars a year condemning the DSM and its misuse or even professional use.  Their argument is that such labeling is judgmental and as such it does not promote improvement but instead categorization and stigmatization.

Perhaps the most commonly used stigmatizing terms in Scientology are “suppressive person” or SP and “potential trouble source” or PTS.   An SP is defined in Scientology as one of those roughly 2 ½ percent (Scientology founder  L. Ron Hubbard estimation) of any population who exhibit the characteristics of a sociopath or psychopath.  Scientology’s diagnostic scheme for identifying an SP is nearly identical to psychology’s and psychiatry’s diagnostic standard for identifying the sociopath or psychopath.   A PTS is a supposed  member of approximately 20% of the population who are intimately connected with an SP and consequently are mistake-prone or act ill or cowed.

Scientologists are encouraged to take a three week course of study in order to achieve the purported professional  ability and  license to identify and handle an SP and the target of his effects, the PTS.  All Scientologists are required to take this course and are expected to apply it with an attitude of certainty regardless of lack of any other professional credential.   The result, bluntly, can denigrate into a community  of untrained, arrogant, Monday morning shrinks passing the most condemnatory judgments upon one another at the drop of a hat.

To make matters worse, there is a distinct SP characteristic in Scientology writings that takes precedence over the other dozens that align with the psychology field’s similar diagnostic characteristics checklist.  That is, if someone exhibits an ‘anti-Scientology’ leaning he or she is sure to be diagnosed as being an SP.  To qualify one only need question the wisdom of any Scientology writing.  This fact alone is probably more responsible for Scientology taking on the character of an insular cult than all others combined.

L. Ron Hubbard once quipped that it is futile to get into an argument with a psychiatrist.  The problem, he noted, was that the minute you get a leg up on the psychiatrist he definitively ends the debate with the evaluation, ‘you are crazy.’   Ironically, this ad absurdum joke could almost describe the modern day Scientologist.  If you attempt to even discuss a shortcoming of Scientology the debate decisively ends with the evaluation, ‘you are an SP.’  Per Scientology policy all Scientologists must disconnect from an SP.  That is, the Scientologist must refrain from any type of communication with the SP, directly or indirectly.  That policy holds whether the declared SP is one’s spouse, child, parent, business partner or best friend.   The SP is entitled no civil or human rights as far as any Scientologist is concerned.

By way of comparison, the psychiatrists’ condemnatory label ‘crazy’ is a rather mild evaluation.

Nonetheless, Scientologists – even those who have disaffiliated from its organizations because of its alleged proclivity for judgmental evaluation, trying and sentencing of followers and the population at large – believe ‘judgmentalism’ is not a problem with Scientology.   They are so dead serious about that that they are prepared to prove it by disconnecting from anyone who says otherwise.

Decompression is important in any cult recovery effort.

Re-education is probably even more important.

‘Going Clear’ Muddies the Water

To true-believer Scientologists, Lawrence Wright’s book Going Clear will be an extreme test of faith.   To independent-minded Scientologists the book will be a test of how well they understand Scientology and correspondingly how well they differentiate the technology of Scientology from personage of its original author.

This is so because the majority of the book is little more than a compendium of greatest shots by L. Ron Hubbard’s many erstwhile enemies.   There is no balance, but for the occasional gratuitous, condescending nods to L. Ron Hubbard’s power of imagination.

Having read a number of Wright’s previous works, I anticipated much more from the Pulitzer prize winning author.   I never wrote a review of Janet Reitman’s  Inside Scientology because I considered it a rather dry, overly academic history of Scientology.  While it was more comprehensive and balanced than any previous outsider look at the subject, I found it to be rather turgid, impersonal and careful.  It, like all books by outsiders who haven’t experienced that which they write about, lacked the vital subjective component that truth requires.  Note, some level of subjective experience is essence in covering a subject (religion/philosophy/spirituality) that is  by academic and scientific standards wholly subjective. Having seen how Wright made the entire Middle East vs. Western culture divide personal, and understandable in his The Looming Tower – from both the Middle Eastern and Western perspective – I believed he might do the same for the sorely misunderstood subjects of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology.

Instead Wright spent 2/3^rd of his book regurgitating what several before him had already done: indicted, convicted and sentenced L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology to death.  It was sad to see a gifted author  with an advance allowing him two years to investigate squander it by essentially cutting and pasting from a twenty-seven year old biography penned by British Author Russell Miller (Bare-Faced Messiah).    About the only thing Wright added was to make it more salacious and one-sided by sprinkling it with the death bed accusations of a former Hubbard wife (which incidentally conflicted with her earlier shrill, divorce-court accounts given to Miller) and giving it a far less charitable and objective slant than even Miller – who did little to mask his hatred for Scientology – did in 1986.

The rest of the book is a disjointed account of the post-Hubbard years in Scientology, the bulk of which had been reported long ago on this blog and extensively by other media outlets.

Despite having a formidable team of researchers and fact checkers, next to no critical examination of credibility of sources was done.  If someone had something lurid to say about L. Ron Hubbard, regardless of how improbable, it was stated as authoritative fact.  By way of example, had the Wright team took me up on my pre-publication offer to review their facts ahead of time, they would not have published these inventions that I personally know to be manufactured or grossly inaccurate:

-          Tom Cruise was being audited by Marty Rathbun at the Gold base in 2002.

-          Marty Rathbun (or anyone for that matter) was serving as Nicole Kidman’s ethics officer in 2002.

-          Marty Rathbun was auditing Penelope Cruz.

-          There was no ‘convincing evidence proving the facts were wrong or the reporter was biased’ presented in the Scientology vs. Time magazine case.

-          Church funds were used to purchase assault rifles and explosive devices for the perimeter of international headquarters.

-          A campaign was run to blackmail attorney Charles O’Reilly.

-          O’Reilly’s house was bugged and his office was infiltrated.

-          Most Sea Org members at the Int Base did not know their own geographical location.

-          Miscavige attempted to get damning taped admissions from Mary Sue Hubbard so her husband could turn her in to the justice department.

-          L. Ron Hubbard demanded a divorce from Mary Sue Hubbard and she refused.

This is a partial list containing only items that Wright was either informed were false or reasonably should have known were false.   Granted, the verifiable allegations condemning Hubbard and Scientology in the book are legion.  And I recognize that the list of inaccuracies doesn’t put a dent on Wright’s conviction of both the founder and Scientology.  But, they highlight the velocity of the rush to judgment Wright was apparently engaged in.

Ultimately, Wright is guilty of what journalists  and critics have accused Hubbard and the church of Scientology of, not without justification, for decades.  To wit, rather than tackling the issues taken with the subject, Scientology policy calls for attacking the credibility of the one raising the issue.  Thus, we see over 400 pages of a book promising to answer the question ‘what makes Scientology so appealing to so many?’, never even attempting to explain what Scientology is and does.   Instead, Wright takes one esoteric teaching that Scientology asserts could not possibly be understood by someone not well-steeped in Scientology practice, and pretends that is all there is to a subject consisting of some 50 million other words.  With that straw dog firmly in place, Wright proceeds to burn hundreds of pages reciting the accusations of avowed enemies of L. Ron Hubbard.

By way of comparison, by the time one reads The Looming Tower (The book that Wright won the Pulitzer prize for) and Going Clear, there is little chance the reader will fear Osama Bin Laden more than he will fear L. Ron Hubbard.  While the former is journalism at its highest attainment, giving the reader an understanding of a figure made nearly impossible to understand by popular media culture, the latter can be characterized, at best in my opinion, as piling on.

While the church of Scientology can be partially credited with the result by its easily discreditable insistence on portraying L. Ron Hubbard as God, Wright had access to dozens of Scientologists unaffiliated with the church who gave far more measured, rational and credible accounts of what Scientology is capable of achieving in de-radicalized hands.

Wright chose to simply ignore the latter and shoot the sluggish, fat fish the former  placed in a barrel before him.   Good work if you can get it.   But, do not delude yourself that Going Clear is any insightful, definitive, and least of all, balanced look at either L. Ron Hubbard or Scientology.

Now that the big guns have issued, I can settle down to attempting to deliver something more along that line.