One Good Reason To Read ‘Scientology Warrior’

Now for one reason you might want to read Memoirs of a Scientology Warrior. Tony Ortega hates the book, characterizing it as a love letter to the cult:  Ortega’s take.

Rattling both ends of the extreme is an indicia of hitting the sweet spot.  Reference:  The Great Middle Path Revisited.

Ten Reasons to Avoid ‘Scientology Warrior’

Ten reasons why you should not read Memoirs of a Scientology Warrior:

1. If you read it, you might get the idea that Scientology is something that one ought to graduate from.  This could be particularly troubling for folk who can’t seem to get over the reunion-of-the-folks-from-the-good-old-days mentality.
2. If you read it, you might get the idea that for Scientology to assert the idea some of its ideas are sacred and ought to remain hidden is the height of hypocrisy. This could be particularly difficult for those who cling to a sense of mystical superiority over mere mortals.
3. If you read it, you might get the idea that Scientology is nothing more than, as Ron once noted, ‘a workable technology’.  This could be particularly trying for those who assert ‘total certainty’ on the ‘only road to total freedom.’
4. If you read it, you might become curious as to the evolution of psychotherapeutic and spiritual practices during the time Scientology has existed.  This could be particularly upsetting to those who find comfort in knowing without doubt that anything developed or discussed outside the halls of Scientology is destructive, dangerous business.
5. If you read it, you might get the idea that having to have someone to blame or fight is a severe limitation to one’s spiritual growth.   This could be particularly disconcerting to the ‘onward Scientology soldier’ set.
6. If you read it, you will more than likely doubt every utterance emanating from the church of Scientology from David Miscavige on down.   This could be particularly perplexing for those who find solace in relying upon those they have decided are ‘on Source’ or ‘with Ron’ or ‘with Scientology.’
7. If you read it, you might find out that L. Ron Hubbard did not live an immaculate resurrection as popularly accepted.   This could be particularly enturbulating to those whose gains in Scientology are based upon the  foundation of the stable datum of ‘doing what Ron would do.’
8. If you read it, you will more than likely forever lose the ‘ends justify the means’ think that Scientology implants upon its members.   This will be particularly jarring to those weaklings who take some measure of pride in judging, denigrating, and black pr’ing those who don’t see eye to eye with them on Scientology.
9. If you read it, you might find out that much of Scientology takes away the positive that it is also capable of producing.  This will be particularly unsettling to those who have a weak understanding on the observable mechanics that make Scientology produce results .
10. If you read it, you might not continue to think Ron is Buddha reincarnated or, on the other hand, a grand con man.  This will be particularly troubling to those whose gains were founded upon, or bolstered by, belief. It will also cause consternation to those who have found  a safe solution in targeting Ron as inherently evil.

Now Available at Amazon Books: click here: Memoirs of a Scientology Warrior

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

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.

Colbert Report on Scientology

Like it or not, justified or not, the following segment on the popular Colbert Report (see both segments, second the interview with Lawrence Wright) pretty well sums up the public image of Scientology.  Not the church of Scientology in the eyes of the world at large, but Scientology.   A whacky religious cult with bizarre beliefs, violent practices and a threatening way of dealing with criticism.

The Colbert Report on Scientology

Do you believe this public image can change?   How?  How long will it take to change significantly?

Luis and Rocio Garcia vs. The Machine

From the author of a Letter From Garcia, please see a Lawsuit from the Garcias.  Updates forthcoming.

ABC Action News Tampa

CBS News Tampa

NBC US News

NBC News Tampa

ABC World News

see also: Rocio’s story

L. Ron Hubbard by Tom Martiniano

Blogger note: Op Ed means ‘opposite of the editorial page’, where views are published whether they align with or collide with the editorial positions of a publication.  While it doesn’t technically mean the opinions stated are opposite of that of the publication in question, the page is often filled with such opposing views.  The essay below submitted by Tom Martiniano clearly is challenging the views I have been expressing on this blog for 4 years and in my book What Is Wrong With Scientology?   and probably is best characterized as an Op Ed. I happen to know it represents the views of at least a handful of others who are not so bold as Tom to express their positions despite my continuing invitations that they do so.  It is my hope that some of those folk muster the courage to pipe up here.   Tom and I have something in common – beyond Scientology – that makes me appreciate him and his views.  We have both been on the wrong end of a gun on more than one occasion and lived to express our views.  Nonetheless, I will likely soon post clarifying precisely where I part company with his viewpoints (attempting to succinctly sum up what I have been attempting to do here for 4 years).   In the meantime, I would love to hear your views. 

L Ron Hubbard

For four years now I have been an “Independent Scientologist”, a title borne of the blog “Moving up a Little Higher”, owned and penned almost every day by Marty Rathbun.

We’ve had a lot of talk about Scientology, L Ron Hubbard, seen peoples viewpoints on what happened to Scientology, who’s to blame and so forth.  I have also watched as people sit in judgment of L Ron Hubbard, second guess him and his actions, criticize the man and his products.

The name L Ron Hubbard has taken tremendous bashings over the last several years, especially recently and it is mainly and solely due to the actions of David Miscaviage and others like him who push LRH and Scientology over the abyss with their irresponsible and unpardonable actions with the body of technology that was entrusted to them to care for “Attacks from governments or monopolies occur only when there are “no results” or “bad results” KSW #1.

I want to say a few things about the man, the author, the Science Fiction Writer, the founder of the most controversial Church ever or whatever anyone wants to call him.  I am not going to be open minded and say “well, he has a viewpoint and he is right in some of the things he says”.  I think LRH deserves a standing ovation for all of his accomplishments in this lifetime.

L Ron Hubbard is the best friend that a person could ever want.  There have been hundreds of philosophers over the millennia who have introduced technology and doctrines for living and they all have been helpful to one degree or another.  But LRH has developed technology throughout the space of thirty short years that covers every aspect of life.  Some say that LRH is not the only technology that there is, nor is his philosophy there only one that works and that following his technology or values only is being blind or being robotic.  That’s fair and in theory it is a solid viewpoint, but in practice it is fatal.

LRH even said in one of the PDC tapes that he doubts that there is any original thought in this universe.  He’d be the first one to tell you that most of what he developed is from research into the world at large where he learned such things as the basic purpose of mankind’s existence is the urge to survive and from there he developed the entire body of the triumphant Dianetics, the world’s first successful foray into the real structure of the mind.  Successful technology has been lying around the planet for eons, all developed by aboriginal tribal witchdoctors, psychologists, clans or civilizations, waiting for someone to come along and codify it and put it to good use.  LRH found all of this knowledge and brought forth only the technology that was time tested and proven to be a high-rate-of-success application which made people better.   LRH was like a kid in a candy store finding and testing workable technology.  He would travel to far ends of the earth, find technology, research it for workability and in some cases adjust it so that it would work in most cases and then make it easy to us to use.  He even developed technology for us to be able to duplicate written material.  How’s that for a first-ever?  This is a lot of work for one man.

When you apply something that is so utterly simple and so remarkably effective as the “Contact Assist”, or “Touch Assist” or even the powerful “Locational Assist” realize a lot of time and development went into it and L Ron Hubbard worked a lot of late nights in order to bring this technology to you in an easily understandable form to make your life that much better.  And just as an aside here, we used the locational assist in New Orleans and Mississippi after hurricane Katrina on people who never heard of L Ron Hubbard and had people tell us that it saved their lives. We had thousands of such wins from folks in the Gulf area from the lowly locational assist. It worked like magic.

You see, LRH cared about you. He cared about all of us much more than we actually understood.  He didn’t invent Study Tech to make money. He made it so we could read and duplicate. That’s love.

Is his tech and philosophy the only tech out there? No, not by any means. Is the way it is codified and presented to lay men the only usable tech out there? Yes.  LRH introduced us to “The Wall of Fire” and then taped the route through it for all of us to see.  All we had to do was walk the taped line.

But this is way too simple and a lot of people have to add their own viewpoints to the chalked path and wreck the path. LRH Says in HCOPL 14 February 1965 SAFEGUARDING TECHNOLOGY

“It has taken me a third of a century in this lifetime to tape this route out.

“It has been proven that efforts by man to find different routes came to nothing. It is also a clear fact that that the route called Scientology does lead out of the labyrinth. Therefore it is a workable system, a route that can be travelled.”

“Scientology is a workable system. It has the route taped. The search is done. Now the route only needs to be walked.”

Independent Scientologists are Scientologists that are independent from the Church of Scientology.  The Church is errant and has been turning good, workable Scientology technology into unworkable technology to free people and turned it into workable technology to entrap.

There have been a lot of recent books, writings and talk about L Ron Hubbard and the end result of all of this talk and writings, rantings and foam of the mouth is an attempt to make LRH less of a successful philosopher.  Most Scientologists are taking the bashing right alongside of LRH and feel the pain.

Realize that ANY attempt to write against L Ron Hubbard is an attempt to destroy that which frees mankind from their traps.

Is Scientology the only route out? Yes. It is the only applied philosophy that has the OT Sections (which were removed from the bridge by David Miscaviage).

Should someone follow L Ron Hubbard blindly? I would say so because to me it would be better than stumbling around blindly for the rest of your existence.  LRH is the smartest person I have ever met. He is also the most caring person I have ever met. He cares about us more than any other person on this planet, even more than Tom Cruise does (joke).  The tech volumes, the miles and miles of taped recordings, the green volumes were written by LRH for YOU to use.

Yes, you can read the Tao or read Buddha and so forth, but you would have to sort a lot of wheat from a lot of chaff to get to Nirvana.  LRH already sifted and worked it all out for us to use.

This posting is written for Scientologists, those who sat down and did TR-0 and had their lives changed for the absolute better, or those who experienced going exterior for the first time, or those who went whole-track on a touch assist and the other hundreds of ways one could have a major stable win applying the fantastic tech by LRH.

Get back on the taped route and find your way out of this mess. Find a good Indy auditor and go up the bridge.  LRH said to build orgs. Then by God build orgs. LRH said to manage orgs, then we manage and we fix management and what went wrong with it the first time. Do it the way LRH says to do it and it will be right. Just because it went wrong the first time was not LRH’s fault. It is right out of KSW #1 “What Did You Really Do?”  We screwed it up. So we set it right, not cancel it because we screwed it. It’s exactly the same thing as saying “Well, I tried process X and it didn’t work, so toss it out.” Come one, wake up. KSW was at the start of every course and checksheet you ever did and that is because LRH ordered it. He saw this coming.

So come on. Let’s get this show back on the road.

 

Tom Martiniano

 

‘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.

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.