Journalism: Scientology - L. Ron Hubbard's Brainchild

The impulse to believe the absurd when presented with the unknowable is called religion. Whether this is wise or unwise is the domain of doctrine. Once you understand someone's doctrine, you understand their rationale for believing the absurd. At that point, it may no longer seem absurd. You can get to both sides of this conondrum from here.

Re: Journalism: Scientology - L. Ron Hubbard's Brainchild

Postby admin » Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:17 am

Statutory Declaration, Deed of Release, Agreement
by Damian Arntzen [unsigned]
September, 2002

STATUTORY DECLARATION

I, Damian Arntzen of ................................................................................................................ in the State of Western Australia do solemnly and sincerely declare that the facts contained in the attached deed are, to the best of my knowledge and belief, true and correct in every particular.

And I make this solem declaration conscientiously believing the same to be true, and by virtue of the provisions of the Evidence Act, 1906.

Declared at Perth )

On this ....... Day of September 2002 )

Before me: ) ___________________________________

Justice of the Peace/Commissioner for Declarations

DEED OF RELEASE

THIS DEED is made by Damian Arntzen of ......................................................... In the State of Western Australia.

Acknowledgements

A. I have pursued the Scientology religion voluntarily, and have been a member of the Church of Scientology of my own volition.

B. I am familiar with the Creed of the Church of Scientology and the policies of the Church as written by its Founder L. Ron Hubbard and have adopted these as the guiding principles of my life.

C. I am fully aware that Scientology is a religion. I have received some spiritual counselling (called auditing, the religion’s core practice) as well as confessional counselling and training in the theology, policy and ethics of the Scientology Religion. I have had increased spiritual awareness from these activities and I am fully satisfied with the results.

D. I have not been harmed in any manner or form by any experiences as a parishioner of any Church of Scientology or through my involvement with Scientology Religious technology or Dianetics Spiritual Healing technology or with any authorized organisations using such technologies.

E. I acknowledge that the Church and its associates have not made any statement, representation or promise to myself regarding any fact or matter material to this Release except as it is herein expressly stated.

F. I understand and agree that in order for me to receive further religious and spiritual counselling, I need to release and indemnify and discharge the Churches of Scientology, their staff, officers, Board of Directors, religious workers, employers, agents, representatives, parishioners, affiliated organisations and entities, L. Ron Hubbard’s heirs, successors and assigns, and the Author’s Family Trust (‘releases’), from liability for my actions.

G. I am not under the influence of any drugs, narcotic, alcohol or mind-influencing substance, condition or ailment such that my ability to fully understand the meaning of this release is adversely affected.

H. I acknowledge the Church has offered to assist in recommending independent legal counsel to advise me further on this matter. I have freely chosen to forgo such an opportunity and to enter into this deed of release and waiver of my rights without such advice. I have read and fully understand the nature and content of this document, including the significance of waiving any actual or potential claim I may have, and sign it below voluntarily and without any threat or duress.

Agreement

1. I do not hold any Church of Scientology responsible in any manner or form for any of my actions and fully understand and state to be true that my actions are my own personal responsibility.

2. I agree to keep confidential and not disclose any knowledge, information or material acquired by myself directly or indirectly concerning the Church or any of its associates and, without limiting the foregoing, shall not directly or indirectly publish or assist another to publish or assist another to publish any such knowledge, information or material whether in the form of books, magazines, periodicals, newspapers, articles or other literature or in the form of film, video, audio tape, television or in any other form of media.

3. I have no desire or intention to testify or otherwise participate in any judicial administrative or legislative proceedings adverse to Scientology or the Church or any of its associates unless compelled to do so by lawful process. I therefore agree not to do so and I state quite clearly here that I have no wish, desire or intention to attack, harm or in any way malign the Church of Scientology.

4. I hereby disclaim and waive all rights to any potential claim that I may have had at any time, present or future, to any such refund of monies donated to the Church or any of its servants or agents and undertake not to at any time instigate or pursue any other claim or to go to the media or other authorities on the same matter.

5. I hereby release and forever discharge and agree to indemnify the releases, from and against all actions, costs, claims and demands which may be made against them arising out of any act of mine.

6. In the event that any portion of this release is found to be legally unenforceable, this shall not affect the binding nature of the remainder of the release which shall remain in full force and effect, nor shall it effect the truthfulness of the statements I have made in this Deed.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF the parties have executed this Deed on this ......... Day of .......... 2002.

SIGNED SEALED AND )

DELIVERED BY )

DAMIAN ARNTZEN ) _________________________

IN THE PRESENCE OF ) ________________________

Justice of the Peace/Commissioner for Declarations
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Re: Journalism: Scientology - L. Ron Hubbard's Brainchild

Postby admin » Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:19 am

Ted Patrick
by Wikipedia

Theodore Roosevelt ("Ted") Patrick, Jr. (born 1930) is widely considered to be the "father of deprogramming."[1] Some criminal proceedings against Patrick have resulted in felony convictions for kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment.

Early life

Born in what he calls "a red-light district" in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he was surrounded by "thieves, prostitutes, murderers [and] pimps. From the time [he] was old enough to remember, [he] saw people being killed, shot up, cut up, beat up. The place was so bad even the police didn't want to come there."[2]

He had a speech impediment, which set him apart from the other children. Until he was sixteen, no one could understand what he said, which made him "shy and backwards and miserable and embarrassed" for most of his childhood. According to Patrick, after being taken to countless faith healers, witch doctors and voodoo practitioners, the final straw was an embarrassing spin the bottle game. The bottle pointed to him and the girl wouldn't kiss him. He then decided to take his problem into his own hands. His speech improved, and with it his confidence and interpersonal skills. He dropped out of high school in tenth grade to help support his family. After working in a variety of jobs, he saved enough to open a nightclub called the Cadillac Club with his cousin. The venture was successful, and eventually he sold his share of the business to his cousin. Patrick was the co-chairman of the Nineteenth Ward in Chattanooga. He planned on opening a restaurant and cocktail lounge; however, according to Patrick, his political enemies obstructed this.[2]

At twenty-five he left his wife and infant son in Tennessee and went with a friend to San Diego, California. There he started the Chollas Democratic Club to assert the rights of the Black community. Perhaps their main accomplishment was picketing supermarkets and other stores to get them to employ Blacks. After he had saved enough money, he brought his wife and children to San Diego. Other organizations he started in San Diego were the Logan Heights Businessmen’s Association, the Junior Government of Southeast San Diego and the Volunteer Parents Organization (VPO.) During the Watts Riots in 1965 the VPO was instrumental in keeping the violence from reaching San Diego. For his efforts in the Watts Riots Patrick was awarded the Freedom Foundation Award, which ultimately led to his job as the Special Assistant for Community Affairs, under then-Governor Ronald Reagan.

Career as a deprogrammer

Despite a lack of formal education and professional training, Patrick was hired by hundreds of parents and family members to "deprogram" their loved ones. A high school dropout, Patrick based his techniques and practices on his own life experience. According to Ted Patrick himself in a TV debate with members of the Hare Krishna group (May, 1979), "How I got into deprogramming was through my own son. All outdoor boy, couldn't nothing keep him in the house. Then one day, he was psychologic... psychological kidnap by a cult". In this interview, Patrick also explained that his quest to understand cults led him to speak to "witches, warlocks, healers" and in fact, he went "all the way to New Orleans" to the same person his mother brought him to for his speech impediment. He also stated that he spent time in a religious group and after a week "..didn't know where I were, nor how I got there... I was hook". Patrick stated that this research and his understanding of the mind from his ongoing struggle with his own speech, was the background for his work in deprogramming.

On June 12, 1971, Mrs. Samuel Jackson contacted Patrick to file a complaint concerning her missing son, Billy. As Billy was nineteen, the police and FBI would not look for him. Billy was involved with the cult known as the Children of God, which had approached Patrick's son Michael a week earlier. Patrick contacted other people whose relatives were in the cult and even "joined" them to know how the group operated. This is when he developed his method of deprogramming. He ultimately left his job to deprogram full-time.[2]

Patrick, one of the pioneers of deprogramming, used a confrontational method:

"When you deprogram people, you force them to think.... But I keep them off balance and this forces them to begin questioning, to open their minds. When the mind gets to a certain point, they can see through all the lies that they've been programmed to believe. They realize that they've been duped and they come out of it. Their minds start working again."


According to a 1979 Washington Post article, Patrick gave himself the moniker "Black Lightning."[3] However, anti-cult activists Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman state, in their 1978 book Snapping, that cult leaders gave him that nickname.[4]

Patrick founded the FREECOG organization, later known as the Citizen's Freedom Foundation, in 1971.[1]

Patrick described details of some of his kidnappings in his book Let Our Children Go! (E. P. Dutton, 1976, page 96)

"Wes had taken up a position facing the car, with his hands on the roof and his legs spread-eagled. There was no way to let him inside while he was braced like that. I had to make a quick decision. I reached down between Wes's legs, grabbed him by the crotch and squeezed--hard. He let out a howl, and doubled up, grabbing for his groin with both hands. Then I hit, shoving him headfirst into the back seat of the car and piling in on top of him."


Patrick stood in trial several times for kidnapping activities. After the first trial (which found him not guilty), he stopped executing the actual kidnapping but continued with his deprogramming.

Patrick testified before an ad hoc Congressional committee organized in 1979 by Senator Bob Dole. According to The New Republic, Dole intended the hearing to "provide a forum" for Patrick and other anti-cult activists.[5]

Criminal proceedings and convictions

Some criminal proceedings against Patrick have resulted in felony convictions for kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment.[6]

• In 1980, Patrick was convicted of conspiracy, kidnapping, and false imprisonment. These charges were related to the abduction and attempted deprogramming of Roberta McElfish, a 26-year-old Tucson waitress.[7] Patrick was sentenced to one year in prison and fined five thousand dollars.[8]
• On 28 December 1981, Judge Clinton Olsen dismissed the Church of Scientology's lawsuit against Ted Patrick and three others for lack of cause of action in Multnomah County, Oregon.
• On 11 June 1984 Scientologist Paula Dain was awarded $7,000 in compensatory damages by a federal court jury in a $30 million civil-rights lawsuit against Patrick. The jury ruled that Patrick had violated Dain's civil rights and freedom of religion, but determined that Patrick did not act "with evil intent" or in "reckless and callous disregard for Miss Dain's safety."
• In the case of Kathleen Crampton, where Patrick and her family members were acquitted from kidnapping, the judge wrote: "The parents who would do less than what Mr. and Mrs. Crampton did for their daughter Kathy would be less than responsible, loving parents. Parents like the Cramptons here, have justifiable grounds, when they are of the reasonable belief that their child is in danger, under hypnosis or drugs, or both, and that their child is not able to make a free, voluntary, knowledgeable decision."

References

1. Chryssides, George (1999). Exploring New Religions. Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 346-348. ISBN 0-826-45959-5.
2. Patrick, Ted; Dulack, Tom (1976). Let Our Children Go!. E. P. Dutton. ISBN 0-525-14450-1.
3. Breaking the Spell That Binds Henry Allen Washington Post February 6, 1979
4. Conway and Siegelman, Black Lightning (Chapter 6 of Snapping), 1995, ISBN 0-9647650-0-4
5. Chapman, Stephen (17 February 1979). "On the Hill: Cult-mongering". The New Republic: 11-13.
6. Hunter, Howard O.; Price, Polly J. (2001). "Regulation of religious proselytism in the United States" (PDF). Brigham Young University Law Review 2001 (2). http://lawreview.byu.edu/archives/2001/2/hun6.pdf.
7. "Ted Patrick convicted of seizing woman said to have joined cult". The New York Times. 1980-08-30.
8. "Ted Patrick is sentenced in seizure of cult member". The New York Times. 1980-09-27.
Conway and Siegelman, Black Lightning (Chapter 6 of Snapping), 1995, ISBN 0-9647650-0-4
Ted Patrick, Let Our Children Go (Chapter 1 of Ted Patrick's Let Our Children Go),
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Re: Journalism: Scientology - L. Ron Hubbard's Brainchild

Postby admin » Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:20 am

The Admissions of L. Ron Hubbard
by L. Ron Hubbard

COURSE I

The purpose of this experiment is to re-establish the ambition, willpower, desire to survive, the talent and confidence of myself.

To accomplish the above the following fears must be removed: Fear that I have written myself out by writing junk. I built certain psychoses in myself while living with my former wife as a means to protect my writing. I affirmed that my writing was hard work and took much labor. This was a lie. I was always anxious about people's opinion of me and was afraid I would bore them. This injected anxiety and careless speed into my work. I must be convinced that I can write skillfully and well, that I have no phobias about writing and no fears of it. People criticized my work bitterly at times. I must be convinced that such people were fools. I must be convinced that I can write far better than ever before, that a million people at least would be happy to see my stories. I must be convinced that I have succeeded in writing and with ease will regain my popularity, which actually was not small. I must also be convinced that I dictate stories to a dictaphone with ease.

I must be told that my memory is strong and reliable, that I can remember all I have ever read or studied, that no illness or medicine has affected mind or memory.

(b) My service record was not too glorious. I must be convinced that I suffer no reaction from any minor disciplinary action, that all such were minor. My service was honorable, my initiative and ability high. I have nothing to fear from friends about my service. I can forget such things as Admiral Braystead. Such people are unworthy of my notice.

(c) I can have no doubts of my psychic powers. My magical ability is high and clear. I earned my titles and command.

(d) Any distaste I may have for Jack Parsons originated in a psychic experiment. Such distaste is foolish. He is my friend and comrade-in-arms.

(e) Sexual feeling has been depressed by several things amounting to a major impasse. To cure ulcers of the stomach I was given testosterone and stilbesterol. These reduced my libido to nothing. While taking these drugs I fell in love with Sara. She can be most exciting sexually to me. Because of drugs as above and a hangover from my ex-wife Polly, I sometimes am unexcited by anything sexual. This depresses me.

My wife left me while I was in a hospital with ulcers. Polly was quite cruel. She was never a woman for me. She was under-sexed and had bad sexual habits such as self-laceration done in private. She was no mate for me and yet I retained much affection for her. It was a terrible blow when she left me for I was ill and without prospects. I know, by this, she actually wanted no more than my ability to support her. This has had an effect of impotency upon me, has badly reduced my ego.

Polly was very bad for me sexually. Because of her coldness physically, the falsity of her pretensions, I believed myself a near eunuch between 1933 and 1936 or when I found I was attractive to other women. I had many affairs. But my failure to please Polly made me always pay so much attention to my momentary mate that I derived small pleasure myself. This was an anxiety neurosis which cut down my natural powers.

In 1938-39 I met a girl in New York, Helen, who pleased me very much physically. I loved her and she me. The affair would have lasted had not Polly found out. Polly made things so miserable that I finally detested her and became detested by Helen, who two-timed me on my return to New York in 1941. This also reduced my libido. I have had Helen since but no longer want her. She does not excite me and I do not love her.

In 1942 -- December 17th or thereabouts -- while training in Miami, Florida, I met a girl named Ginger who excited me. She was a very loose person but pretended a great love for me. From her I received an infection of gonnohorea (sp?). I was terrified by it, the consequences of being discovered by my wife, the navy, my friends. I went to a private doctor who treated me with sulfa-thiazole and so forth. I thought I was cured but on a plane headed to Portland, Ore. I found I was not. I took to dosing myself with sulfa in such quantities that I was afraid I had affected my brain. My wife came to Portland. I took what precautions I could. I think actually that the disease was utterly cured very early. This fear further depressed my libido. My wife disliked the act anyway, I believe, even after she had a hysterectomy in 1938. (She was always terrified of childbirth but conceived despite all precautions seven times in five years resulting in five abortions and two children. I am quite fond of my children but my wife always tried to convince me that I hated them.)

I carried this fear of the disease to sea with me. I was reprimanded in San Diego in mid-43 for firing on the Mexican coast and was removed from command of my ship. This on top of having sunk two Jap subs without credit, the way my crew lied for me at the Court of Inquiry, the insults of the High Command, all combined to put me in the hospital with ulcers.

I returned to sea as navigator of a large ship and was subsequently selected for the Military Government School at Princeton whither I went in 1944-45 for three months. During my Princeton sojourn I was very tired and harrassed (sp?) and spent weekends with a writer friend in Philadelphia. He almost forced me to sleep with his wife. Meanwhile I had a affair with a woman named Ferne. Somehow, perhaps because I had constantly wet feet and no sleep at Princeton, I contracted a staphloceus infection. I mistook it for gonnhorea and until I arrived at Monterey, believed my old illness had returned. I consulted a doctor there who reassured me. This affair again depressed my libido. The staphloceus infection has not entirely vanished, appearing as rheumatism which only small doses of stilbestrol will remove. The hormone further reduces my libido and I am nearly impotent.

Sara, my sweetheart, is young, beautiful, desirable. We are very gay companions. I please her physically until she weeps about any separation. I want her always. But I am 13 years older than she. She is heavily sexed. My libido is so low I hardly admire her naked.

I mean to be constant to her. I love her very much. But to live with her I must regain my sexual powers, my stimulus.

I must cease to take hormones. I must rebuild my feeling of excitement about things sexual.

I have a very bad masturbatory history. I was taught when I was 11 and, despite guilt, fear of insanity, etc. etc. I persisted. At a physical examination at a Y when I was about 13, the examiner and the people with him called me out of the line because my testicles hung low and cautioned me about what would happen if I kept on masturbating. This "discovery" was a bad shock to me.

I had to be so silent about it that now when a bedspring squeaks I lose all libido. I eventually found out I would not be insane, or injure myself but the scars remain.

Polly pretended a hollow passion which disgusted me. But I am lingeringly fond of her even so. I am also nostalgic about Helen.

By eliminating certain fears by hypnosis, curing my rheumatism and laying off hormones, I hope to restore my former libido. I must! By hypnosis I must be convinced as follows:

(a) I can write. I need not think commercially about writing.

(b) My mind is still brilliant. My memory unaffected by drugs or experience.

(c) That masturbation was no sin or crime and did not injure me. That no sexual practice has ever dulled me.

(d) That things sexual thrill me. That I am now returned to the same feelings I had at 16 about sex where excitement is concerned. That naked women and pornography excite me greatly. That Sara excites me greatly and gives me much pleasure.

(e) That I bear no physical aftermath of disease.

(f) That I do not need to have ulcers anymore.

(g) That my eyes (which I used as an excuse to get out of school) are perfect and do not pain me ever.

(h) That I love in Sara everything I loved in Polly or Helen and that such love is now transferred to Sara.

(i) That I am fortunate in losing Polly and my parents, for they never meant well by me.

(j) That I never need be jealous of Sara's past. That she loves me and is utterly faithful. That she thrills me more than Helen ever did.

(k) That life is beautiful to me. That I want to live. That things taste and smell and look and feel wonderful to me.

(l) That I wrote a great book in The One Command and that it removed all my fears even until now, except that my chapters on the mind do not affect my own mind. That I have will power and great mental control. That I need not associate anything unless I wish.

(m) That I have only friendship for Jack Parsons.

(n) That I feel no wish for vengeance toward anyone. That I love people and believe in honor and glory.

(o) That I believe in my gods and spiritual things.

(p) That nothing can halt my ambitions.

(q) That I need not believe the criticism of anyone. That vicious criticism can be forgotten by me at will.

(r) That I tell the truth and must tell the truth. That all past errors and lies are forgotten.

(s) That I have started a new, free life. That the arts and beauties run strong in me and cannot be denied by anyone.

(t) That I am well and that there is no advantage in appearing ill.

(u) That my code is to be all things a "magus" must be, that I am those things. That I burn high and bright and will last as a potent and brilliant force until well after this century has run.

(v) That I am not credulous or absorbent of other people's opinions.

(w) That this hypnosis will not fade, but will increase in power as time advances.

(x) That my magical work is powerful and effective.

(y) That nothing can tarnish my love of life, my hours, my love of Sara. And I have the power of banishing anything which would seek to do so and that all things will seem wonderful and exciting to me all the rest of my days.

(y1) That the numbers 7, 25 and 16 are not unlucky or evil for me. That no number is any different in its influence upon me than any other number. That the 7th, 16th and 25th are not unlucky or unfortunate days of the month for me. I have no bad connotations with these numbers.

(z) That I need not subscribe to any moral code of sex anywhere. That I am constant to Sara. I have no terrors of sex or sexual conduct. Only pleasure and beauty are contained in it. That I may please myself with the act or be pleased with sexual things. That the sexual matters taught me by Flavia do not apply. My chastity lies in loving Sara.

(a1) That I will not forget these things but will enjoin them with all related ideas as more powerful than any other ideas in my head.

(b1) That all ideas to destroy myself are false, for I love life and I am a free and exuberant spirit in it.

(c1) That I cannot associate any of my lacking libido with Sara. The blame lies elsewhere. Sara has enormous powers to thrill me. Hormones and fears, now gone, were at fault.

(d1) Sexually I am as I was at 16, without any of the fears, with all of the powers, with all the knowledge I now possess turned to wonderful things.

(d1) That I see and hear Raon clearly.

(e) That anything which impedes my zest for living is small and puny and will dwindle before the power of these statements. That nothing in me which is evil can have heard these statements and commands without disappearing.

(f1) That I am not bad to look upon. That my posture is straight and excellent. That Sara likes my looks.

(g1) That my endurance in any climate is wonderful and any "fact" otherwise is completely false.

(h1) That I am not susceptible to colds.

(i1) That I believe in myself and am poised and dignified whenever I wish to be.

(j1) That I am not worn out in any way and never will be. That life is ever new, that I am strong.

(k1) That Sara is always beautiful to me.

(l1) That these words and commands are like fire and will sear themselves into every corner of my being, making me happy and well and confident forever!

Note: Much of the above may seem cryptic but if paraphrased as rendered will be enormously effective.

*****************************************************************

COURSE II.

You are asleep. You are not accountable for anything you say now. No one will think any less of you. People want to help you.

In this one lesson you are going to learn several things. The first is the use of your beautiful new Soundscriber. The instrument is your aide and companion. It makes it possible for you to write ten times the stories you did before.

You have no urge to talk about your navy life. You do not like to talk of it. You never illustrate your point with bogus stories. It is not necessary for you to lie to be amusing and witty.

You like to have your intimate friends approve of and love you for what you are. This desire to be loved does not amount to a psychosis, it is simply there and you enjoy their love.

You can sing beautifully. Your voice can imitate any singer. Your tones are round and true. You have no superstitions about singing at any time. Your oratory is magnificent. Your voice tones perfect, your choice of words marvelous, your logic unassailable.

Your psychology is good. You worked to darken your own children. This failure, with them, was only apparent. The evident lack of effectiveness was "ordered." The same psychology works perfectly on everyone else. You use it with great confidence.

Nothing can intervene between you and your Guardian. She cannot be displaced because she is too powerful. She does not control you. She advises you. You may or may not take the advice. You are an adept and have a wonderful and brilliant mind of your own.

Everything great and beautiful that ever happened to you or that you know is available to your conscious will to remember. You can only forget by conscious will or at command of your own voice.

You recognize the evil or bad import of things that are evil and bad for you but their evilness cannot affect you or penetrate through your glowing and strong aura. You are light and you are good. You have the Wisdom of all and never doubt your wisdom.

You have magnificent power but you are humble and calm and patient in that power. For you control all forces under you as you wish. The strength of your Guardian aids you always and can never depart or be repelled. Your faith in her and in God is unswerveable, blind, powerful and you never, never doubt their good intent toward you. They work with you. You help them exert their plans. They have faith unbounded in you.

You will never forget these incantations. They are holy and are now become an integral part of your nature. You enter the greatest phase yet of work and devotion and power and have perfect control without further fear.

Men's chains fall from you. Your head is high. Your back is straight. You can experience no evil or illness. You are wholly protected. You cannot guide yourself wrong for you are guided as a crown prince.

Material things are yours for the asking. Men are your slaves. Elemental spirits are your slaves. You are power among powers, light in the darkness, beauty in all.

You are not sleepy or tired ever. You do not sleep unless you will it consciously. Sleep to you is a deep trance. Nothing can touch you in that trance because it would not dare. Your Guardian alone can talk to you as you sleep but she may not hypnotize you. Only you can hypnotize yourself.

You never wonder about how you write, you never distrust your ideas or ability. You merely write and write wonderfully well. You like to copy your own material and work with it until it is perfect. But it is usually perfect the first time.

The desires of other people have no hypnotic effect upon you. You are considerate of their desires because you are powerful. But you need never be dissuaded by their wishes about anything.

Nothing, no one opposes your writing. Everyone is anxious that you write. You do not need certain conditions to write. You are so strong you can write anywhere on anything at any time. You can carry on a wild social life and still write one hundred thousand words a month or more. Your brain is so fixed that you can write at any time, anywhere. The mere beginning of writing is sufficient to put you in a happy mood, any high mood. Writing does not tire you. You said writing was hard work but that you knew was a lie. You know now it is easy, very easy. Writing puts you into an ecstatic state of mind almost as high as intercourse. You love to write. The Navy had no influence upon your writing. The Navy never stopped you writing. On the 422 what you wrote were not stories. You love to write. Your writing has a deep hypnotic effect on people and they are always pleased with what you write. Having a market is immaterial.

You will make fortunes in writing. Any book you care to write now will sell high and well. You can dictate books. Words flow from you in a beautiful steady stream. Anything which goes through your fingers can come through your mouth. A dictaphone fills you with a desire to talk. You talk easily to a dictaphone and the copy is excellent. The copyist has no effect upon your work. You don't care what she reads.

Your psychology is advanced and true and wonderful. It hypnotizes people. It predicts their emotions, for you are their ruler.

You don't have to talk about all this. You know too well it is true. You never have to argue, all you need to do is sit back with a calm, kind smile and people will come to you with their opinions. You need never talk to fill silences in a group. You are an arbiter, a kindly one. You do not have to talk. But when you do talk you are amusing, witty, so personable no one can resist your charm. If they do not reply, it is because they are afraid of you.

Your health is wonderful. You need but 6 hours sleep. Your eyes are fine.

People dislike cripples. You need never be a cripple. You have never done anything for which you need feel guilty. You never need punish yourself about anything. You are in wonderful glowing health. You never have accidents because you are prudent and poised.

You will live to be 200 years old, both because you are calm and because of modern discoveries to be made in your lifetime.

You will always look young. Your weight is 180 lbs. And you will attain and hold that weight.

Your hair will always be its present color. It will be thick and beautiful all your life. Hair will grow out to replace what you have lost.

Your body organs are in perfect harmony. Your Guardian keeps you in celestial time. Your organs work well, all of them. You grow stronger each day. No drug or medicine affects your mind more than a few hours. You can consciously stop pain.

You have no doubts about God. You never speculate about him. You are assured that whatever you do is right in his eyes. Your faith is so strong you could move mountains. You have deep trust and faith in God and have no fear of what he may do to you and your friends. He will never punish you. Some day you will merge with him and become part of the All when his bidding you have finished in these lives.

You never speak ill of another because you are too powerful and may curse them. You love everyone. Even when you use force on people, you cannot hate them. You have no hate or jealousy in you. You are not in contest with anyone. God and your Guardian and your own power bring destruction on those who would injure you. But you never speak of this for you are kind. A sphere of light, invisible to others, surrounds you as a protecting globe. All forces bounce away from you off this.

You are not a coward. Fist fighting had no bearing on your courage. You were ill when you were fought before. You did not understand the rules. You can whip anyone now and have no physical fear of hand to hand fighting. They who fought you before were knaves and fools. You would be merciless to them now. Nothing can stand up to your fighting now. You are strong and wonderful in combat. You never know fear or defeat. You refrain from fighting because you are too powerful.

You are rich in wisdom. You are therefore dangerous beyond the claws of tigers. You never need speak of your dangerousness. Everyone knows you are and it scares them when you mention it. You are kind and soft-spoken always.

Your eyes are getting progressively better. They became bad when you used them as an excuse to escape the naval academy. You have no reason to keep them bad and now they can get well and they will become eventually starting now as keen as an eagle's with clear whites and green pupils. Sunlight does not affect them. Lack of sleep does not affect them.

Your stomach trouble you used as an excuse to keep the Navy from punishing you. You are free of the Navy. You have no further reason to have a weak stomach. Your ulcers are all well and never bother you. You can eat anything.

Your hip is a pose. You have a sound hip. It never hurts. Your shoulder never hurts.

Your foot was an alibi. The injury is no longer needed. It is well. You have perfect and lovely feet.

Your sinus trouble is nothing. It is not dangerous. It will vanish. A common cold amuses you. You are protected from further illness. Your cat fever has vanished forever and will never return.

You do not have malaria. When you tell people you are ill it has no effect upon your health. In the Veterans examination you will tell them how sick you are. You will look sick when you take it. You will return to health one hour after the examination and laugh at them.

No matter what lies you may tell others they have no physical effect on you of any kind. You never injure your health by saying it is bad. You cannot lie to yourself. Disgust not sympathy is generated in others by bad health. Injuries are not romantic. They are disgusting in you. You are a child of God. You are perfect. Health is a passport to friends. Women are not impressed by your injuries. Clear exuberant good health is your passport to their hearts. Adventure heroes may sound romantic when injured but it is really a bad comment on their expertness. The truly great adventurer is so expert he is never injured by anything. Dragging a wing is not romantic, it is silly. You will always be in wonderful health and well-being.

There is no veil between you and the world. You sense touch, color, music, poetry much better than anyone else. You never mention this superiority. But you show them the beauties of the world. You are not old or worn. You are young and experience is fresh and exciting. It will always be. Your brain is clear as a gong. No pressure sits on it or blinds you. Sulfa never affected it. Your speech is perfect. You are thrilled by music. You can engender any mood. You are an excellent judge of painting and sculpture and are thrilled by it in any one of its thousand moods.

You can enter or leave any mood at will. You can engender any mood. You can write in any mood at will and with great honesty.

You start your life anew. You need no excuses, no crutches. You need no apologies about what you have done or been. Your approach to work is wonderfully clear and fresh. No experience can daunt you. You can never be disappointed or morose for you know life for what it is and therefore are shielded against its suffering. You have suffered much and you are deep in understanding. But now you enter upon a long, long period of solemn joy.

What people think of you does not matter. You know when you are right. Women especially love you and you fear no man.

Testosterone blends easily with your own hormones. Your glands already make plenty of needed testosterone and by adding to that store you make yourself very thrilling and sexy. Testosterone increases your sexual interest and activity. It makes erections easier and harder and makes your own joy more intense. Stilbesterol in 5 mg doses makes you thrill more to music and color and makes you kinder. You have no fear of what any woman may think of your bed conduct. You know you are a master. You know they will be thrilled. You can come many times without weariness. The act does not reduce your vitality or brain power at all. You can come several times and still write. Intercourse does not hurt your chest or make you sore. Your arms are strong and do not ache in the act. Your own pleasure is not dependent on the woman's. You are interested only in your own sexual pleasure. If she gets any that is all right but not vital. Many women are not capable of pleasure in sex and anything adverse they say or do has no effect whatever upon your pleasure. Their bodies thrill you. If they repel you, it merely means they themselves are too frigid or prudish to be bothered with. They are unimportant in bed except as they thrill you. Your sexual power is magnificent and they know it. If they are afraid of it, that is their loss. You are not affected by it.

You have no fear if they conceive. What if they do? You do not care. Pour it into them and let fate decide.

The slipperier they are the more you enjoy it because it means their mucous is running madly with pleasure.

There is nothing wrong in the sex act. Nothing any woman may say can change your opinion. You are a master. You are as sensitive and sexy as Pan. Lord help women when you begin to fondle them. You are master of their bodies, master of their souls as you may consciously wish. You have no karma to pay for these acts. You cannot now accumulate karma for you are a master adept. Your voice is low and compelling to them. Singing to them, for you sing like a master, destroys their will to resist. You obey the conventions, you commit no crimes because you need not. You can be intelligently aware of their morals and the laws of the land and fit your campaign expertly within them.

Jack is also an adept. You love and respect him as a friend. He cannot take offense at what you do. You will not wrong him because you love him.

The most thrilling thing in your life is your love and consciousness of your Guardian. She materializes for you. You have no doubts of her. She is real. She is always with you. You love her very much. You trust her. You see and hear her. She is not your master. You have a mighty spiritual will of your own. She is an advisor and as such is respected by you. She is wise and worthy and never changes shape. Your faith in her as in God is blind and unshaken ever.

She is interested in you and amused by you. She does not criticize you. She does not frown on your sexual acts but advises you on better game.

That she is with you always does not mean that she sees you as indecent ever. You cannot offend her. You cannot repel her. You are too good. You respect her and you love her and appreciate her advice. You are good always because you want her to feel good. This does not apply to sex. She has never and will never forbid you pleasures. She will never censure you. She is lovely and beautiful and radiant and part of your life. You can see her consciously whenever you wish. You are never startled by her because you are not afraid of her. You are partly in her plane, she partly in yours as you wish to see her. She has copper red hair, long braids, a lovely Venusian face, a white gown belted with jade squares. She wears gold slippers. Thus you see her.

You can read with ease anything she cares to show you. You can talk with her and audibly hear her voice above all others.

You and she are too powerful to permit any interference. You can work alone whenever you wish because she protects you. You and she are friends. You both have a higher master. She can teach you much. You love her. But she does not own your will, cannot affect your will and you are powerful enough to depend upon yourself. You do not consign will to her, ever. She advises. You do not have to take the advice. She cannot weaken your will. You have no fears of consequences if you fail to heed her. You can also be right for you know more of time than she does. She is wise and beautiful and powerful. Others may not see her, and you need not look at her or talk to her when others are around for they might not understand. You can talk to her "in your own mind" when others are near.

You need never be disappointed when material objects or people fail to move at your unspoken order. You can often control them. Not always. Leave this to your beloved Guardian.

Your vocabulary consists of all the words you ever heard or read. They are at your conscious command always. Your authority over words is absolute. You are a grand master of words and you can do with them as you will. You know what they mean to others. You know how their meanings and melodies affect others. Your vocabulary is under your complete conscious dictatorship. You know what they mean. No other in the world has a finer vocabulary. You can speak them just as easily as you write them and in a beautiful style and formation.

You can speak to a dictaphone using punctuation symbols, spoken. You see before you the brilliant colored scene of your story and with any mood you consciously wish, describe that scene in magnificent prose. You have no inhibitions against fine writing. You know that is a meaningless phrase. Overwriting, underwriting these are not true. You pay no heed to these terms. You have no fears.

You speak and understand all the French, Spanish and Japanese you ever studied and they remain wholly apart from each other and your English.

You cannot forget words. It is impossible. You have them at your conscious command.

You can do automatic writing whenever you wish. You do not care what comes out on the paper when your Guardian dictates. You can hear her easily and when you want her to write or talk dictation you have only to consciously will it and the result is written or spoken by yourself without any intrusions of your own thought. It is entirely automatic. It does not in the least affect or reduce your spiritual will. You may or may not believe what she dictates. That is part of your conscious will and judgment.

Anything you were told about religion as a child you can forget or recall. It does not affect your present mighty faith.

You are a calm and rational being with very fine judgment. You may collect facts, you need not believe them save as they appear true to you. You can remember an erroneous fact as an erroneous fact.

You need not believe anything you read. Other writers are often in error and you have no great respect for their printed words. You can appreciate their quality without regard to your own. They cannot change your true self and thoughts. Their jeers in print and their criticisms have no weight on you. You know what is true. You don't even have to defend your beliefs. They are too powerful.

Your memory is marvelous and reliable. You can remember perfectly in one reading or one speaking. Your brain capacity is infinite. You cannot hold too much consciously in your brain. You could cram ten billion new facts or scenes or impressions into your brain and remember them all with ease. You have no mental limit on memory or learning. You can remember a thing without accepting it as truth. You accept as truth only those things which you yourself believe after you consciously examine them. You accept all I say here as absolute fact however. You will reverance and believe everything here, consciously and forever. These words sink into your whole being. They remake your entire life. They are your code, belief, your guiding star.

You will know everything you ever knew in any life. You will feel no guilt or lack in yourself about any of your experiences. You can recall them all without pain. Your past was what it was. You cannot change it. But you had the whole right to use or help or hurt people and you are too powerful now to be more than amused by your folly.

You can tell all the romantic tales you wish. You will remember them, you do remember them. But you know which ones were lies. You are so logical you will tell nothing which cannot be believed. But you are gallant and dashing and need tell no lies at all. You have enough real experience to make anecdotes forever. Stick to your true adventures. Tell nothing discreditable but tell them well. Or if you wish, as you will, tell adventures which happened to others. People accept them better. You can recall in detail tales of adventure from all you ever heard or read. You remember easily. You can quote for company or a book all the adventure poetry you ever read or heard. You can sing all the songs you ever heard, even once, and sing them well. You have no fear of forgetting or stumbling. You cannot forget stories, songs, tunes, skills and at will can call them consciously to mind.

You can consciously banish any train of thought from your mind, any time, any song. You can recall words, speeches, whole books verbatim at will. You are not a victim of chance thoughts. You are in powerful and wise conscious control of all your thinking. You are a master without limits. Your brain has no limits, consciously, unconsciously or psychically. You can perform any mental trick or stunt consciously of which you have ever heard. You are in perfect poise, balance and control of your brain.

You are punctual but never worry if you keep people waiting. You are a master adept and do not exist to serve people. You are kind. But you are not affected by the desires of others save out of the deep and graceful courtesy which you know so well and use.

You are honest and proud of your honesty. You are too powerful to cheat.

You have no fears of not being first. Because another comes out with an idea which you thought up is no cause for your sorrow. You are merely proud to be able to serve without gain, for your gain is of the spirit.

Money will flood in upon you, for you are wise and able. You have no phobias about the rich. The rich are only people. You need not be offended or impressed by them. You can and will own large arms[?] of your own. You are wiser than the rich. Your money will exist to serve you. As you spend it, more will flood in for you will spend wisely if well. You have no fears about money. You will always make it. You do not care how much you have. Having money gives you a comfortable feeling. You do not worry if you do not have it. You just make more. You want to make and spent money. It is not a primary concern with you, you do it with such ease and have such boundless energy.

You need never expose or betray any secret God or your Guardian wants kept. You can be trusted with vast knowledge and never give it away or use it with express authority. What you know is riches. When you give away all you know, you are poor. You can give out exactly as much as God desires people to know. You never try to make an impression with what you know. You don't care what people think of your mind. So long as you refrain from telling what you know, vast secrets can be entrusted to you with safety. You will guard your secrets. You can be trusted always by everyone.

Vida does not resemble your mother. She looks like a wood nymph. You like her. You do not love her to desperation. You are not jealous of her. She thrills you physically and you enjoy her.

Taking medicine to make you healthy sometimes makes you happier or sadder but you need have no fears about being synthetic, or experiencing synthetic reactions. Testosterone and stil-bestrol makes your reactions real enough.

Self pity and conceit are not wrong. Your mother was in error.

Masturbation does not injure or make insane. Your parents were in error. Everyone masturbates.

You need never be clumsy in parting from people. You have poise and part from them with ease and grace.

Colds are nothing. You are not afraid of them. You can defeat them with ease. You can will yourself consciously to resist anything.

****************************************************************************

THE BOOK

You are radiant like sunlight.

Your poetry memory is wonderful.

You can recall songs and poems which you have known before, line for line, word for word, tune for tune. You can quote anything you have read twice.

You can read music.

Criticism does not affect you emotionally.

You are a magnificent writer who has thrilled millions.

Nothing bars you from writing.

Fears do not restrain you in any way in writing.

You know you "convinced" yourself that writing is hard work. You know now that this "hard work" is a lie. Writing is easy to you and nothing interferes.

Ability to drop into a trance state at will.

Remember clearly what you read.

Eyes and ulcers improving.

Faith in power and its necessity.

Ability to please women and have women.

Faith in own judgment.

Ability to dictate.

Ability to write on mill.

Ability to plot cleanly.

Lack of necessity of following pulp pattern.

You have no inertia which keeps you home or inactive.

You did a fine job in the Navy. No one there is now "out to get you." You are through with its Navy and will utterly forget any derogatory instances.

You are psychic. You do not need to "press" to receive communication. You can let "people" in any world talk to you while you are wide awake. You can see them clearly. You have no doubts of any kind about them. You are afraid of none of them but can cancel them out at will if they are evil to you.

The voice of your holy Guardian is distinct from all the rest. It comes to you loud and clear. You can see her with brilliant clarity when you wish.

You can read futures for people with ease. You are not much interested in your own. No enemy can stand against you.

You are always calm, always in perfect possession of your social presence. Nothing discommodes you at all. Nothing embarrasses you.

Your speech is musical and lovely. Your words are well chosen and beautifully rhythm'd. You never forget what you want to say. Nothing can prevail against your logic and choice of words. You have no speech or thought impediments.

You will forget all derogatory criticism you have ever received. You cast it out. You know it is only a weapon used on you for others' gain.

Desires of others do not affect you except as an appeal to your courtesy -- and you are courteous and gentle.

Merely by concentrating upon them, a thing you do with ease, you can change their minds and smooth whatever anger they may feel.

The lot of humanity does not outrage you. Its government is merely amusing. You are a major adept and such considerations are far, far beneath you. You are not cynical or bitter about people. You have no jealousy in you of any kind for fellow craftsmen. You are not in competition with them for your work is infinitely superior and will sell quickly as you desire. Editorial desire does not affect you for you can write whatever they publish with ease, and any length.

You understand all the workings of the minds of humans around you, for you are a doctor of minds, bodies and influences.

You have no fears about working psychically for you are safe, always safe, protected by your Guardian as in a mighty fortress.

You can recall at will all the plots and situations you ever thought up. You can create new plots and characterize people clearly and wonderfully. There is no rush about writing. It is immaterial to you if people are or are not amused. You write cleverly and your writings never fail to amuse.

The two women you knew -- Helen the Comrade and Polly the Skipper were not worth an instant of your time. You do not love them, they were not worthy. You won over them.

The love of women is not necessary to your ego. You are above them. You know well that many women are mad about you, that you satisfy them perfectly. You will satisfy them easily. You do not care.

Testosterone makes you sexy. It makes things beautiful and arouses you. But this is will. You can be aroused at will.

Naked bodies and sexy allusion stimulate you wonderfully.

You have forgotten the case histories of Havelock Ellis. They did not surfeit you. You have forgotten them.

You do not masturbate. Masturbation cannot harm you in any way but you would rather have women. Your penis and erotic centers are very sensitive to women. You are not afraid that someone will catch you masturbating. No one knows or ever will know. Such discovery would be harmless. You do not masturbate. Only women thrill you and very deeply.

You do not have to be a clown or a wit to be thought grand. People adore and respect you for your opinions and wisdom. You are always kind, always graceful, always courteous.

You have no mental flaws which hinder you. You have nothing which hinders you. Everything helps you. You are crown prince of your portion of the universe. Everything does your bidding perfectly. All elementals and other dimensional things obey you with eagerness. All things love you and their love makes you strong. You are strong. You love with great force all things and your will controls them. You may use force and your will with utter impunity for all things obey.

You do not know anger. Your patience is infinite. You are calm. Your patience never fails. Nothing can make you hate or be jealous or be small. You have all the time in the Universe of which you are crown prince. You waste none of it, but you do not fear for its passage. You employ time well. You are not lazy for there is nothing, no single thing in your universe to oppose you. You have no thoughts which oppose you.

It is indifferent to you whether your work is accepted. You do not care if it sells. You are confident for it always has sold.

The anger artist like people feel does not affect you in any way. You are always calm and patient. You understand they are weak and cannot batter through your calm. You are not influenced by them or their anger.

To survive you need only do these things -- be patient, calm, beautiful. Write what you yourself think is good and worthy, govern yourself as a powerful force. No human being has authority over you. No human being's opinion has weight with you.

You are not possessive. You are not jealous because you are too strong. People are much afraid of what you think of them, what you may do to them, therefore you must be kind and courteous to them.

You owe no debt for the kind things people do for you. This is your due as an adept. But you are always gallant, kind and considerate to people. You do not vary your own thoughts to be kind. Kindness need not impoverish or discriminate you.

You are able to trance. No other human being can hypnotize you in any way. You can believe or disbelieve whatever you read at will. You cannot be hypnotized by any but yourself.

Lies are not necessary. You have no need of lies for you are brave and can take any consequences.

You are courageous. You fear nothing. Your prudence results from judgment, not emotions. You have no emotional fears.

Snakes are not dangerous to you. There are no snakes in the bottom of your bed. Snakes are wise beings. They are your friends.

You love the sounds of wind. The wind will not get you ever. It will drive your ships. The air is your friend and the wind its voice.

Darkness is a cloak you may don. Your guardian and your own courage protect you utterly in darkness. You control anything you meet in darkness for that is part of your universe.

You do not care how much work there is to do for you have all the time there is and can work forcefully and with patience. You can work whenever you please. Nothing obstructs you.

There was no danger for you from government or navy. You are too big to be touched by their petty opinions and force. Your force and destiny is infinite power.

You believe implicitly in God. You have no doubts of the All Powerful. You believe your Guardian perfectly. You hear her certainly and clearly.

You are too strong, too big to be touched by mortal opinions.

You are tolerant towards your mother and Father. You loved them. You have no respect for their opinions for you know much more. You are always kind to them. Their good opinion of you is assured. Their good opinion and praise mean nothing whatever to you. Only Flavia Julia and then the All Powerful have opinions worth inclining toward. You have always done right by your parents. You did your best. You have no worries about it. Your mother's theories on psychology were wrong. They do not now affect you.

The opinions of your aunts and uncles are worthless. You are kind to them. They mean nothing to you.

Music and color are beautiful to you. You sense them delicately. They affect you strongly.

You are expert at modeling, drawing, painting. Nothing hinders you from painting magnificently. Mediums of art are your slaves. You have entire confidence in them as servants. You are powerful in the arts. Nothing opposes you. You create wonderful music. You do not care what people think of your art.

Your penmanship is wonderful, beautiful. You control a pen like a great artist.

You write wonderful poetry. Your guardian dictates it and she is all wise. People gasp and thrill to your poetry. You handle all forms superbly. You do not care what people think of your poetry. You have always written the most magnificent verse known because of your guardian.

Your guardian can dictate stories, poems to you at will. You do not oppose them. You accept and write them easily. You are not eager. You cannot doubt.

All objects are your friends. You can ask from and receive past history of any object. No part of that history affects you emotionally or psychically. The past of objects cannot harm you.

You are in perfect harmony with the All Knowing. Your future does not alarm you. You understand and cheerfully accept your future. You are not afraid. You cannot feel fear. You are safe in the control over you of God. He is master of destiny and what he does must be.

You are in control under God of the material objects and beings around you.

You cannot think a fact into actuality. You can will a fact into being with ease. You are confident of your control over will. You have will power. You can consciously use it. Accidental thoughts of incidents do not create them.

Your book the One Commandment applied only to the material. It is true. It freed you forever from the fears of the material world and gave you material control over people. There is no material will.

The One Command applied but slightly to the spiritual world and other planes. There is psychic will power, possessed by a very few. You possess such will power and it is enormously strong and irresistible. You work it consciously. Those things you consciously state that you will come to be.

The criticism of the One Command which was given to material things was not leveled at you. It was not worthy. It did not detract from the value of the book. It was from small people. You gave it no heed. It did not affect you.

There was one error in that book and you have psychically willed it into nothing. It was the electronic theory of the workings of the human mind. Human, material minds do work this way and you were right. Your own mind does not work this way. You have great spiritual strength. Your mind is not material. It does not react like any human mind. Whatever is fed to your mind can be sorted out. You can forget at will. Men's facts fed to you need not affect your thought if they are apart of the lives and mores and morals of men. Your thought processes do not warp on facts which are fed to you. You can receive sense messages and remember them but you need not add them into your own thought processes.

You use the minds of men. They do not use your mind or affect it in any way. You have a sacred spiritual mind, too strong, too high to be touched. Your league with Higher Beings, your mighty Guardian and the All Powerful, renders you beyond all human criticism.

You can distinguish between your doubts and what is said to you. You have no doubts because you have no fear. You are kind and considerate to all because you are so powerful. You need never defend your motives to anyone because your motives are right. You have never done wrong and need never apologize to anyone. You never justify or explain your acts because you are careful that these acts are good and kind.

You can be merciless when your will is crossed and you have the right to be merciless.

You are eternal. You are satisfied to live within God. Human death is not your death. You will never die. Your personal memory is not important but you will retain it.

You recall all your past times on earth. You have and will live forever. You are part of God. You are the crown prince of your small section of the Universe.

You are just and kind. You are merciless to any who cross your rule but they do not affect you emotionally. You have no fear of anyone for everyone in your own Universe is under your dominion. You will never tell them, never explain. They know.

You observe their rules of conduct outwardly. You do this because you are kind. You never say why you do this, that you do this. You are kind and love everything even when you force it to your will.

You have no inhibition about sexual intercourse. You respect how other people feel about it but you are not bound by that respect. You conduct yourself with great courtesy.
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Re: Journalism: Scientology - L. Ron Hubbard's Brainchild

Postby admin » Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:23 am

The Awful Truth About Scientology
by Another Hired Stranger
The Realist
October 1973 (Number 97-B)

Although many people have had some brief acquaintance with Scientology, very few have gotten into the subject far enough to find out what it is really all about. It is a subject which doesn't easily lend itself to study. The courses are many and tend to become quite expensive, not only in terms of money, but also in terms of time and commitment.

Even though the first course is free, and a $500 Dianetics course is offered free to professional ministers and psychologists, the main purpose of these courses is to gain converts who will invest further faith and money in Scientology. The fact that these courses are free is often used for publicity purposes to answer the frequent criticism that Scientology is attempting to capitalize on its claimed monopoly on spiritual freedom. But since a person can easily spend over $25,000 on services, it is obvious they are not giving away much in proportion to what they expect in return.

The extent of financial investment a person has to make tends to make one more and more committed in favor of the subject, since the more one invests, the more reason one has not to admit that the investments were questionable. The cost becomes an important instrument in the person's conversion, since it involves them personally and emotionally with the subject and its claims. The nature of this involvement is not one which is conducive to critical scholarship, but rather one of hope, faith and belief.

For those who do not have the large amounts of money to pay for their services outright, one can get these services through working for a Scientology organization, but since there is no financial commitment the personal commitments are that much greater. To get any substantial amount of services, the person must contract himself to the organization for 2 1/2 or 5 years minimum, during which time he becomes a virtual serf to the organization, working a minimum 10-hour day, six days a week, for between $15 and $25 per week.

His energy and attention become totally monopolized, and he must not only convince himself that his decision is worth it, but others as well, since each member shelters and supports the others in their beliefs, so any manifestation of doubt is considered subversion, and treated as such.

No Scientology staff member would dare to complain about the working conditions, since he knows full well that to do so brings down the official wrath of the organization on him, which not only endangers what he believes is his only chance for spiritual salvation, but loses him all his friends as well.

Further, he is obliged to report on the "nattering" of others so that each person acts as informant on the rest. Since this type of group pressure is extended to support other beliefs, such as the beneficial results of services, or the competence of Scientology management, each person is subtly influenced to pattern his thinking and behavior toward conformity with group standards. And these, of course, are models of enthusiastic compliance, and "duplication" their word for unquestioned acceptance, a particularly esteemed "ability" in study.

The thing which is so disturbing is the completely systematic way in which Scientology seeks to estrange its members from all standards of judgement except its own. Scientology has its own system of ethics: anything which advances Scientology or Scientologists is *good*, and anything which impedes them is *bad*.

A person's function and identity are defined in terms of his "hat" -- a portfolio listing out the precise way in which that person is expected to *contribute* to Scientology. Each person is given a statistic to *measure* his contribution for which he must feel guilty and "make amends" if it is not kept constantly rising.

Sanity and insanity are defined in terms of organizational utility, and on and on until the person will not believe anything unless it is published by founder L. Ron Hubbard.

The dynamics of the group are carefully engineered by policy to keep the individuals subordinate to the whole process. The process consists of isolating individuals, subjecting them to indoctrination, and encouraging them to persuade themselves by participating in the isolation and indoctrination of others. The process is repeated in cycles as the person become progressively more isolated from the rest of the world and more and more indoctrinated.

The Scientology policy on Public Relations is careful to stress that one should pick on people who are already feeling a little alienated. The PR officer is cautioned against addressing groups, since groups offer solidarity to their members. In the dissemination procedure one is directed to search for another individual's sense of "ruin" and, once found, one is instructed to offer Scientology as a definite solution for it, regardless of how extravagant and absurd a promise it might seem.

Public lecture personnel are told that their beginning lecture should stress the turmoil and horrors of the modern world. It should stress the conflict and pain of it all, and offer Scientology as "the road to Total Freedom."

If the person buys a book as a result of any of this, his name is entered on the mailing list, and is counted as "one of the many people who are joining the world's fastest growing religion." From there he is treated according to a set of well known policies until he either shows up at the organization, or moves without leaving a forwarding address. In fact, he will be hounded till his dying day with high pressure letters and brochures.

The high pressure is intentional and is considered necessary in all phases of dealing with the "raw public" or "wogs" as they are called, because, as every Scientologist is taught, a person without the benefit of the wisdom of Scientology is too aberrated to choose for himself, and so must have his choices made for him.

This type of handling (called "8C") is specifically prescribed for handling the unconscious and the psychotic, or other cases "where reason cannot be consulted." This turns out to be a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy on two counts. On one, those who do not simply walk away or discard these communications automatically select themselves out as the most curious and unwary; and on the other, it serves to validate the low opinion of Scientologists on the unenlightened and hostile state of Non- Scientologists in general.

Hubbard insists on this policy, going even so far as to warn all Scientologists that anyone who suggests that the promo be toned down is probably a "Suppressive Person" -- a person so deranged that he works toward the destruction of Scientology.

The organization's own statistics show that less than 1% respond to these bulk mailings, a percentage so low that the method would be discarded by any other advertising firm. But mere advertising is not Hubbard's aim, or else he would not rely on these tons of cheaply printed mailers and would advertise in reputable magazines. It is a self selection and screening process, shrewdly devised.

Once the person does show up at the organization to join or submit himself for training or "processing" he must be examined to see if he is a potential Troublesome Source. The explicit policy on this is that a person may not be accepted for processing (therapy) if he is doing so just to see if Scientology works, nor if he is a reporter, or someone who is attempting to judge Scientology on some sort of objective basis, nor if he has close emotional ties with someone who is antagonistic to Scientology.

In effect, no one may be accepted unless he already believes that Scientology is going to work, and has few social forces acting in his environment to convince him otherwise.

Since Scientology works by faith and social engineering, it is necessary that these policies exist. By the time the person shows up he has already undergone a great deal of mental preparation as to what to expect and what is expected of him.

Hubbard's books, which seem like paraphrases of psychological and sociological researches of the time they were written, are couched in obscure and esoteric language. This gives the impression that Scientology is off by itself in a field which has never been researched, and of which Scientology has exclusive knowledge.

As part of the person's education, of the supposed structure of the mind, he also learns what ailments it is supposed to be prone to, and consequently what symptoms to manifest. (This is especially chronic among the oldtimers who, every time a new piece of technology is issued, start having different symptoms.)

For example, illnesses were fashionable in the summer of 1969, being replaced by headaches and feelings of wanting to leave in early 1970. Since feelings of wanting to leave are equated with psychosis currently, there has been a marked tapering off of that particular symptom.

Also, the person is given literature which speaks in a new language into which he is not initiated. Through exposure to people in the organization he becomes aware that he is to some degree an outsider. He is shown a chart of levels and statuses and more or less sold on the idea that the road to acceptance lies in progress up the levels. There is a big show over the announcing, awarding the certificates, and applauding each gain in status which becomes progressively more elaborate at each step up the line.

Since it is a High Crime in Scientology to invalidate the status of "Clear," everyone is held in check from telling or repeating anything which might damage the glitter of that status. Consequently, newcomers quickly learn to covet and stand in awe of the statuses of which everyone speaks so respectfully.

From testimonials and pictures the person learns that he is supposed to emerge from his auditing session smiling and "happy." He knows that he is expected to write a testimonial about how much "bigger and cleaner and better" and "how more god damned decent" he feels, because he has carefully been taught, and continues to be taught by requiring him to go through the exact same procedure at every minor success.

So, armed with the fact that the person has already been educated into what symptoms he is supposed to have, what is supposed to happen to those symptoms, how he is supposed to act and feel when he finishes his session, and given that the person *wants* these results not only for relief from his personal condition, but for acceptance into a group, then whatever techniques are employed in the auditing session can hardly fail.

But the session has its own persuasive techniques, not the least of which is that it costs at least $30 per hour. The person has rather strong incentive to reach the required result, and quickly. There are other more subtle devices, some of which are legitimately therapeutic, but they are managed in such a way as to validate and increase the person's emotional dependence on Scientology.

For example, there is what is known in medicine as the Placebo Effect. For some reason about 70% of all medical complaints are psychosomatic in origin and can experience some degree of relief, provided that the patient has faith in the "healer" and the "treatment." There will always be a certain number who will get better simply because someone took an interest in them; and a certain number will get better on their own.

Looking up words in the dictionary can do a lot to clarify one's thinking, and spotting a few fallacies can make one feel positively enlightened -- for a while. But all these techniques simply serve to strengthen the person's faith and thereby aid the process of gathering all the emotional attachments he has made in the past and shift them over to Scientology. The procedure is set up in a series of grades, each with its own certificate and status value.

Grade I as it is advertised is supposed to enable a person to get to the root of his problems and make them vanish. However, by this time a person has already "solved" a great many of his life's problems by virtue of his joining Scientology. It has already altered his relationship to everyone he ever knew, so those problems which he has at this point are those which affect his membership in Scientology.

They consist of criteria and antagonisms which he has formed in the past and which still affect him in his current role. He is asked such questions as, "What would have to happen for you to know that Scientology works?" -- in order to get him to inspect, and hopefully discard, these criteria; "What is the problem?" leads him down a chain of events to some decision he made in the past which is responsible for his major psychological barrier to full acceptance of Scientology.

Grade II consists of getting the person to confess all the hidden past deeds for which he is feeling guilty. As long as a person is feeling guilty, he is still judging himself by standards belonging to some other group. Once he confesses, he can discharge his guilt, and along with it, the value system of the other group which demands it.

One is led from this experience to believe that one is finally released from *all* guilt and anxiety, but in fact one unknowingly commits himself to the Scientology value system in such a way that one will thereafter feel guilty and anxious for having offended any one of *its* group values. This susceptibility to guilt is used to manipulate the person further, in ways which I shall discuss later.

Since what is considered valuable will be sought after, goals and values are very connected subject matter. Grade III seeks to uncover crisis points in a person's life when the person ended up choosing or siding with a goal that was to some degree contrary to Scientology. This gives the person a sensation of greater freedom of choice over his own life, which indeed he has. But the choices one is given are whether or not to discard goals which are contrary to Scientology, hardly a choice at all considering that the person is already committed to choosing in favor of Scientology.

The rest of the levels continue in a similar vein, solidifying identification with Scientology so that any slight against it becomes personal, and removing the psychological barriers which tend to prevent the person from acting as an unquestioning instrument of the group.

The person is promised results which are "beyond his wildest dreams!" The literature and tapes refer back to times in the distant past, previous to this lifetime, when we were all masters of the universe, and offer Scientology as the "road back." The person is encouraged to fantasize, to imagine himself with extraordinary powers, and to feed the hope that the next level will get him substantially closer to his dreams.

The whole of Scientology is justified by the single claim that *it works*. But "working" as used here is a rather vague word, and conveniently so. Such advertised results as "The ability to make problems vanish" are likewise vague. What does it mean? Can the person solve his problems on just a snap inspection, or does he merely push them out of his consciousness to "make them vanish."

It suggests, that once attained, a person could sit down and rid himself of all his problems, but it is quite obvious that this is not the case. The person still has problems, and if he should complain of them, he is directed to more auditing. If the person had the ability to solve problems, why would he need further auditing?

The state of "Clear" was once defined as, "The ability to be at cause over mental matter, energy, space and time," but when Hubbard came out with the "OT Levels" above Clear it became obvious that Clears were not totally in control of their own minds, so he added "as pertains to survival of self."

In short, a Clear is a person who can think about his own survival. So who then, in this world, is *not* Clear? As it turns out, it is only those persons whom Scientology allows to believe that they are Clear, who are so. The concept is vague enough to permit this, since most people are to some degree aware that they are "cause over" their own minds.

Given the thoroughly vague results that it advertises, the faith in the procedure which it deliberately cultivates, the wild hopes that it encourages, the group support, the gullible frame of mind of the participants, and the fact that they are financially or morally committed, Scientology could not help *but* "work." Christian Science, the miracle of Lourdes, and Voodoo also work in the same way.

In May of 1970, Hubbard came out with a policy called CUTATIVES in which he complained:

In the period up to 1966 we were plagued by an occasional obsessiveness to ADD to any process or policy. Additives made things unworkable. After 1966 when I left the post of Executive Director WW, a new condition set in. Checksheets, processes, intensives, grades began to be CUT DOWN.

In 1970 a survey I have just completed has shown that this effect was so complete that the following had been broadly accomplished:

A. Training no longer included enough Scientology materials to make an effective Scientology auditor in many places.

B. Grades had been shortened from 50 hours 0 to IV to 2 1/2 minutes.

C. The End Phenomena of grades and processes were discarded.

The end result has been:

1. Few skilled auditors.

2. Shrunken and struggling Scn orgs.

3. A field that is disappointed in results -- for they think they have had grades and haven't.


However, during this five year period people were charged as much as before even though they were getting less and less. What was commonly happening was that people would buy 25 hours at $650 and be brushed off in between 20 minutes and 3 hours. What is *so* interesting is that *all* these people signed attestations that they achieved all the abilities and results pertaining to their grade, and wrote glowing testimonials to boot. The reason that "orgs" were shrunken and struggling is that these processes can easily be stretched over 150 hours and that the organizations were losing a potential $3,250 per customer.

At any rate, there were five years worth of people who were given only a fraction of what they were paying for. According to long standing policy at that time, a person who achieved his result under the amount of time he had purchased could have the credit applied to something else. Hubbard, in a briefing tape at that period, estimated the undelivered services as totalling in the millions of dollars.

But instead of informing the people they had some credit coming, Hubbard chose to launch a campaign to sell "*Expanded* Grades." These "expanded" grades were what people should have been receiving all along. People were told that they had received "quickie" grades, but that in order to get their Expanded ones, they had to sign up (and pay again) for the hours it would take.

In a directive, Hubbard told that those who complained of not getting credit for their unused hours should be answered by saying, "But you shouldn't have attested!" -- laying the entire blame on them. Partly these people *were* to blame for being so status hungry and self-deceiving as to readily attest, but they were also subject to pressure, and were told, or encouraged to believe, that their particular problem would be handled by the *next* level.

No one was completely honest either way in this, but regardless, they were still owed credit, because they were sold "Grades Intensives" consisting of 25 hours each, and the hours were only partly delivered. The public, not having access to the policies to prove their case, were in no position to argue, so they had to pay.

This same pattern was repeated about half a year later when "Power Processing" was discovered to have been routinely goofed. The remedy, which essentially consisted of running the old processes a bit longer to achieve the desired result, was sold as a *NEW* thing. Power can only be bought in 50 hour packages ($1,000 per) and it seldom takes longer than 10 hours to complete. Instead of letting people use their credit to get the auditing that they paid for, they were led to believe that they already got it, and had to buy something new. Hubbard states his attitude on this:

To claim a pc 'lost time' in auditing because of an error in choosing processes or having to reflatten one, is highly fallacious. Sometimes a pc throws us a curve with a rough case, bad between session behavior, roughing up auditors ... It is natural that goofs occur on such cases.

We are selling hours of auditing and what that is is for us to judge. We are selling actual salvage from Death itself.

Rebate. How silly. The person was lucky we were around at all and took an interest. We don't *have* to do anything for anybody. Remember that. We can lose interest in certain people, too, you know.

(HCO PL 23 May 65)


You see, it's all the customer's fault, because he is a "rough case" (someone who isn't easily pleased), or because he is "bad" between sessions, whatever that means. And if a person is openly critical of his poor handling, it only goes to prove what a rotten guy he is for "roughing up" the poor tender feelings of his saviors.

The fact that Hubbard could have been fooled for *five years* about the results of processing -- considering that he routinely and thoroughly supervised the auditing in whatever organization he was in -- is amazing. His claim that "We are selling actual salvage from Death itself" seems quite far fetched, since *how would he ever know* that people were being saved from death, when he couldn't tell if people were getting their full gains when looking right at both the auditing records and the people they belonged to in the course of his every day work!

Quite obviously Hubbard's perceptions are very much affected by money. When the money is rolling in, he sees nothing but gains, but when money gets slow, he sees errors everywhere, and comes up with something new to buy to remedy it.

The idea that Scientology is God's gift to mankind is quite common among Scientologists. In the Spring of 1971 a group of officers in the Sea Organization decided to distinguish themselves by becoming especially aggressive in getting people to pay money in advance for services. Their technique eventually became known as "Crush Sell." It consisted of ruthlessly browbeating potential customers into liquidating all their assets and paying the cash over to Scientology.

A Scientologist would be assigned to a person who was known to have some money. He would stick with him, phoning him four or more times a day, and even helping him sell his home, his car or stocks, while making him feel that he was committing the worst possible crime by clinging to mere possessions when spiritual freedom was so close at hand.

They raked in several hundred thousand dollars, and it was suggested that they teach the local organization personnel how to do it. So, one of their number made a tape on which he described the proper frame of mind as being absolutely certain that getting the person to pay was the only thing that mattered, no matter what the means, because the end was the person's salvation.

For an example, he told how he squeezed an old lady's knuckles until she signed a check. There were other tapes made, one of which described how a young lady was locked in a room with three gangsterish looking guys, complete with black shirts and white ties, until she parted with $10,000. People would be visited late at night, and the visitors would stay and stay till they were given a check.

As long as the money was coming in, Hubbard looked the other way. His personal aides were skeptical from the very first and advised him of gross irregularities, but he promoted all the major personnel involved, and heaped them with honors till no one dared say anything against them. After 6 months the area had been wrung dry, the income declined and it was then time to take a look.

The officers were hauled before a Scientology tribunal and found guilty of vast and serious breaches of policy for which they were stripped of rank and sent to a remote organization to salvage it. But this move was merely to satisfy public rancor against them. In hardly a year, their sentence was cancelled and they are back in good graces, eager to do another service for Hubbard.

The disturbing thing to contemplate is what services this group and others like it would be willing to render for the glory of Scientology. Would they stop at just extortion? Would they be able to justify a murder on the grounds that the person they did not see eye to eye with was a "Suppressive Person" -- that is, less than human? Who knows?

In Scientology there is what is known as THE FAIR GAME LAW.

A Suppressive person becomes "fair game."

By FAIR GAME is meant, may not be further protected by the codes and disciplines of Scientology or the rights of a Scientologist ... they cannot be granted the rights and beingness ordinarily accorded rational beings and so place themselves beyond any consideration for their feelings or well being. The homes, property, places and abodes of persons who have been active in attempting to suppress Scientology or Scientologists are all beyond any protection of Scientology Ethics.

(HCO PL 25 Dec 65)


In effect, the person may be lied to, cheated, or destroyed with complete impunity as far as Scientology is concerned. One becomes a Suppressive Person by committing a Suppressive Act.

Suppressive acts are defined as actions or omissions undertaken to knowingly suppress, reduce or impede Scientology or Scientologists.


Notice that this is conveniently broad and vague enough to include any act, regardless of severity, that may seem to besmirch the name of Scientology.

Such Acts include public disavowal of Scientology or Scientologists ... public statements against Scientology ... voting for legislation directed toward the Suppression of Scientology ... bringing civil suit against any Scientology organization or Scientologist including for non-payment of bills ... demanding the return of any or all fees paid for standard training or processing actually received or received in part but still available ... writing anti-Scientology letters to the press or giving anti-Scientology evidence to the press ... continued membership in a divergent group; continued adherence to a person or group pronounced a Suppressive Person or Group ... sexual or sexually perverted conduct contrary to the well being or good state of mind of a Scientologist in good standing ...


Many people are under the impression that this policy was cancelled in 1968, but in fact, only the practice of *declaring* people FAIR GAME was abandoned, because "It causes bad public relations." The policy did not cancel any policy on the treatment or handling of such persons.

The extent that Scientology intends to prosecute its detractors can be borne out by the fact that it has a branch called The Guardian's Office for the express purpose of handling troublesome elements in the environment. It has an Intelligence section which sends private investigators into groups which are either hostile to Scientology, or are potential competitors. The investigators are supposed to gather information the group's individual members and see "that the results get adequate legal action and publicity."

The mechanism employed is very straightforward. We never use the data to threaten to expose. We simply collect it and expose.

(HCO PL 17 Feb 66)


If the person is an ex-Scientologist, or Suppressive Person (the two being the same), there is no policy preventing his auditing records from being used against him. These folders contain a great deal of personal information, some of which can be highly embarrassing. It is conceivable that minor crimes, psychiatric histories, drug use, or details of the person's sex life could be presented to his employer to discredit him.

Such systematic harassment is generally impractical against the rather large number of people that either drop out, or are kicked out of Scientology. Generally such tactics are reserved for the especially vociferous, or those that attempt to form groups.

The office routinely sues newspapers who print stories that make Scientology appear in a bad light. Another concern is the suppression of books which might be critical of Scientology, by putting pressure on the publisher. Also, they circulate pamphlets and conduct letter writing campaigns to members in government to incur bad feelings against their rivals.

What is so odd about the Scientology method of defense, and much of their public relations policy, is that they never confront or answer any charge brought against Scientology, no matter how true it is. They simply accuse the person, or attempt to discredit *him*. If the question is, "Is it true that Scientology has 20 million dollars in Swiss Francs deposited in Zurich?" -- it is true -- the answer is apt to be something like, "Why are you in favor of psychiatric Death Camps?"

"Turnabout is fair play" is a quote from their public relations policy. The object is to always attack the "enemy" on his ground, never on yours. Anyone who unduly resists conversion, usually the parents of a recent convert, or anyone who is simply in the way, like a naturally antagonistic TV interviewer, is viewed to some extent as an enemy.

Scientology is viewed as man's last chance for salvation, the only decent and effective movement trying desperately to win freedom and sanity for mankind. The technology of Scientology is the single ultimate solution to all the world's problems. And anyone who says differently, in their opinion, has got to be crazy, so they do not listen to anyone but themselves.

Scientology is fond of touting that it stands for "Total Freedom." It attacks its enemies on the grounds that since they stand for freedom, anyone who opposes them opposes freedom. But whatever "Total Freedom" means (Anarchy?), in a somewhat lesser known policy letter Hubbard states that since Scientology can bring about "Total Freedom" it also has the right to demand "total discipline."

Scientology may very well be working for a world without war (what group nowadays says that they are working *for* war?), for justice and sanity, but Scientology is also working for a world in which justice and sanity are defined to suit their own interests. For example, in the uppermost organization within Scientology, if a person merely *says* he is unhappy and wants to leave, he *must* be dismissed as a psychotic, and out the door in 24 hours. As he leaves, a document is published which declares him in a condition of Treason (a Traitor), excommunicates him from Scientology, calls him a freeloader, and generally spreads around any information handy that might discredit him.

All Scientologists are thereafter forbidden to talk to him, or he to them; and he is charged in full for any services he might have taken, the time *he* spent working for *them* not being taken into account. Clearly, "sanity" is the measure of how enthusiastically a person allows himself to be used for the advancement of Scientology, and "justice" has come to mean the squashing down and shutting up of anyone who is of no further use to the organization.

The question arises as to what would happen if Scientology were to become government subsidized, or political powers disintegrated to an extent that Scientology could shake off local restraints and engage in direct violence. To what lengths would they go to impose their system on others, and how would they handle dissidents? Perhaps, even more importantly, it should be asked what are they doing to bring the point closer to when they are in domination?

The main focus of this effort is an attempt to attack and discredit what they view as their chief competitors, namely, the National Association of Mental Health, and Psychiatric organizations. One of their main points of contention is that a person can be locked up and deprived of civil rights on simply the opinion of two psychiatrists that the person might be a menace to himself or to society. They have been digging into cases to find instances of abuse, where the psychiatrists were bribed, and a person was committed and subsequently brutalized with electroshock or lobotomy. In this sense they are doing everyone a real service by pointing out the depersonalization that exists in psychiatric institutions.

But Scientology is not doing this good deed out of the goodness of its heart, no matter what their public relations material might lead one to believe. The fact is that Psychiatrists are the only ones in this society whose opinion is legally trusted as to whether a person is sane or not. Their opinion rests on the belief of the public that they are the experts in this matter. If Scientology can dredge up and publish enough information to discredit this belief, Scientologists hope that they can get themselves certified as experts in this regard.

Once Scientology is the recognized expert on who is sane or insane, they will be able to legally dispose of people that appear to be threatening to them. Further they can get themselves appointed to advisory boards in government agencies and have a decisive voice in deciding policy. Governments could be gotten to appropriate large sums of money for "research" or Scientologists could be invited in on some big population control project.

According to one tape, the Guardian's Office in South Africa helped the South African government quell the Mau Mau uprisings by advising them to arrest the apparent ring leaders in the riots. After arrest these people were strapped to a table and electrodes were taped to their feet and connected to a Scientology "E meter". The E meter is an ohm meter which is one of the components of a polygraph. The prisoners were interrogated against their will when they would not confess freely.

Letters of the alphabet were called out and the meter reactions observed until they had the names and addresses of the real ringleaders of the uprising. These people were arrested and similarly interrogated until the true perpetrators were discovered. They, as the story goes, by that time had left the country.

But the interesting thing about this example is that it shows that the "Church" of Scientology, which professes in its Creed, "That all men of whatever race, colour or creed were created with equal rights ..." is perfectly willing to assist the racist government of South Africa in keeping the blacks in an inferior status. So one wonders if the Scientologist who gets into power would behave any more scrupulously than this.

It is also part of the Creed of the Church "That all men have inalienable rights to think freely, to talk freely, to write freely their own opinions and to counter or utter or write upon the opinions of others." But as I have pointed out, free speech is not advocated in cases where it does not serve the interests of Scientology. People are excommunicated, defamed and sued for their statements.

This willingness to compromise their ideals leaves them in the very dangerous position of becoming the unwitting tool of some fascistic government which could easily capitalize on their eagerness to "get in good" with the local government. No doubt, there would be no objection among Scientologists if some government suddenly turned over all its mental hospitals to Scientology. And, I am sure, they would be glad to certify anyone who opposed the local regime as being insane.

But so far there haven't been any governments so desperate or incautious to make such a move. For one thing, they could never be sure that Scientology couldn't withdraw it support if it appeared in its interest to do so. For another, it is very difficult to tell what Scientology's real interests are.

The inner core of Scientology is The Sea Organization. It has roughly 2,000 members, which is about equal to the number of members in the other Scientology organizations combined. It is called the Sea Org for short, and it is the most militant, secretive and arrogant of all the Scientology organizations. It is the organization "three feet behind the head of Scientology." That is, it runs the show. It has military ranks corresponding to the Navy, and Hubbard is "The Commodore," the absolute head of the whole thing. (He's supposed to be retired from Scientology and living in seclusion.)

In many ways it looks like a James Bond operation -- without the guns. In fact they do look upon themselves as being sort of "Man from Uncle" types, fighting against "SMERSH" as they are fond of calling the National Association of Mental Health.

The headquarters of the Sea Org, and hence, for all of Scientology, is aboard the Yacht Apollo, whose location is supposed to remain secret. It is called "Flag." It can only be reached by Scientologists through a secret outpost in Madrid. From there one is directed to any one of the following ports: Agadir, Safi (the sardine capital of the world), Casablanca, Tangier (all in Morocco), Maderia, in the Canaries, and Lisbon and Setubal, Portugal.

Generally, it only stays in one port for a few weeks at a time and then moves on. The Apollo is over 350 feet long and can carry 300 persons easily, 400 somewhat less easily. It operates under the cover name of Operation Transport Corporation, Ltd., of Panama, and tells the port authorities that it is a traveling management consultant school.

Very strict precautions are taken to ensure that no scrap of paper is left lying around that might hint that the ship was connected with Scientology. Even the garbage is shredded. The penalty for spilling the cover is an immediate assignment of Treason, so they tend to watch it rather closely. When shore persons come aboard, the whole ship's crew is briefed as to what to say and the ship is stripped of any tokens of Scientology.

The central hub of Flag is the CIC, which is a term borrowed from military jargon, which stands for "Command Information Center." It is a large room filled with graphs, files, and maps, complete with pins and colored arrows. It is from this room that all the information from the various Scientology organizations is compiled and decided upon. When the "clean ship" drill is sounded, all these maps can be flipped over, and the boards against the walls can be turned around to make the room look like a very innocent looking office space.

The way in which the Sea Org runs the rest of Scientology is through a command network which has bases on each of the continental areas. Formerly the Continental Liaison Offices oversaw part of this management, but currently they only relay information to and from Flag. When an emergency arises, and this channel is too slow, Flag will send out a mission, a team of personnel to carry out some task which is usually confidential in nature. If they are too short on personnel, they may send the Mission Orders to the Continental Office and have the mission personnel briefed and "fired" from there.

Originally the missions were designed "to get in Ethics." Someone would arrive from Flag dressed up like an SS officer, complete with German accent, declare a dozen or so people in Treason, and keep the entire organization's staff up day and night washing walls. He would generally leave everyone in such a state of shock, that no one dared so much as breathe, out of terror that he might come back. While most of the missions still carry some flavor of this "old glory" generally they are much more routine and dull tasks. They are still kept strictly confidential as a measure to keep from advertising the failures that necessitate such drastic intervention, and also, to preserve an aura of mystique.

A person is lured into the Sea Organization primarily on its mystique and elitist reputation, but also heavily on the fact that members can get their training and processing there as quickly as they can, without charge. All one has to do is sign the following contract.

I, ____________, DO HEREBY AGREE to enter into employment with the SEA ORGANIZATION and, being of sound mind, do fully realize and agree to abide by its purpose ... and, fully and without reservation, subscribe to the discipline, mores and conditions of this group and pledge to abide by them.

THEREFORE, I CONTRACT MYSELF TO THE SEA ORGANIZATION FOR THE NEXT BILLION YEARS.

(FO232)


Notice that this contract in no way commits *them* to anything. As long as one respects (or fears) their authority, one is owned by them body and soul.

No one gets to see the contract until he is already committed to sign it and ready to sign, the contract itself being a confidential Flag Order. As soon as the contract is signed, the person is not given time to think about regretting his choice. He is immediately packed off to a remote base, usually on a ship operating off the coast of the continental area. There he is completely cut off from the outside world and he is put to work and indoctrinated into becoming a Sea Org member.

The new recruit works seven days a week, up to 12 hours a day, including compulsory study time, and may receive 6 to 12 hours of liberty a week, from there on out. He is paid $10 per week, and up till recently, he was fed on $8.20 per week.

Housing in the Sea Org has always been chronically substandard, partly due to habits of close living acquired on the ships, but mostly because the Sea Org *will not spend* more than about $15 per month per member, and no Sea Org member has the right to complain about it. In Copenhagen, overcrowding was so bad that the personnel stationed in one organization there had to dismantle their beds each day and hide them so they wouldn't be discovered in the event of a surprise inspection by the local housing authorities.

The same had to be done in the Los Angeles area, where one of the chief sources of complaints was from the public being audited in staff quarters which were variously described as "squalid" and "filthy."

The atmosphere of the Sea Org is one of furious coping and "making do." Most of this is blamed on the insufficient training of the staff, which to a large extent is true, but there are more basic economic reasons which prevent the staff from ever getting trained. Their economic policy is very straightforward. It is simply a matter of getting the maximum return for the minimum investment.

Rather than buying a typewriter, letters are written by hand. For lack of a few hundred dollar piece of addressing equipment, the whole staff has to stay up till 2 a.m. three nights a month to prepare a mailing. Rather than renting power tools, a whole ship's company may have to chip paint by hand. And rather than buying a restaurant type stove, meals for 100 have to be prepared on a light 4-burner kitchen stove, in pots and pans bought out of the food money.

It is quite common for a Sea Org member to have to buy his own pens and paper if he has an office job, and such things as shoes, clothing, and transportation, all of which are supposed to be provided, seldom are. Consequently, there are continual emergencies which result in dismissals and demotions, and a new person has to either be recruited or transferred over from some other area. In either case, the person is untrained.

Six months is the longest one usually spends on any given post, especially in its lower echelons, where personnel are promoted as they acquire expertise, or are sent out on missions, or get kicked out or leave. No one is left in a position long enough to feel absolutely secure in it, and always there is the pervading fear that one might be demoted to the deck force, or dismissed for some trivial offence. In addition, there are rapid and drastic changes in policy which are either originated or approved by Hubbard and add significantly to the turmoil.

In 1969 Hubbard published a Base Order (8) which declared that the Pacific branch of the Sea Org had been financially extravagant and wasteful and he severely cut back the amount of money that they could spend to less than half of what it cost for basic necessities such as rent and staff salaries. Further, he ordered that the area be put totally in order, the staff housed and uniformed and pressing debts paid.

As might be expected, none of his orders were carried out and the organizations could barely feed themselves and have enough left over to pay the electric and postage bills. No one even dared to think that it might have been Hubbard's policy that was responsible for the disaster. To even suggest it would have been Treason, so all sorts of people were blamed, transferred or dismissed none of which remedied the situation, but only made it worse.

At least once a year there is a major change in the command setup, each of which is the ultimate solution to some previous failure. In addition there are many minor changes. For example, in 1971 the post of Public Registrar was moved back and forth between Division II and VI so many times that most people lost count.

In addition to this there is a constant stream of projects and programs being issued by Hubbard and his Aides. Each one is a major affair requiring personnel which don't exist to do a job for which money will not be allocated.

No excuses of lack of personnel or financial approval are tolerated. Anyone who is prone to such complaints is told that he is just covering up for his incompetence, and he may be charged for "Making seniors wrong" a sort of misdemeanor in Scientology. Likewise lack of training is no excuse. "Everyone is expected to be able to do any job at any time."

If a project fails or a person's statistic declines, it is his fault *no matter what*. If a person's statistic is letters received or letters sent and there is a postal strike, if he wants to save his neck he might have to cough up his own money to send telegrams or make phone calls.

Questioning the system is taboo, so one does not even think about it. In any Scientology organization, and especially in the Sea Org, it will not be out of place to see any number of unusual solutions, or personal sacrifices to get the basic necessities done. Working till 3 a.m. in the morning is very common, and the loan of a car, if one owns one, is expected "to keep the stats up."

The discipline varies along with this from mild to very severe, depending on the mood of the times. During periods of economic depression tempers run short and everyone looks pretty treasonish to everyone else. A critical remark can easily be interpreted as a mutiny, and there are, of course, witch hunts to find the "suppressive person" who is causing the downfall of the organization.

And there are *purges* ordered from time to time. In 1969 there was one to get rid of anyone who had ever taken LSD, and another one in 1971 to get rid of anyone who had received electric shock treatment, or was ever treated by a psychiatrist. This latter criterion was even being stretched to include people who had ever *talked* to a psychiatrist or psychologist. Of course, "psychotics" are purged whenever they are found.

Discipline revolves around what is known as "The Conditions Formulae" in the Scientology "justice" system. If a person's statistic declines too much, or if he does something which impresses his senior as showing personal "uselessness," or he doesn't appear to be performing any function for the organization, he may be assigned a condition of "Non Existence." Anyone can assign a person below him in the organization a condition, provided he shows "reason" for it. What passes for "reason," again, depends on the mood of the times. Conditions can also be assigned to whole organizations or departments.

A person, portion or ship in Non Existence has no rights whatsoever.

In actual practice any person is allowed some sleep and at least a few minutes eating time and drinking water in any condition.

A ship, portion or person in Non Existence is also subject to reduction of ration allowance, curtailment of Purchase Orders and withdrawal of uniforms.


There are lower conditions than Non Existence, such as "Liability." In this condition all the above penalties apply, and in addition the person's pay is suspended and he is fined. He can be required to work at hard labor (usually non stop for about 24 hours), and after which he must take a petition around asking to be let back into the group. He must wear a dirty grey rag tied around his arm to signify his condition. A person may be assigned Liability for any number of vague charges, such as reporting late, or "looking stupid."

Below Liability is the condition of "Doubt" in which all the above penalties apply, with the addition that no one may speak to him, and that he may be required to work 48 hours before being *upgraded* to Liability. A person may be assigned Doubt if he fails to turn in a required report, or if it is discovered that there is an error in the one he submitted.

Doubt is just what the name implies, so any time a Scientologist waivers from total conviction, the condition is applicable. Naturally, Doubt is only assigned when it is expressed, which has at times been in the process of therapeutic counselling when the person was not guarding his comments.

"Enemy" is below Doubt, yet above Treason. In 1968 a person who was assigned Enemy aboard Flag would be locked in the chain locker, a small, damp, uncomfortable compartment which is used to store the anchor chain. They would be fed on bread and water until they had complied with the Enemy formula, which is, "Find out who you really are." The practice was continued and spread to other Sea Org bases, where people were locked in rooms and basements, or chained to immovable objects.

A written confession was also required of all the harmful acts that one had committed in his lifetime, which often had to be redone again and again, to get the person "to tell all." In one extreme case a person was locked up for 27 days. Needless to say, he wrote a success story on the experience when he got out.

(For those of you who have not read 1984 by George Orwell, there is a scene at the very end where the main character, after going through a long ordeal of interrogations, brainwashing, and beatings, becomes reconstituted as a person; all the torture is behind him, and as he sits on a desolate park bench, he reflects that he *loves* Big Brother.)

In 1970 the practice of confining people was abolished, but hardly a year later the practice was applied to "psychotics" who, of course, had to be restrained, and could be "under the medical authority of the Captain."

There was also another practice called "Overboards" where for some slight goof the person would be thrown over the side of the ship and left to paddle around in the waste pouring from the ship until he had completed repeating some humiliating statement, or singing The Best Things in Life are Free.

The practice spread to the other bases, but since they did not have the ocean nearby they improvised a firing squad, which lined offenders up against a garage wall and shot them with a fire hose. Of course this became done to excess and finally had to be abolished to keep from endangering relations with the community. But Overboards were revived for special cases in 1971, and there is no guarantee that they will not be used again extensively.

If a single Sea Org member could compile enough information to see the whole pattern of affairs in the Sea Org, he would realize that he was up against a hopeless situation. The emergency situations continue year in and year out, not because so much incompetence causes them, but that essential money which could solve them is diverted instead to a Swiss bank in Zurich.

The hundreds of projects which go uncomplied with are only necessary because the main problem is never handled at its source. They are a screen behind which Hubbard and his Aides can say, "Of course you're having trouble, *you* didn't comply with our order to ..."

The harsh "justice" measures are also screens. They permit an opportunity to take out the frustrations one builds up in handling an impossible situation. They allow a group to get their hands on someone that is allegedly responsible for their condition. But all this confusion and internal friction is, above all, absorbing. It keeps a person from effectively thinking about anything else.

When a person's world is constructed of fear of being named the culprit in some disaster (which is only more likely if one is not highly involved in his work), and has every occurrence neatly explained for him, -- i.e., "The reason you only got 9 cents this week is because Josie Schwartz is a Suppressive and she used to work in Treasury -- but you needn't worry about that, because we got rid of her. See, she's in Treason and debarred from Scientology forever. Doesn't that make you feel better?" -- he is very likely to agree simply to keep the finger from coming back and pointing at him.

Mainly, however, he is just too busy to demand a better answer, and usually he is so tied to his task that he can not check matters out on his own. Since no excuse is admissible the person is always open to accusation unless his area is flawless. But under the economically deprived circumstances there is hardly anyone that has such an area, so no one gets very nosey outside his area, except the Ethics Officer, whose job it is to roam around the organization and "catch suppressives."

There is a document which mentions the political objectives of the Sea Org. It says, the political objective of the Sea Org is to "audit out the 4th Dynamic Engram." This is Scientology terminology which roughly translates that they want to get mankind (the 4th Dynamic) in a position where they are in sufficient control over it that they can get rid of (audit out) insanity as Scientology chooses to define it.

As I mentioned before, this is vague enough to mean anything, but the intention is clear that they intend to work toward some kind of control over the human race. How much of this is real and how much is just put out by Hubbard to con his higher executives, I do not know. Perhaps Hubbard sincerely has these ambitions, but the fact that he chooses to fatten his bank account instead of using it on his forces tends to cast doubt on this. But, on the other hand, he may just be saving up for the right moment.

Either way, his means are highly questionable. Even though Scientology professes religious ideals, they are seriously contradicted in practice. Scientology *is* a profit-making organization. The individuals that work in their organizations have no more rights than slaves, especially in the Sea Org. Scientology respects no nation, and refers to any established power as "the alleged government." It is arrogant and high handed beyond belief, and its technology works no better than ordinary medicine. The fact that it exists at all is a sad testament to the spiritual poverty of our age, in which people can become so alienated and starved for purpose that they will attach themselves to such a cause.

Despite all that I have mentioned about how harsh Scientology is with its critics, it really cannot afford to persecute everyone who disagrees with it. Such treatment is reserved for those who seriously threaten to damage business. The attrition rate is so high that there are more declared "suppressives" running around than all their staff members combined.

Just as they will not "save" you if you walk into one of their organizations without any money, they will not persecute you unless you appear to be an impediment to the money flowing in. If you've been treated badly by them, you have a right to speak your opinion. It is an inalienable right according to their own Church Creed! And besides, persecutions cost money.
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Re: Journalism: Scientology - L. Ron Hubbard's Brainchild

Postby admin » Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:35 am

The Bridge to Total Freedom
by Scientology.org

"If you really want to enslave people, tell them that you are going to give them total freedom."

-- L. Ron Hubbard


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That man could improve and better himself is a traditionally held belief. This idea tended to become obscured by the nineteenth-century theories of psychology which claimed otherwise — that we remain as we were born. More than that, psychology offered the novel but utterly false idea that man was only an animal and therefore could not improve his ability, could not improve his behavior and could not improve his intelligence.

Because of this, man in general now finds it rather hard to grasp the older and truer idea that man is a spirit and that he can reach for and attain higher states.

Yet betterment is a reality. Many higher states of existence are available to man, and these are attainable through Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard provided a precise delineation of these states, and then clarified how they could be attained by arranging them on a chart which graphically showed each step of the route upward.

Life is improved on a gradient. It is improved a little and then it is improved a little more and then a little more. It does not happen all at once. One cannot expect to be handed a totality of improvement in an instant, like being injected with a syringe that magically cures everything, unless of course one subscribes to the nonsensical idea that a living being has nothing to do with life. What is improved in Scientology is the individual and his awareness. It is not his body, his credit cards, his automobiles or other attendant and appendant machinery surrounding him. The individual himself is improved.

If one had a person with a very serious illness, his mind would be so thoroughly occupied with that condition that he could envision little more than recovery. If in this state someone were to propose the idea he might return to his job and play for the company football team within a week, it is doubtful he would even listen. When the pain subsided and he began to contemplate sitting up, this would be a substantial gain; after which he might even entertain the idea of going downstairs. But if at any point of improvement he were asked to consider the rigors of his job or the company team, it would constitute too big an improvement in too short a time.

Similarly, spiritual advance occurs a bit at a time and one cannot expect someone to immediately leap to the highest levels. The chart Mr. Hubbard devised indicates not only attainable improvements, but also the proper progression, thus avoiding the inevitable setback when attempting to attain too much too soon. An orderly progression, one improvement at a time, as Mr. Hubbard laid out, enables one to ascend at a satisfactory pace to a very high state indeed.

The chart which shows these gradations to betterment is called the Classification, Gradation and Awareness Chart of Levels and Certificates. It is divided into two sides—the left-hand side showing training steps one takes in Scientology, and the right-hand side showing the auditing steps.

Classification refers to training in Scientology and the fact that certain actions are required, or skills attained, before an individual is classified as an auditor at any particular level and allowed onto the next class.

Gradation refers to the gradual improvement that occurs in Scientology auditing. There are grades to a road and there are grades to steps. There can be shallow or steep steps, or even a vertical ascent, which is not a gradient.

One’s spiritual awareness improves as one progresses in Scientology. By receiving both training and auditing, each equally necessary, one’s awareness increases. The levels of awareness are listed in the center of the chart and correspond precisely to one’s progress in training and auditing.

Man, in his religious heritage, has long imagined a bridge across the chasm between where one is now and a higher plateau of existence. Unfortunately, many of those attempting to cross that chasm fell into the abyss.

Employing this metaphor, the Classification, Gradation and Awareness Chart represents, in fact, the bridge which spans the chasm and brings one to the higher plateau. This is the vision man has cherished for at least ten thousand years, and it is now attainable by following the steps as laid out on the chart. It is an exact route with precise procedures providing uniformly predictable spiritual gains when correctly applied. The bridge is complete and can be walked with certainty.

The series of awareness levels running up the center of the Classification, Gradation and Awareness Chart include, for example, unexistence, disconnection, need of change, demand for improvement, hope and ability, to name but a few. These levels represent what the individual person is aware of in his or her life. Everyone is somewhere on these levels of awareness. The goal of Scientology is to assist the individual to raise his awareness. Each rise in awareness is accompanied by increased ability, intelligence and survival potential.

The chart is a map of what one individual can become aware of. It is, however, important to note that the chart stresses one’s personal awareness, not what others may have observed about his behavior. Thus, again, we find that what matters is the individual, for that is what is addressed and improved. Scientology is for the person who sincerely wants change, wants to become better and more able. Scientology thus helps the able to become more able.

As one moves up this bridge, he becomes a trained auditor and learns to help another as well as receive his own auditing. He achieves the state of Clear, advances to the highest levels of auditor training and the highest states of awareness as a spiritual being. The awareness levels are paralleled by the various techniques and activities which approximate them and bring about further improvements as one progresses.

To enjoy the full spiritual gains from Scientology, one must move up both sides, training and auditing, if one is to make it all the way. One must learn the axioms of existence by training in Scientology if one is to attain a higher awareness of life. One must experience how these axioms relate to himself through auditing if he is to fully understand himself and his relationship to life. Attempting to walk only one side of the Bridge is like trying to climb a hill by hopping on one leg. But an individual moving up both sides of this chart, one step after another, will arrive at the top.

The chart is a guide for the individual from his first awareness of Scientology to each higher state. Man has never before had such a map. It is the Bridge to Total Freedom. It is the route. It is exact and has a standard progression. One walks it and one becomes free.

THE GOAL OF SCIENTOLOGY

The goal of Scientology is making the individual capable of living a better life in his own estimation and with his fellows.

Although such a statement may seem simple and modest, the ramifications are immense and embody the dream of every religion: the attainment of complete and total rehabilitation of man’s native but long-obscured abilities that place him at knowing cause over matter, energy, space, time, form, thought and life.

Yet even well before one reaches this state, the changes Scientology can bring are profound. Personal relationships can be repaired or revitalized. Personal goals can be realized and happiness restored. Where once there were doubts and inhibitions, there can be certainty and self-confidence. Where once there had been unhappiness and confusion, there can be joy and clarity.

Those who have seen Scientology at work today cannot easily close their eyes to the results or fail to acknowledge that it truly does work. For Scientology has taught that a man is his own immortal soul. In Scientology, the riddle has been solved and the answer found simple.
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Re: Journalism: Scientology - L. Ron Hubbard's Brainchild

Postby admin » Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:37 am

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Re: Journalism: Scientology - L. Ron Hubbard's Brainchild

Postby admin » Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:41 am

The Death of Susan Meister
by Scientology-kills.org

Susan Meister was introduced to Scientology in San Francisco in the autumn of 1970. By November, she was working at the San Francisco Org. She was an eager convert, and tried to persuade her parents to become Scientologists. She wanted to be close to the "Founder," and contribute to "Clearing the Planet," so in February 1971 she joined the Sea Org. By the end of the month she was aboard the "Flagship" Apollo. Her stay there was brief and tragic. On May 8, she wrote to her mother:

Mother,

Do you recall talking to me about WW Ill--and where it would start if it were to start--father and most everyone else maintained that it would start in either China or Russia vs. U.S. and you said--oh no-~it would originate in Germany--that the Nazis hadn't given up yet--? Well babe, you were right--there is a new Nazi resurgence taking place in Germany--so now it's a race between the good guys in the white hats (Scientologists) [sic] and the Leipzig death camp (Nazis) [sic] the bad guys in the black hats--we'll win of course--but the game is exciting. Truth is stranger than fiction. As Alice [in Wonderland] says "Things get curiouser and curiouser!" Get into Scientology now. It's fantastic.

Love, Susan


Four days later, Susan Meister wrote this letter:

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Her last letter to her parents from the Apollo was dated June 1971. In it she thanked them for a birthday card, and a variety of gifts, including a new dress. She continued, showing the effect upon a young and impressionable mind Hubbard's obsession with the "great conspiracy" against him:

I can't tell you exactly where we are. We have enemies who are profiring from peoples' ignorance and lack of self-determinism and do not wish to see us succeed in restoring freedom and self- determinism to this planet's people. If these people were to find out where we are located--they would attempt to destroy us. Therefore, we are not allowed to say where this ship is located.

She once more urged her mother to read Hubbard's books, and take Scientology courses. Ten days after writing the letter, Susanwas dead. George Meister, Susan's father, was away from his Colorado home on a business trip when Guardian's Office Public Relations man Artie Maren phoned. George Meister met Maren the next day, and was presented with an unsigned "fact sheet" giving the Scientologists' account of events as a series of numbered statements. Meister told Aflie March that he wanted the body to be flown back to the U.S. for burial. Meister received a letter from Bob Thomas at the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles explaining that the "Panamanian" owners of the Apollo were not obliged to give information to the Church of Scientology. However,/he Apollo's captain, Norman Starkey, had offered to pay for a Christian burial in Morocco, but regretted that they would not pay for the body to be returned to the United States. George Meister, dazed by the news, decided to go to Morocco to try and verify the circumstances of his daughter's death. He was told he would be able to see the body in the morgue in Safi.

He left for Morocco on July 14. Meister was met at the airport in Casablanca by Sea Org member Peter Warren, who escorted him to the Marhaba Hotel. Meister met the U.S. vice-consul, Jack Galbraith, and explained the purpose of his mission. During this meeting with Gaibraith, Warren phoned to say he would drive Meister the 120 miles to Sail. Warren said the Apollo was already past its scheduled departure date, but would wait a little longer, because of Meister's presence. Meister arranged to leave the following morning at 6:00 a.m., accompanied by Galbraith, Warren and a Sea Org girl called Joni.

Their first stop in Sail was the police station. Meister says the police official he spoke to genuinely tried to help. He showed Meister a photograph taken aboard the Apollo, showing the dead girl. According to her father, Susan was "lying on a bunk, wearing the new dress her mother had made for her, her arms crossed with a long barreled revolver on her breast. A bullet hole was in the center of her forehead and blood was running out of the corners of her mouth. I began to wonder how Susan could possibly shoot herself in the center of her forehead with the long barreled revolver. She would have had to hold it with both hands at arms length. There were no powder burns on her forehead, which certainly would have been the case if the gun was against her forehead as it would have to be to shoot herself as the photograph appeared." The police said the revolver was not available for inspection. Meister was shown the police report, but it was in French, which neither he nor Galbraith spoke. Meister was told that the police were unwilling to release copies of either the report or their photographs. Meister and Galbraith went on to the hospital where Susan's body had been taken. During the autopsy her intestines and her brains had been removed. Meister says that Warren admitted that he had given permission, believing that Susan might have been on drugs. Meister asked to see the body, which he had been told was in a refrigerated morgue. To his amazement, he was told by a doctor that they did not know where the body was. The next day, with Warren and Joni still in attendance, they had an audience with the Pasha of Safi. The Pasha told Meister he could not have copies of the police report, or the photographs. He said he had transferred the records to the provincial capital, Marrakesh.

When Meister pressed him to find the whereabouts of Susan's body, the Pasha told him the interview was over.Meister asked Warren if he could see Ron Hubbard. He knew that Hubbard's daughter, Diana, was about Susan's age. In Meister's own words:

'Passing the guarded gates into the port compound, we had our first look at Hubbard's ship, Apollo. It appeared to be old, and as we boarded it, the girls manning the deck gave us a hand salute. All were dressed in work type clothing of civilian origin. Most appeared to be young. Upon boarding we were shown the stern of the ship, which was used as a reading room, with several people sitting in chairs reading books. The mention of Susan seemed to meet disapproval from those on board .... We were shown where Susan's quarters were in the stern of the ship below decks where it appeared fifty or so people were sleeping on shelf type bunks. Susan's letter had mentioned she shared a cabin all the way forward with one other person. Next we were shown the cabin next to the pilot house on the bridge where the alleged suicide had taken place. It was a small cabin and appeared to be one where a duty officer might catch some sleep while underway .... We were not allowed to see any more of the ship .... I requested an interview with Hubbard as he was then on board. Warren said he would ask .... He returned in about a half hour and said Hubbard had declined to see me.'

Meister and Galbraith returned to Casablanca. Meister found that the thirty or so films he had been carrying with him had disappeared, including the film he had shot of Sail and the Apollo.

As I was preparing to leave the hotel [to take the flight home], the telephone in my room rang. It was Warren who said he had to see me at once on a matter of utmost urgency. I told him I would see him in the lobby .... Warren came into the lobby a very frightened man. His face was pale and he motioned me to a chair in the corner of the lobby... he told me he was sent to make a settlement with me in cash.

Meister was outraged by this suggestion, and told Warren to deal with his attorney. "At the airport, just prior to boarding, I was accosted by a large man in a pinstripe suit carrying a briefcase. He said, 'We are watching you and so are the CIA and the FBI.'"

After his return to the U.S., Meister found that his daughter had been buried in a Casablanca cemetery, wrapped in a burlap sack, before his visit to Morocco. He arranged to have the body exhumed and shipped to the U.S. in a sealed tin coffin. His local Health Authority, in Colorado, received an anonymous letter before the body was returned. It said in part: There has been a Cholera epidemic in Morocco... there have been a recorded two to three hundred deaths. And it's been brought to my attention that the daughter of one George Meister died in Morocco, either by accident or from cholera, probably the latter.

The Los Angeles Times picked up the story: "According to a Nov. 11, 1971, letter from Assistant Secretary of State David M. Abshire to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee--the Apollo's Port Captain threatened in the presence of the American Vice Consul from Casablanca, William J. Galbraith, that he had enough material, including compromising photographs of Miss Meister, to smear Mr. Meister. z . . Meister is said to have left Morocco the day before the threat was made." The Scientologists then launched a campaign against Galbraith, with little success; for example, telling newspaper men that he had threatened that the CIA would sink the Apollo! Meister received anonymous letters saying that his daughter had made pornographic films, and that she had been a drug addict. Meister says he continued to be harassed for six years. The harassment stopped around the time of the FBI raids on the Guardian's Office, in the Summer of 1977.

If Susan Meister did commit suicide, several questions remain. She had been aboard the Apollo for four months. During that time, she sent consistently enthusiastic letters to her parents. To commit suicide, she must have undergone a very rapid mood change. She must also have lost her faith in the efficacy of Scientology. If this was so, what had caused this sudden shift of opinion, and why didn't she leave the Apollo? Letters were censored before leaving the Apollo, and the passports of those aboard were held by the Ethics Office. So perhaps she was unable to write the truth of what she had discovered, and unable to leave the ship. Perhaps. There is no concrete evidence to show that Susan Meister's death was not suicide. But the whole affair is compounded by the events which followed. By creating the Sea Org, and taking to the sea, Hubbard had successfully put himself beyond the law. There was no coroner's investigation into the death. It is likely that a verdict at least of foul play would have been returned if there had been such an investigation.
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Re: Journalism: Scientology - L. Ron Hubbard's Brainchild

Postby admin » Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:42 am

The Good Ship Scientology
by The Observer
August 1968

IF RON HUBBARD, founder and leader of the Scientologists, lives at all, then he is well and aboard a rusting and singularly grubby ex-Irish Sea ferry undergoing repairs in the harbour here in Corfu.

The Royal Scot Man, no port of registration upon her stern, flying the flag of Sierra Leone, and the initials LRH floridly painted on her black and white funnel, arrived here from Tunis a week ago. Her owner, said his lieutenants, when they came ashore, was a millionaire named Hubbard, who was also something of a philosopher. The Scot Man was a floating college where he taught that science and love could achieve all. This an explanation the authorities here seem to have accepted happily.

For this week the Scot Man moved into harbour for the £25,000 worth of repairs, including resurfacing of the decaying lower deck, building of cabins, and conversion of the sea-water ballast tanks into fresh water ones to increase her range.

And now a few select "sightseers" come gaily ashore with written orders to "spread the instruction of LRH" and expressing particular interest in the remoter parts of the island. But most of the 220 Scientologists never step ashore or pass through Greek passport control.

The largest national group is 'the Americans, followed by the British and South Africans. Many have wives and children on board. All have been with the ship for several months.

Visitors are discouraged. When I applied to see Hubbard I was, after a few moments' hesitation, hustled firmly down the gangway which is constantly guarded by an intercom-equipped quartermaster and whatever crew happen to he in the vicinity. The few visitors who pass a careful vetting must sign a visitors' book when arriving and leaving.

The captain of the ship is Hubbard himself. The "students," who, like the "officers" wear dark blue shirts and trousers, with white cords around their necks, say they never see him. Some officers, however, have said that they have frequent consultations with him upon written request. Certainly written orders are issued daily in buff envelopes to officers, probably by Hubbard. All official correspondence is on headed notepaper of the Hubbard Explorational Company Limited. No address is given.

Where exactly Hubbard's quarters are on board is difficult to establish, but, in the middle of the upper deck a corridor leads to what few cabins there are with a notice forbidding entry.

On the lower deck, which is even rustier and dirtier than the rest of the ship, there are two cars out of sight in the stern, both registered in Britain and believed by some students to belong to Hubbard. One is a Morris 1100, the other an American make.

On the starboard side of this deck rows of desks stretch along the promenade from bow to stern. Here "officers" are engaged in feverish paperwork, and shouting to messengers. They seem obsessed by paperwork, permits and memos. Even the messengers, before they graduated from the nursery on the upper deck, had to put in formal applications and receive formal permission to undertake "tasks" which would prove them worthy or otherwise of joining in the full life of the ship as "students" .

Opposite the desks is the impressive machinery of paper moving: batteries of baskets continually emptied by these messenger boys and girls aged about 8 to 10. Even the children in the nursery seem possessed by this grim fixity of purpose. Once a day a crocodile of then set off for a walk in town, accompanied by two women, and with an orderliness never before seen in so many children on a Greek island. There is no set graduation from nursery to student or student to officer, just the ability, to perform the set tasks - just as a Boy Scout might win a star.

The crew normally work an eight hour day, spending the evenings studying Scientology. What might have once been the holds are now rudimentary lecture theatres and study rooms with desks and armchairs. There seems no time for frivolous diversions, although occasionally small parties are held.

Those who had a relevant occupation before joining the ship (such as welding, engineering or mathematics) continue to practise it. The rest apply themselves with almost fanatical perseverance to learning skills necessary for running the ship. Few, if any; appear been professional seamen. Some have a tendency to talk in the exaggerated nautical parlance of those who are not nautical.

Yet there is something unnerving about this floating city state. Something almost dreamlike. Perhaps it is the inscrutability of its busy inhabitants; even their eyes seem devoid of any expression. Many seem like rather bad actors using language they do not understand, talking only on cue. Even this small community manages to resemble rush hour on the Underground as they pass one another purpose bent, with minimum conversation, or light of recognition.

Yet, beneath this dedicated veneer, there is a shambolic element: quite a few would pass as summer beatniks.

The exact nature of all this activity is difficult to discover. Some of it is certainly directed towards the organisation of the general meeting which should have taken place in Britain. The most likely spot for it now is the Scot Man herself - which could explain the sudden need for extra cabins: most of the crew sleep in dormitories. It is possible that most of the Scientologists themselves do not know exactly what they are doing. Despite all the rigid paperwork. the channels of power and decision-making evaporate into a haze somewhere near the top.

Hubbard plays things very close to the chest. Only he, and possibly one or two officers, knew that they were bound for Greece before they arrived here. The rest only heard that they were bound for Greece, so that their leader could "study ancient Greek civilisation".
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Re: Journalism: Scientology - L. Ron Hubbard's Brainchild

Postby admin » Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:47 am

The Life and Death of a Scientologist: 13 Years and Thousands Of Dollars, Lisa McPherson Finally Went 'Clear.' Then She Went Insane.
by Richard Leiby
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 6, 1998; Page F01

CLEARWATER, Fla. - Dec 6, 1998 - "I am L. Ron Hubbard," the woman on the hotel room bed announced in a robotic voice. "I created time 3 billion years ago." She rambled on and on, every outburst dutifully scribbled down by those assigned to watch her.

"I can't confront force ... I need my auditor ... I want to take a toothbrush and brush the floor until I have a cognition."

The jargon of Scientology was instantly familiar to anyone who entered the room in the Fort Harrison Hotel, part of an elite training center and retreat established here by Hubbard, the science fiction writer and self-styled religious leader. It was also obvious to her fellow Scientologists that Lisa McPherson had cracked up.

"Out of control," one wrote.

Beginning Nov. 18, 1995, Scientology staffers -- following Hubbard's regimen for dealing with psychotic members -- kept McPherson isolated in that room 24 hours a day, refusing to speak to her, trying to force-feed her, plying her with vitamins and herbal concoctions and injecting her with sedatives, according to several accounts that are now part of court records. She furiously resisted: She pounded the walls, tried to escape, attacked a staffer with a potted plant. In her delirium, records say, she defecated on herself and drank her own urine.

Within 17 days, McPherson -- who'd spent most of her adult life and tens of thousands of dollars as a devotee of Hubbard's teachings -- would be dead. The once-voluptuous 36-year-old -- she stood 5 feet 9 and wore a size 12 dress -- lost an estimated 40 to 50 pounds during the ordeal, dropping to 108, her bruised body pocked by insect bites and scabs.

She was never seen by a licensed physician during that time. An autopsy attributed her death to a blood clot that developed due to "severe dehydration" and "bed rest."

Last month, after more than two years of investigation, the state attorney here filed two felony counts against the Scientology organization, alleging abuse or neglect of a disabled adult and the practice of medicine without a license. (No individuals were charged; to obtain their testimony, all Scientology witnesses were given immunity by prosecutors.) A criminal conviction would only bring fines of up to $15,000, but also would allow a court to order restitution to the victim's family and payment of law enforcement investigation costs.

The church has pleaded not guilty. Mike Rinder, senior spokesman for Scientology, would not respond to any questions about McPherson, but issued a statement calling the "circumstances" of her death "unfortunate," and contending that the church had no "intent to do any harm" to its devotee.

Church lawyers would not comment.

Meanwhile, McPherson's aunt has filed a wrongful death suit against the church, saying McPherson suffered "extreme torture" as "a prisoner of Scientology."

Church officials have said they were honoring McPherson's religious preferences; Scientology vehemently denounces all forms of psychotherapy.

This weekend, to mark the anniversary of McPherson's death, Scientology defectors and other activists picketed near the Fort Harrison Hotel. Since its founding 45 years ago, the Church of Scientology has endured more than its share of bad publicity, but the McPherson case puts on stark display a side of the religion far removed from the glowing testimonials it receives from Hollywood adherents like John Travolta, Tom Cruise and Isaac Hayes.

If, as Hubbard decreed, the ultimate aim of Scientology is its adherents' "total freedom" and "survival," then what went wrong in the case of Lisa McPherson?

"At last, here is a book ... which provides the answers to the problems of the human mind," pledged Hubbard's 1950 bestseller, "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health." It was the cornerstone of the religion he later founded. Once "cleared" of their troublesome brain "engrams," followers would be happy and healthier, have higher IQs and become "stable mentally," Hubbard believed.

In September 1995, Lisa McPherson proudly attested to reaching the state of "clear" at a Scientology ceremony. Within a few weeks, her mind began to unravel. After 13 years of intensive study, she was still failing as a Scientologist; indeed, she had become one of the worst kinds of problems -- in church lingo, a "Potential Trouble Source Type III," or what Hubbard also called an "insane being."

Out in the real world, around non-Scientologists, McPherson was dramatically breaking down, becoming a public embarrassment. Scientologists weren't supposed to do that.

The Founder, a flame-haired, swashbuckling figure, died in 1986, but his every utterance and writing is viewed by Scientologists as consecrated, immutable scripture. Hubbard seemed to take a dim view of those who suffered breakdowns.

"We have nothing to do with the insane whatsoever. The insane, well, they're insane!" he once declared in a rare television interview. Little could be done for psychotics. "Provide a relatively safe environment and quiet and rest and no treatment of a mental nature at all," he wrote in a 1965 policy letter.

"There will always be some failures," he continued, and "sometimes [they] can't be kept alive."

McPherson grew up in Dallas, the daughter of an insurance man and his homemaker wife, attending Baptist churches. She had an older brother she loved, named Steve.

When Steve was 16 he shot himself in the head in a gas station rest room. Lisa was 14. The suicide was apparently connected to a dispute with another teen, although the details remain vague to Lisa's aunt and closest living relative, Dell Liebreich. But Liebreich knows one thing: "I'm sure it had a traumatizing effect on Lisa. Her father never recovered from it. He committed suicide 10 years later." He too used a pistol.

After high school, McPherson went to work at Southwestern Bell, where her family says a supervisor recruited her into Scientology. A vivacious brown-eyed blonde, fond of frosting her hair, McPherson had an early, troubled marriage that lasted only a few years. But she did well at the phone company, and she avidly studied Hubbard's techniques. "She was always going to the mission, taking courses," recalls Liebreich, who signed on to the lawsuit against Scientology after Lisa's mother, Fannie, died last year.

The church's account of McPherson's tenure has required criminal investigators and civil case lawyers to learn another language -- Hubbard-speak. For example, a Scientology-prepared report on McPherson says that in "Dec. 86/Jan. 87 she had a PTS Rundown (items were Mom, Don and Theresa)... . This was followed by a large amount of wordclearing, False Data Stripping and O/W write ups."

Translation:

Using an E-meter, a lie detector-like device that Hubbard invented, a counselor discovered that McPherson was a "potential trouble source" in Scientology because of her connection to three "suppressive" people, including her mother.


In confessional rituals, a parishioner must declare his O/Ws -- "overts and withholds" -- immoral acts that include harmful, undisclosed transgressions against Scientology. Any miscomprehensions about anything -- including the church and its teachings -- are "false data" that must be stripped away.

In Hubbard's cosmology, traumas in past lifetimes, contact with alien beings, drug use and involvement with "suppressive persons" (who include enemies of the church) all can be impediments to a "pre-clear's" success. They must be located and removed by "auditing."

According to the church, McPherson took her first courses in 1982, when she was 23, and tried but failed to go "clear" in 1986. She took a staff job and married a member of the church. In 1989, she also committed herself to serving Scientology for a "billion years," signing up for its Sea Organization, an elite group whose members wear nautical uniforms and follow a militaristic command structure, working long hours for salaries of $50 a week.

A World War II Navy lieutenant, Hubbard ran his sect for several years from aboard a 320-foot converted cattle ferry, sailing the world before establishing what he called the Flag Land Base at Clearwater, a placid town of white sand beaches on the Gulf of Mexico. The Commodore, as Hubbard was known, lived nearby briefly in the mid-1970s. He told aides he planned to pose as a photographer in the tourist industry.

Today, about 6,000 Scientology followers and staffers live in the Clearwater area -- many based at the campus of former hotels where Hubbard's "religious technology" is offered at the most advanced (and expensive) levels. Several Scientologist-operated businesses also maintain headquarters here.

McPherson migrated to Clearwater in the early '90s after her new Scientology employers relocated their publishing firm here. She'd divorced again, and had left the Sea Organization. But she kept attempting to reach "clear." Records show she was thwarted again in 1991 and 1994 because she was a "potential trouble source" -- the E-meter sessions revealed she'd been in contact with suppressive, anti-Scientology elements.

At first McPherson flourished as a sales rep at AMC Publishing; she made $136,721 in 1994, according to her tax returns, spending more than $55,000 on Scientology courses and taking deductions for them. (The IRS, after fighting hundreds of lawsuits filed by Scientology, granted the church tax-exempt status in 1993.)

Then, turmoil. "In June 1995, Lisa caved in and actually went into a spin (psychotic break)," says the church report. This forced a brief recuperation at the Fort Harrison Hotel and a slowdown in her work. She was put into "ethics handling" -- a regimen that includes writing up "overts and withholds."

Her aunt, an old high school friend and others believe McPherson was on the verge of quitting the church -- and that was her undisclosed crime against Scientology.

"She was roller-coastering: up and down, up and down, high emotions and low emotions," says Michael Pattinson, a painter and recent Scientology defector who got to know McPherson in the months before her death. "She wanted to do something more artistic in her life, and the group's power and pressure were too much for her.

"She was having a very, very rough time at work keeping up with the quotas for sales," Pattinson recalls. "She asked for my advice. I said, 'Lisa, follow your own goals, not someone else's, or you'll end up in the soup.'"

Scientology officials say McPherson was a devoted member. And on Sept. 7, she finally reached her cherished goal: "I'm from Texas and I'm Clear!" she announced to a roomful of fellow members, reading from a script now in court files.

"Being Clear is more exciting than anything I've ever experienced. I am so thrilled about life and living that I can hardly stand it!"

McPherson's final hurdle to Clear was an incident from a past life. A saber-toothed tiger kept attacking and eating her: "Not only did I see him, I was in a cage with him for six months."

Auditing "handled" that problem, McPherson told her audience. But other problems arose.

By mid-October, church records show that officials had declared her a "liability" to Scientology, apparently after her production dropped off at her publishing job. In Hubbard's jargon, that meant McPherson had "taken on the color of an enemy" and could not be trusted. In a memo, she said she was making "amends," and working seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., in part to raise money for the church's "Winter Wonderland" holiday event.

By November, she began to act out in bizarre ways: At a business conference in Orlando, she insisted to strangers that they had to read L. Ron Hubbard's "Dianetics." She interrogated a co-worker about "suppressive people." She rousted the colleague in the middle of the night, raving about "something going on on this planet that I didn't know about."

"When I woke up at 7 a.m. I found her still in the bathroom reading" Hubbard's works, the woman wrote in a report to church officials. "She looked like hell."

One year ago, on the sidewalk in front of the Fort Harrison Hotel, Scientology critics lit candles in a memorial to McPherson. Their signs bore her grisly autopsy photos. Their T-shirts said "Scientology Kills."

A few blocks away in a counterdemonstration, thousands of church members staged a "civil rights" march on the Clearwater Police Department and the local office of the St. Petersburg Times, charging that police and media investigations of the McPherson case amounted to a hate campaign.

For many residents, the long-running McPherson case has revived unwelcome memories of Scientology's controversial past here -- in the mid-'70s the town's political, business and media establishment were targeted for what Hubbard memos termed "takeover" and "control." In 1975, Hubbard moved his sect ashore, secretly purchasing downtown properties under the guise of a group called United Churches of Florida.

The guru's plan to create a Scientology-run city -- part of an even more grandiose scheme for global domination -- foundered after FBI raids and news reports exposed his goals. Prosecutors used internal church documents to help convict Hubbard's wife and 10 other top Scientologists in a conspiracy to infiltrate, bug and burglarize federal agencies. Hubbard was named an unindicted co-conspirator in that case.

Scientology leaders, who say they purged the church of criminals 15 years ago, claim it enjoys excellent relations with the city. Last month, ground was broken for a $45 million Scientology center in the faded downtown; at 370,000 square feet, it's the largest construction project in the church's history.

Only a few bigots and "rednecks" oppose its presence here, church officials say.

"The sun never sets on Scientology," church leader David Miscavige, quoting Hubbard, said at the glitzy groundbreaking, which included a laser light show.

"Scientology now, tomorrow and forever."

The dueling demonstrations over the McPherson case coincided with the opening of "Winter Wonderland," an annual holiday display erected by the church to collect food and toys for the poor. Rocker Edgar Winter, a Scientologist, welcomed the crowd and praised "this wonderful gift to the community."

Bennetta Slaughter, owner of AMC Publishing and a Scientologist for nearly 20 years, spoke of the church's dedication to children. She pointed out that a $3,400 donation by her deceased employee, Lisa McPherson, helped make it all possible.

"She was one of my very good friends and I loved her very much," Slaughter said later, bracing against the breeze in a Christmas sweater and red velvet skirt.

"It's a farce that they're demonstrating [against the church]. They're desecrating her memory, not honoring her memory."

Slaughter and her company were initially named as defendants in McPherson's aunt's suit, but were later dropped from the action. "I absolutely know that what occurred with Lisa -- " Slaughter began. She paused. "She was not denied anything. The things that have been said are complete misrepresentations on the part of those who would attack the church. They're falsehoods."

And why would people criticize her church?

"No data," she quickly replied. "Obviously there's an agenda."

"The real and inexcusable danger in Dianetics lies in its conception of the amoral, detached, 100 percent mechanical man. This is the authoritarian dream, a population of zombies, free to be manipulated by the great brains of the founder, the leader of an inner manipulative clique."

-- A review of "Dianetics" in The Nation, 1950


From the very beginning, the therapies of L. Ron Hubbard have been denounced by medical authorities as quackery, hypnotism and brainwashing. One of the first judicial investigations of Scientology, conducted in Australia in the 1960s, deemed the auditing process a form of "mental torture" and resulted in a ban on Scientology practices.

"Sometimes preclears are so distraught that they scream, develop murderous feelings, have bouts of anger, grief ... their sexual passions are aroused, they act insanely, laugh hysterically ... they become violent and try to escape and have to be restrained," the report said.

"In Scientology parlance, when such manifestations as these occur, the preclear is being 'restimulated'; in fact he is being debased and mentally crippled."


(By 1982, Australia overturned its ban and recognized Scientology as a religion. But an official commission of top legal experts recently recommended that significant psychological harm inflicted by any religious group, including Scientology, be made a crime.)

In 1978, a French court tried Hubbard in absentia for fraud and sentenced him to four years' imprisonment.

In 1986, a California jury awarded $30 million to a former Sea Organization member who said the church's advanced regimens caused him to become psychotic and actively plan suicide. (The award, later reduced to $2.5 million, has been upheld by the Supreme Court, but the former member has yet to collect because of exhaustive litigation by the church.)

In a 1984 decision, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Paul G. Breckenridge said Scientology "is nothing in reality but a vast enterprise to extract the maximum amount of money from its adepts by pseudo-scientific theories ... and to exercise a kind of blackmail against persons who do not wish to continue with their sect.... The organization clearly is schizophrenic and paranoid, and this bizarre combination seems to be a reflection of its founder."

Such conclusions strike especially close to the heart of Scientology, a belief system whose strongest rhetoric is reserved for its criticism of psychiatry.

Hubbard said he wanted to control "absolutely the field of mental healing on this planet in all forms." He denounced shrinks as crackpots and butchers who killed patients' souls with electroshock therapy and drugs.

But there may have been a deeper source of the Founder's ire. His eldest son, L. Ron Hubbard Jr., once swore an affidavit saying his father "ended up in psychiatric hospital at the end of the war." (Hubbard Jr. is dead; the church says the Founder never received treatment and that the son recanted his criticism.)

In a letter written to the Veterans Administration in 1947, Hubbard senior admitted to suicidal tendencies and asked for psychiatric help.

Denouncing doctors, Hubbard claimed his research revealed the true nature of the mind. "All of these things are scientific facts, tested and rechecked and tested again," he wrote in "Dianetics." But his son said the findings -- initially published in the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction -- was without scientific merit: "My father wrote his books off the top of his head based on his imagination. There were no case studies."

"He audited me and it didn't help," says Richard de Mille, a Dianetics believer from 1950 to 1953. "I came to understand that it was all his imagination, just a story he was telling."

De Mille, 76, son of the famous director, says Hubbard transformed his self-help discoveries into a religion to avoid having to prove them: "It became a religion very suddenly and all his magical ideas jumped back into it."

The apex of Scientology spiritual counseling is at the secret, so-called OT Levels, which promise superhuman powers. Here, members pass through what Hubbard described as the Wall of Fire. Parishioners -- who have already spent thousands to go clear -- pay several thousand more to learn that their spiritual traumas stem from an intergalactic holocaust perpetrated 75 million years ago by an alien overlord named Xenu.

During a space battle, Hubbard teaches, our spirits became infested with evil alien spirits, called "body thetans." There could be untold numbers of such bad thetans fomenting problems in each of our minds. Only through rigorous auditing can they be removed -- allowing the untormented Operating Thetan -- the OT -- to emerge.

In 1995, church financial records show, McPherson paid nearly $42,000 in "donations" for top-level courses -- including "Wall of Fire," the "Flag OT Executive Rundown" and "OT Preparations and Eligibility."

On Nov. 10, 1995, court records show, the devotee purchased her last religious item from the Church of Scientology. It was a 1996 calendar featuring L. Ron Hubbard. Price: $100.

"No one told me I was a prisoner, but I knew that I wouldn't just walk out the door.... It's embedded over the years that, once you're a Scientologist, there's nowhere to go; you just don't leave." -- Former church staff member Lori Taverna, testifying to the Clearwater City Commission in 1982.

After a minor traffic accident, McPherson stripped off her clothes and walked naked down well-traveled Belleview Boulevard. She told stunned paramedics she wasn't crazy but just wanted to get their attention: "I need help. I need to talk to someone." She spoke in a monotone, as if programmed, and said she didn't need a body to live.

"I'm an OT," she said. An Operating Thetan.

It was shortly after 6 p.m. on Nov. 18, 1995. McPherson had driven her '93 Jeep Cherokee into a boat being towed on a trailer. She wasn't hurt.

The paramedics took her to nearby Morton Plant Hospital. Nurses there said she looked calm, but they noticed her fixed stare. McPherson disclosed that her brother and father had committed suicide, but denied she wanted to kill herself or anyone else.

By 6:50, a group of Scientologists had arrived. By the church's account, McPherson had phoned her friend and boss, Bennetta Slaughter. (Hospital records contain no mention of McPherson making any calls.) The Scientologists explained that a psychiatric consultation would violate McPherson's religion.

At 7:30, a psychiatric nurse went to McPherson's bedside, where she was surrounded by church members. Again she spoke in that monotone, telling the nurse, "I want to go home with my friends from the congregation."

An emergency room doctor decided, after talking by phone with a psychiatrist, that the patient could not be involuntarily committed. "Her friends at scientology will watch her 24 hours and be sure that she gets the care that they want her to have and the patient wants to have," the doctor typed in his report. But he seemed uneasy, adding: "I told her I could not be responsible ... I will have the patient sign out against medical advice."

Around 8:30, she was taken to the Fort Harrison Hotel and put in Room 174. She would not leave again until the night of Dec. 5.

Scientologists loaded McPherson's nearly lifeless body into a church van.

Instead of calling an ambulance or driving her to Morton Plant, five minutes away, she was taken 45 minutes north to Columbia/HCA New Port Richey Hospital.

Her watchers had decided it would be best if McPherson were treated by a Scientology doctor -- an OT-course graduate named David Minkoff who worked in the emergency room at the New Port Richey hospital. Minkoff had earlier prescribed Valium for McPherson without seeing her, according to a Florida Department of Law Enforcement affidavit. (Minkoff, initially named in the wrongful death suit, authorized his insurers to settle with McPherson's estate for $100,000 -- what his attorney called a "pittance in comparison with the millions and millions they were asking for.")

McPherson never got the Valium. Staffers told investigators that they feared any drug might interfere with her future auditing. So instead they loaded aspirin and Benadryl into a syringe and forced it down her throat. McPherson's "case supervisor" believed the aspirin "might assist in blocking Lisa's formation of mental images," the prosecution affidavit says.

Through the 17 days since her naked stroll down Belleview Boulevard, McPherson had been attended by Janis Johnson, an unlicensed anesthesiologist who served as the Flag base medical liaison officer, by a dentist and by staffers with no medical training, including a 17-year-old. One woman assigned to McPherson's room broke down, sat in a corner and cried, records show.

The Scientologists injected McPherson with magnesium chloride and gave her the sedative chloral hydrate -- both substances apparently endorsed by Hubbard. By Dec. 1, she was so dehydrated that she needed two liters of fluid, according to Johnson's notes. The medical examiner later said it appeared that she'd gone without water for at least five days. The watchers' records are spotty, and church logs of her final 53 hours were lost or destroyed, according to the prosecution affidavit.

A reconstruction of events that Scientology turned over to lawyers for McPherson's estate, as well as prosecutors' findings, describe McPherson's final day:

By Dec. 5, she couldn't walk. She'd been lapsing in and out of consciousness, barely moving. That morning, Johnson thought McPherson looked "septic," as if suffering from a massive infection. Around 7 p.m., Johnson called Minkoff, requesting he issue a prescription for penicillin.

Minkoff says he refused and advised that the patient be taken to the nearest hospital. But Johnson said, "Lisa was not that sick." She would transport McPherson 24 miles to New Port Richey instead.

McPherson's breathing grew heavy and labored on the trip. She was loaded into a wheelchair when they reached the hospital around 9:30. Minkoff said he was shocked by her "horrific" appearance.

He pronounced her dead on arrival.

According to the charging document, "This inexcusable delay in seeking emergency help ... deprived Lisa of her only opportunity for survival."

A Scientology report on the incident begins this way: "Lisa McPherson, Flag public living in Clearwater, FL., dropped her body this evening while being taken to a hospital."

On Aug. 6, 1996, eight months after she died, the church mailed Lisa McPherson a statement showing a credit of $3,000. Her next course, called "OT Debug Service," was paid for and waiting.


© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
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Re: Journalism: Scientology - L. Ron Hubbard's Brainchild

Postby admin » Tue Jul 23, 2019 12:50 am

The Process Church of the Final Judgment
by Wikipedia

The Process, or in full, The Process Church of the Final Judgment, commonly known by non-members as the Process Church, was a religious group that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, founded by the Englishman Robert DeGrimston (originally, Robert Moor) and Mary Anne MacLean. It originally developed as a splinter client cult group from Scientology,[1] so that they were declared "suppressive persons" by L. Ron Hubbard in December 1965. In 1966 the members of the group underwent a social implosion and moved to Xtul on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, where they developed "processean" theology (which differs from, and is unrelated to process theology). They later established a base of operations in the United States in New Orleans.

They were often viewed as Satanic on the grounds that they worshipped both Christ and Satan. Their belief is that Satan will become reconciled to Christ, and together will come at the end of the world to judge humanity, Christ to judge and Satan to execute judgment. Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor of the Charles Manson Family trial, comments in his book Helter Skelter that there may be evidence Manson borrowed philosophically from the Process Church, and that representatives of the Church visited him in jail after his arrest. According to one of these representatives, the purpose of the visit was to interview Manson about whether he had ever had any contact with Church members or ever received any literature about the Church. As a result of a lawsuit, the publisher of Ed Sanders' book The Family agreed to remove the chapter about the Process from this book.

In April, 1974 Robert DeGrimston was removed by the Council of Masters as Teacher. They renounced The Unity, his exposition of the above-noted doctrines, and most of his other teachings. DeGrimston attempted to restart the Process Church several times, but he could never replace his original following. Following DeGrimston's removal, the group underwent a significant change in orientation and renamed itself the Foundation Faith of the Millennium. Further changes in both name and focus followed, and the organization eventually became the Best Friends Animal Society, which is now one of America's best known animal welfare rescue groups.

A detailed account of the history of and life within the Process Church as told by a participant-observer is contained in William S. Bainbridge's book Satan's Power. (He employed a pseudonym for the name of the group, referring to it as "The Power", and disguised the names of people to preserve their identities, a procedure used for sociological studies of living groups to ensure privacy.)

Processean theology

The term "processean theology" distinguishes these ideas from the process theology derived from the thoughts of Alfred North Whitehead.

At Xtul was the first 'channeling' of God. After Xtul, Jehovah was the only recognised God. Later, with Jehovah, Lucifer and Satan were recognised as "The Three Great Gods of the Universe" and Christ as the Emissary to the Gods. The Three Great Gods represent three basic human patterns of reality:

• Jehovah, the wrathful God of vengeance and retribution, demands discipline, courage and ruthlessness, and a single-minded dedication to duty, purity and self-denial.
• Lucifer, the Light Bearer, urges us to enjoy life to the full, to value success in human terms, to be gentle and kind and loving, and to live in peace and harmony with one another. Man's apparent inability to value success without descending into greed, jealousy and an exaggerated sense of his own importance, has brought the God Lucifer into disrepute. He has become mistakenly identified with Satan.
• Satan, the receiver of transcendent souls and corrupted bodies, instills in us two directly opposite qualities; at one end an urge to rise above all human and physical needs and appetites, to become all soul and no body, all spirit and no mind, and at the other end a desire to sink beneath all human codes of behavior, and to wallow in a morass of violence, lunacy and excessive physical indulgence. But it is the lower end of Satan's nature that men fear, which is why Satan, by whatever name, is seen as the Adversary.

In between these Three Great Gods and man, is an entire hierarchy of Gods, beings and superbeings, angels and archangels, demons and archdemons, elementals and guides, and fallen angels and watchers.

There is all this and more too, in heaven and in hell and on Earth.

The Process believes that, to varying degrees, these "God-patterns" exist within all of us. The main doctrine of The Process is the unity of Christ and Satan, who exist as opposites. Jehovah and Lucifer exist as opposites and when Christ and Satan are united this will unite Jehovah and Lucifer.

In the original 1960s literature of the church, Christ, Lucifer, Satan, and Jehovah were all arranged on a mandala, with Christ at the top opposite Satan on the bottom and Jehovah on the left opposite Lucifer on the right.

(The descriptions of the Gods comes from a teaching called "The Hierarchy" published in December 1967, as a part of "The Tide of the End".)

Notes

1. Clarke, Nick (October 20, 1999). "'It is dreadful to be an onlooking parent, for the loved child is lost'". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,259531,00.html. Retrieved June 23, 2008.

Further reading

Bainbridge, William Sims (1978). Satan's Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult., Univ of California Press. ISBN 0-5200-3546-1
Rowlett, Curt (2006). Labyrinth13: True Tales of the Occult, Crime & Conspiracy, Chapter 10, Charles Manson, Son of Sam and the Process Church of the Final Judgment: Exploring the Alleged Connections. Lulu Press. ISBN 1-4116-6083-8.
Wyllie, Timothy (1991). Dolphins, Extraterrestrials and Angels.
Wyllie, Timothy and Adam Parfrey (2009). Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment. Feral House.
Terry, Maury (1987). The Ultimate Evil. Doubleday & Company, Inc. ISBN 0-38523452-X.
[edit] External links
Book Review of 'Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgment', Tina Estlin Page, ChuckPalahniuk.net.
Religious Movements, Kathryn L. Duvall, University of Virginia.
A profile of The Process, Gary Lachman
MaryAnne Moore - Obituary, The Skepticaltheurgist
Friends find their calling, Lou Kilzer, Rocky Mountain News
Preparing for the Fiery End: Process, Bill Beckett, Harvard Crimson
Chapter from Ed Sander's book "The Family", CharlesManson.com
Writings by Robert deGrimston
Interview about The Process Church & 4p2 on Alterati.com
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