Scientology and Me
If you look on the internet, you will find many horror stories written by former Scientologists about their experiences with Scientology. This article presents my experiences with Scientology, which I imagine may be more typical. It's much less dramatic (i.e. boring) than some you'll find. I'm writing this assuming you know nothing about Scientology. My purpose is to show that Scientology may very well contain much useful and helpful data about the mind, data which should be freely available to the human race as a whole, and not monopolized by a small group of people. [In fact, on the internet, you can find former Scientologists who are involved in auditing people, etc]
Scientology contains a vast amount of information, and as it deals with a new way of looking at the mind, L. Ron Hubbard, the sole author behind Scientology, had to create a new vocabulary. Therefore, in front of every Scientology text, there is a note about the "misunderstood word," or MU for short. Hubbard proposes that the reason people quit studying a subject is they have encountered an MU, and an MU may be a word for which a person has a wrong definition, or perhaps no definition at all. The solution to the MU problem is to always have an appropriate dictionary available, and whenever you suspect that you don't fully understand a word, you look it up. This is called "word clearing" (not to be confused with the "clearing" to be described later), and the complete procedure is this: look at the definition which appears to be the one applicable, make sure you understand the definition (i.e. there are no MUs in the definition, which you would then also have to look up), then make up sentences of your own with the word, and then clear all the other definitions of the word. Also, you are to understand all the symbols involved in the derivation and pronunciation.
The reasons I've spent so much time on this is are: this is an example of a process of Scientology I consider to have some validity (I'll save all my reservations and problems with Scientology for the end of the article), and it will explain why I'll have to spend much of this article defining terms.
Now for some background on me, pre-Scientology. Due to privacy and anonymity issues, I'll have to be somewhat vague. After graduating from high school in the top 10 of my class, I proceeded to drop out of a few of America's finest universities. After the third one, I finally decided to see a psychologist. He concluded that I had "cyclothymia," which he described as a "mild" case of manic-depression. I view manic-depression this way: normal people have high and low moods, somewhat like a sine-wave, where in the manic-depressive, the sine wave has a higher amplitude. In my case, it didn't seem like I actually went into manic states until after I started talking to the psychologist, where I was able to unload a bunch of stuff I couldn't talk to anyone about. Also, my manic states weren't very extreme, the main symptoms being an inability to sleep, an inability to shut up, and an inability to concentrate. In order to "smooth out the sine wave," lithium was prescribed.
Also, we determined that there was nothing physically wrong with me, and the reason I was depressed was that I didn't have a girlfriend, and he gave me some good, common sense advice on this and other topics. We looked at a few of my dreams. Then, I went back to college and lasted about 5 quarters before I dropped out again, having failed to find a girlfriend. (I was on lithium for only 2 of those quarters, after which I quit and never went back on it. It seemed to "flatten out my sine wave," but after I went off it, I didn't experience as intense depressions as I did before, and no real manic periods.)
After a few years, I happened to read Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health at about the same time I was looking for a job. It seemed to make sense, and inspired me to check out the local Scientology mission. So, now for some details on Dianetics: the goal of Dianetic processing is to audit a preclear until he becomes clear by removing his engrams. So now I have to define terms again. A preclear is one who isn't clear yet, a clear is one who no longer has his own reactive mind, the reactive mind is one's collection of engrams, and auditing is a series of procedures designed to remove engrams. An engram is a mental image picture containing pain and unconsciousness, which the preclear doesn't consciously remember. A mental image picture is essentially a perfect memory of an event, containing all sensory data, including sight, touch, taste, sound, smell, temperature, body position, balance, and so on. Engrams are conceived to be the cause of stress, psychosomatic illness, and aberrated behavior. Anyone not clear therefore suffers from stress and psychosomatic illness and displays (on occasion) aberrated behavior. During auditing, an engram is found and gone over until all the details of it are recalled, at which time the engram is erased, and no longer has negative effects on the person. For more details on engrams, see Dianetics; complete details are beyond the scope of this essay. Let me just say that the concept of the engram still seems valid to me.
I went into the mission saying "I probably can't afford this, but I was curious to see how I could go about getting clear." The usual first procedure given to someone is to give the preclear the standard Scientology personality test, which they did. Also, they give a questionnaire asking such things as "do you work for the CIA?" and "have you ever had extended care under a psychiatrist," which I answered honestly. Then the person who gave you the personality test describes yourself to you. I laughed a few times during this, and at one point, I thought "Oh, that's how other people see me, not how I really am," but the person said "Well, it's how you are." Some of the descriptions seemed to fit, some didn't. The gist of it is, any flaws in your personality can be fixed through Scientology.
What the psychologist labels "manic-depression" the Scientologist labels "PTS Syndrome," and whereas psychology offers no cure for depression, the Scientologist offers a cure for PTS. PTS is an acronym for "potential trouble source," which is a person who is somehow under the influence of a suppressive person (either in the present time, or one is being influenced now from a past event.) Put as simply as possible, a suppressive person is an antisocial person; one who is out to hurt people. A suppressive person will fight against any group which tries to improve things for the human race, so according to Scientology, an anti-Scientologist is a suppressive person. The suppressive person has a negative effect on those around them, and could make them PTS (i.e, depressed, not functioning as well as they could).
After telling them I was on lithium for a time for depression, they informed me that by their own rules, there were limits to what they could do for me. I was an "illegal pc" (pc = preclear) which is to say that it would be illegal for them to audit me, unless I petitioned to a higher authority. There were some things I could do, and PTS handling, their first process on me, was one. During PTS handling, they had me read out loud excerpts of things written by Hubbard about ethics, PTS, suppressive people (SPs), while word clearing me on what I was reading.
Then they had me write up my overts and withholds, which is a process everyone goes through early on because "you can't get case gain (get better) if you ethics aren't in" (you are being unethical, or feel guilt about past misdeeds). An overt is essentially anything you consider to be wrong, something you shouldn't have done, and a withhold is an overt that you haven't told anyone about, that you're afraid to talk about. The first time you do this, you write up every overt and withhold (o/w's) you've ever done in your entire life that you can remember. Writing up an o/w requires that you write the exact time, place, form, and event, at least as nearly as you can remember (I could remember a childhood overt, but I couldn't get the date, for instance.) The "form" describes fully what you did, and the "event" describes the consequences of the action. This took me many days to complete. When I was finished, I felt an immense relief. [ I would almost recommend that you pop into a Scientology church, write up your o/w's, and then leave. It's relatively cheap.] This concluded my PTS handling, and to this day I believe it cured me of my "manic-depression." Well, kind of.
I was allowed to take courses, and taking Scientology courses is also perceived to be therapeutic. The purpose of the courses is to train people to either become auditors (those who run processes, or auditing, on pc's) or other members of the staff. There are also courses simply to help people learn more about the mind to help them get through life. Not all Scientologists are on staff; some are just pc's. The first course I took was the Hubbard Qualified Scientologist course (HQS), was described many aspects of Scientology.
In the HQS course, I was introduced to Training Routines (TRs), which is almost a form of auditing, but I was still permitted to do it. The purpose of the TRs is to improve one's ability to communicate, which is necessary for both auditors and pc's. In the first TR, "Being There," one sits in a chair across from another person, with the knees almost touching, with your eyes closed, and the goal is to simply be there comfortably and not do anything else. The tricky thing about this is that it's almost impossible to stop thinking (yogis spend many years trying to stop thinking), so I wonder if anyone really honestly passes this one. In the next TR, "Confronting," you do the same thing with the eyes open this time. As I did this, my body would experience various reactions (yawning, for instance). The goal is to "flatten" all of these reactions. The next TR is "Bullbaiting" Here, you sit still with your eyes open, while the other person, the TR coach, tries to get a reaction from you, by insulting you, trying to make you laugh, any verbal means to provoke a reaction. To be unprovocable would be a necessary skill in an auditor, since the auditor needs to be able to hear what the pc says without laughing at the pc, or getting upset at what the pc says.
Other TRs involve saying statements clearly, acknowledging statements, and running a sample command such as "Do fish swim?" without getting thrown off the subject by the pc, and handling when the pc experiences a reaction during auditing. For instance, in auditing an engram, the pc will re-experience the pain involved in the engram, until the engram is erased. The TRs train the auditor to handle the pc and guide him through the engram.
These TRs improved my ability to communicate greatly, but unfortunately they were done so long ago that their effectiveness has been reduced. Theoretically, they should have made a permanent improvement on me, and perhaps I am better off now than I was before I began Scientology, but I am not in as good a condition, communication-wise, as I was when I was an active Scientologist. My "TRs are out," which is to say that I've lost some of the gains that TRs gave me.
I took many more courses, and at one point I had begun to take the first course that would train me to be a supervisor. In the Scientology academies, there are no teachers, just supervisors. The student reads the literature, and the supervisor is there to not answer questions. If a student has a question, the supervisor is supposed to find a written reference which will answer the question, and often times the question is a sign that the student has an MU, so the supervisor has to figure out what the word is that the student doesn't understand and clear the word with the student. In order for me to be a supervisor, though, a pre-requisite was for me to have taken the Professional TRs course (a high-intensity version of TRs), and the pre-requisite for that was the Purification (Purif). When a superior organization learned that I was being trained as a supervisor, they told the mission to stop training me, and all references about me being trained was removed from my file (this seemed a little odd to me.)
In order for me to progress, then, I had to take the Purif, and being an illegal pc, I had to petition to be allowed to do that. The Purif is supposed to chemically clean out your system by putting you on a regimen of taking lots of vitamins, particularly niacin, exercising, and sweating in a sauna. The niacin and the exercise is to free up the toxins, and the sauna is to sweat the toxins out of your system. The Purif is particularly helpful to people who have been addicted to drugs, but just about everyone undergoes the Purif whether they've done drugs or not. They weren't sure if the Purif would fix whatever "damage" the lithium was supposed to have done to me. In any event, my petition to take the Purif was taking months to get any action on, and after someone tried to get me to sign up for a $1000 course, I left Scientology.
Since leaving Scientology, I have returned to college yet again, and this time it's finally beginning to look like I'll graduate. I believe that without Scientology I would not have had the persistence to continue. It has been difficult, though, and this could be related to word clearing, since I've been neglecting it. Defining "convolution" is an example of a major sticking point. (Now I just gave you an MU.)
I believe that what I have written so far has been a fair and accurate portrayal of Scientology and my experiences with it. If any former or current Scientologist has problems with what I've written, I invite them to e-mail me. Now comes the reservations and problems. A useful analogy from Hubbard is the Gold Plated Locomotive, which I'll call a GPL. There is a steam locomotive which has no smokestack and no wheels. An aberrated person looks at it and says "This is just awful! All the brass fittings on the train have been plated in gold! What an obscene waste of money!" There is absolutely no brass or gold on the train, and the person doesn't see that there's no stack and no wheels. The person sees that there is a problem with something, but he doesn't know what the true problem is, and the problems he does identify are hallucinations. Some people have a similar relationship to the government: they know there's something wrong, but they don't know what. I suppose both the liberals and conservatives would accuse each other of looking at a gold plated locomotive.
I bring this up because I feel that psychology was Hubbard's GPL, and I talk about this more in the article "Scientology vs. Psychology." More reservations: the cost(I spent thousands, without even getting the Purif), the Freewinds (a luxury yacht on which higher-level auditing takes place), the fact that Hubbard wrote it all, so it's kind of "carved in stone," and there's this one line that I wish I could quote exactly, but I don't have the reference: "We have all the important information about the mind." Also, there's a document called "Pain and Sex" which I thought was odd when I read it, but I don't have a copy of it. Also, there's the whole "Xenu" issue.
After one has reached the state of clear, there are further levels to be achieved. The end goal (?) is to become an Operating Thetan (OT), which is one who is not dependent on a body and is in full control over matter, energy, space, and time. (A thetan is a spirit or soul.) The auditing levels above clear are named OT I, OT II, OT III, etc, until one finally becomes fully OT. Supposedly, at OT III, one was given the Xenu story, which describes how we were all victimized eons ago by Xenu. I don't remember the exact details; the story is available at many places on the internet. (Oh, by the way, we are all trillions of years old and we reincarnate. I don't have a problem with reincarnation, but the trillions of years throws me, as do the pieces of intergalactic history I've picked up here and there.) It seems that the Xenu story is no longer included in OT III, but it seems hard to believe, after looking at all the evidence, that anti-Scientologists made the whole Xenu thing up. This article is intended to be my own personal experience with Scientology, though, and I have no experience with Xenu.
The most important reservation would be: "Does the state of Clear exist?" If it does exist, it should be capable of being shown to exist to someone like James Randi, who offers $10,000 (perhaps more now) to anyone who can demonstrate a psychic ability.
Ethics Check: In writing the above article, have I committed a suppressive act? Here are some suppressive acts from Introduction to Scientology Ethics:
Issuing alter-ised Scientology technical data or information or instructional or admin procedures, calling it Scientology or calling it something else to confuse or deceive people as to the true source, beliefs, and practices of Scientology.
(Alter-ised, means "altered," which is in itself an example of alter-ising, since I'm not providing the complete definition. In order to avoid alter-ising, I would have to compose this essay entirely from quotes from Hubbard, which would then involve copyright laws. There's really no way to talk about Scientology without alter-ising, which is one reason why whenever you see John Travolta or Kirstie Alley or Tom Cruise in an interview, and you they are asked about Scientology, they'll say "read a book." This is also why supervisors are to show references instead of explaining things to students. However, it is not my intent to confuse or deceive you, and the word deceive involves a judgement call.)
Public disavowal of Scientology or Scientologists in good standing with Scientology organizations.
(I hearby state "publicly" that I am not currently a Scientologist.)
Writing anti-Scientology letters to the press or giving anti-Scientology or anti-Scientologist data to the press.
(Does saying "Hubbard was paranoid" on the internet count?)
Seeking to splinter off an area of Scientology and deny it properly constituted authority for personal profit, personal power or "to save the organization from the higher officers of Scientology."
(Well, this article doesn't do that.)
Engaging in malicious rumor-mongering to destroy the authority or repute of higher officers or the leading names of Scientology [Hubbard] or to "safeguard" a position.
(In conclusion, I do not believe putting this on the internet to be a suppressive act, though a Scientologist may disagree. He could say that the article may persuade some not to become involved in Scientology, which hurts Scientology, and is therefore suppressive. Oh well. You could look at the fact that I still "worry" over whether I'm being suppressive or not as a sign that they still have a "hold" on me after all this time.)