For Current Scientologists That Are Curious

[Karakorum]

Actually, it does come down to (1) or (2).

Regarding your superior, what you seem to be saying is that he didn't believe the tech would increase your ability to get your job done, to a degree sufficient to justify even the minimal expense and effort of having a staff-staff auditor.

If he believed that, then on what basis would he agree with Scientology justifing getting people to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for it?

Ok, emotional old-timer outburst over. I had unenturbulated myself since the previous post

Speaking frankly, I believe we were closer to 2 than 1. Though it certainly wasn;t a cynical: "Tech doesn't work, but we're gonna keep pushing it" approach either. I guess we believed in the big picture, but that doesn't mean we believed in every single piece of scientology there was out there.

To use an analogy to Christians: "We were the guys who still believe in Jesus and prayer, but we no longer believed that prayer alone would save uncle Jim from his cancer".

By SO standards were were a hard-nosed, close-knit, "boots-on-the-ground", "hit the ground running" outfit. No mercy for slow or disoriented people. But we also the most humor-friendly part of scientology I have ever seen. With all the standup-comedy style jokes flying around, I wouldn't trade that team for any other spit&polish deadly serious "stick-up-the-arse" SO outfit.

And just to be clear: That superior I mentioned? By the time I left the SO he was gone and I was sitting in his chair and had to go through the same tough decisions he would. Well, I guess I "led by example". I didn't get any OT levels done there, but I closed a boatload of cases.

 

[Enthetan]

And just to be clear: That superior I mentioned? By the time I left the SO he was gone and I was sitting in his chair and had to go through the same tough decisions he would. Well, I guess I "led by example". I didn't get any OT levels done there, but I closed a boatload of cases.

One point of curiosity: did you get pressure to focus on cases which might have impact on org GI, or create "out-PR flap", at the expense of not spending time on cases that just involve some public getting screwed?

 

[Karakorum]

One point of curiosity: did you get pressure to focus on cases which might have impact on org GI, or create "out-PR flap", at the expense of not spending time on cases that just involve some public getting screwed?

Yes and no. It wasn't that simple.

Internally we were in control of our operation, we cooperated very closely with one another and often traded cases. So not infrequently a longer case would be closed with 4 different people working on it at different points in time. There was no "formal" way to mark a case as super important, but we had some internal informal ways and most of the time we would just talk: "Hey dude, look at this! Geez this is gonna be big, we need to focus on this one!"

There was some systemic stat-based pressure, and that was "aging cases". Simply put: cases shouldn't sit too long in the queue without having been pushed forward and these shouldn't stay too long with no closure. We would need to get all that into nitty-gritty level with reports. If a case was aging for too long people would take notice and we would need to explain very carefully why this is so.

The good part was that if I had a really big complex case and had stuff like: "Yeah, we need to send a guy to San Francisco in person to get this done", there would usually not be any extra heat from above. People could be pushy, but after I was done talking to them they would stop demanding the impossible.

So if we thought some case was more important we could go with that over other stuff. Doesn't matter if it was local org level or some AOLA nonsense. Even from our own initiative, we did tend to prioritize out-2D and financial stuff and these things also got some more attention from above. But it wasn't excessive.

So far, everything would be relatively fine...

BUT...

...Enter the CMO:

"Kara, guys, Kara, guys! KAAAARRRAAAA! Drop EVERYTHING you are doing this instant and just work on THIS ONE CASE!!! NOOOOOOWW!!!"

Sometimes it was something which did look like some serious financial irregularities (though most often it turned out someone was just falsifying stats in a stupid way while the real money was all safely there). But quite often the CMO requests made no rhyme nor reason and left us all scratching our heads why "some idiotic tiny KR originating from some hicks in the sticks would fly so high".

And yep, sometimes this would be some real PR-tar-baby that everyone would recoil from at first sight. I would take a look around the room for a person to assign it to... and everyone tries to appear as small and as busy as possible hoping someone else gets this dreadful, writhing, black, horrible bloody mess that just landed on our plate.

Everyone would get one such case from time to time, there was no way out of that. Some were simply HUGE with over 70 different people marked in a single inv case. Some were not huge, but were super tricky. Some were just related to horrible people who would absolutely lash out at us if we made a single error somewhere in all the of pages of documentation that would be needed to be filed before the case was closed.


But yeah, the most crazy weird things and the most intense pressure came from these sudden CMO 'requests'. Worst if it was a request to re-open some old case that someone decided we must have botched (and sometimes we in fact did) At times CMO peeps did demand the impossible. If I got a buck for each disagreement I had with them....
Yeah shouting matches with the CMO, my fav sport


EDIT: I think the worst out-PR cases never reached us. I never recall anything to do with Tom Cruise or any celebrity for example. I'm sure these were done by someone at the International level, or by some OSA special tiger team or something.

We would get serious stuff, but serious for our level. Which might also be the reason why I never saw even 1 rape case or 1 pedophilia case.

 

[Dotey OT]

Bump

 

[Dotey OT]

Bump

 

[Karakorum]

If auditing really made people "more able", then there would have been a push to get staff up the bridge. But there wasn't.

This implies that senior execs either:
1) believe in the tech, but don't want it applied (They are SPs), or
2) Do not believe the tech works, but want to sell it to the gullible (They are SP con-men)

Either way, the ones at the top are suppressive.

Actually, it does come down to (1) or (2).

Regarding your superior, what you seem to be saying is that he didn't believe the tech would increase your ability to get your job done, to a degree sufficient to justify even the minimal expense and effort of having a staff-staff auditor.

Speaking frankly, I believe we were closer to 2 than 1. Though it certainly wasn;t a cynical: "Tech doesn't work, but we're gonna keep pushing it" approach either. I guess we believed in the big picture, but that doesn't mean we believed in every single piece of scientology there was out there.

I guess I want to revisit the issue brought up by the 3 quotes above. I thought about it for a few days and I think that the "believed in the tech, but not completely" part had indeed applied to the supervisor I mentioned. It did not apply to me.

I would say by the end I was squarely in the "type 2" you mentioned - I did not believe the tech works.
If I had to be super precise (using neoplatonic tripartite terms) I'd say I believed that both the vegetative soul and the rational soul die with the body. The sensitive soul goes back to and is dissolved in the world soul. The world soul in accordance with Poltinus then emanates both time and the physical world (thus reincarnation).

Of course, the idea that the rational soul dies with the body will utterly defeat the purpose of any gnostic philosophies including scientology.

Thus, I did not believe in clear and TO powers, I did not believe that touch-assists mean anything, I knew we were not going to clear the planet. I also knew that "we", as defined by our memories and thoughts, will also not "come back".

Soo... I guess I was in fact a suppressive. Maybe that SP declare had more sense than they ever knew.

I still soldiered on for some 2 years, mostly focused on trying to take firm control over our part of the administrative system and making it work. Of course it would never work and obtaining further control was both risky and wasn't worth it to begin with. That was Ron's game and I didn't want to play it.

How many people in the management reached the same conclusions? Honestly, I think zero.

 

[Dotey OT]

Way back when, there was an idea amongst the tech people that if we could get staff rolling on courses or auditing, we could get the org rolling. I guess that was in my days of the tech working, so this would be "Applying the tech", as it were. It was also a care factor of sorts to our fellow staff members. I was a tech guy and I also cared about the people that were being fucked either less than, equal to or greater than I was being fucked.

It wasn't easy getting staff debugged on sleep and food to get them into and onto course. Getting auditors to handle a bugged staff member was another issue. Staff students that immediately fell asleep when walking into a courseroom was common. By any measure, the staff were pretty fucked up. That's twenty or twenty-five years ago.

I recall having four staff in the courseroom on a Monday morning, (maybe 25 total staff members total at that time) and having the FBO screaming that we had become a "staff clinic". Ordered all of them back onto post. I started to develop the idea that it didn't work or wasn't important.

 

[Dotey OT]

Bump

 

[Karakorum]

Staff students that immediately fell asleep when walking into a courseroom was common.

That sounds super familiar.

 

[Dotey OT]

Bump

 

[Dotey OT]

Bump

 

[Incognito]

Thirty years in

Out in 2017

FSMd by an "upstat and able" friend. He is no longer in.

One hell of an ethics cycle made me WAKE UP.

The huge amount of doubt about it all became so large that I was exiting quietly, but decided to join staff once again. This after three Ls, clear, tons of training. I saw public lied to on a continual basis by senior Sea Org people. It was habitual. I attended events where the stats at my org were falsified. These were Int events.

There is more.

Thanks for this info...what were the L's like? What sort of questions did u get? Jason beghe says in his interview that they messed him up....! Also did u feel anything after clear or was that just because u got a huge validation and love bombing so u felt amazing ?!

 

[Trippy]

What do you believe the biggest obstacle to current member's seeking out the truth are?

1) That they just believe any criticism of the church is an outright lie, spoke by SP's with bad motivations and thus see no reason to research Scientology on the web.

2) That they're scared that when the truth is revealed to them, their entire way of living, their thought processes and belief systems, will be stripped so far away from them that living the lie is better than the consequences of facing the truth.

 

[stratty]

What do you believe the biggest obstacle to current member's seeking out the truth are?

1) That they just believe any criticism of the church is an outright lie, spoke by SP's with bad motivations and thus see no reason to research Scientology on the web.

2) That they're scared that when the truth is revealed to them, their entire way of living, their thought processes and belief systems, will be stripped so far away from them that living the lie is better than the consequences of facing the truth.

Well, the first scenario reflects how things are pretty much IMO. In your second example, if they were 'seeking out the truth' as you put it, they'd simply be wasting their time if they then refused to accept it wouldn't they?

 

[I told you I was trouble]

What do you believe the biggest obstacle to current member's seeking out the truth are?

1) That they just believe any criticism of the church is an outright lie, spoke by SP's with bad motivations and thus see no reason to research Scientology on the web.

2) That they're scared that when the truth is revealed to them, their entire way of living, their thought processes and belief systems, will be stripped so far away from them that living the lie is better than the consequences of facing the truth.

I think it's often a combination of both but fear is never a good reason to remain shackled if you don't have to be is it?

The longer a person is in the cult the more they usually have to lose when they finally leave and one of the most traumatic losses can be that of family so avoiding the truth at all costs may seem like a good idea for a while.

There are a lot of exes nowadays (far more than 2.5%, lol!) but I don't think I have ever heard of anyone saying they wish they hadn't freed themselves from the cofs even if they did lose family, as many of us did.

Welcome to ESMB @Trippy .

 

[Dotey OT]

They already know the truth, as it has been told to them by lrh. There is no reason that anyone in their right mind would criticize scientology, so they must not be in their right mind.

So it is yes to 1).

But it is also a bit yes to 2).

With all of the unanswered questions and illogical things observed by the scientologist, like me for example, I just did not want to believe that something bad could be true, regardless of the fact that many signs pointed to it.

So I would say definitely 1), for me when I was gung ho. But 2) crept in more and more, as I saw odd things.

 

[Dotey OT]

What do you believe the biggest obstacle to current member's seeking out the truth are?

1) That they just believe any criticism of the church is an outright lie, spoke by SP's with bad motivations and thus see no reason to research Scientology on the web.

2) That they're scared that when the truth is revealed to them, their entire way of living, their thought processes and belief systems, will be stripped so far away from them that living the lie is better than the consequences of facing the truth.

Oh, and Welcome!!!!

 

[Dotey OT]

What do you believe the biggest obstacle to current member's seeking out the truth are?

1) That they just believe any criticism of the church is an outright lie, spoke by SP's with bad motivations and thus see no reason to research Scientology on the web.

2) That they're scared that when the truth is revealed to them, their entire way of living, their thought processes and belief systems, will be stripped so far away from them that living the lie is better than the consequences of facing the truth.

There is a trap associated with this.

As a practicing scientologist, if you felt there was something wrong with scientology that you needed to know something about, you had nowhere to go. What had been done to you prior to this was to develop in you the certainty (but not certainty with regard to the truth) that there was nothing to gain by looking outside of scientology for information about scientology.

All scientologists know the following: The internet is full of lies. Only people with overts post bad things about scientology. Only psych based hate sites exist, and the psychs put tons of money into blasting the internet full of lies about scientology. This is done because the psychs want to destroy scientology, and destroy the world. The only problem is that none of this is true.

The truth is scientology creates false websites about people that go public with actual stories and truth about scientology. Again, scientology is guilty about what it accuses others of doing.

So then as a scientologist, you are trapped, knowing something is wrong but not knowing how to find out what it is that is wrong.

 

[Dotey OT]

There is a trap associated with this.

As a practicing scientologist, if you felt there was something wrong with scientology that you needed to know something about, you had nowhere to go. What had been done to you prior to this was to develop in you the certainty (but not certainty with regard to the truth) that there was nothing to gain by looking outside of scientology for information about scientology.

All scientologists know the following: The internet is full of lies. Only people with overts post bad things about scientology. Only psych based hate sites exist, and the psychs put tons of money into blasting the internet full of lies about scientology. This is done because the psychs want to destroy scientology, and destroy the world. The only problem is that none of this is true.

The truth is scientology creates websites with data about people that go public with actual stories and truth about scientology. Again, scientology is guilty about what it accuses others of doing.

So then as a scientologist, you are trapped, knowing something is wrong but not knowing how to find out what it is that is wrong.

L Ron Hubbard said that scientology was the only way out of "The Trap."

What he neglected to tell anyone was that scientology was a trap.

This is just one of many things that a scientologist does not want to hear, as in 2) above:

2) That they're scared that when the truth is revealed to them, their entire way of living, their thought processes and belief systems, will be stripped so far away from them that living the lie is better than the consequences of facing the truth.

 

[Karakorum]

There is a trap associated with this.

As a practicing scientologist, if you felt there was something wrong with scientology that you needed to know something about, you had nowhere to go. What had been done to you prior to this was to develop in you the certainty (but not certainty with regard to the truth) that there was nothing to gain by looking outside of scientology for information about scientology.

Yep, that's very true. Which is why one needs a certain amount of self-confidence and risk-taking to get out.
At some point, one needs to say: "Actually, I know better than Hubbard/CoS - thank you very much!"

Those who lacked sufficient self-confidence to put their own experience above church doctrine... well, they are still in.