Ensifer

By “you people” I mean all you Scientologists and ex-Scientologists.

By “crazy” I mean frustrated and having the near irrepressible desire to grab you around the throat and strangle you until you start making sense!

And I have my friend down in California to thank for reminding me why I am being driven crazy by people who revolve around the Scientology galaxy.

By “friend down in California” I mean my friend Penny. A person who I have known for something approaching 40 years now. And who despite her tenacious and wolverine-like grip on life, creating a future and facing the world open-armed with a smile in her face and glint in her eye… she still somehow manages to assign way too much of the reason for what is actually innate and precious in her own self to the writings, mumblings, random page farts and semi-psychotic military obsession of a SF writer-turned-Guru who has been dead and incinerated for almost 25 years now.

So now that you are aware that Scientologists make me crazy and that Penny is one of the legion of crazy-making people, I’ll explain myself…

The basic premise of L. Ron Hubbard’s storyline is that all of us are immortal Thetans. For the uninformed, that means we are spirits who have no beginning and no end. We’ve always been here and always will be here. That wasn’t the story when Hubbard wrote Dianetics though. It came along when he spun Scientology out in the form of Science of Survival. So, just to clarify – everyone here is immortal. Which means that everyone here was here before. Got it? Okay.

Now enter Scientology and auditing. If a person underwent Dianetics and ran a mess of engrams and secondary incidents during the auditing and yet didn’t exhibit the stated attributes of a “clear”… or an individual who had effectively erased all subconsciously damaging elements of their mind… or in Hubbard’s parlance: erased the Reactive Mind… then one has to ferret out the problem. Why isn’t this  person acting like a Clear when they are no longer able to recall undiscovered painful memories that are ruining them?

Like most problems of this nature the answer is probably simple. As in… maybe there aren’t any more destructive incidents ruining the person? Now that isn’t a good answer because it fails to solve the problem of how to get the person to give you more money. Another answer is required here…hmmmm… OH! I know! How about this – the person isn’t recalling any more engrams and losses because the basic on the chains of engrams and losses isn’t in this lifetime! Now that is a much better answer. Not nearly as simple as the obvious one… but much more appropriate for engineering a world-wide organization of pasty-complected white people wearing quasi-military garb and rushing around the planet buying buildings, remodeling them and taking awesome pictures of the pristine interiors.

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So anyway. Penny was having a phone conversation with me a few days ago and it turned into one of the heavy rap sessions. Kind of reminded me of the good old days in the late 60’s when we all used to hang out at Denny’s down by the LA Org and drink coffee, rap, try and get laid and just in general revel in the awesomeness of being immortal. Of course it helped that we were mostly 20 years old, mostly affluent enough to hang out in downtown LA until 3am and, like all 20 year olds… mostly immortal anyway. The only thing missing from the rap session Penny and I had the other evening was the bitter coffee and the french fries with brown gravy on them. Yum.

The conversation boiled down to two basic things.. both of which drive me crazy. Thing #1 was this – “if not for Scientology I would be dead/in jail/a drug addict/axe murderer or some other sort of negative statistic”. Thing #2 was this – “the Scientology tech is what will return me to my previous state of immortal wonderfulness”.

Now what I got out of the conversation is that Penny, like most people well-steeped in the tech, lore and arcane minutia of Scientology, just doesn’t question either of those two items. And that’s not meant as a criticism of you, or my friend, or anyone… it’s merely an observation. Once you hit a tipping point in Scientology immersion you typically no longer question either your immortality or the reality that without Scientology you were clearly going to be fucked.

Neither of those things explains people who don’t believe that stuff and are somehow still successful, happy, creative, wealthy, full of life, fun, skilled and just all sorts of cool.

But Penny is sharp and she turned the tables on me when I began to get somewhat offended that she still attributes her… her… her… awesomeness is the word… she contributes it to Scientology. And I don’t. Not only that, I told her as much. And I have told hundreds of other people the same thing. But she came right at me… like a wolverine… and asked me if I had any whole track recalls. Or if I have ever run a chain that extended into past lives. Or if I had actually ever even had a win in Scientology. She’s good… if I had a Scientology Mission right now I’d put her in as Chief Registrar. I had to answer that yes, I had many successes, revelations and wins while being audited and trained. And yes, during auditing I didn’t hold back and just offered up whatever imagery popped up when asked to find an earlier incident.

The real question, for me anyway, is the question of whether it matters one way or the other if those recalls are real or not. To me it doesn’t make a whit of difference. I honestly never thought about it and to be brutally honest… I never even gave much thought to what came up in my auditing after the session was over. I just wasn’t interested. I still ain’t interested. It didn’t matter to me then and it doesn’t matter to me now. If any auditors or highly trained Case Supervisors are reading this (not likely)  you are, no doubt, writing a program for me at this very minute that will handle my nonchalance when it comes to the matter of past lives or immortal thetans.

I think Penny’s point to me was that Scientology does have value and that being an ex-Scientologist means staying connected to the Scientology Galaxy in one way or another. Maybe I’m splitting hairs here but my take on that is that people who leave Scientology are honor-bound to be skeptical of virtually everything L. Ron Hubbard ever wrote and every word he ever spoke. If his so-called discoveries were real or in anyway unique then it stands to reason that thetans would be popping out of their bodies, stopping terrorists, irrigating crops in the Sudan, extracting drinking water from the oceans, re-freezing Antarctica and just in general making the world a safer place for all 6 billion of us. Well, 6 billion not counting another 200-900 billion body thetans clinging to our naughty bits.

And that brings me to the storyline of us being these down-trodden immortal beings who were tricked and then trapped by vile and evil forces billions of years ago and then dumped unceremoniously into active volcanoes.  How exactly is that possible again? And what about the ‘between lives implants’ that Hubbard told us were the primary reason we don’t have clear, useful knowledge of past lives? Even the most recent one? People have been getting Scientology and Dianetic auditing for 60 years now. Some of you have have thousands upon thousands of hours of this auditing and have attained lofty status on the top of the Bridge. So why no OT abilities? And hey, how come since NASA has sent spacecraft around the moon and Mars and several other planets haven’t we seen images of these implant stations?

Hubbard said they were there. Right?

I just had a thought… they didn’t remove those pages from his books did they? You tell me, I sold all my books on eBay back in the late 90’s when people were still paying good money for them.

Does Scientology actually work?

Of course it does. That’s the easy answer. But so does taking a walk on a sunny day. Other things that work are learning to read and write or being lucky enough to grow up in a home with two loving parents. From my very simplistic view on life pretty much anything that prods a person to look at something in a new way or to move in a fashion they aren’t used to moving in can have very positive results on their emotional and mental health. Why would auditing be any different?

Hubbard had flashes of brilliance as well. Most of what I consider brilliance doesn’t mean other people not adherents of Scientology don’t understand the brilliant parts… it just means that Hubbard wrote something or spoke about something in a way that dove-tailed nicely with my questions or desire to know. It doesn’t mean he actually “discovered” or “sourced” anything at all. And that speaks again to my point that Scientologists and ex-Scientologists that are still attached to the whole Hubbard-ness of Scientology are long overdue for a bit of reading and study outside the scope of their Scientology books, auditor course packs and official HCO Policy Letters.

Scientology is all about problems

No really, it is. You may think it’s about returning to your glorious state of immortal awesomeness, but it isn’t. The sole valid reason for giving people like Sea Org people actual money and then subjecting yourself to very personal interrogations attached to an electric device would be that you have honestly arrived at a point in your life where you have run out of useful solutions for your problems.  If you just start stripping away all the dross and rhetoric  and the fanciful prose and lengthy diatribes about how fantastic the “tech” is and how you never, ever, not in another 65 billion years, would ever have had that realization… if you strip all that garbage out of your personal storyline you’re going to end up in one place regarding Scientology – it’s a tool that you understood would help you resolve problems.

It’s not magical. Well, maybe to some it is. But that’s just marketing. Compare Scientology to a hammer, okay? If you have nails and you have boards and you’re trying to build a thing-a-ma-bob using a rock to drive the nails into the boards… then you have a problem. You can do it. I know because I’ve done it. Don’t ask… okay? I did and it wasn’t pretty.

But a hammer is just a hammer right?

Sort of. That was my argument to Penny when she proclaimed that without Scientology she very likely would have ended up in some terrible life condition and so forth and so on. What I wanted her to know is that I view her as “senior” to anything L. Ron Hubbard ever wrote or said. To me people are more valid than words… or tech… or bibles or holy edifices or anything created by anyone else.

My view of Scientology “Tech” is that it’s just another bag of tools designed to theoretically solve problems that people would like to resolve. So… would you give $100,000 for a building fund to glorify the guy who built the first hammer? Or would you deify the many books written by one person about hammer-usage that claim to reveal not only the ancient secrets of hammers… but also claim to contain the only true way to properly apply a hammer to a nail?

If you answered yes to that then you are probably pretty fucked up. But you didn’t answer yes because the idea of considering a tool to be in any way “senior” to the person wielding the tool is just silly. Except that’s pretty much exactly what Scientologists do. And many ex-Scientologists as well. At some point along their progression through the labyrinth of attaining that ever-elusive state of OT they hit that tipping point I mentioned earlier. They bought the idea that Scientology really is “the way to immortal freedom”.

So every time the ranks of hammer-users thin out – due largely to people solving problems and then moving on with their lives or perhaps to realizing that hammers only work well on wood and they want to build something out of metal – the command structure of Scientology goes into overdrive and generates new uses for old hammers. Or they gussy up the hammers they’re selling and explain that not only are you people not using the hammers properly, you’re using Squirrel Hammers and you need the new, on-tech, official hammer.

What all this comes down to, for me anyway, is that Scientology was never about becoming immortal, regaining full knowledge of the Whole Track, attaining some idyllic state of OT or anything of the sort. Like most people, I had some problems I was getting hung up on and solving them meant I needed to add some tools to my bag. I guess my answer to Penny about whether or not I ever had any huge wins or ran a past life incident that was “so real” is pretty mundane. Yeah, I had wins. Sure, I looked exactly where the auditor asked me to look and revealed everything I saw. But at no time did I ever consider anything I experienced in Scientology  as being unattainable without Scientology. It worked for me like any tool and when the tool distributor began making demands that I buy tools I didn’t need or want or report to them how I used my tools then the relationship became more about the tool then it did about the user.

By the way… feel free to tell me I’m an idiot or that I failed to clear up some basic M/U’s or that some C/S missed a vital aspect of my case. That’s exactly what the Sea Org recovery people tried to tell me 25 years ago.  I still own the original tools I bought from Hubbard and they work just fine. With some modifications… of course.