The other day, more than 14 years after leaving Scientology, I realized that one of the biggest wins I had in Scientology might not have been as valuable as I’ve been thinking it was.
In the 1980’s I was the Executive Director of the Peoria, Illinois Mission. As ED Peoria, I’d written High Crime Reports on David Miscavige and every member of Exec Strata for making the price of auditing and training in Scientology contrary to LRH HCOPLs. I had personally FEDEXED each of them their High Crime Reports. That got me into a lot of trouble. It got my auditing on the FPRD Basic list stopped, and it got me sent to SMI Int for Maoist re-conditioning. It got me replaced as ED, and all kinds of other things too entertaining to get into right now.
But 8 years later, I was no longer on staff in Peoria, and had moved out to LA and was on staff at the now defunct South Pasadena Mission. I was receiving auditing from Class 8 field auditor Melanie Murray, trying to finally finish my FPRD Basic List. Being Ex-CMO, Melanie had a whole series of staff corrections to be done on me that had been C/Sed by Class 9 and fellow Ex-CMO member Barbara Rubio. These corrections as a staff member had been deemed necessary before I could re-start my auditing to finally finish my FPRD.
I was also on the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course at this time, and I was studying the whole development of the technology of security checking. In the BC tapes, LRH gave all kinds of little known techniques that auditors can apply to pcs to get every “discreditable withhold” off of them that they have. One technique consisted of having the auditor be silent during the session and simply watch the pc’s needle, and to take up any thought the pc had which he wasn’t talking about.
It was designed to get off “session withholds” like “I just farted”, or “I wonder what you look like naked”, or “I have to poop.” In other words, this technique was used to break down all social barriers to what is polite and proper to talk about with someone else in our society, and to completely erase any sense of privacy and sense of self a person has.
I endured this type of sec checking for about 3 weeks, comprising 9 auditing sessions, most lasting 2-3 hours. At first I was extremely embarrassed at the things I had to talk about with Melanie. One time I had to tell her that I was just checking out her ass earlier when she bent over to pick something up, and that I thought it was very nice. Then this got into all kinds of things about sex and masturbation and sexual attraction and things that a person just doesn’t talk about with other people, especially other women that they are right now talking to in a non-sexual therapy session.
I was doing all this in order to gain greater spiritual freedom through Scientology, and I thought that it was being done to me in Scientology so that I could attain that greater spiritual freedom. I was going through all this embarrassment and social humiliation in these auditing sessions and looking for something, anything, good to happen to me.
After a while, I acquired a sense of learned helplessness regarding keeping my own private thoughts private, and I just gave up. I started spilling everything that occurred to me, no matter how socially inappropriate or humiliating to myself.
And that’s when the big win happened: I realized that everyone has these little things they think inside themselves, not just me. And that I am not degraded for thinking this way at all – just human. Like everyone else.
I started seeing how people keep up appearances by keeping embarrassing things private from other people – and even themselves – in order to “save face”. I saw how people constantly manage the social image others have of them. That social image can be completely false but you keep it that way in order to not embarrass yourself by being COMPLETELY OPEN AND OUTSPOKEN WITH EVERYONE AROUND YOU AT ALL TIMES WITH EVERYTHING THAT COMES INTO YOUR HEAD.
Big win, right?
Well, I thought so at the time. And for many years afterward.
Until the other day.
See, I’m in marketing, which is bad enough, but this “big win” that I had in Scientology has given me an approach to marketing that has, at times, made me less than successful. I once found myself being laughed at by a room full of fellow distributors for telling the absolute truth – with no sugar coating at all – about a product that we were distributing together. They were laughing at me because I had demonstrated no sales acumen whatsoever, and what I had said to a potential prospect would never make a sale.
There are other incidents like this in my career which have forced me to re-evaluate this “win” I had in Scientology, and to wonder why an auditing technique that was designed to break down all social boundaries and sense of self that a person had would be used to bring about greater spiritual freedom? Wouldn’t this technique ALSO be used on a slave or an enemy prisoner to get him into a state of mind where he told everything to his captors – especially when it did not benefit him to do so?
As any trained police interrogator knows, the person you are interrogating will receive no personal benefit for confessing his crimes to you, and will actually be much worse off for doing so. So, Interrogation 101 is to always work to set up a benefit for the suspect to confess his crime to you.
Wasn’t Ron’s promise of “Clear” and “OT” the benefit that he held out to us for confessing everything to him?
Yes.
In fact, as any BC student knows, when Hubbard reintroduced security checking into Scientology in the late 1950’s, he called security checking a process which gets a person straight to the new state of “Operating Thetan”. In the late 1950’s, he introduced security checking to Scientologists as “the first OT process”.
Think about that within the context of basic police interrogation technology.
People, Especially Scientologists, Can Get Stuck in Their Wins
I think that re-evaluating your wins in Scientology, based on new information and new experiences after Scientology, is an important thing to do.
If you never want to make any progress as a human being, or even as a “thetan” after Scientology, then NEVER re-evaluate your wins. Keep them sacred. Put them up onto a pedestal. Never look at them from different angles, never assess their value with anything else that you’ve learned since.
Keep them on that pedestal, and never take them down.
By the way, I’m slowly regaining my ability to be a “PR Personality” again after Scientology. Some day I hope to be fully recovered.
You’ll have to excuse me now, after all this, I have to poop.
Alanzo
I looked at scio-wins from the viewpoint of deprogramming and how they might be sucking me back toward scio-think and wishing it had worked.
With little effort on my part, just casual observation, the sci-win package floated around for a day or two and landed at: they were what they were when they were.
As aptly state in different ways above most scio-wins don’t stick and as John Doe says, the sensation is history.
By the way, Alonzo, since I’m totally out of scio and fully recovered, I wanted to tell you about about ok-there’s one little thing left so let me get out my e-meter and I’ll get back to you later.
That was a great post, dear Alanzo.
The way I evaluate wins is this :
1. Does it increase my self-determinism and my Free Will ?
2. Does my ability to handle life and work has improved ?
3. Am I able to relate better with others ?
4. Am I enjoying life better ?
5. Can I handle others better in such a way that I can make their lives easier and happier ?
If I can answer any of those positively, then it is a good win regardless where I got it from ; either from Scn, a book, other philosophies, or even from talking with a person.
I think that Scn create “Freedom addicts” ; I’ll explain myself. We were indoctrinated that we weren’t capable enough of coping with life and existence in our present “Home Sapiens” state. There was always a ruin that needed to get handled , and a next one, and a next one, and, and………
The “next level” would handle what we REALLY wanted to handle ; a never ending route to “Freedom”. Acceptance of ourselves as we are , is not something Scn ever taught us. Scn wasn’t designed as a self-help activity, or a “do-it-yourself” therapy even though it could have very easily done so should LRH have wanted that. But power and money, specially power, was apparently more important.
The fact is that the wins that I DID got with Scn, which were a lot, I could have gotten them with any good books excepting perhaps the ones from drilling TRs. That, and the subject of Study Tech. But many of us Scientologists or Ex(es) , had not been properly introduced to the field of philosophy, Human Rights, and the humanities before Scn, but mostly to some self-help books. So Scn was a new subject for many of us. Once in, we were cleverly indoctrinated into thinking that LRH had discovered EVERYTHING that ever needed to be discovered about life and livingness. So we needed not to look at ANY other sources of knowledge ; we were effectively isolated from the “Wog World” who was just a very down-tone, aberrated , and nothing-to-learn-from insignificant group.
Scn has the power to blind the intellect and the senses of those uninitiated in philosophy , as many of us were.
I still uses Scn very much, but the way to use it (or use any other
-ologies or -isms for that matter) is to evaluate EACH datum on its own and as its own, and test its workability based solely on our own observations. There should always be one and only one Authority : OURSELVES.
TC
Wow. I didn’t personally know Melaine but I heard really nice things about her. One being that she was actually making a living as a field auditor, one of the few. Hopefully she’s actively on the internet.
Yes. There were a lot of great people in Scientology. Melanie was one of them.
In fact, her whole family is great.
Alanzo
Alanzo, what happened to Melanie Murray?
I THINK I saw her in an RPF uniform a long long time ago …. maybe 2001?
It saddens me to hear that, Zlica.
The last time I saw Melanie was in the year 2000. She’d routed back into the Sea Org because her daughter had been recruited into the CMO at the age of 13. Melanie was frantic about this and she went back in because she was promised by Miscavige – with whom she used to work – that she would be posted in the CMO to be able to work with her daughter and keep an eye on her as any mother must.
So when she had routed in, Miscavige posted her in the Universe Corps at PAC instead.
I took her out to eat one night in early 2000 to catch up. When I arrived at the PAC Universe Corps to pick her up, her fanatic 18 year old senior looked me up and down like I was a criminal. She asked me where I was going to take her and when we would be back. It was very humiliating to see Melanie Murray, a class 8 auditor since she was a teenager who worked with Hubbard and Mayo, probably one of the best Scientology auditors in the world, having to tell a little 18 year Nazi Youth, “Yes Sir!” and “No Sir!”.
When we got in the car, she was strangely paranoid. She asked “Where are you taking me??” when we had already discussed where we were going – a Sushi place on Ventura that she had suggested to me a few months earlier.
When we got there, I could tell how much pressure she was under. She was smiling sickly sweet and theetie wheetie. She would rave on and on about how much Ron “Loved us!” for giving us the tech. This was not Melanie, but someone who appeared to me to have been spiritually and mentally broken. I was freaked out but trying to remain calm for her.
When it came time to pay, she stopped me. She said “We can’t allow outside influences to give us gifts.” She placed a $20 bill on the table. This was Teru Sushi, one of the best places on Ventura Blvd in Studio City. I accepted her $20 and paid the $110 bill.
I’ve always felt a kind of survivor’s guilt about Melanie. She is a second generation Scientologist, and grew up knowing nothing else. I was on my way out as a Scientologist at the time, and this incident with one of my best, most respected, and closest friends really shook me. I knew that there was nothing I could do, but still often thought it was my job to try to go save her.
It’s sad to think that they put her on the RPF.
But you can find her on Facebook today, so she must have gotten herself out of the SO, if not out of Scientology.
Alanzo
I so much understand about the robbed privacy of yours. For me it was like loosing myself and my self-respect and being owned.
Hubbard’s own definition of slavery is: “being positioned in another’s time and space.”
If you have no private corner, not one last spot where your privacy is not invaded or where you are convinced that you don’t own your own privacy, then you have no own space left – hence you are positioned in another’s space. You are owned. In the Sea Org you have also no own time.
I remember when I was ‘stealing’ moments of my own time, so that I had a moment for myself and could ‘breath’ mentally.
“Slavery: being positioned in another’s time and space.” I read that again and again when I was ‘routing-out’ for over a year, under constant surveillance, with my own security guard handler, a camera pointing straight at me even in the ‘study room’. No own space. No own time. I realized: Yes, I’m a slave.
“The Road to Freedom” is plastered with sacrifice and the more that you are ‘free’, the more you are owned by the CoS. Paradoxical
.
“Re- Evaluating my wins in Scientology” – so important. When I dropped the desperate “but my wins…!!” like the last straw to not confront that I wasted a part of my life and that “my wins” compared to what I gave up (myself) was in an odd relation, it was a sobering experience.
“When I dropped the desperate “but my wins…!!” like the last straw to not confront that I wasted a part of my life and that “my wins” compared to what I gave up (myself) was in an odd relation, it was a sobering experience.”
A lot of people do this after getting out of Scientology.
Sometimes, their own “wins” get in the way of seeing their own and others’ losses. Sometimes, their own wins justify their own and others’ losses!
I finally learned to count the hits AND the misses.
Sure I had wins, but I also had losses. When I finally allowed myself to combine those, I got a net result for having been involved in Scientology.
Alanzo
Great post Alan. Couple things came to mind.
First, the amount of duress and anxiety brought about by Scn Sec Checking (or even ruds for that matter) is pretty damn high. And one’s own concept of what constitutes an overt gets pretty twisted, to a point where little (if any) spiritual gain is possible. Hubbard successfully convinced others they were once Gods, and the main reason you are no longer a God is because of overts and withholds. Therefore, it stands to reason we’re gonna have ta sec check the shit outta ya. And we’re gonna charge you a stupid amount of money to get off overts like “I didn’t make my bed” or “I didn’t acknowledge my waitress.” The presumption is “you have a lot of overts” – you’re on Earth stuck in a meat body aren’t you?
This is one of those embarrassing moments – that I fell for that. What an operation…
Second, was the related area of taking something you learned or a win and applying it to the real world. There have been numerous occasions when I would sit around and discuss this with my Scn friends. Here we have the “secrets of the universe”, data no one else has, surely there must be a way to leverage that and make money off of it (which we would then give to the church and go up the Bridge). We’d have philosophical talks for hours and hours about ARC, KRC, the Tone Scale, Conditions of Existence, Ethics Condition Formulas…on and on. Always trying to shoehorn it into our jobs or profession. But, could never formulate a workable plan that actually made any difference. Of course, we would berate ourselves for not being bright enough or clever enough (which was further proof we needed to go up The Bridge). Only after I left did I realize that shit just doesn’t work in the real world – hell, it doesn’t even work in the Scn Bubble.
Statpush
(Good to see some new posts)
Yes, SP.
The idea that I am STILL, 15 years after leaving, spotting ideological idiocies that I swallowed from my days in Scientology and puking them back up says a lot. The farther I get away from Scientology as a whole – and that includes even being a critic of it – the more profound and life changing are my realizations about the extent to which Scientology fucked up my thinking and view of myself and the world.
I still keep up on Scientology news. But I can’t even say that I agree with all criticisms of Scientology any more. I am finding that I am even becoming a spinning malcontent to my former group of critics. I also have friends who never got involved in Scientology, and who also never got involved in or studied anything spiritual in their lives, who will never get what happened in Scientology and why I would stay in it for 16 years.
It’s like I’ve passed through a door where all the philosophical and spiritual work I’ve done in Scientology and after has left me in a room pretty much all alone. I have no approval or consensus from anyone for what I have learned, and where I am headed now.
For an ex-cult member, it’s something new for me.
What may be missed by some is the two-part nature of any win, whether attributed to scientology or something else.
The first part of any win is the narrative, the story of what happened that lead to the result of a win. This part of a win can be observed by others and, indeed, is the focus of “success stories” in scientology.
The second and most important part of any win is the emotional experience of it. Indeed, the emotional response defines it as a win. It feels like a win. It is the raison d’être of wins themselves.
At any given point in our lives, we are faced with obstacles to overcome. Almost universally, wins seem to occur when an individual overcomes some obstacle. Often, the magnitude of the win is proportional to the individual’s relative level of expectation of his own ability to overcome that obstacle.
All of these obstacles, and the overcoming of them occurs in the narrative, in the “what happened”. But the sensation of the win, the pot of gold, only happens in the subjective experience of the one having the win.
That is not able to be experienced by anyone else. It can be described, but not directly experienced
When one looks back on wins one had, in Scn or life, one can make the mistake of looking at the story and not the emotion.
The win of walking across the yard as a toddler seems laughable when viewed within the context, the story, of an adult.
But the sensation of the win is the same for the toddler taking those steps, for the teenager having his first kiss, for the businessman getting the promotion.
I guess what I’m saying is, keep your wins, and don’t place too much importance about the context in which they occurred, as to whether you should be permitted to have had a win. People can have all sorts of wins with the most unlikely things, even with things designed to harm them.
This is an excellent comment, John Doe. Thank you for that.
You wrote: “All of these obstacles, and the overcoming of them occurs in the narrative, in the “what happened”. But the sensation of the win, the pot of gold, only happens in the subjective experience of the one having the win.”
Yes, that subjective, emotional feeling I call a “brain spooge”.
I have come to see that brain spooges occur for us when we have a win, and when we get applause from a group of our peers, when we have great sex, eat great food, and snort a line of great cocaine.
Brain spooges are the key to recurrent behavior, habits and even addictions in human beings.
In that way, human beings are Spooge Monkeys.
Scientology wins definitely produce a brain spooge.
Alanzo
As Lady Squash has said in her response it is Grade 0 which supposedly allows you to communicate, not Grade 1 as I incorrectly said. Already the details of the subject are growing a little hazy in my mind.
Gimpy wrote:
“Already the details of the subject are growing a little hazy in my mind.”
I’d take a win on that one, Gimpy! 🙂
Alanzo
A very interesting re-evaluation.
My own win’s with the subject are quite limited, for example I don’t think I ever really ‘EP’d’ Grade one as I was never able to say rude, inappropriate things to others as other scns seemed to do, what a great benefit this ‘ability’ must be to them.
There is just one thing that still holds credibility for me and that is word clearing. Even under the scrutiny of sups on the freewinds I only paid lip service to the full clearing routine, however just looking up a word I didn’t know rather than guess at it was a real help – grammar terms especially. Still I have read since that word clearing was actually developed by students on the SHBC then taken by hubbard as his own invention.
All those hundreds of hours spent saying and doing the same thing over and over again on objectives seems now like a real waste of time – where is the long term benefit of this? But I’m sure that the new, wonderful, SRD fixes all past issues and makes super beings of everyone who does it.
I only had one sec checking session, auditing rudiments were my thing, these took the majority of the session time as i divulged the latest batch of scandal. I shudder at the thought that all I divulged is now sitting in a file guarded by a group of fanatics who will (and have) sold out their own family for the cause.
scn speaks of freedom but this is not a win I ever experienced with them, as I dragged myself in there in the final years it never felt like anything but slavery, I couldn’t wait for course time to be over, until one day the final straw broke and I was off to a far greater freedom than I’d known for many years with the cult.
Hi Alonzo,
Nice post.
I know what you mean. I routinely examine my “wins” and find them not to be as fantastic as I once did. One example is Grade O–ability to communicate freely with anyone about anything (or something like that). I attested, thought I could and the truth is I realized after I left, I had lost the ability to communicate as freely as I could before. It’s such a mind fuck.