j0da said:
It's easy to say people are stupid if they are joining the ranks of Scientology, but only when you are not familiar with the breadth and depth of information provided in Scio materials - partly in books written by Hubbard, but most importantly in ones written by his once close associates.
<snip list of books and concepts>
Looks pretty much like what we are all discussing here, ech? The point I want to make is that Scientology and it's ofshoots is NOT for the stupid, to the contrary - it's especially designed to con those most courageous and intelligent seekers. The trick in this case lies in providing MOST of factual/probable information/working techniques and presenting a FALSE KEY to making sense of all this stuff. Therefore, you get a twisted understanding of what really is going on and what to do about it. Classic COINTELPRO at it's best implementation.
I have to agree.
Something I don't talk much about is the fact that, before we left Florida, I was contacted by several Scientologists who were interested in my work after reading the St. Pete Times article about me, and then reading The Wave. What is interesting is that these people were really high level... I mean, like "OT 8". It was all very hush hush. I made an agreement that I would never reveal their names, and I haven't and won't because they were very decent to me.
Anyway, the upshot of the whole thing was that they had doubts that Hubbard had "the whole banana" after all and they really wanted to know what was the "deepest level secrets" kind of thing. They kept pointing out that what the Cs say was so similar - in some ways - to things that Hubbard had come up with in his periods of "enlightenment" or whatever. They just felt that the organization had started to go down hill at some point, had lost its way, and the highest level stuff was being restricted and/or twisted for some nefarious purposes.
It was pointed out to me that Scientology has a very good record of getting people off the streets, off drugs, cleaning up their bodies, working diligently, and so on, and I agreed that this was a very worthy activity. What was missing, as far as I could see based on the data, was the element of free will. People were just exchanging one form of bondage for another.
Well, these people agreed with that assessment more or less, and pointed out that most people need a strong structure and leader.
Well, they have a point, don't they? If 50 % of the people on the planet might be OPs, yeah, they need structure. But the structure they need would be an STO one - if that is even possible, which I don't think it is. Maybe a better way to put it would be "utilizing STS to move in the direction of STO aims."
But that is not entirely what scientology is doing, I don't think. Based on information I was given by the above mentioned individuals, the church has some really dark affiliations at this point and you can bet that whatever structure and leadership is there has nefarious intentions, ultimately.
Anyway, to make this story a bit shorter, what ended up happening is that this group of people actually paid me (they would not take my time without paying me) to instruct them. They very much wanted to leave the church but they could not because of family considerations (they would have been separated from their children who were lifetime members and totally inculcated, etc), yet they wanted to know more, to BE more. So, I instructed them, we had a very satisfactory relationship; I had a lot of respect for them and they for me, and when we were getting ready to leave the U.S., they brought me a beautiful farewell gift and thanked me profusely for enriching their lives.
Never, at any point, did any of them try to persuade me that Scientology was "the way." In fact, they knew that, ultimately, it petered out and could not take people to higher levels of knowledge and awareness, that it was basically a dead end. They also began to think that Scientology was really a structure for OPs and that the new "head" was most definitely a psychopath. But of course, they had to keep all this to themselves.
In the end, I concluded that Scientology is no better and no worse than most any other church and if a person who is taken in by it has that "spark" within, as the people I was dealing with obviously did, it will direct them to a "way" at some point just as happens with anyone in any other social/cultural/religious trap.
