Addition to Chapter 11

Excerpts

From print pg. 91 – 103

AS A SCIENTOLOGY COUPLE, I often felt like we were a balancing act walking a tightrope. What could I believe of Hubbard’s claims? What was real to me? What was real to Peter? What was the Scientology organization, really? One can be spiritual without being in a religion. One can be in a religion without being very spiritual. Businesses can capitalize on religion and spirituality. Religions can capitalize on business, as various groups like Scientology and Christian Science have done, to name just two.

Continue to excerpt:

RANT:

I have to diverge here with a rant reflecting my later opinions: Scientology has proven itself to be a purposely complex set of corporations, in business selling self-help services and products at retail fixed prices, under tax-exempt status as a religion in America, but they don’t get away with this in many other countries. The Church of Scientology International’s operations show us that one can be a corporation in business selling self-help services and products through retail outlets with fixed prices, and call that “religion” under tax-exempt status in America.

Scientology officials assert that Hubbard’s discussions about the spirit, spiritual beings, gods, and God legitimize Scientology as a religion. This reasoning ignores the fact that many products and services across various markets address the spirit and are dis-related to religion. Scientology does address the human spirit, but so do a lot of things—new age books, age-old philosophies, self-help techniques, messages in movies, meditation, yoga, wellness books and recordings, and the like. Nevertheless, Scientology’s dominion over the IRS won their status as tax-exempt (which I describe later), so Scientologists pay fixed prices but get to claim those purchases as tax-deductions as if they were donations. Between Scientology’s gross income collected, plus Scientology’s real estate investment businesses, this is millions of tax dollars a year not flowing into the American people’s tax contributions, benefiting no one in the U.S besides Scientologists and the Scientology corporations’ network.

Continues on print page 91: In my early days, I had a hard time referring to…

On print page 95, a paragraph begins with “I’d often re-read SOS’s Book One…” This excerpt follows:

THE EMOTIONAL TONES

SOS is considered by many Scientologists as a work of a genius, the first accurate prediction of human behavior. Outside of Scientology, the tone scale is considered a con because Hubbard provides no results from scientific testing or psychological evaluation for his claims. He doesn’t provide scholarly evidence of testings as do cognitive psychologists and scholars on the subject who worked in this field long before he wrote about it. Just some of those include psychologist William James’ 1884 theory of emotions (What is an emotion? from the Heart of William James), the James-Lange Theory of Emotion (late 1920s), and the Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotion (1927) not to mention Aristotle’s work on emotions in the Art of Rhetoric—none of whom Hubbard attributes yet appears to draw from.

Hubbard’s Chart of Human Evaluation provides a map of emotional “tones” used to perceive and predict certain behavior. Tones are emotional behaviors and mental manifestations that indicate the person’s general condition and ability to survive. The goal of auditing is to raise the individual on the tone scale (SOS, p. 242). Tones for a thetan with a body range from 0 at body death to +40, the ultimate tone for a spiritual being operating at full potential. Tones go below 0, too, which reflect the tone of the spiritual being separate from his/her body.

Scientologists learn how to display the different tones on the tone scale by acting them out with a partner. An expert of the tone scale should be able to match tones, or act a tone above or below the tone of others, to control other’s behavior. When a Scientologist knows just a few characteristics about another person, s/he can use this tone scale chart to plot the person’s position on the tone scale and thereby know, and even predict, the rest of the person’s behavioral characteristics. For example, if someone’s tone is from 2.0 (Antagonism) to bored, interest, happy or 4.0 (Enthusiasm) their analytical mind is in control.

Be aware that if you ever speak to an advanced Scientologist, s/he may be using the tone scale tech on you, striving to move you up or down the tone scale, according to their wishes. Strangely, Sea Org members I later worked with were not experts at using this tone scale tech, as evidenced by how they allowed church leadership to behave at low tone levels and treat staff destructively, without connecting their behavior to a particular tone level, and then doing anything about it. I saw the tone scale tech used more by public Scientologists, particularly Celebrity Centre public, who were really focused on using it to protect and improve their careers.

THE SNAKE PIT OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR, ACCORDING TO HUBBARD

Hubbard goes so far as to describe certain people as adders that dwell in the snake pit of human behavior, such as the devious and insidious critic of Scientology, homosexuals, fascists and communists (p. 198). The emotional tones of these folks are between 0 (body death) fear (1.0), covert hostility (1.1), anger (1.5), or 2.0 (Antagonism), where the reactive mind is in control (p. 198). This extremist appraisal of human behavior raises red flags about sexual orientation and critics’ freedom of speech. He condemns these behaviors as so undesirable and dangerous to society that “adders are safer bedmates than these people,” capable of doing vicious damage to others. If Scientology auditing can’t fix these people, then they should be “disposed of quietly and without sorrow” (SOS, p. 195). Deletion of these individuals from our social order “would result in an almost instant rise in the cultural tone” (p. 195) (bold emphasis mine).

Hubbard describes one of these adders, the homosexual, as a pervert or sadist, whose personal and sexual behavior is “the pollution and derangement of sex itself so as to make it as repulsive as possible to others and inhibit procreation” (p. 198). He makes no mention of a homosexual’s human rights or freedom to love the person of their choice. While Scientology claims to welcome all people, Hubbard would prefer to delete them from our social order if Scientology can’t “fix” them. Read testimonies online by people (such as Michael Pattinson and Nora Beth Crest) who tell how Scientology took their money to address their sexual orientation and made no change.

SOS reveals how Hubbard condones human extermination. He explains that a Venezuelan dictator once improved the country by wiping out lepers and beggars. His anecdote concludes with, “By the simple expedient of collecting and destroying all the beggars in Venezuela, an end was put to leprosy in that country” (SOS, p. 196). As a novice Scientologist stunned by this content, I remember questioning its meaning in the classroom. The supervisor told me to find my misunderstood words if I had a problem with it. I can only explain why I continued in Scientology despite reading this, by saying that I assumed I didn’t yet understand what Hubbard meant and would learn it in the more advanced levels.

Hubbard even offers a description of how the International Management leadership commands the environment, although he places the information under his description of subversives and fascists in the low-toned range of 0.6 to 2.0. Around 1.4, we see absolute control using forthright and strong-armed means to seek that control. He says, “The dominance of others is continually preached, where safety and safeguarding are continually stressed and where destruction and threats of punishment are used to force others.” At 1.3 and below is the subversive who “promises a people freedom…and gives them a slaughter of their best minds…. to the end of totalitarian dominance” (SOS, p. 202).

As an early Scientologist, this struck me like a lightening bolt but I didn’t say anything. Hubbard says “the idea of having the right to do hidden and vicious things for a ‘glorious’ cause” is attractive to people of this tone level. Yes indeed, this describes the general offerings of freedom to Scientologists who, in exchange for money, become entrapped in the system. It describes the groupthink that justifies Scientology’s fair gaming against critics such as journalist Paulette Cooper, Leah Remini, Mike Rinder, me, and on; and hate speech against too many ex-members to count, who left the organization and revealed their experiences to media. As my friend Doug Parent posted on Mike Rinder’s blog (7/19/17): “Scientology denies what Scientology actually does to people and blames others for what it is really doing. Without disconnection and the eternity card, Scientology would be toothless.”

(Continues on print page 95 at Moral Exclusion, through Death Struggle Over Money.)

CONTROLLING THE SCIENTOLOGY MINDSET THROUGH LANGUAGE

We know that people think through language, a system of rules using words as symbols that allow users to create meaning, define reality, and experience the world. Through Scientology’s nomenclature, I learned concepts—many that I’ve already described—that differ with the principles known to the non-Scientology outside world that we learn in school and our upbringing.

But Hubbard denigrates and attacks the “normal” as being wog, inferior, unenlightened, middle class status quo. Freedom of thought begins to vanish for a new Scientologist, because Hubbard’s specialized vocabulary replaces the words we used in our pre-Scientology way of thinking. Thousands of words with exclusive meanings created by Hubbard, on hundreds of thousands of pages of Hubbard’s books and policies—it’s an overwhelming volume that makes Scientology look larger than life itself. At times I felt lost and groping for familiarity, which creates that feeling of being in a labyrinth, with one’s life minimized by the magnitude of the Scientology materials, and making a person dependent on Scientology for getting through it.

In the beginning, I thought my world was getting so much bigger because of learning Scientology. In truth, the opposite was happening. Scientology words don’t expand our thought through its many “new” words; instead, the range of our thought shrinks because only the “correct” thought is a Scientology thought, and other modes of thought are wrong.

When I bring up Scientology’s nomenclature, we could just as easily be talking about the language of the Party in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In a nutshell, the Party ruled Oceania as a totalitarian state, using Newspeak to meet the ideological requirements of the Party’s principles. The population’s mindset included living with doublethink, holding two opposite ideas in their mind simultaneously. Reading this book would help anyone better understand at least how Hubbard uses Scientology’s loaded language to control its members and how Scientologists think through Scientology terms. I’ve already explored the concept of “freedom”—a perfect example of Scientology doublethink.

While Sea Org members work to ensure Scientology is delivered to mankind to help people achieve spiritual freedom, they work in slave-like conditions with no autonomy in their prison of belief. A Scientologist spends huge amounts of time and money on the Scientology bridge to attain spiritual freedom, while becoming entrapped in Scientology beliefs and practices that strip them of their money and time.

Ideas that diverge from party principles, such as morality, democracy, science, and religion, are unthinkable in the population. Big Brother allows none of those ideas to actualize in the masses’ world. The words that matter to Scientologists are the specialized terms in the Technical Dictionary and Management Dictionary, and anything else used in Hubbard’s policies. Scientology’s authoritarian bureaucracy controls its membership through language: the smaller the choice of words, the smaller the temptation to take independent thought.

Notably absent from the Scientology vocabulary and lifestyle are words and actions I learned in my family and early school days: love, grace, sin, salvation, faith, worship, God the creator, compassion, kindness, tolerance, I’m sorry, and “forgive me for making a mistake.” Since Scientology is not based on love, grace, worship, faith, or salvation, these words are not in Scientology’s lexicon, nor are the actions that go with those words displayed in a Scientologist’s behavior. Children born into Scientology do not usually learn these concepts or behaviors.

I was unaware of being controlled by Scientology’s language, particularly because we studied Scientology in the context of achieving spiritual freedom. So who would think we were being controlled, while studying about freedom? We were convinced to accept all the Scientology nomenclature as a specialized language, as if this is as common as the specialized words we find in medicine, accounting, and the like. Scientology’s exclusive vocabulary has meanings and usages that don’t exist in the outside world: theta, Clear, OT, Reg, as-is, blow charge, PTS, SP, pantywaist dilettante, refund case, stat crasher, stat pusher, FPRD case, keyed in, keyed out, and on and on. As an adult learns Scientology, its words, ideas and rules replace former ways of thinking with Scientology’s ways.

Hubbard’s Study Technology is a major tool of Scientology indoctrination through words. We were shown the only way to study, what language to use, and how to use it. Scientology’s specialized vocabulary is a complex system of words with specialized definitions that only a Scientologist can use in context. This makes Scientology less accessible than a religion using everyday language truly meant for the masses for planetary “clearing.” Children are thus more desirable as recruits because they haven’t yet developed a life full of language and concepts, and are more easily moldable to Scientology thinking.

I admit that I eventually drew power from knowing and speaking this exclusive language. Having knowledge of a specialized subject created a sense of superiority over others who didn’t know it. The power that Scientology language had over me, over Peter and my friends, intrigued me but concerned me. I sometimes thought of it as liberating because I could use it to control life, and other times thought of it as dehumanizing when people didn’t understand what I was saying and this made them feel excluded or diminished. But it shaped my spirituality, and was my world. I couldn’t yet see that this special language put me in any danger, or that I was caught in a dichotomy. I failed to see at the time how arrogant this was, and that it made me look and act like a cult member.

Years later, getting a college education, especially in English and Communication helped me to clear out the Scientologese from my language habits, and restore my mind by re-connecting with culture as part of the outside world again. Education also helped me to realize just how powerful a factor language is in our humanity, which is why I wanted to specialize in the English language and help people use it to their advantage.

All that being said, it would feel incomplete to avoid a discussion of Scientology ethics tech: the molten lava of the Scientology world that heatedly shapes the ideas and behavior of every Scientologist—ethics, suppression, potential trouble sources, justice, disconnection, and fair game.