The Big Empty part 4 Losing My Religion

 The Big Empty

This is the fourth post in a series on the state a person may find themselves in after leaving a cult. It's in part my own personal experience and in part the result of reading several books on cults and seeing the biographies of ex cult members and their remarks about life after the cult. I recommend that all the posts in this series be read in order from first to last as several build on points made in the earlier posts.

Note: here is a link to my blog archive by topic which has almost all my older posts at the blog sorted into categories for your convenience.

• Blog Archive by Topic

So, I hope in the earlier posts in this series I established that Scientology founder Ronald Hubbard intentionally and knowingly set out to mentally enslave people. He tried to use a combination of new terms and contradictions to overwhelm people. He was convinced that if he could present himself as an unequaled authority and expert on the mind, spirit, and a number of other things that his statements would be accepted as hypnotic commands. 

These commands (he hoped) would go in the minds of his followers below the conscious level of awareness and escape any independent or critical thinking. In other words they would go in unopposed and uninspected and just become the beliefs of his followers. He called such commands implants and went to great efforts to do two things. 

He wanted to put them in the minds of his followers as the solution to an ever more confusing set of beliefs they were to hold that would result in them becoming more and more submissively dependent on his increasing authority.

Additionally, he wanted the effects to be sustained by the thoughts, words, feelings, and actions of his followers. He wanted them to act as their own enslavers and to never be aware of it. 

So, the guiding principles they ended up adopting after all this are the ideas Hubbard presented and most of all his authority, the correctness and infallibility of his doctrine and the idea that he himself always knew the best and correct way to deal with any situation. 

Okay, now this explains to some degree the mindset of a long term Scientologist who has experienced a lot of indoctrination and been strongly influenced by it. 

Now, the big question that inevitably must arrive is, if a Scientologist who has gone far into being controlled by the influence of Hubbard and submitted thoroughly to his authority for months or even years or decades stops believing in Hubbard and his technology, then where are they left?

Picture a lifetime of having hundreds and hundreds of times that you as a Scientologist are not sure if one thing is right or a different thing is.  They are not compatible and you set aside your own awareness of the issues and your own desires and best judgment and values.  You just try to see it as Hubbard would and do what he wants. 

This could be for a decision morally. This could be regarding joining staff or the Sea Org. It could be regarding giving a donation to Scientology. 

You develop a lot of bad habits this way, frankly. You justify a lot of being cruel and hurtful to people in all likelihood. You have a lot of questionable decisions that you don't really take responsibility for and justify to whatever degree you do by seeing the judgement of Hubbard as guiding you or as it being infallible so you don't reflect on the actions of your self in situations where you should. 

You bury a lot of conflict in your self and confusion or discomfort and don't face the discomfort and confusion and they can build up. 

So, if you, like a hundred thousand or so others before you, eventually leave Scientology you discover something. This can happen whether it is very gradual and over decades or relatively quick and over months or even weeks. You go through a process in which you reject the character of Hubbard and the technology of Dianetics and Scientology -  it is quite stunning. It can be crushing and utterly devastating. 

Now, every person is different, and may have a different set of experiences and a different perspective, so this may to a greater or lesser degree not apply to a particular individual, so if you know it's not your experience then you know, or if you know an ex Scientologist don't automatically assume my description, my speculation on this, is accurate for every specific individual. 

But here's something that I found to be true in my own case. After the ideas and feelings and actions that Scientology founder Ronald Hubbard intentionally provided as the guiding and unexamined foundation of a life and the justification for the way that life was lived were both thrown into doubt, then examined and questioned and probed and carefully looked over with decreasing preference and bias for them, they were cast aside as false. 

Over a process of weeks then months I carefully looked at various ideas that are the foundation of Dianetics and Scientology and realized they are in all probability far more likely false than true and not supported by sound scientific evidence and in many cases a wealth of evidence is available to debunk or refute them. 

I won't go over everything but I rapidly realized that the Sea Org is not a bunch of superhuman beings that have mental and spiritual powers as is promised in Scientology. And if they don't have the promised powers then the most reasonable explanation is they never had them.

 After all, if Hubbard had created an army (or navy) of thousands of immortal geniuses, with telepathy, precognition, telekinesis and a vast array of other abilities in the nineteen fifties through nineteen seventies and set them up with advanced organizations and technology for running groups and advanced technology for surviving they should not be reduced to a bunch of bumbling idiots that no one can organize by the year 2010 or so.  (This refers to The Posse of Lunatics story published by Scientology in their Freedom magazine which described a half dozen or so alleged incompetent Sea Org members who in the story stumbled and bumbled through decades in the Sea Org including at the highest levels, unhandled for decades!)

So, I realized the OT powers promised in Scientology never arrived. Then I realized if there are no OTs and never were any it's also extremely likely that the state of clear doesn't exist and was also never achieved. 

Then I realized that auditing doesn't produce the miracles promised but convinces some people temporarily that it does. I looked closer at auditing and hypnosis and saw that auditing is hypnosis. If you examine hypnotic techniques and the signs a person has been hypnotised a tremendous overlap between auditing and hypnosis becomes obvious. 

Some auditing commands and techniques come right out of books on hypnosis. In several old lectures Hubbard admits auditing came from hypnosis and that auditors lay in hypnotic commands, whether they intend to or not. (Jon Atack described this brilliantly in his article Never Believe A Hypnotist)

In The Saint Hill Special Briefing Course lectures and several lectures from the early fifties he makes it quite clear. 

Then I realized that the indoctrination technique I was exposed to the most in Scientology itself was also a hypnotic technique: study technology.

Hubbard took an idea from a book he had recommended on hypnosis. I read the book and realized what Hubbard had done. I had to read several books on hypnosis and watch lots of videos describing hypnosis at a very granular level, so I got what very technical ideas and terms in the subject mean.

I also had to get a very detailed description of the original study techniques that Hubbard took to see that he changed the methods in very significant ways to create his final very different product he called study technology. There was a very good reason for these tremendous alterations and additional material. 

The book was Hypnotism Comes of Age by Wolfe, Bernard and Raymond Rosenthal.

The book described the combination of hypnosis and psychoanalysis to create hypnoanalysis. Hubbard combined the study techniques that others presented to him with his own knowledge of hypnosis and loaded language to create a synthesis of the two which used a facade of education over a framework of covert hypnosis to practice a form of insidious enslavement. 

When I realized this the last bit of Scientology technology that I thought was legitimate was revealed to be a harmful fraud, a covert method of hypnotic influence and not at all the path to wisdom and profound enlightenment I had thought it was for decades. And all the information that I was indoctrinated in was revealed to be given under false pretenses and meant to simply be accepted with no critical thinking allowed, no power of choice on my part meant to exist. 

So, I over time worked out that there are huge flaws in the arguments and evidence for the various ideas Hubbard presented over time. Sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually, sometimes using long periods to reflect and analyze the ideas and with other ideas quickly seeing they are not supported by any good evidence, with others I had to learn about entire subjects that may have been plagiarized from to create ideas in Scientology or sometimes I had to learn about subjects to understand what Hubbard was really doing like hypnosis and rhetoric and propaganda analysis. Sometimes I had to read lots of books on psychology and cults to see what was actually happening in Scientology.

So, the obvious thing that comes up after this is where is one at when they see that their entire belief system was a pack of lies and a fraud?

And to be clear, Scientology for the heavily indoctrinated and thoroughly fanatical zealot IS the entirety or near entirety of their beliefs. It's a combination religion, philosophy, science, ethics, morals, and just about everything else that's the foundation of the identity and beliefs a person can have by that point. 

You might have the tiniest bit of individuality left, like preference for chocolate over vanilla or something like that, but everything important and that strongly determines your values and priorities has long since been determined by Hubbard's doctrine and nothing else. 

So, the place you are at when you realize that it is all a fraud is empty. You are drained of the ideas you relied on, in my case for decades, ideas that were uninspected assumptions or deeply held values I could think and say with extreme certainty they were true, they had to be true. The alternative to that was unthinkable.

And you have to accept the unacceptable, you must bear the unbearable. It's not an exaggeration to say that many Scientologists tell each other they would rather die than stop believing in Scientology. When they hear about people leaving Scientology and completely rejecting it they can't fathom why.

But when you are lucky enough to realize the horrible, crushing truth, that Scientology is a harmful fraud that has no profound wisdom or enlightenment or miracles to offer and is a pack of lies you somehow have to live with everything you have held onto to provide stability and guidance stripped away. The whole house of cards crumbles and you have to try to pick up the pieces. 

The Big Empty