I was asked in several different ways about how I got out of Scientology. More specifically how I got so far out of Scientology so quickly. As I have said many times I was in the cult for twenty five years and within several weeks of looking outside the cult I realized it was completely fraudulent and harmful.
People find out I had spent thousands of hours using Scientology indoctrination methods and was at times on staff and a very devoted and fanatical and zealous cult member. Then they cannot fathom how quickly and completely I rejected Scientology. I have been asked about the route out of Scientology. I am convinced that the experiences that make people into Scientologists fit the patterns folks like Jon Atack and Robert Jay Lifton and Margaret Singer have described. Jon Atack explained this in the Scientology Mythbusting series at the Underground Bunker website and in his book Opening Minds. Lifton describes this in Thought Reform And The Psychology Of Totalism, particularly in his eight criteria for thought reform. Margaret Singer describes this in excellent videos and her book Cults In Our Midst.
I will describe a key experience from my indoctrination that I can clearly recall as the moment I went from being a person investigating Scientology to being a Scientologist. This experience bears describing in fine detail because it fits several ideas put forth by the authors I just listed. It also is for me something I can recall despite twenty seven years having passed. It is something most Scientologists have a hard time recalling and a harder time understanding.
I joined Scientology at seventeen years old. I had been told Scientology was an odd thing in that they believed a person is responsible for everything that has ever happened to them. That seemed absurd. I met one Scientologist and asked him how that could be. After all, I knew women who had been raped, kids who had been molested and people who lived in extreme poverty or with mental or physical illness. To me blaming them was entirely immoral.
Despite my antagonistic approach the one Scientologist I met was willing to keep talking with me and introducing simple ideas like past lives, postulates, conditions and dynamics. The ideas seem to cover any broad questions about life in a very, very general way. Especially if you know nothing about Scientology, it's history, Hubbard's past or hundreds of sources Hubbard plagiarized from.
And by following the Scientology TRs the Scientologist seemed to be friendly, compassionate and very much in agreement with everything I said. I didn't understand how TRs worked so I thought I found a fast friend and figured why pretend to be friendly to a guy with no money ?
I didn't know or understand another pair of facts: my new buddy needed to recruit a replacement because he wanted to leave staff without getting an SP declare and he would talk to me about Scientology for a simple reason. He couldn't find anyone who didn't already hate Scientology.
So despite my being a poor guy with no job experience and a skeptical attitude toward Scientology I would at least talk about it and agreed to enter a Scientology org while you couldn't pay most people to go in a Scientology org.
He had to put in weeks of hanging out with me to draw me in, but had no other prospects. So he put in the time and I didn't understand love bombing can be a one on process of simply listening to someone, and acting like a concerned friend. I didn't realize some jobs are actually scams.
So I joined staff with the naive and idealistic thought that I would find out if Scientology was really what it claimed to be and if it was then to help it. And if not then I would expose them and tell the world. I foolishly thought as a skeptic and in my opinion an intelligent person I would easily see through any fraud and not be fooled. That incorrect assumption was essential to my being deceived. I now KNOW I am gullible as a PERMANENT unalterable state. I consider it a state that cannot be removed by being aware of it. It's here to stay.
I joined staff unaware that Scientology usually doesn't pay anything and just has staff stay on until they quit. If I knew that I would never have joined staff. It simply is a fraud unto itself. But I foolishly didn't focus on pay at first and tried to look at the technology. It seemed odd in many ways but Scientologists certainly were impassioned by it. I didn't get much auditing but thought the people who did must be experiencing something. After all, they trained for years to deliver auditing and paid thousands of dollars for auditing or the courses.
So I was on staff for two months as a non Scientology staff member and doing my staff status training and had a very special experience. The admin tech is instrumental in duping victims in indoctrination. The extreme complexity with immense loaded language helps to overwhelm and confuse minds. This in my own indoctrination for example led to having to memorize over twenty departments in order with their definitions and awareness charecteristics in order to pass a drill on my staff statuses courses.
I instantly realized my suspicion of everything in Scientology being lies must be true. From reading the Scientology Mythbusting series at the Underground Bunker and Never Believe A Hypnotist by Jon Atack along with articles on hypnotism at Lermanet.com I learned that the getting confused and brightening up I had experienced were actually from hypnosis.
That realization enabled me to reframe my entire experience and to zero in on hypnosis, cognitive dissonance theory, rhetoric and social psychology as areas to study in depth.
I wrote on the exact details of how Hubbard uses thought reform in Insidious Enslavement: Study Technology, Propaganda By Reversal Of Meaning, Basic Introduction To Hypnosis In Scientology, The Secret Of Scientology part 1and in many other posts. I hope this helps to make it perfectly clear how I got into and eventually out of Scientology.
People find out I had spent thousands of hours using Scientology indoctrination methods and was at times on staff and a very devoted and fanatical and zealous cult member. Then they cannot fathom how quickly and completely I rejected Scientology. I have been asked about the route out of Scientology. I am convinced that the experiences that make people into Scientologists fit the patterns folks like Jon Atack and Robert Jay Lifton and Margaret Singer have described. Jon Atack explained this in the Scientology Mythbusting series at the Underground Bunker website and in his book Opening Minds. Lifton describes this in Thought Reform And The Psychology Of Totalism, particularly in his eight criteria for thought reform. Margaret Singer describes this in excellent videos and her book Cults In Our Midst.
I will describe a key experience from my indoctrination that I can clearly recall as the moment I went from being a person investigating Scientology to being a Scientologist. This experience bears describing in fine detail because it fits several ideas put forth by the authors I just listed. It also is for me something I can recall despite twenty seven years having passed. It is something most Scientologists have a hard time recalling and a harder time understanding.
I joined Scientology at seventeen years old. I had been told Scientology was an odd thing in that they believed a person is responsible for everything that has ever happened to them. That seemed absurd. I met one Scientologist and asked him how that could be. After all, I knew women who had been raped, kids who had been molested and people who lived in extreme poverty or with mental or physical illness. To me blaming them was entirely immoral.
Despite my antagonistic approach the one Scientologist I met was willing to keep talking with me and introducing simple ideas like past lives, postulates, conditions and dynamics. The ideas seem to cover any broad questions about life in a very, very general way. Especially if you know nothing about Scientology, it's history, Hubbard's past or hundreds of sources Hubbard plagiarized from.
And by following the Scientology TRs the Scientologist seemed to be friendly, compassionate and very much in agreement with everything I said. I didn't understand how TRs worked so I thought I found a fast friend and figured why pretend to be friendly to a guy with no money ?
I didn't know or understand another pair of facts: my new buddy needed to recruit a replacement because he wanted to leave staff without getting an SP declare and he would talk to me about Scientology for a simple reason. He couldn't find anyone who didn't already hate Scientology.
So despite my being a poor guy with no job experience and a skeptical attitude toward Scientology I would at least talk about it and agreed to enter a Scientology org while you couldn't pay most people to go in a Scientology org.
He had to put in weeks of hanging out with me to draw me in, but had no other prospects. So he put in the time and I didn't understand love bombing can be a one on process of simply listening to someone, and acting like a concerned friend. I didn't realize some jobs are actually scams.
So I joined staff with the naive and idealistic thought that I would find out if Scientology was really what it claimed to be and if it was then to help it. And if not then I would expose them and tell the world. I foolishly thought as a skeptic and in my opinion an intelligent person I would easily see through any fraud and not be fooled. That incorrect assumption was essential to my being deceived. I now KNOW I am gullible as a PERMANENT unalterable state. I consider it a state that cannot be removed by being aware of it. It's here to stay.
I joined staff unaware that Scientology usually doesn't pay anything and just has staff stay on until they quit. If I knew that I would never have joined staff. It simply is a fraud unto itself. But I foolishly didn't focus on pay at first and tried to look at the technology. It seemed odd in many ways but Scientologists certainly were impassioned by it. I didn't get much auditing but thought the people who did must be experiencing something. After all, they trained for years to deliver auditing and paid thousands of dollars for auditing or the courses.
So I was on staff for two months as a non Scientology staff member and doing my staff status training and had a very special experience. The admin tech is instrumental in duping victims in indoctrination. The extreme complexity with immense loaded language helps to overwhelm and confuse minds. This in my own indoctrination for example led to having to memorize over twenty departments in order with their definitions and awareness charecteristics in order to pass a drill on my staff statuses courses.
While listening to the tape Org Board And Livingness this resulted in an intense focus of my attention that had astounding results. I entered a deep euphoric state of mental focus with my critical and independent thought suspended. I thought it was an epiphany. In fact it was just hypnosis, but sold as spiritual enlightenment.
I can describe this in a bit more detail because it is quite important. In taking on Scientology study tech I wrote Insidious Enslavement: Study Technology as a post at this blog. As part of submission to hypnotic all-encompassing authority a very specific series of physical and mental changes occurred. I was exposed to the tremendous shifting and contradictory terms in Scientology. They are given in an ingenious method for thought reform. A student takes on thousands of Scientology terms AND thousands of normal English terms and idioms SIMULTANEOUSLY in Scientology indoctrination.
The brilliant thing about this is it gives a person three sets of information to constantly keep track of and keep separate. You need to know what are your own ideas and beliefs.
You also need to hang onto Scientology terms which all tie into each other in a long bizarre unclear never-ending circle of ideas defined by each other but containing other ideas which are more unclear and refer to others in a never ending chain.
You also have to learn new English terms so it seems like you are getting an education and better vocabulary. You seem to get confused then brighter. The easiest way to overcome the overwhelm trying to keep all these ideas separate creates is to stop carefully keeping them separate and just take them all as equal. All as true. Remember the ideas include your own as a person, so rejecting everything would include your own beliefs from before Scientology and be impractical. Besides rejecting the definitions and idioms and derivations you learned from dictionaries would also be impractical. After all, they are just English.
I bit by bit stopped thinking of ideas as mine, from dictionaries and from Hubbard. Before that Hubbard's ideas were all conditional, hypothetical and unproven. It was incredibly complicated to do Scientology indoctrination methods and doubt them and seek to do them standardly. It was too much to keep track of. So I stopped. I pushed doubts out of my mind over and over until they stopped returning. Just believing without using critical and independent thinking became free from the tension of cognitive dissonance. In a hypnotic state trance logic ensues. Trance logic has distinct characteristics. In trance logic contradictions are ignored by the conscious mind and cognitive dissonance is buried in the subconscious mind (or unconscious). Nonsensical or absurd ideas are accepted from a hypnotic authority and a person is age regressed and open to magical thinking and black and white thinking. Many things are oversimplified and misrepresented.
It is the thinking of a person who has submission to an authority as more important than having free will or observing reality. It is similar to a young child knowing that a parent knows more and that even if a command doesn't make sense you still listen to the parent because you know they are much wiser than you. Your belief is the parent must be right so doubts are wrong and blind faith replaces reason. You don't have to know how the parent is right - you have certainty they are right.
That experience was my conversion into a Scientologist. Had I understood hypnosis, rhetoric and critical thinking it would have been very different. Lifton, Singer, Hassan and Atack all describe that method cults use.
It took me twenty five years to learn that. Many Indies think hypnosis is something else and so keep faith in Scientology because they don't understand their own reactions. Sad.
Now part of why my rejection of Scientology was so sudden and total was because I had realized something vital rapidly. When I was first on course back twenty seven years ago I realized Hubbard either had to be constantly lying for decades and either unnoticed or helped by Scientologists, or completely mad or sincere. I thought putting in decades of writing and lecturing alone was an immense undertaking. Why someone would keep at it for a scam baffled me. I set that worry aside when I bought into Scientology .
When I finally looked outside the cult after seeing the famous Freedom magazine article Posse Of Lunatics I knew something wasn't right. I realized there were no OTs in the Sea Org. And that meant there never were any. And that meant no clears either.
Now part of why my rejection of Scientology was so sudden and total was because I had realized something vital rapidly. When I was first on course back twenty seven years ago I realized Hubbard either had to be constantly lying for decades and either unnoticed or helped by Scientologists, or completely mad or sincere. I thought putting in decades of writing and lecturing alone was an immense undertaking. Why someone would keep at it for a scam baffled me. I set that worry aside when I bought into Scientology .
When I finally looked outside the cult after seeing the famous Freedom magazine article Posse Of Lunatics I knew something wasn't right. I realized there were no OTs in the Sea Org. And that meant there never were any. And that meant no clears either.
That realization enabled me to reframe my entire experience and to zero in on hypnosis, cognitive dissonance theory, rhetoric and social psychology as areas to study in depth.
I wrote on the exact details of how Hubbard uses thought reform in Insidious Enslavement: Study Technology, Propaganda By Reversal Of Meaning, Basic Introduction To Hypnosis In Scientology, The Secret Of Scientology part 1and in many other posts. I hope this helps to make it perfectly clear how I got into and eventually out of Scientology.
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