Many unpleasant things are said and written about Scientology, including
an article in this forum (SCWHAT.TXT by Martin G.V. Hunt)

You may wonder how it is possible that such an allegedly evil
organization can attract any large number of adherents, so I think it
may be helpful to give an outline of what Scientology actually teaches
and does. This article does not concern itself with the horrors of
Scientology although these do also exist.

I was an adherent of Scientology for more than seven years and even
worked as a staff member in a private organization licenced to use
Scientology techniques for four years, coering the period from 1975 to
1983. During that time I climbed up the Scientology "grade chart" ladder
to the level of OT III, and also studied extensively all Scientology
materials up to the level of a "Class IV", "Dianetics" and "Happiness
rundown" auditor, so I am actually quite familiar with the teachings and
practices of Scientology as far as the actual "spiritual" aspects of
this phenomenon are concerned. I left Scientology when I finally could
not close my eyes any more to the gap between claims and the harsh
reality inside Scientology organizations. Nevertheless, I feel quite
strongly that I have gained many benefits in personality and abilities
through Scientology practices and teachings.

Here follows an outline of Scientology thinking and practices:

A human being basically consists of three parts: The physical body, the
mind and the spiritual entity called a Thetan. You don't have a thetan,
your ARE a thetan. Being immortal, that unit being aware of its
awareness "has all potentialities, but no mass, no wavelength, no energy
and no time or location in space, except by its own consideration or
postulate". Man is basically good, Scientology claims.

Today, us thetans are almost inextricably stuck to meat bodies and
confined to an insignificant planet. Insanity, war and crime are our
daily companions. How is this, when a thetan is potentially absolutely
free and good?

In ages past, creating universes and things within such universes was
just another game for a thetan. He/she liked to show his/her creations
to other thetans, and by too close identification with their creations
and "helped along" by other thetans, we gradually were reduced to what
we now are. In order to have a game, a thetan must forego some of its
omnipotence and omniscience. If you know everything beforehand, a game
is no fun any more, isn't it?

That much for the very basic principles. Now what can we do today to
help us reclaim our former potential?

Every person has a mind where all events are stored in mental-image
picture form. These mental images contain some mass and energy. Everyday
incidents are not particularly dangerous but there are also times when
you were hurt, damaged or even killed. Apart from pain, such incidents
also contain unconsciousness. Things said by other persons or decided by
the thetan in such incidents are also stored along with the trauma and
can form post-hypnotic commands which will later influence your
behaviour and thinking without you knowing it.

This is likened to a mechanical calculating machine where you can press
a digit, say "7". If you now were to do calculations while the seven is
pressed, all your results would be wrong. For the mind, such wrong
results could be any psychosomatic illness, pain or ill feeling,
attitudes, behaviours, mental concepts. In fact, practically everything,
including accidents, are in some way connected to the mental state of
the sufferer. We all have our "held-down sevens". For this reason, much
in our behaviour and thinking is unknowingly erroneous. In order to
arrive at correct computations you have to "clear the calculator" first.

Everyone coming to Scientology to get the sources of erroneous
attitudes, behaviours and thinking located and handled, is therefore
called a pre-clear person or preclear, in short.

Scientology knows a vast number of processes and procedures to locate
and get rid of such unwanted conditions. Usually there is a person
applying these processes, called the "auditor" (because he listens to
what the preclear says, latin: audire - to listen).

I remember a case when I audited a person who always looked dejected.
After a number of Dianetics sessions (of which later), he found an
incident of a long time ago where he, being ugly, was ridiculed by a
woman whom he loved. In a state of desperation and misery he killed that
woman and himself (obviously this didn't happen in the person's current
lifetime). Suddenly that person looked up at me, and with a surprised
face stated that he had actually felt sad and miserable ever since. A
great joy went over his face and then he laughed his head off. Since
then, his posture was not any more bent down with shoulders hanging
foreward, but straight and firm.

Scientology starts with a "Communications Course". This course teaches
and practices simple but powerful little exercises which are intended to
improve your ability to stand up to life and its problems. You are made
to sit facing another person about three feet apart. You just look at
that person. The objective is to be able to do so without discomfort
(just try this, you will be amazed). This is called "confronting". It
does not include any notion of aggressivenes, it merely means "to be
there and doing nothing else but being there". This ability is increased
by various other exercises, all aiming at improving a persons ability to
deal with life and other people in a saner and more ethical way without
getting into useless emotions.

There are other courses teaching ways of dealing with other areas of
life such as work, family life, education, dealing with oppressive
environments, locating sources of trouble in organizations or your own
life, etc.

Most of these courses also include definite procedures which you can
study and train to apply to yourself or to other Scientologists. As all
of this is about mental matters, a person alone cannot usually handle
his own disabilities. If the person could, he/she would most likely not
have those disabilities in the first place. Therefore a second person is
needed who applies those procedures to you. It goes without saying that
before such auditing sessions begin, there is a clear understanding that
the person undergoing auditing must know what will be going on and has
agreed to it. Otherwise, it wouldn't work.

A Scientologist learns about life and how to handle it better, and
he/she also learns to apply mental and physical procedures and processes
to bring improvement about within himself or to others. This is the
"training side".

There also is the "auditing side". Question-and-answer techniques are
applied to the preclear to locate areas of disability or discomfort and
to get rid of these. An ability to "confront" things in the sense
outlined above, is clearly required as it is mostly not nice stuff that
you will discover in your past.

As a person is considered an immortal being (the thetan) with a body and
personality as temporary means to live on earth, it may not come as a
surprise that most Scientologists could tell you a lot of "past lives"
exerting influence on their current ones. This is, because when you die,
you take your mind with all its traumatic mental-image pictures with
you. In your next incarnation, most of that stuff is initially not yet
restimulated and has no active influence on you. But with the years,
more and more of those traumas come to live and cause a person to loose
the brightness and freshness of young children. Through Scientology
methods, one attempts to destimulate or even wipe out these
"unconscious" incidents (stored in the "reactive mind" as opposed to the
"analytical mind") and restoring them as normal, harmless memories in
your "analytical mind"

Dianetics concerns itself with bodily and emotional psychosomatic harms.
You may have heard of the E-Meter. This is a device for measuring skin
resistance to a tiny electrical current. As has already been found with
so-called "lie detectors" that mental trauma or discomfort shows itself
in a sudden rise of that electrical skin resistance. I have worked with
this E-meter for years and can only state that it actually works
marvellously for this purpose. The preclear holds tin cans which are
connected to the E-meter. A littly current runs from one hand to the
other through the body. The current is so tiny that you won't notice it.
The E-meter has a dial with a needle in it which shows changes in skin
resistance. There is also something called "tone arm". This is a control
which is used to keep the needle in the readable area of the dial.

Using an E-meter, the auditor asks the preclear for pains, emotions,
feelings etc. while at the same time closely watching the needle
reactions accompanying the preclear's statements.

The auditor then up picks the psychosomatic items given by the preclear
in the sequence of needle reaction size.

Say, the preclear has given a "pain in the left elbow" which produced
the larges needle reaction. The auditor would then begin with the basic
Dianetics procedure. He would ask something like: find a time when you
had "pain in the left elbow". The preclear usually remembers quite well
a time when he had this.

Preclear: Yes.
Auditor: Thank you. When was it?
Preclear: Last month.
Auditor:        Good. Go to a time "last month". (It can be observed as
a needle reaction when the preclear in his mind has indeed gone to "last
month").
Preclear: yes.
Auditor: Close your eyes. What do you see?
Preclear: Our kitchen. I can see the clock, it is half past seven in the
morning.
Auditor: Good. What is the duration of this incident?
Preclear: Perhaps three hours.
Auditor: Thank you. Go through this incident till "perhaps three hours"
later.
The preclear mentally "re-lives" that incident. The auditor watches his
E-meter writing down the readings.
When the preclear is through with the incident, he/she will usually look
up or say "yes".
The auditor then has the preclear tell what happened in the incident:
"Tell me what happened".
The preclear does so. Depending on E-meter reactions, the auditor will
know if this incident is "erasing" or if there must be an earlier
similar incident. (If the tone arm is rising, there must be something
earlier or more basic as this means that mental trauma is a bit more
restimulated.)
Auditor: Is there an earlier incident when you had "pain in the left
elbow"?

The preclear will usually find one as psychosomatic discomforts usually
have a long history.

Although no preclear is ever told to find incidents in a "past lifetime"
(an earlier reincarnation), even fresh people usually inadvertantly and
much to their own surprise, find pictures coming up which cannot stem
from their current lives. But this is no prerequisite.

The procedure roughly outlined above is followed down until the preclear
suddenly comes up with some sort of "cognition", some realization about
himself and his condition. The tone arm comes down indicating that a lot
of trauma is moving away. The needle starts to "float" which is an idle
and free movement of the needle on the dial while during the session the
needle tends to be tight. Most notable, however, is the big laughter by
the preclear and his generally "good" or "very good indicators" as
Scientology speak calls it.

This would be good time to end the session.

The preclear is then sent to an independent "examiner" who again checks
for the preclears "indicators", needle reaction and tone arm reading.
The examiner notes this down. The auditor places the examiner's report
into the preclear's session file and passes the whole documentation of
this session on to the "case supervisor". The auditor is not allowed to
reconstruct the session after it is concluded. Rather he keeps a
protocol while the session is going on. He may clarify his scribblings
if something he has jotted down, is illegible.

The case supervisor now goes over the session to see if the auditor has
made any mistakes and to give instructions as to what the next session
should contain (the auditor has given his suggestions, though). If the
auditor has displayed any imperfections in his auditing, he is made to
re-study the pertaining materials and to train them until he will not
repeat his mistakes in the future.

At this point it should be pointed out that Scientology procedures are
not open to any laxness. The auditor has to follow exact techniques.
He/she must not include his own personal ideosynchracies in order not to
disturb the preclear's action of exploring his/her own "reactive mind".

In this way, whole chains of mental-image pictures are found and
destimulated or erased. But if a person has some psychosomatic
discomfort, one does not only look for harmful acts "done to him" but
also for similar acts "done by him to others". One major point in
Scientology is the absolute responsibility of a person for
himself/herself. Even more traumatic than incidents where something
happened to you, are incidents where you caused others to suffer from
what you are suffering now. "Locate a time when you caused another to
have "pain in the left elbow" would be the next process run on our
fictitious preclear. There are two more chains to be audited: watching
another causing others to have a "pain in the left elbow", and "causing
yourself 'pain in the left elbow'".

After only a few dozens of hours, the preclear usually will be much
better off than before.

Returning to "past lives", I recall how I saw my first past-life
incident. In my early Scientology days, I did not believe in such
things, so I told my auditor merely what I saw - hastening to add that,
of course, I didn't belief in it. I was processed on a chain of
incidents having to do with throat aches. We had come down in time to my
early stages as an embryo, when, suddenly (or so it appeared to me), my
auditor asked if there was an earlier time. Strangely, although not
believing in past lives, I had the feeling that the answer was 'yes'.
The auditor then asked for when it was, and immediately the figure 1796
flashed up in my mind. The incident took about half an hour, and I had a
clear impression of seeing old houses with ship masts behind them. I
recognized a crowd in front of me, a parson coming up trying to make me
repent, and then I was hanged by the neck. I felt myself floating
upwards, and that was the incident.

This and other incidents plus other Scientology processes had the result
of me getting rid for good of recurring (about every three months) of
very painful throat aches.

Today, I am not so sure about my past lives any more, but they
definitely had a beneficial therapeutical effect!

That much for Dianetics. Dianetics is a section of Scientology.
Scientology proper deals with the spirit or thetan. A vast abundance of
processes and procedures to handle well-defined areas in life is
supposed to remove all sorts of barriers to make a thetan free from
obstacles that hinder him to regain his past potential because
Scientology claims that it is all there still. You remove the crusts of
many lifetimes, and there is your thetan clean and shining. He now is a
clear!

Initially, Dianetics processing was done at a very early stage in a
Scientologist's auditing career. In the mid-70s, Ron Hubbard (founder of
Scientology) found, that many people had actually "gone clear" during
Dianetics auditing. It didn't take the organization long to discover
that this plugged a good source of revenues. I suspect that that was the
reason behind moving Dianetics auditing to a much later stage on the
Scientology "Grade Chart to Total Freedom". Today, preclears have to go
through a rather lengthy stretch of Scientology auditing, quite helpful
in itself but in my experience not nearly as powerful as Dianetics.
Nowadays, Scientologists don't get "clear" that cheaply and easily any
more.

To be a 'Clear' means that your own mind is free from irrational
impulses. You are no longer subconsciously influenced by any traumatic
experience from the past. However, even people declared 'Clear' showed
flaws in their characters and bodies which were hard to explain in view
of their state of 'Clear'. In the early sixties, Hubbard discovered the
reason why. In his major book "Dianetics - The Modern Science of Mental
Health" (1950) he explains that parts of your mind can form encysted
areas caused by heavy traumatic experiences - encapsulating life force
which is no longer accessible and usable by you and which can appear as
individual minds with their own personalities. In a somewhat later book,
"History of Man" (early 50s), Hubbard suggests that these encysted areas
might actually be true individual people or "thetans" sticking to your
body, but at that time he was not quite sure.

The OT III materials tell us that you are actually not just one person
but that thousands and millions of other thetans are glued to you
influencing you in many undesirable ways. A Clear, therefore, may still
have many psychosomatic disorders of body, character, emotions etc.
although his very own mind has been cleared. But there are, of course
the minds of the very many "body thetans" - the other thetans which form
the whole of your composite personality. These must be dealt with as
well.

This is done in OT III. How is it that so many thetans are attached to
us? Well, this is a grim story which in many Scientology pamphlets is
hinted at as a vast catastrophy which happened some 75 million years ago
in our sector of the galaxy. What this catastrophy was, is carefully
withheld as unprepared people might die from learning about it if this
incident be restimulated in a person without it being handled.

The story goes something like this: There existed an interstellar
civilisation consisting of a number of inhabited planets each of which
having a population of some 200 billion. An evil being with the name of
Xenu usurped power and decided to solve the problem of overpopulation.
He grabbed billions and billions of people, extracted the thetans, and
by some high-tech electronic means confined them within ice cubes. These
were transported to a planet called Teegeeack, our Earth. There, the
thetans where placed around volcanoes. Then H-bombs were exploded in
those volcanoes, and the thetans being torn upwards by the explosion
where caught by electronic beams and fused together. Then they were
exposed to many days of painful implantation with mental concepts and
hypnotic commands which these thetans would unconsciously adhere to and
follow in later incarnations. To cause minor discomfort in people, such
an exploding volcano is shown on the title page of the Dianetics book.
Other books carry images which allegedly were part of that traumatic
implantation process. The intention is said to be making people feel
uncomfortable enough to rush into Scientology centres to find relief.

Xenu was later hunted down by "loyal officers" and captured within a
magnetic box where, hopefully, he is still confined to this day in his
bodiless thetan form. These loyal officers now populate the Sea
Organization ("We come back" is their motto) trying hard to eliminate
the desastrous after-effects of Xenu's crime.

In OT III, one deals with those body thetans by locating them using the
E-meter. If you have difficulties with your, say, right eye, although
being a Clear, it may well be that a body thetan or even a whole cluster
of body thetans is sitting there with a post-hypnoting command of "I
cannot see well" in action. Once found, it is established if it is a
cluster of a single body thetan. This determines the procedure to be
followed next. The objective is to give those body thetans an awareness
that they are thetans who could very well lead their own lifes and not
to be stuck to somebody else. They will then fly off trying to find some
fresh body of their own (delivery rooms in hospitals being favourite
places for this). In the case of a cluster, one does this, for example,
by running an even earlier ghastly incident which contains blinding
light, a steady beat, fanfares being blown and an angel-type being
riding to and fro in a carriage.

You may laugh at all this. I had many astonishing experiences while
doing OT III and felt great relief as a result of these procedures. One
definite outcome was a major improvement in self-confidence which was
only to be expected considering that a lot of life force is freed and
made available to a person by getting rid of so many thetan parasites,
according to Scientology lore.

Even today, not being an adherent of Scientology since 1983, I feel that
Scientology has done me much good. I have spent a lot of money there
(about 60.000 dollars from 1975 to 1982) but the benefits were certainly
worth it. From my own experience I can clearly state that most of
Scientology does indeed work and could be of much benefit to most
people.

Unfortunately, Scientology organizations are more or less what Mr. Hunt
has outlined in his article given above. If a group of people can
monopolized something really powerful, they will easily be corrupted by
the lure of money and influence. L. Ron Hubbard himself had some
skeletons hidden away in his many cupboards.

Today, I also think that some of the basic tenets of Scientology: the
concept of a thetan, in particular, and the notion that unpleasant
incidents are something to get rid of in order to live better in this
world, are principally wrong. But that clearly is a matter of belief.

I hope to have given a good idea of what people actually do in
Scientology and why it is attractive despite the organization's
questionably methods.

--
Cogito, ergo sum.             http://scientologysucks.lron.com

  Watch Xenu TV: http://www.xenutv.com

  Go to a protest in your area: http://www.xenu.net/picket/

  The premier Scientology webpage: www.xenu.net

  Mr. Hamra said, "The Church of Scientology now had a database
  of information on every subscriber which included names, credit
  card info., credit reports, telephone info., computer info.,
  who had referred them to Earthlink and who were their previous
  ISP providers." Mr. Hamra told me about the "other Earthlink
  building" which was next door on New York Avenue in Pasadena.
  Mr. Hamra told me that the other building was high security and
  is where Earthlink and the Church of Scientology did all the
  monitoring of the internet. - DECLARATION OF ROBERT J. CIPRIANO.