Express and Echo
29 July 1991
ENGLAND
The rock drummer Out to beat Cults
A fromer victim now helps people escape "brainwashing" sects
Last week cult expert Jon Caven-Atack set up a meeting in Exmouth and persuaded a . member of the Church of Scientology to return to her family. The Echo's Peter Hardy now talks to the man who has dedicated his life to exposing cults which he says brainwash their members.
FOR NINE years, former rock drummer Jon Caven-Atack was under the spell of a "religious" sect known as the Church of Scientology.
Now, outside the cult, Jon has pledged his life and a full-time career to expose the workings of an Organisation which has attracted thousands of followers.
The cult. which, like the Moonies is accused of brainwashing its members is thriving and has between 50,000 and 100,000 members.
Since leaving the "Church" In 1983 Mr Caven-Atack, now aged 36, has helped around 100 people leave the sect and hasinfluenced many others He lives in East Grinstead where the church's British operation is based.
He has already written one book, A Piece of Blue Sky, which came out last October, and isb now working on three Others.
He is a consultant on the Church of Scientology and is fast becoming an expert on the techniques of mind mani- pulation, which he says are used by advertising companies and by politicians to put over their message.
Things like trigger words or colour matching for certain products can sink suggestions deeper in the mind than the conscious on-looker realizes.
Last weak. he and two American cult experts travelled to Exmouth to help a mother and father retrieve their daughter from the grip of the Church of Scientology,
After luring her to a guest house in the town, they spent three days trying to convince the girl of the truths behind the teachings of the late L Ron Hubbard. the founder o! the movement. The girl then agreed to return with her parents to their horns in the North of England.
Mr. Caven-Atack refers to L Ron Hubbard as a state hypnotist whose book, The Science of Survival, first drew him into the cult.
"I was in a pretty receptive state of mind at the time," he recalls.
"I had just come" back from a tour of France where I had not been able to find one gig to discover that my girlfiend was living with one of my best friends and they were intending to move to New Zealand."
" I was just hooked by it, it wasn't a religious thing and there weren't any drugs or electric shock treatments. "You were just going to sit down and talk over the traumas you had lived through in the past and it seemed eminently sensible." '
Mr Caven-Atack said he did not have any money and had to scrape together the L5 for his first communications course.
it is these courses. known
collectively as The Bridge, that can cost their students up to L2S0,000 to complete. "The promises at the end of It all were that I would become super human and gain the ability to make lots of money."
"1 was trained in how to recruit other people in Scientology and altogether got about 5O people it In. Luckily, most didn't stay. The only rules were to avoid communists, journalists and homosexuals
.
-They didn't pay me and they dldn't provide me with anything I was simply a happy hooker for L Ron Hubbard." Mr Caven-Atack knows of Scientologists who have parted with over 450,000 dollars in six weeks to the cult. Well known household names
regularly contribute. and the church is thought to be worth many millions of pounds..
"The Bridge is never ending," said Mr Caven-Atack
"Prices for the courses really went crazy from 1978, they were going up at ten percent a month, which was a 320 percent per annum rise.
After two years a L6 course was costing L120. I managed to reach the
filth OT (Operating Thetan) level, All the time you were trying to rid your lives or body satans.. I spent very little, probably about L6,000 to L7,000."
According b cult experts Conway and Siegelman the Church of Scien- tology has the most debilitating set of hypnotic rituals of any cult. in the united States. Meanwhile, the cult's late creator continues to be revered In three sacred shrines where all his writings are preserved - etched onto stainless steel to stand the test of time.
The shrines are multi-million pound caverns hewn out of rock ans secured with titanium steel vault doors. L.Ron Hubbard has been the subject of many books since his work to create the Church began in the 1950's. Mr Caven Atack's 420 page book is available direct from his home at Avalon, Cranston Road, East grinstead, West Sussex. Price L16.95
OCR'd and posted by Lermanet.com Exposing the CON
I'd prefer to die speaking my mind than live fearing to speake
If the Borg were to breed with the Ferengi you'd get Scientology!
The only real product of Scientology is More Scientologists That is the etiology of cancer.
The internet is the Liberty Tree http://www.lermanet.com/faqs.html http://www.lermanet.com/scientologynews/index.html http://www.lermanet.com/scientologyscandals/index.html
"Scientologists believe that most human problems can be traced to lingering spirits of an extraterrestrial people massacred by their ruler, Xenu, over 75 million years ago. These spirits attach themselves by "clusters" to individuals in the contemporary world, causing spiritual harm and negatively influencing the lives of their hosts" [Judge Leonie Brinkema 4 Oct 96 Memorandum Opinion]
What do we get from getting people out of scientology? We create an individual who has become a Houdini of all mind traps.. folks who won't be fooled again. People who can DE-program, People who can spring mental traps..
We create, by freeing someone of scientology, a being who has the ability to break the strongest slave chains of all.
Those forged of lies. (c) Arnaldo Lerma