Recently at the Lisa McPherson Trust, we helped a woman get out of Scientology.

She took her child with her, a child who at a very young age had already been recruited into the Sea Org.

The woman's mother has been in the Sea Org for a long time. She came to the woman's house, extremely upset that the woman had left but particularly upset that she had taken her child out of the Sea Org. The mother brought a sheet of paper with the tape excerpt below. She frantically told the woman that she was throwing away her future and urged her not to let considerations about her family stand in the way of her freedom and that of her child.

The woman told her mother that she didn't want to be in Scientology any more.

Then the woman's mother pulled the child aside and in all seriousness urged the child to file for legal emancipation from the parents so that the child, who is underage, could go back into the Sea Org.

The child was very upset but, according to the woman, is beginning to enjoy interacting with other family members and friends. I asked the woman to fax me a copy of the tape excerpt her mother had given her. When I read the excerpt, it sickened me. I have never seen this excerpt before. I have never seen a quote from LRH in which he so clearly urges his followers to turn away from their families.

Here is the text of the excerpt:

"THE GE IS A FAMILY MAN The GE is a family man; the GE is lost without a family. It's very strange, but Homo sap is a family unit. The GE is built on that basis. It's fascinating, fascinating. It's not important to know it but a lot of your urges toward families and so forth are not thetan urges at all, they're the GE. The GE can't survive at all without a family unit. He's just as dead as a mackerel if he isn't a family unit, whereas your thetan is just dead as a mackerel if he gets too mixed up in family units.

You can't talk to GEs; they're kind of psycho. And by the way, you can fall into this dreadful trap with a GE. You see, he uses the MEST universe with which to build. He's gotten very, very bad off and he has to use MEST materials all the time.

So, you get this situation here with the GE, and your GE is busy: build, build, build, build, build. And, of course he's got to have a family to build with.

You get this terrific family thirst. And you get your GE surviving best and being loused up the most because of interfamily relationships.

And your thetan, by the way, can much more easily go into a group. Families are not good groups; they're bad groups."

LRH, From the taped lecture "Flows: Patterns of Interaction"

10 December 1952 For you to understand why this quote affected me so strongly, I have to translate LRH's Scientology-speak into plain language. First of all, the GE is the Genetic Entity. The Scientology Tech Dictionary defines it this way:

GENETIC ENTITY, 1. that beingness not dissimilar to the thetan which has carried forward and developed the body from its earliest moments along the evolutionary line on earth and which, through experience, necessity and natural selection, has employed the counter-efforts of the environment to fashion an organism of the type best fitted for survival, limited only by the abilities of the genetic entity. The goal of the genetic entity is survival on a much grosser plane of materiality. (Scn 8-8008, p. 8) 2. formerly referred to as the somatic mind. It has no real personality, it is not the "I" of the body.

This is the "mind" of an animal, a dog or a cat or a cow. (HOM [History of Man], pp. 13-14) 3. that entity which is carrying along through time, that is making the body through the time stream, through the action of sex and so forth. (5410C10D) Abbr. GE Now let me tell you how I understood it when I was in Scientology. I want to try to give you a window into how Scientologists think. I want you to understand how it could possibly be that Scientologists turn against their own families and see it as an ethical thing to do; how Scientologists can see their feelings of love and loyalty to their families as something psychotic, something they need to do away with in order to be good Scientologists.

This is how Scientologists are taught to think: The Genetic Entity is the part of a person that is still tied to the universe of Matter, Energy, Space and Time - known as the MEST Universe in Scientology -- that we will leave behind when we are able to become stably exterior with full perceptics. This is the real goal of a Scientologist - to be free of the MEST Universe, to be able to discard the body and be completely free of the limitations of MEST. When enough Scientologists reach that goal (a goal which no one to my knowledge has yet attained) and Planet Earth has been cleared, they will be able to travel at will anywhere in the galaxy to clear other planets and, eventually, the entire MEST Universe. They will do this without the encumbrance of their bodies, of course. They will be free of their bodies. They will just pick up new bodies on whatever planet they go to. They might be meat bodies like the ones on Earth, or they might be doll bodies, or any of a variety of other kinds of bodies thetans use throughout the MEST Universe. But the point is that they will be able to mock them up at will, because they will be totally at cause over MEST.

Obviously, for someone who has it in their head that they are trying to leave the MEST Universe behind, the Genetic Entity - and everything connected to it -- is something from which one would have to distance oneself. In fact, there is an insulting slang term in Scientology for someone who is too much into their body, or too much into their family - meaning their husband or wife, their children, their parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents. A person like that is considered to be "stuck in the GE." That's a very bad thing in Scientology. Very out-ethics. Psychotic, in fact.

When LRH said in the tape excerpt that "your urges toward family are not thetan urges at all, they're the GE," what he was saying was that anyone who puts any importance on the family is going in a direction toward MEST, not Theta. That is an out-ethics thing to do. It is putting counter-intention on the forward motion of Scientology. It is holding back the entire group.

When he said that "Homo sap is a family unit," he was denigrating Homo sapiens for caring about family. He was saying that Homo sapiens, the evolutionary phase of the human race before Scientology came along, is a terribly primitive creature. Homo novis, the superman that Scientology has made possible, is the next evolutionary step, the superior being. Homo novis isn't interested in families. Homo novis is at cause over Matter, Energy, Space and Time. Who needs a family when you can exteriorize at will? Who needs to procreate? Who would want to hold onto any connection to the MEST Universe once you realized that those connections are doing nothing but holding back the forward progress of the entire human race?

It is Homo sapiens - "Homo sap," as he says in the tape - who needs a family.

It is Homo sap who still has a connection to the GE. But you see how LRH lets you know what a degraded being - what a Homo sap - you are if you care about your family. Listen to what he says: "the GE is as dead as a mackerel without the family unit, but the thetan [that's Homo novis, which is only possible to attain through Scientology] is as dead as a mackerel if he gets mixed up with a family unit." So you are actually putting up a roadblock to Mankind's forward progress by clinging to old, primitive notions such as family.

The message here is clear. If you're an ethical Scientologist you are not going to hold onto MEST relationships like your family. You are going to be much more interested in theta relationships like your fellow Scientologists - people who have risen above MEST-oriented relationships and are interested only in theta-based relationships - those that will further Scientology's aims. An ethical Scientologist only wants to associate with others who are also striving for the enlightened state of Homo novis.

I no longer adhere to this belief system. I am no longer a Scientologist. But for fifteen years I distanced myself from my family and the friends I had had before I got into Scientology for this very reason - I did not want to contaminate myself by associating with unenlightened people. In Scientology this is called contagion of aberration; you don't want to be around people who are stuck in MEST because it might rub off on you. You don't want to do anything that will slow you down from becoming an enlightened Theta Clear.

For those of you who are familiar with the term Suppressive Person, or SP, and Potential Trouble Source, or PTS, it is upon this fundamental concept that these terms are based. An SP is someone who is so stuck in the MEST Universe (so solid) that they can't bear to have anyone around them who is moving in the direction of theta (the opposite of solid). A PTS is someone who has allowed themselves to become vulnerable to an SP's influence and is therefore getting more solid - less theta.

This is why Scientologists distance themselves from the rest of society. It is why the Sea Org members in Clearwater refuse to make eye contact with the citizens of Clearwater when they walk down the street. It is why the Scientologist son of a dear friend of mine has refused to speak to his mother for thirty years.

Recently a woman contacted the LMT for help. She had been happily married for nearly twenty years. She and her husband had two beautiful teenage children.

They had a beautiful house and a wonderful life. She considered herself the luckiest woman on Earth because she had such a happy family. Then her husband got into Scientology. By the time she spoke to me, her husband had gotten them nearly $100,000 in debt. He wanted a divorce because she didn't want to be a Scientologist. He refused to speak to either of this children because they didn't want to be Scientologists. When she begged him to speak to someone with a different point of view about Scientology he told her he would disappear and never contact her again if she ever tried to put him in contact with someone critical of Scientology. She and her children are heartbroken over the loss of a man who was once a wonderful husband and father. He, on the other hand, is convinced that she is an SP - that she is trying to keep him from moving toward the enlightened state of theta clear.

Another woman contacted the LMT recently about her sister, who has just joined the Sea Org. The sister has two children. Now that she is in the Sea Org, the children have been sent to the Sea Org children's ranch north of Los Angeles.

They never get to see their mother. They have been sneaking phone calls to their aunt, tearfully asking their aunt why their mother doesn't love them any more. The mother, meanwhile, fully believes that her children are a distraction from her production and that it is necessary to separate from them so that she can realize her full potential. She also believes that if the children are ethical, they, too, will benefit from severing their ties with her, since their relationship is based on nothing more than the fact that she is their biological mother, something which is meaningless in the new society of Homo novis.

At the LMT we get these heartbreaking calls nearly every day.

Today, I see the Genetic Entity, Homo novis, and the whole idea of isolating oneself from the so-called MEST Universe and concentrating on becoming Theta Clear as a delusion of grandeur which originated in the unbalanced mind of L.

Ron Hubbard. Hubbard was unable to have healthy relationships with his parents, his three wives or any of his children. But instead of taking any responsibility for these failed relationships, he blamed his family members.

Then he took it a step further. He created an entire cosmology that would justify his inability to have successful personal relationships. Families are bad, friendships are bad, any close relationships are bad, because he was incapable of having them. All he could conceive of was a world in which there is no love, no compassion - nothing but impersonal, cold-hearted relationships based on statistics and the "greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics." What he said in the tape transcript sums it up: "Families are not good groups; they're bad groups."

I realize I risk incurring the wrath of dedicated Scientologists by saying what I did in the above paragraph. But I think it is extremely important for Scientologists to realize that LRH does not have to have been a perfect man for there to be any validity to the Tech. I speak to people nearly every day who have had wins and gains from their auditing. I never tell them their wins aren't valid. I never tell them the gains aren't real. I'm happy if someone has had wins and gains. The tech is not something I want for myself, but I don't think everyone else has to feel the same way I do. I have no doubt that many people have had wins and gains from the tech.

But this does not mean that LRH was perfect. I discovered he wasn't perfect when I worked on the LRH biography research while I was still a Sea Org member in good standing. This discovery did not cause me to lose faith in the tech.

All it did was to make me realize that even though LRH developed a technology that could help people, he was a human being just like the rest of us, with blind spots and character flaws the same as everybody else. The problem was that one of his flaws was an utter inability to accept any criticism, and as a result of this he tended to label anyone who did criticize him as an enemy.

This flaw has now been institutionalized in the organization known as the Church of Scientology.

But criticism is not a bad thing. It is a good thing. If the tech really works - and I know many people feel it does - then it can bear critical scrutiny.

Just because someone criticizes something doesn't mean it isn't valid. It doesn't mean that person is an enemy. Scientologists must learn to differentiate between the parts of Scientology that are valid and those parts of it which are not. LRH had a blind spot on the subject of personal relationships and the flaws in his own thinking have been inherited by the organization called the Church of Scientology. It is crucial that Scientologists begin to see that they have the right to accept those parts of Scientology that work and to discard those parts that do not. LRH's view of the family as a degraded, out-moded form of human relationship is terribly destructive and urgently needs to be recognized by Scientologists as a harmful part of the Scientology world view that should be discarded. This does not mean I am advocating that the entirety of the tech should be discarded. It means I think LRH had a blind spot on this subject because of his own shortcomings, and I don't think his personal shortcomings should be embraced by Scientologists so that they take on his own blind spot as their own.

Until Scientologists become willing to differentiate the beneficial from the harmful aspects of Scientology, the outside world will continue to view it as a chillingly amoral belief system and respond accordingly to it.

For the people on the outside, the question is how do we get through to the people who have bought into this chillingly amoral belief system? How do we help the thousands upon thousands of families who have been torn apart by Scientology? My answer is this: All we can do is continue to do everything we can to get through to Scientologists at every opportunity. Thank God for the internet. It is our best chance to communicate to them. The most hopeful thing of all at the LMT is that we are getting calls every day from Scientologists who are making the decision to embrace their Constitutional rights of freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of association. They are going on the internet despite orders from the Organization not to. They are learning for themselves about all sides of Scientology. They are regaining their powers of critical thought and deciding for themselves which parts of Scientology they want to embrace. And they are beginning to rebuild their own shattered lives and broken families.

Stacy Brooks

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