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.

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