What exactly is Auditing? Is it psychological counseling? Helping with Spiritual leveling up? Is it very personal and trying to keep you on some sort of right path?
Auditing is at once, very complex and very simple.
What I mean by that is that the basic process is really pretty straightforward, although it does come in two distinct flavors: Dianetics and Scientology Auditing.
Dianetics (called “Book One” Dianetics by Scientologists) is really simple: You have an Auditor and a Pre-clear. The Auditor, after some initial set up, asks the Pre-clear to recall an event and then the Pre-clear verbally talks his way through it, paying particular attention to all of his senses (called “Perceptics” in Scientology and there’s way more than five of them) as he relives the scene of this past trauma over and over and over again until they don’t feel so bad about it any more. You then go to an earlier similar event and then an earlier similar event and so on until you find the root trauma (called the “Basic” in Dianetics) and then that person is “cured” of that particular problem.
Scientology Auditing works pretty much the same way with two major differences: First, they use the E-Meter. Now, a lot has been said about the E-Meter, and about half of it is true. The straight dope on the E-Meter is this: It’s a skin galvanometer. That’s all it is. It measures the electrical resistance across your body. Hubbard’s view was that thoughts, especially engrams, are energy and, thus, have literal mass that can be measured using an E-Meter. Yeah… I know… it sounds whack-a-doo, but remember, galvanic skin response is one of the primary components of polygraphy and I have seen ex-Scientologists demonstrate an E-Meter with
shocking levels of insight into the emotional responses of whoever is hooked up to them… even when they can’t see the person and can’t hear the person, they can tell you when something they just said triggered an emotional response.
The second major difference between Scientology Auditing and Dianetics is that Scientology has a specific program, starting with the Grades and proceeding up through Clear and the OT levels, of what to Audit. In Dianetics, you just talk about what’s bothering you. In Scientology Auditing, you are being directed to deal with specific issues in a specific order. There are literally thousands of these processes, but the basic outline is this: Recall (i.e. memory), Communications, Problems, Overts and withholds (i.e. Scientology Ethics), Fixation (on past upsets), Abilities, and then New Era Dianetics (which covers a whole host of issues that can range all the way into past lives, if that’s what it takes.) Usually, at that point, you go Clear. If you don’t theres more processing to get you there and then on to the OT levels.
Also where does all the money go? Does anyone track that? Does it go to the top members running this religion? Does any of it get donated to causes?
“Byzantine” doesn’t even begin to describe the complex network of Scientology organizations and finances. Basically, the money flows upwards from individuals to whatever org they are receiving services at to the over arching organizations that control Scientology at the top. It
all stays in Scientology. Even their “charitable” efforts are really just money transfers from one Scientology org to another Scientology org that will direct people back to the main org. Their anti-drug “charity” Narconon (not to be confused with Narcanon, which is a 12-step program), channels people back to the main org for the Purification Rundown, and so on. About the only truly “charitable” organization they have is the Citizens Commission on Human Rights and that’s really all about black-PR against legitimate psychiatry and psychology, which in turn drives more people to the Org.
As to what happens to it all: They spend it. They build building hand over fist, even though they’re having trouble filling them. They constantly renovate the buildings they have to make them ever more ostentatious. Frankly, most of them look like they were decorated by Liberace or a Parisian Madame. They do have some staff, but they are
ridiculously under paid, even those who are civilians and are not in the “religious order” within Scientology called SeaOrg.
They also spend a lot of money on a base near Trementina, New Mexico where in they are recording every single word of LRH’s writings, lectures, films, et al. on stainless steel sheets, rolled up and stored in indexed titanium steel capsules flooded with inert gas and stored in geologically stable underground caverns so that, if and when we annihilate ourselves as a species, the returning souls of SeaOrg members in the distant future will know where to find them. I’m not kidding on that, either. That’s the whole idea.
. Yes, I still get mail from them, emails daily, and at least one phone call a day (that rings out to voicemail of course), and I left them awhile ago. It usually picks up when there’s an upcoming event, since these events are also opportunities to solicit “donations” or get people to join staff.
