Ask A Scientologist.

[LivingWaters7]

Oh, no no no. I mentioned it earlier but the entire extent of my formal Scientology training consisted of Introductory Services. I took the Hubbard Dianetics Auditor Course (i.e. “Book One” auditing, not Scientology Auditing) and I did some of the Life Repair Courses. I never made it onto the Bridge on either the Training or Processing sides.

I think you mean you did some of the “Life Improvement” courses. Life Repair is an introductory Scientology auditing service.

I wanted to do the Hubbard Dianetics Seminar, but the weekend I was supposed to do it, Reverend Alfreddie Johnson, a somewhat prominent “Christian Scientologist” (at least in Scientology) was speaking at the Sunday Service, and there was going to be a special briefing, with him speaking, after the Sunday Service, and I was told that I had to go to that, it would be super amazing, and I could wait to do the HDS.

 

[BeProfOSX]

I think you mean you did some of the “Life Improvement” courses. Life Repair is an introductory Scientology auditing service.

You’re right again. There’s so many “Scientologese” terms that are like this. Almost but not quite the same thing. I keep mixing them up.

I probably ought to do my Student Hat so I stop doing that.

I wanted to do the Hubbard Dianetics Seminar, but the weekend I was supposed to do it, Reverend Alfreddie Johnson, a somewhat prominent “Christian Scientologist” (at least in Scientology) was speaking at the Sunday Service, and there was going to be a special briefing, with him speaking, after the Sunday Service, and I was told that I had to go to that, it would be super amazing, and I could wait to do the HDS.

What I did was the correspondence course. It wasn’t really the HDS or the HDAC, but it was, as far as I can tell somewhere in between the two. It was more than the HDS but I never sat in the chair with a Course Supervisor watching me audit, neither. As far as I can tell, it was more or less the HDAC checksheet but without the lectures and without the co-auditing. It was fairly typically stuff: read the chapter, define the words, do the demo, take the quiz. Lather, rinse, repeat until they finally say “PASS!” and hand you a little yellow card that represents your “RealUltimatePower™” and then go clear the planet.

 

[LivingWaters7]

What I did was the correspondence course. It wasn’t really the HDS or the HDAC, but it was, as far as I can tell somewhere in between the two. It was more than the HDS but I never sat in the chair with a Course Supervisor watching me audit, neither. As far as I can tell, it was more or less the HDAC checksheet but without the lectures and without the co-auditing. It was fairly typically stuff: read the chapter, define the words, do the demo, take the quiz. Lather, rinse, repeat until they finally say “PASS!” and hand you a little yellow card that represents your “RealUltimatePower™” and then go clear the planet.

Ah okay, that’s interesting. Apparently the HDS includes watching the new Intro to Dianetics (I’m forgetting the actual title) DVD, which I own anyway (It’s one of those DVDs that’s out in the Public Information Center, so I thought, why not), plus co-auditing. So really, you’re just paying for the co-auditing. It’s similar to the Personal Efficiency Course, where you watch the Problems of Work DVD (which you can purchase and watch on your own), have some group discussion, and, write up your thoughts on a few things.

So is what you did all correspondence/extension, or were you able to go to the Org in person?

 

[BeProfOSX]

Ah okay, that’s interesting. Apparently the HDS includes watching the new Intro to Dianetics (I’m forgetting the actual title) DVD, which I own anyway (It’s one of those DVDs that’s out in the Public Information Center, so I thought, why not), plus co-auditing. So really, you’re just paying for the co-auditing. It’s similar to the Personal Efficiency Course, where you watch the Problems of Work DVD (which you can purchase and watch on your own), have some group discussion, and, write up your thoughts on a few things.

So is what you did all correspondence/extension, or were you able to go to the Org in person?

Closest Class V to me is a hundred miles away, so all correspondence. We used to have a mission like 80 miles away but they went out of business.

I chalk that up to God’s good grace. Who knows what would have happened to me if I had made it in the building?

 

[LivingWaters7]

Closest Class V to me is a hundred miles away, so all correspondence. We used to have a mission like 80 miles away but they went out of business.

I chalk that up to God’s good grace. Who knows what would have happened to me if I had made it in the building?

Indeed (For those curious about what it’s like inside a Scientology “organization” (what they call the local church), without actually stepping foot into one, see this video: youtube.com/watch?v=ALVUus22NVc)

I enjoyed going to the org at the beginning, when I was doing the Personal Efficiency, Basic Study Manual, and Success Through Communication Course. Heck, even during Life Repair I enjoyed being at the Hubbard Guidance Center. But slowly, as they mounted the pressure to buy books, lectures, pre-pay for further things on the Bridge so that I can immediately start when I’m there, the pressure to attend events, sign up for Lifetime membership in the IAS, join staff, come more frequently, etc, the less I enjoyed going (plus the issues with auditing/how the E-meter is essentially infallible, dealing with PTS/SP handling), until finally I just “blew”. If none of that financial/time pressure was there (and that pressure is pretty much standard. Ex-Scientologists around the world have recounted the same experiences: tampabay.com/specials/2009/reports/project/part9.shtml), and if it was A LOT cheaper, I’d probably still go just for the fun of it.

 

[AdvanceAlways]

LW7, you’ve had one fascinating spiritual journey! Just out of curiosity, did you practice Scientology at the same time you were LDS?

 

[LivingWaters7]

LW7, you’ve had one fascinating spiritual journey! Just out of curiosity, did you practice Scientology at the same time you were LDS?

Yes, though it was more out of curiosity than anything else.

 

[Razanir]

How do Scientologists argue that Scientology is true?

 

[BeProfOSX]

How do Scientologists argue that Scientology is true?

One of the central tenants of Scientology is that truth is “what’s true for you.”

Now that may sound like extreme relativism, but it’s not. It’s more of an extreme pragmatism. Their argument is that, if Scientology is true, then it should help people. It does help people, therefore, it must be true. Their only apologetic is doing it and seeing if it works for you.

As a counter example, I would point to chiropractic. Yes, there is some credible, scientific evidence that chiropractic treatment can provide temporary relief of certain types of pain. But that does not then, necessitate, that all their woo-woo about subluxations and the rest must also be true. Neither does it follow that, if chiropractic can temporarily relieve my lower back pain, then it must be able to cure my cancer.

And that, of course, leaves out the fact that while chiropractic does have credible scientific evidence behind it, Scientology doesn’t. Indeed, what little scientific evidence there is on the subject (all related to the efficacy of Dianetics) shows that it provides no benefit whatsoever and that, furthermore, the fundamental claim of Dianetics (namely, that all people possess perfect recall of everything that ever happens to them, even when drugged or unconscious) simply isn’t true.

It also completely ignores the fact that lots of Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and Jews and folks of every religious stripe will point to the beliefs and practices of their respective faiths as being tremendously helpful for them. I’ll put a hundred or a thousand evangelical alcoholics up who will swear on a stack of Bibles that only Jesus was able to get them off the sauce for every alcoholic that Scientology can put up that’s been genuinely cured by Dianetics. Clearly both Christianity and Scientology cannot both be true, but both help people.

So, long and short, Scientology, at least with regards to the “try it out” argument, fails both the coherence and correspondence tests. That argument is neither logically consistent, nor does it align with the evidence.

 

[Razanir]

One of the central tenants of Scientology is that truth is “what’s true for you.”

Now that may sound like extreme relativism, but it’s not. It’s more of an extreme pragmatism. Their argument is that, if Scientology is true, then it should help people. It does help people, therefore, it must be true. Their only apologetic is doing it and seeing if it works for you.

As a counter example, I would point to chiropractic. Yes, there is some credible, scientific evidence that chiropractic treatment can provide temporary relief of certain types of pain. But that does not then, necessitate, that all their woo-woo about subluxations and the rest must also be true. Neither does it follow that, if chiropractic can temporarily relieve my lower back pain, then it must be able to cure my cancer.

And that, of course, leaves out the fact that while chiropractic does have credible scientific evidence behind it, Scientology doesn’t. Indeed, what little scientific evidence there is on the subject (all related to the efficacy of Dianetics) shows that it provides no benefit whatsoever and that, furthermore, the fundamental claim of Dianetics (namely, that all people possess perfect recall of everything that ever happens to them, even when drugged or unconscious) simply isn’t true.

It also completely ignores the fact that lots of Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and Jews and folks of every religious stripe will point to the beliefs and practices of their respective faiths as being tremendously helpful for them. I’ll put a hundred or a thousand evangelical alcoholics up who will swear on a stack of Bibles that only Jesus was able to get them off the sauce for every alcoholic that Scientology can put up that’s been genuinely cured by Dianetics. Clearly both Christianity and Scientology cannot both be true, but both help people.

So, long and short, Scientology, at least with regards to the “try it out” argument, fails both the coherence and correspondence tests. That argument is neither logically consistent, nor does it align with the evidence.

So then how do they get from “This stuff is actually helpful” to “Xenu was real”?

 

[Monkey1976]

So then how do they get from “This stuff is actually helpful” to “Xenu was real”?

Take one part sociopathic, pathologically lying megalomaniac, several million dollars, and mix vigorously. Garnish with Thetans.

 

[BeProfOSX]

So then how do they get from “This stuff is actually helpful” to “Xenu was real”?

Short answer: Because they remember him. Scientology doesn’t allow for any idea of false memories in Auditing. If you remember it in Auditing, then it happened and that’s all there is to it.

Longer answer: This gets into the deep weeds of the finer points of Scientology’s metaphysics and epistemology, but the reason they don’t allow for any notion of false memories in Auditing is because they believe, essentially, that even if what you are remembering didn’t happen exactly the way you remember it in the “real world”, you are, in a sense, creating that reality in your own world by returning to it.

Indeed, they believe that we, in fact, don’t live in a single, coherent universe with a strict linear progression of time and a logical flow of cause to effect. We each live in our own universe of, more or less, our own making and that my universe and your universe are interacting with each other right now by the fact that we both A) Agree on the reality of the subject we are talking about, B) have some kind of affinity towards each other in the sense that we are both occupying a shared putative mental space, and C) we are completing cycles of communication wherein word-thought-mass-energy-picture-particles are being exchanged.

If you want the “big secret” of Scientology, that’s it: A Thetan transcends the categories of viewer and the thing being viewed and, indeed, creates them both. The difference between you and God is only a matter of viewpoint. Indeed, the difference between any two things is only a matter of viewpoint.

 

[flameburns623]

It was my understanding that many of the strategies employed by Scientology–such as the reverie techniques used in Self-Analysis and presumably in Auditing, generally–were and are techniques used by psychologists and psychiatrists generally. And for that reason, genuinely helpful.

Likewise, the health strategies proposed in the Purification Rundown, while rather one-dimensional and applied overly broadly–are in most things that any medical adviser or even fitness trainer might offer. Those strategies “work” because if the practitioner is able to apply the strategies consistently, the strategies have been long known to be effective.

And the interpersonal strategies, likewise, are mostly the time-tested sorts of strategies one could cull from Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale.

IOW–a certain number of people are going to experience significant benefit from Scientology because LRH cobbled together a number of things long established to be effective in the areas where LRH applied them.

Have I gotten something wrong here? Thanks again for being willing to discuss these matters. Beliefnet/Scientology has real, believing, practicing Scientologists who can converse about their faith; but they tend to be almost hostile to non-Scientologists who have read about the CoS and/or LRH from “unapproved” sources. They seem to presume every “tough” question equates to a “trollish” question and respond accordingly.

They’re off-putting to a degree that has made me pretty leery of the whole or.

 

[BeProfOSX]

It was my understanding that many of the strategies employed by Scientology–such as the reverie techniques used in Self-Analysis and presumably in Auditing, generally–were and are techniques used by psychologists and psychiatrists generally. And for that reason, genuinely helpful.

Sort of helpful. Kind of helpful. Not really helpful.

Again, I keep beating the drum of the comparison to chiropractic but that’s exactly what it’s like: Yes you feel better for a little while, but no, nothing’s really changed.

Likewise, the health strategies proposed in the Purification Rundown, while rather one-dimensional and applied overly broadly–are in most things that any medical adviser or even fitness trainer might offer. Those strategies “work” because if the practitioner is able to apply the strategies consistently, the strategies have been long known to be effective.

Purif is pure woo-woo. It’s basically a lot of flushing out of “toxins” by doing a lot sweating and drinking a ton of vegetable oil and megadoses of vitamins. No specific testing of Purif has ever been done, to my knowledge, but lots of testing has been done on those sorts of regimens and they do absolutely nothing to help your body eliminate the metabolites of anything and certainly not the effects of radiation (as Hubbard claimed it would.)

Scientific evidence has shown over and over again that the only thing you need, indeed the only thing that works at all is good old fashioned water and time.

And the interpersonal strategies, likewise, are mostly the time-tested sorts of strategies one could cull from Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale.

I will admit, the Success Through Communications stuff is really quite good, for what it is.

The ARC triangle, just so long as you limit it’s application to interpersonal relations and don’t try to build an entire epistemology around it, really does work. I still use it from time to time.

IOW–a certain number of people are going to experience significant benefit from Scientology because LRH cobbled together a number of things long established to be effective in the areas where LRH applied them.

Yeah… Dianetics is basically a folksy, homespun, DIY version of a particular form of Neo-Freudian analysis that was… well… never really popular in academic circles, but it did have a certain cache in some circles, especially with Naval Psychologists of Hubbard’s time.

All of it in its entirety have been more or less completely abandoned by more modern psychologists and psychiatrists, but yeah… I can easily see how Hubbard got from Point A to Point B given his historical context.

Have I gotten something wrong here? Thanks again for being willing to discuss these matters. Beliefnet/Scientology has real, believing, practicing Scientologists who can converse about their faith; but they tend to be almost hostile to non-Scientologists who have read about the CoS and/or LRH from “unapproved” sources. They seem to presume every “tough” question equates to a “trollish” question and respond accordingly.

They’re off-putting to a degree that has made me pretty leery of the whole or.

Yeah… you need to watch out for those people, half of them are probably OSA agents. You don’t want to get on their radar.

 

[flameburns623]

Don’t rightly know what “OSA Agents” are.

What little I know of Scientology/Dianetics comes from books, popular media, and the Internet.

Never took a course with Scientology, bought books via E-Bay or Amazon or popular bookstores. I’m not anti-Scientology, but have never met a live Scientologist.

And the internet interactions I have had have not been hostile but have been deterrent in causing me to pursue my usual interest in comparative religious beliefs.

All the talk about heavy-handed pressure to spend money, the too-obvious covering-up of their more esoteric beliefs, and particularly the reputation they have for declaring even moderate critics “fair game” and harrying them by all means available.

There is probably some hyperbole in much of what I have read: and not to engage in hyperbole myself. But only radical Islamists seem more aggressive in shielding their beliefs from “insult”.

 

[BeProfOSX]

Don’t rightly know what “OSA Agents” are.

What little I know of Scientology/Dianetics comes from books, popular media, and the Internet.

Never took a course with Scientology, bought books via E-Bay or Amazon or popular bookstores. I’m not anti-Scientology, but have never met a live Scientologist.

And the internet interactions I have had have not been hostile but have been deterrent in causing me to pursue my usual interest in comparative religious beliefs.

All the talk about heavy-handed pressure to spend money, the too-obvious covering-up of their more esoteric beliefs, and particularly the reputation they have for declaring even moderate critics “fair game” and harrying them by all means available.

There is probably some hyperbole in much of what I have read: and not to engage in hyperbole myself. But only radical Islamists seem more aggressive in shielding their beliefs from “insult”.

OSA is the Office of Special Affairs. They are the Scientology “ministry” in charge of dirty tricks, investigations, and all other “handling” of external “threats” to Scientology. They are bad, bad people, and that’s not a term I use lightly.

I’m not really a real live Scientologist. I just play one on the internet.

If you scroll up through to the beginning of the thread you’ll see the extent of my formal and informal training in the matter.

 

[LSK]

One of the funniest episodes of South Park I ever saw purported to ‘reveal’ actual beliefs of this movement, i.e. coming from outer space, soul catching volcanos, etc. How much of that was true?

 

[Razanir]

One of the funniest episodes of South Park I ever saw purported to ‘reveal’ actual beliefs of this movement, i.e. coming from outer space, soul catching volcanos, etc. How much of that was true?

From what I’ve heard? Shockingly much

 

[BeProfOSX]

From what I’ve heard? Shockingly much

That’s basically the background material for OT III. It is true that it’s in there but it’s an exceedingly minor part of Scientology as a whole and is by no means the “ultimate secret” of Scientology.

 

[LivingWaters7]

Purif is pure woo-woo. It’s basically a lot of flushing out of “toxins” by doing a lot sweating and drinking a ton of vegetable oil and megadoses of vitamins. No specific testing of Purif has ever been done, to my knowledge, but lots of testing has been done on those sorts of regimens and they do absolutely nothing to help your body eliminate the metabolites of anything and certainly not the effects of radiation (as Hubbard claimed it would.)

Scientific evidence has shown over and over again that the only thing you need, indeed the only thing that works at all is good old fashioned water and time.

Indeed. The megadoses of vitamins can actually be very harmful, especially niacin (they also tell you to take high doses of certain vitamins every day during auditing. I stuck with my multivitamin and left it at that). The “success stories” often talk about weird colors coming out as sweat during the Purif, weird feelings, etc (for those that don’t know, whenever you finish a Scientology course or service, you “attest” to it, meaning that you demonstrate that you’ve successfully completed it, many times done on the E-meter, then you write a success story telling your “wins”. These are published in emails, brochures, etc for various services so that people can see what to expect after completing it, so it goes).

I will admit, the Success Through Communications stuff is really quite good, for what it is.

Meh, some of it is good, some of it is useless. Sitting facing someone with your eyes closed for 1+ hours is pointless (when I did that, and the drill where you sit facing someone else and stare at them for 1+ hours, without fidgeting, smiling, etc, you were supposed to just sit there and not think of anything, just “be there”. Impossible, at least for people that aren’t monks or yogis). The “acknowledgement” drills are interesting, because if you pay attention to how Scientologists talk, you’ll see how those drills affect speech. They’ll provide an acknowledgement for everything someone says to them (“ok, fine” is popular), even when normal, everyday English wouldn’t warrant it. Somewhat frustrating drills to complete.

Very interesting once you go through STCC and see how these drills (there are other communication drills in the Hubbard Qualified Scientologist course, the TRs and Objectives service, and the Professional TRs that basically repeat the STCC drills, but have higher standards of passing) affect Scientology communication.

The ARC triangle, just so long as you limit it’s application to interpersonal relations and don’t try to build an entire epistemology around it, really does work. I still use it from time to time.

I agree.