Scientology’s Bridge to Nowhere: Part 2

This is the second part of my breakdown of Scientology’s Bridge to Total Freedom, otherwise known as the Grade Chart. This is L. Ron Hubbard’s step-by-step guide to spiritual freedom and personal immortality, or at least that’s what he said it is. What it actually represents is a one-size-fits-all guide to an increasingly more expensive series of training and counselling services which result in a person having spent hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to end up pretty much exactly where they started. I don’t mean that no one ever gets anything from doing Scientology services. That would not be true. What I mean is that Scientologists these days are literally being made to re-do Bridge steps they’ve already paid for and completed, sometimes more than once.

In my own case, I was officially involved with Scientology for 27 years. I received thousands of hours of auditing and training. I made it to the state of Clear in the early 1990s but didn’t really move much on the Grade Chart after that. The day I left the Sea Org at the end of 2012, I was told that I had been sent back down to the bottom of the Bridge because it turns out I had not standardly completed any of the steps I’d done. In other words, every auditing service I’d received had somehow been so badly performed on me that it was impossible for me to really be Clear or even be done with my Grades or the Objectives or the Purification Rundown. So my next step would be to re-start the whole thing with the Purification Rundown.

I was not alone in this. Almost every Scientologist who had attained the state of Clear was told that a review had been done and it turned out they were not really Clear so they had to re-do many of the actions they’d already done to get back to Clear, at their own expense, of course. Then it turned out that everyone’s Objectives hadn’t been done right and people were sent wholesale back down to that step at the bottom of the Grade Chart. Then it turned out that actually, it wasn’t just the Objectives but the Purification Rundown that was also not done right so everyone had to re-do that.

This is just one of the scams that David Miscavige has run on Scientologists using the Grade Chart to bilk even more money and time from them. Let’s go ahead and get back to our breakdown of the chart, picking up where we left off at the Class V Graduate Auditor training course.

This course teaches how to do case repairs and special auditing actions on people up to the level of Clear. Hubbard created various specialized counselling services to address things that only some people would need, services that are not listed on this Grade Chart specifically but could still be needed. For example, Hubbard said that in some cases a person could go exterior, meaning have an out-of-body experience, and then have difficulty in their auditing afterwards because it would restimulate earlier times they had gone in to a body and had left a body, like in a past life birth or death. The remedy for this was a special series of auditing actions called the Interiorization Rundown where the person could go back and recall times they had spiritually gone in and out of things and this would relieve the problem. An auditor learns how to do the Interiorization Rundown and other rundowns on the Class V Graduate or Grad V auditor course.

Following this is the single largest and most comprehensive course in all of Scientology, the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course. This chronological study of all of the materials of Dianetics and Scientology results in a Class VI auditor, someone who is supposed to be an expert in every kind of auditing procedure and rundown for everything up to the state of Clear. The course is not delivered at city-level, Class V orgs but is only available at the Flag Service Org in Clearwater, Florida or at Saint Hill organizations which are manned and run by Sea Org members. There are Saint Hill organizations in Los Angeles, California; Copenhagen, Denmark; Sydney, Australia and of course at Saint Hill in England.

Hubbard moved to Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, England back in 1959 and set up shop for Scientology internationally there amid the rolling green hills and placid English countryside. By late 1960 he was calling for Scientology organizations and field auditing groups to send auditor trainees to him to train on the latest and greatest technological advances and he used these auditor trainees to test his ideas on each other. The student auditors would audit one another and give Hubbard their feedback on what had happened and whether the processes he was developing were working or not. Hubbard also used a great deal of the ideas these auditors came up with on their own and claimed them as his discoveries. From 1961 to 1966, Hubbard ran this course personally, lecturing twice a week on average and overseeing the progress of his auditor trainees. Students would come and go on a rotating basis, sometimes staying for a few months or even a year before going back home.

Eventually, the 450+ lectures which Hubbard gave during this period and the full collection of all the bulletins and technical issues Hubbard wrote going all the way back to 1950 were compiled into checksheets so students could study all this material in the same sequence Hubbard released it. As the years went on, new techniques and methods and bulletins were released and these were added to the course so that eventually it covered everything up to the present. It takes students about a year of full-time study and practice to complete the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course.

However, as I stand here talking about this, the Briefing Course is not being currently offered as a service by the Church of Scientology. This has been the case since around late 2006. As I mentioned earlier, the most current and widespread scam of Scientology is to have every Scientologist re-do all of their earlier training and auditing services based on the ridiculous notion that no one who did Scientology services up until recently has ever done them right. This includes all the training services up to the Briefing Course, so all Scientologists who were up to, or in the middle of, this course were sent back down to re-study all the Scientology Basic books and then re-do their Student Hat, TRs and Metering courses and then re-do their earlier auditor training.

Moving on, the Class VII course is really more of an addendum to the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course and teaches auditors how to deliver Power and Power Plus. Since these services are only available at Saint Hill level and above organizations which are manned only by Sea Org members, public are not allowed to do the Class VII course. It is only delivered to Sea Org auditor trainees.

Now we are caught up on both the auditor training and processing sides and are ready to look at the OT levels, otherwise known as the Advanced Courses or OT Sections.

OT I is a Solo audited level but really is hardly much of anything in terms of content, with no earth-shaking revelations or new information imparted. Instead, the person simply Solo audits some common, lower-level procedues to get the hang of Solo auditing. The end result according to the newest Scientology Grade Chart is the “ability to handle OT phenomena in relation to others and confidence as a Solo Auditor.”

OT II is a complicated level that deals mainly with the idea of dichotomies, opposing ideas which Hubbard claimed had been implanted in people’s minds over the millenia of their spiritual existence and which made people into slaves and robots. These implants are kind of complex but basically involved overwhelming the thetan with electronics so strong that Hubbard said they hadn’t even been invented here on Earth yet. Various commands or ideas would be installed during these implants to change the thinking and behavior of the thetan and by installing opposing ideas, they setup a kind of insanity. These dichotomies are things like “He must survive – he mustn’t survive” or “I should exist – I shouldn’t exist” or “to die is to live – to live is to die.” Hubbard listed out hundreds of these dichotomies in the materials of OT II.

In Scientology, the sum total of everything that has happened to a person as a spiritual being is called the “whole track.” The end result of all these implants on the whole track is to put us all into a kind of spiritual hypnotic daze, where each life we lead is based on some cookie-cutter pattern: get a job, get married, have a dog, have a cat, have kids, drive a car, go to work, grow old and die, rinse and repeat. Hubbard said that thetans had been implanted with these different ideas thousands of times so they wouldn’t want anything else but this humdrum, boring existence and would stay out of trouble.

By following the Solo auditing procedures of OT II, a person addresses and erases these dichotomies so they no longer affect their behavior or block their whole track memories, so the end result is the “ability to confront the whole track.”

Then there is OT III, also called the Wall of Fire, which contains the infamous Xenu narrative as laid out on South Park back in 2005 and discussed on almost every talk show and expose ever put out on Scientology since. I won’t go into all the details of the whole story here, but here is the handwritten account that people who do OT III read:

“The head of the Galactic Federation (76 planets around larger stars visible from here) (founded 95,OOO,OOO years ago, very space opera) solved overpopulation (250 billion or so per planet – 178 billion on average) by mass implanting. He caused people to be brought to Teegeeack (Earth) and put an H-Bomb on the principal volcanos (Incident II) and THEN the Pacific area ones were taken in boxes to HAWAII and the Atlantic area ones to LAS PALMAS and there ‘packaged.’ His name was Xenu. He used renegades. Various misleading data by means of circuits etc was placed in the implants. When through with his crime loyal officers (to the people) captured him after six years of battle and put him in an electronic mountain trap where he still is. ‘They’ are gone. The place (Confederation) has since been a desert.”

The story is interesting science fiction but the idea that any of it is literally true is ridiculous, since almost every aspect of it is so easy to debunk. But instead of going in to all that, which is not the purpose of this video, instead I want to say that I believe the importance of Xenu has been grossly blown out of proportion. Yes, that whole crazy story is part of OT III, and it’s a big part, but the real meat of OT III for Scientologists is not finding out about Xenu, it’s the consequences of what happened as a result of Xenu’s genocidal actions. What people also don’t generally talk about is that the Xenu story, also called Incident 2, is only part of OT III. There’s also Incident 1.

Incident 1 is the earliest incident Hubbard ever wrote about. It occurred 4 quadrillion years ago and is something every single thetan in this universe has in common. This handwritten page from October 28, 1968 is the only description of it:

“Occurs at start of track

“Loud snap
“Waves of light
“Chariot comes out, turns right and left.
“Cherub comes out.
“Blows horn
“Cherub recedes
“Shattering series of snaps
“Darkness dumped on thetan”

While this reads more like someone’s LSD trip, Hubbard assigned a lot of importance to this beginning of life in the physical universe. He said that Xenu took advantage of a phenomena called clustering but that Incident 1 is actually the basis of why thetans cluster in the first place. So what is clustering? Well, this is where things get really weird. You see, Hubbard said that thetans are peculiar in that they sometimes can become subordinate to one another and stick together in clumps. When a thetan is stuck to another thetan or a body but isn’t the one in control, it’s called a “body thetan” or “BT.” He said that a cluster is “a group of body thetans crushed or held together by some mutual bad experience.” Why would this happen? Well, you may be amused or disgusted or just plain confused by this explanation from Hubbard, but here’s what he said:

“I’ve isolated a way a thetan comes to be stuck to another thetan. This gives the basis of clusters and having BTs.

“The cycle is t his: A thetan collides with another. That one makes a picture of being collided with. Other BTs get stuck to the picture.

“The moment of actual contact of thetans was brief but the picture (containing a stop or withdraw) tends to be permanent.

“Thetans then get the idea they can be permanently stuck as they see pictures of it happening.

“Thus we get the concept of a “black theta body.” This would be actual BTs stuck to a thetan plus pictures of BTs stuck to a thetan.” (Bulletin of February 5, 1970, THE BASIC ON BTs)

In the OT 3 materials, after Hubbard wrote about Xenu, he wrote the important part:

“One’s body is a mass of individual thetans stuck to oneself or to the body.

“One has to clean them off by running Incident One then Incident Two. It’s a long job, requiring care, patience and good auditing.

“You are running beings. They respond like any preclear. Some large, some small.

“Thetans believed they were ONE. This is the primary error. Good luck.”

It is this mass of body thetans which Scientologists believe they are addressing and liberating from a kind of spiritual captivity which gives Scientologists the idea that they are literally saving lives and creating a new world. It being the case that only about 5% of all Scientologists have ever made it this far, the vast majority of them have no idea what anyone is talking about when Xenu, aliens or space cooties are brought up and honestly refute these ideas as ridiculous and not part of Scientology. That’s why it might be fun to ridicule Scientologists by talking about how silly the Xenu narrative is, but realize that unless you are talking to an OT, your criticism is lost on them and you won’t be doing a thing to change their heart or mind.

The newly freed thetans are no longer considered to have the stauts of “body thetan” and are now free to set off on their own. Hubbard wrote about this in an issue of May 4, 1968 called “CHARACTER OF BODY THETANS” where he said:

“Body thetans are just thetans. When you get rid of one he goes off and possibly squares around, picks up a body or admires daisies. He is in fact a sort of cleared being.

“He cannot fail to eventually, if not at once, regain many abilities. Many have been asleep for the last 75 million years.

“A body thetan responds to any process any thetan responds to.

“Although a human being is a composite being there is only one I (that is you) who runs things.

“Body thetans just hold one back.

“You will continue to be you. You, inside, can of course separate out body thetans and so solo auditing is the answer.”

Hubbard said that body thetans are the reason a person has random thoughts or ideas or attitudes that don’t seem to make a lot of sense. Body thetans think their own thoughts and have had their own experiences before clustering and these old memories can confuse a person, mistaking those memories for their own. It’s easy to see how this could contribute to insanity, because those voices in your head are real and they are not always just your imagination. They create trouble in auditing and in life with a kind of false memory syndrome. Hubbard also said that the entire OT III incident is the reason for Man’s tendency to incite mob violence and war as well as Man’s zealotry and religious ideation. By doing OT III, Scientologists believe they are literally eradicating the reason for war and a great deal of criminality and insanity. The goal of OT III is to rid oneself of all their body thetans and thereby gain the return of their self-determinism.

OT III was released in 1967 and it wasn’t for another 11 years until Hubbard came to realize that there were more issues with body thetans than he first imagined. The next step on the Grade Chart is OT IV, the OT Drug Rundown.

Hubbard claimed that drugs and toxins have been around for a very long time and that there were even cultures earlier on the whole track that were much more drug-centric than ours. Hubbard didn’t have a lot of good things to say about drugs, especially recreational ones such as LSD, which he blamed for all kinds of cognitive problems. He came up with a pseudoscientific approach to detoxification which he called the Purification Rundown and he then came up with various auditing actions that would address times a person had taken drugs or alcohol or medicines and sought to find the earlier problems or upsets that had driven the person to them in the first place.

The Scientology Drug Rundown is the first of these, near the bottom of the Bridge, and uses simple recall techniques to look mainly at this-lifetime incidents of drug intake. At the point of New Era Dianetics, there is a step called the NED Drug Rundown which takes a deeper dive into drug use and uses Dianetics auditing to re-live the moments of pain and unconsciousness connected with drug use and which goes back down the whole track as far as necessary to get rid of their harmful mental effects.

Then there is OT IV, the OT Drug Rundown. This is done by an auditor, not Solo. Here’s what Hubbard said about this:

“BTs and clusters are affected by drugs. They mock up [re-create] the biochemistry and they mock up the drug and drug incidents. Drug taking in this lifetime restimulates earlier incidents of drug taking on the track. When the case is viewed as a composite of BTs and clusters, you will see that drug taking in this lifetime causes a highly multiple restim. A drug incident can be a cluster-making incident.

“Earlier drug cultures on the track were much worse than this drug culture. In some cultures the psychiatrist, priest and medico were all one and the same person and frequently used drugs. Some implanters used drugs, either as part of the implant incident or to keep a population enslaved thereafter. When BTs and clusters who have whole track drug incidents are restimulated by a this lifetime drug incident, there is a multiple restim, and if severe enough can form a new cluster composed of the BTs and clusters thrown into restimulation by the drug.” (Bulletin of January 29, 1980, THE OT DRUG RUNDOWN)

So it is that one finds out that there are more BTs to deal with, the ones who weren’t found on OT III because they were too dead or unconscious to be dealt with because of that past drug use. The end result of OT IV is “freedom from the mental and spiritual effects that drugs, medicine and alcohol can have on a being.”

Flipping over to the tr aining side for a moment, we have the Class VIII Course, which teaches not only how to do repair auditing for people who mess up somehow on OT III, but also teaches how to audit OT IV. Originally taught by L. Ron Hubbard personally to a small, select number of auditors who flew to his ship, the Apollo, in 1968, the Class VIII course is considered the pinnacle of teaching what Hubbard called Standard Tech, the exact one right way to apply Scientology techniques and methods. The checksheet is not long but is gone over three times by the student, with a little over a hundred bulletins and 19 recorded lectures. Because it teaches about repairing OT III errors, there is a lot more information on this course about the Xenu narrative than what Scientologists get when they just do OT III. I’ve quoted from some of that information in this video. Far fewer Scientologists have done the Class VIII course than have even done OT III, so most Scientologists do not even know everything Hubbard had to say on Xenu. Not that the new information on this course makes it make any more sense, because the story is still full of logical fallacies and nonsense, but again, it sure makes for interesting science fiction. Public Scientologists can and have done the Class VIII course, but usually Class VIIIs are Sea Org or Scientology staff members.

OT V, the next audited level, is also known as the second Wall of Fire or, more formally, New Era Dianetics for OTs or NOTs. OT V is a series of many different auditing actions that address different issues and aspects of a person’s case, all involving problems that yet more BTs are causing. The idea with OT V is to deal with enough of this that the person is setup to then audit themselves and finally get rid of every last body thetan. So OT V is audited by another auditor, then the Scientologist does OT VI which is a course that teaches him how to Solo audit himself on NOTs and then OT VII is the actual level where the person Solo audits until they have no more BTs and are now considered to be “cause over life.” On the training side, the Class IX auditor course teaches an auditor how to audit OT V.

These levels from OT I – OT VII are called the “pre-OT levels” because they are all about negative gain, removing things from a person in order to then get him or her ready for the actual OT levels which start at OT VIII. These are the levels where gain is supposed to be positive, where the person is no longer addressing things that happened in the past but instead is boosting or rehabilitating their spiritual abilities and powers. Unfortunately, OT VIII, the last level that Scientology has released, is not everything it promises.

Called Truth Revealed, OT IX is delivered only on the Freewinds, Scientology’s small luxury cruise ship which sails around the Caribbean islands. There have been different versions of this level over the years, so depending on which OT VIII you talk to, you may get different ideas about what they did. The latest version, according to testimonials of those who have done it, is a very short action which calls for a person to go back to earlier incidents they’ve addressed in their past auditing and determine if the identities they recalled being were actually their own or identities of their body thetans. It’s fairly obvious that if a person had confusions about this, it could mess them up because they’d have false ideas about who and where they’ve been and what they have actually done versus what their old BTs actually did. By going over many incidents in their past auditing and looking this over, the Scientologist is supposed to have a fresh, clear perspective on exactly who they are not, thereby being ready to find out who they really are by doing the rest of the as-yet-unreleased OT levels. They are also expected to be able to now remember all kinds of things which they previously could not because of the false memories and identities getting in their way.

Needless to say, many OT VIIIs were more than a little disappointed to get to the very top of the Bridge only to find that they do not have any new spiritual powers or abilities, or even a clear memory of what happened a year ago much less ten million years ago. A LOT of OT VIIIs have since left the Church in disgust, hundreds of thousands of dollars poorer and having wasted years of their lives to find out it was all for naught.

Now to rapidly finish up our tour, the last three training steps on the other side of the Bridge are the Class X, XI and XII courses. These courses teach how to audit a specialzied series of auditing actions known collectively as the Ls or L Rundowns. The three Ls are L10, L11 and L12 and are delivered only at the Flag Service Organization in Clearwater, Florida. They are the most expensive auditing actions that can be done in Scientology. As of 2007, each block of 12.5 hours of auditing costs $12,000 each, although there is a sliding scale for the more auditing you buy at one shot. If you wanted to do all three Ls, it’s an estimate of 100-250 hours of auditing and will cost you between $72,000 – $150,000.

The L Rundowns are considered “thetan boosters” and are supposed to address deep, core-level issues a thetan has with himself and getting along with others. One doesn’t have to do the Ls in order to make it to the highest OT levels. They were originally developed by Hubbard in the early 1970s to help staff and Sea Org members who were on the Apollo doing special executive training to run Scientology churches around the world. Because of the specialized nature of how the Ls are audited, it required the smoothest, most highly trained auditors in the world and so Hubbard created the Class X, XI and XII courses. Each course teaches how to do their respective L rundown.

When it comes to the total cost of all of the Grade Chart, the price tag varies enormously from person to person. One reason for this is that while there is a one-size-fits-all model, the amount of auditing one person will need to complete a step can be very different from what another person needs. Auditing is paid for almost exclusively by the hour rather than by result, so while one person might finish Grade 0 in two intensives, meaning two blocks of 12.5 hours of auditing, another person might take four intensives. When a person gets to the Solo OT levels, they pay not just for the level itself, but also for the time it takes a Case Supervisor to oversee their progress in their Solo auditing. When a person is on OT VII, they often take many years or even a decade to complete that level. Every six months, they are required to report back to the Flag Service Org for what is called a “refresher” which is really a short security check to make sure they’ve been good and haven’t been at home looking at the internet or otherwise letting anything else get in the way of their OT VII auditing. These refreshers are expensive and most of the Scientology public are required to pay for accomodations at Flag during their stay. This makes OT VII a very expensive level, something on the order of $40,000 a year.

On top of all this are the material costs for course packs, books and lectures as well as being constantly, and I do mean constantly, harrangued to give straight donations for no return at all to the International Association of Scientologists and fundraising to purchase new buildings for existing Scientology churches. Scientologists have been known to give literally millions of dollars in excess of just what they are paying for their Grade Chart steps. So it’s very difficult to put an estimated price on how much an “average” Scientologist will be made to pay over the years for all these services. The generally agreed upon price is somewhere around $500,000 just for the materials and services, but everyone agrees that Scientologists almost always pay much more because of the straight donations they are also pressured into.

So now that we have concluded our step-by-step tour of Scientology’s Bridge to Total Freedom, you can see that spiritually and financially, it’s actually the exact opposite of what it says. Scientologists strap themselves financially and endure thousands of hours of spiritual abuse and nonsense in the name of achieving salvation and immortality. Whether L. Ron Hubbard or David Miscavige believe in Scientology or not doesn’t matter, because in the end they both know that they made promises they couldn’t keep. David Miscavige is desperate at this point because all he can do is repackage and recycle the services Hubbard created and continue charging people to do the same stuff over and over again. Top level Sea Org executives who escaped Scientology have made it clear that there are no more OT levels to release. They simply don’t exist despite being named and laid out on the Grade Chart. So OT VIII is as high as it goes and we already know from OT VIIIs themselves that it does not come close to giving anything like increased spiritual awareness or super abilities.

Scientology has a bridge to sell you. It’s a Bridge to Nowhere. And now that you know more about it than almost every Scientologist in the world, I hope you will take care to never let yourself or anyone you know be fooled by Scientology’s empty promises.

Thank you for watching.