Hello everyone.
I’ve offered quite a few facts, views and opinions about Scientology over the past almost two years and I’ve been very happy to see the positive effects this has created with so many people on my channel. My efforts have been an attempt to be a kind of whistle blower to the abuses and damage that Scientology causes to anyone it comes in contact with. While it wasn’t my original goal to do this, my channel has been a sort of documentary of my own recovery from the cult and the progress I’ve made in re-integrating into the real world through learning and using critical thinking skills.
But I’m not the only one who has experienced this sort of thing and I thought it would be a very good idea to talk to some other people who have also come out of destructive cults and get their stories. I mean, my own story is interesting enough but I think if anyone wants to do any real critical thinking on a subject, they have to get more than one person’s point of view.
When I was in Scientology’s Sea Organization, my path crossed with Robyn Capella a few times and I always liked her. After I got out, I was very surprised and happy when she reached out to me through social media. She too had made it out of Scientology and was doing quite well, raising her daughter and succeeding in life beyond the cult.
As we talked, it became obvious to me that she had a lot of unique and interesting experiences of her own worth telling and she agreed to be interviewed. We covered her entire Scientology experience from when she first got involved at 15 years old until she left it entirely 19 years later. That’s a lot of ground to cover so I’ve broken the interview down into smaller bits which I’ll be putting out over the next many weeks.
Please forgive the slight audio distortions that occur from time to time. It wasn’t clear when we were recording that these distortions were happening and I’ve done the best I can to minimize them in editing.
Here’s Part I.
It is good to do what you believe in.
Because we are creatures of habit (what do you think, that perhaps 80% of our thoughts are automatic actions, patterns we have made ourselves familiar with), it has to be good to question our beliefs once in a while, if not make it at least a small part of our daily routine. Nobility is not a comparison to other human beings, it comes after a comparison to our former selves.
We were young.
We knew the world was hard and cruel and impersonal. We were battered and abused by our parents, abandoned by our lovers and left damaged and hungry. These were things we all had in common.
And, one day early in our lives, in walks the Scientology disseminator with all these answeres, promises that all this misery and suffering can be fixed, fixed for you and all the ones you loved and the whole world at large. It was new, fresh and inside everyone was filled with enthusiasm… and so, why not?
Maybe I can help, do some good in the world after all.
What you see as a person off the street is, of course, a well-painted facade. This church is nothing but a trap. The mechanism is called “bait and switch”.
The focus of Scientology, in relation to the practitioner, is to make you believe that Scientology can reveal to you the secret of immortality. Then they sweeten the pot, professing to have the tools to conquere insanity, end war and crime and all the rest. How, you ask? The answer lies at examining the trap, and then looking at the girders that hold it place, for those are the same bars that keep you thinking that what you are thinking is true and correct. These are actually the secrets of mind-control.
First, there is the control of information.
Once inside Scientology, you are told that LRH is the only source.
Information from outside the church is mortally blocked. You are not allowed to view the internet to gain information about the church, information at all for that matter, and you will be punished if you do. You will not ask questions about anything you hear from outside for you will punished if you do. Punishment costs you precious liberty and plenty of cash, for one less than a billion years left to go.
Then, again to insure that the flow of information is controlled, Scientologists are further restricted, forbidden to talk about what they experience in auditing. Pay the hefty price for LEVEL ONE auditing and what you get is a trickel of garden-variety therapy. What waits for you in LEVEL TWO remains a guarded secret until you complete the step you are on and pay again, each time paying more and more.
But, don’t talk to the guy who has done a step higher than you, oh no, lest you both get punished.
Literally thrown in the brig. Isolation, until you can voice the revelation that the problem has always been you, yourself. Boy, you are going to need lots of auditing. Lots and then lots more.
And so, the “Bridge to Total Freedom” and everything that happens on it remains invisible.
That is why the policy “Keeping Scientology Working” was written. Keep the meddlers out, lest you spoil the beautiful con. The beautiful trap that is Scientology. Oh, time out. It is time for the next enthusiasm-filled staff-meeting where we all get to share our wins with everybody. Fill the room with well-invested Scientologists. Close the doors, shut down the computers and… Testify!
Bring this bridge to light and it will cease to exist. Thanks. Thank you very much indeed.
Think about the 30,000 still-active members still inside their invisible trap, and wonder how that number compares with the the number of ex-Scientologists in the world today, the number of ruined families (notably not excluding the Hubbard family), not to forget the poor souls lost to mortal attrition who spent the majority of their adulthood in Sea Org, if not having had their childhoods sacrificed altogether.
– Acceptable collateral damage, if you live on that side of the fence.
Yet something is learned about the nature of ourselves, who and what we are, and how we operate,
Yes?
“The primary aberration in situations that are being mishandled is:
The person is unable to recognize Source.”
HCO P/L 23 April 1965, Issue 3, Problems (web:Friends of LRH, 6 Sep 2015)
Draw a line, bend it around until you have a field separating the outside reality from the group within.
Make the line a fence, keeping information from penetrating inside.
Make it a bubble.
Continually reinforce it.
Provide catharsis information inside to demonstrate your depiction of reality as fact, and to exalt the members into ” believing”
1) that they are superior as humans, destined to become superieor than humans, and
2) the the information on the outside is all malicious, anyway…
And, presto,
you have a cult.
You are in control of a cult that believes they are in control of their lives.
That it is the only way to be truely in control, is to sap up the information you are providing, and, basically nothing else.
Your only problem now is in keeping the outside thinking that you are legitimate in some way.
And other problems, like keeping your tax-exempt status despite the billions of wealth you’ve accumulated since 1953.
Not so easy a thing to do in the information age. (Yet, amazingly, they do?)
Which is why I like talking, why I love guys armed with critical thinking, and why I posted the quote above that shows an actual policy letter that demands the punished practitioner to accept the problem as always being himself. If nothing else, Scientology has taught me indeed, that I need to DO something.